Playing Librarian

On Tuesday, Marsha and I began to organize all the books in the orphanage library. There are a lot of books, and whatever organization they were originally in has been rearranged and shifted out of recognition, so there really wasn't any kind of order at all, which drove me crazy. So I was more than happy to start by taking all the books off the shelves (and wiping down each one with a dust-rag while I was at it). We started by separating the French and English books into two sections, which took most of yesterday. Then today I got the English side sorted into basic categories, and arranged all the childrens books in a rough order from easiest to hardest, and tried to sort all the educational books by subject. The French side was a bit harder to organize, because neither Marsha nor I know French. This makes figuring out the content of the books a little difficult, and we didn't get much farther than "Well, this looks one has numbers on the front, we'll put it in the math pile. This one has pictures, it goes in the kids pile..." After school was done for the day one of our girls came in and helped us out by translating the titles of the teaching materials for us, and sorting the novels by reading level.

We came across several French books that had naked women on the cover. We decided those were probably not appropriate for a Christian school's library, but I can't help wondering if somebody was just really careless when choosing the books to send, or if French people just don't bat an eyelash over naked women and it didn't occur to someone that it would be considered inappropriate here.

Some other rather strange features of our collection are a sort of homeopathic cookbook, the 2003 report on infections diseases published by the American Pediatrics association, and my personal favorite, a book in French that I think roughly translates to "A Name to Live By" which tells you all about your personality based on your name. In addition to a lot of complicated graphs and charts that I didn't bother decipthering with the French/English dictionary, I discovered that my color is Blue, my vegetable is Carrot, my animal is the Squirrel, and my electrical resonance is 34,000 v/s. Who knew? Apparently I also share these characteristics with people named Edith and Marguerite.

Despite the oddballs, there are a lot of really good books here, and I found a lot of old friends that I am eager to reread. I've already finished The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and The Wind in the Willows; up next are Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The kids here don't like reading very much, and can't figure out why I do. I think I wouldn't like reading much either if the only books I had to read were in my second or third language. I haven't found a single book written in Creole in our library, which is really sad, but I suppose there isn't exactly a market for Creole publishing. I've also been steaming through the books I brought with me - so far I've read The New Friars, Simple Spirituality, and I'm half done with The Good News about Injustice - all of them really good,  thought-provoking, and incredibly relevant to my experiences here. I'll probably write more of my thoughts about those here when I've had time to think about them a little bit.