The first year I arrived at the school, the ‘library’ was a building of decent size, but it was stuffed with school desks that I had to move or crawl over to get to shelves full of text books that had been saved since the school opened. Many were ragged, missing pages, had rough edges, and still boasting the covers the students had made for them. There were teacher manuals, old student notebooks, and falling-apart boxes of old annual tests among the students’ books. Sandwiched here and there in between all those books were books donated by safari travelers, but I had to hunt to find any. I wish I had taken a ‘before’ picture of where we started. 
I finally managed to convince the headmaster that we didn’t need all the old text books in the library. Students helped to throw out junk, sort through books and box them up to move to another location, clean the shelves and the room, and put the books we could use on the shelves; probably about 12 feet worth of English reading books along with several sets of little classroom story books in either English or Swahili.
After we got the promise from Books for Africa that we would be receiving about 20,000 books, we got funding to have the room painted and extra shelves built. We also had two tables 
and some chairs built. When we received the books, we discovered that about 3/4 of them were for the secondary school level rather than primary school. (We have since shared most of those with secondary schools in the area including those where our village students attend.) Teachers are now encouraging students to spend time in the library reading.
Most of the pleasure reading books are on those lower shelves in the corner in the last few photos. Text and reference books make up the rest. The text and reference books are very helpful and essential, but there is a need for more leisure reading material so as to have enough for students to check out to take home to read. More tables and chairs, and/or benches are also needed.
