Hundreds of extra hands gathered to support the local Library Project initiative to organise, sort and pack more than one thousand books into boxes to ship to Vanuatu schools and public libraries.
The Library Project – Vanuatu, brainchild of local teacher Neale Collier in collaboration with peers and friends repurposes discarded and older copies of textbooks, biographies, recipe books and more non-fiction and fiction books.
Mr Collier said when volunteers arrived at Redlands College in Wellington Point on Saturday March 9, jobs were assigned including forming boxes from flat packs, setting up temporary shelving and finalising book categories.
“Before lunch time, we got everyone together, ran through some information and then everyone divided up into one of larger categories based on the Dewey Decimal System and then got to work bringing over books of each subcategory and dividing them up equally between schools,” he said.
In larger categories, such as Sciences, books were sorted into subsections and then volunteers were tasked with ensuring that each recipient would receive a balance of content between different subjects, such as space, plants and chemistry, and any collections were not split up.
“It was a big day of sorting and organising, but everyone did a great job, and we are very thankful for the volunteers that came,” Mr Collier said.
“It was a very friendly day at Redlands College, but we had a few days of moving the boxes and books between our facilities, so every volunteer was appreciated for their hard work.”
Mr Collier was joined by Library Project – Vanuatu’s team, including a collective of volunteers that had made the trip over to Vanuatu with the deliveries in previous years.
“We had all these people that had been on the trips there, which is why they have different coloured shirts on,” he said.
“They came along knowing the impact these books are having… they have seen it firsthand.”
Mr Collier said this years donations had reached a record number, resulting in many usable books unable to make the deliveries size/weight restrictions.
“We had category fill two shelves per school, with a variety of every subcategory they had, so there were many books left over at the end of the day, but everyone did get a fair balance,” Mr Collier said.
“We can’t take too much over because some of the locations may have too little space for the books, but we are definitely taking over as much as they can accommodate for.”
Since the volunteer-involved weekend, the Library Project – Vanuatu has been working with shipping support to prepare the boxes for travel and this weekend the container will arrive at the storage warehouse to load.
Mr Collier said he and his team thanked every volunteer who donated their time and efforts to the sorting. packing or delivery processes and he said anyone interested in volunteering can keep an eye out for posts on the Library Project – Vanuatu Facebook page.
