Жительница Мейна собрала более 15 тысяч долларов для оснащения библиотеки в ботсванской деревне

Sue Downes has committed much of her life to education. From her time as a librarian at the Rangeley Public Library in the early 2000s to her various roles as a music teacher in the area, Downes has remained dedicated to teaching or helping to expand access to educational resources. Her new goal is to outfit a library at a primary school in Lesenepole, a village of 2,500 in Botswana, a landlocked country in southern Africa, where she recently taught English. In the roughly five months since she has returned to Rangeley, Downes has gathered the support of the local community. She held a fundraiser at the Rangeley Lakeside Theater with the goal of securing $6,000 to go toward the Lesenepole library. The fundraiser exceeded her expectations, bringing in more than $15,000 she can use to help bring new resources to the village. She plans to return in October for a two-month stay with her original host family. There, she will complete her project of restoring the school library, stocking the shelves with new books and two computers. In 2024, she decided to apply to the Peace Corps, fulfilling a lifelong dream that she could never find the time to focus on. By 2025, she was accepted to the program and joined a group of 24 others going to Africa where she was assigned a school to teach a group of fourth, fifth and sixth graders. During her time at the school, she found the library was closed to students and in poor condition. “The last dates I saw and stuff was like 2017 or 2018,” she said. From there, the restoration of the library became her mission. Aside from teaching and bringing her students on hikes and field trips, Downes spent her time in the closed library cleaning shelves of dirty books and repainting the floor; she sometimes had the help of her students and colleagues. “We cleaned every single book,” she said. “Sometimes it was just with water and an old rag, but it was better than what we found it as. It (the books) was like bat poop covered. The bookshelves were in decent condition, but they needed to be cleaned.” In April, Downes’ time in Lesenepole was cut short because she was forced to return to Maine for medical reasons, but she couldn’t get the library out of her mind in the months since. She is planning her return, independent of the Peace Corps, to finish the restoration of the space. Downes said the school had around 1,000 books in its library while she was teaching, but they were all outdated or inappropriate for young readers. “They still have encyclopedias from the ’70s,” she said. And, without access to a computer, students do not have any way to access up-to-date information. Her next mission is finding a way to get supplies back to the primary school overseas. Downes said that due to her 50-pound weight limit on flight baggage, she is restricted in what she can personally take back with her. “I’m looking for books that will speak to those kids, where they can see themselves in them and aspire to things,” Downes said. “It’s tough for them when not one of those kids has a book at home. While the restoration of the library is at the top of her mind, Downes is also looking forward to reconnecting with her students. During her first nine months in Lesenepole, she started a small hiking club with her students. Almost daily, she and a group of five to 30 children would hike a 500-foot hill outside their town, one that many of the students had never climbed before. “I watched a lot of the kids go from scared of climbing up the hill, thinking they were gonna fall, to being like super comfortable doing it and feeling really, like accomplished, brave, you know, building confidence.” While the official drive for the library has ended, Downes is still accepting donations for the library. She has an account at Skowhegan Bank under her name that will accept funds; she also has limited room in her baggage to bring along books. She hopes to bring back children’s books that feature Black characters, to better connect with her students. “The community has been amazingly supportive of this project,” she said.