Alexandra Community Library – Through the looking-glass

Alex Landscape by Tommy Machaba

For a suburban girl like me, driving into Alexandra township is akin to diving through the looking-glass into a whole new world.

Colours burst off the roadside, goats amble in mysterious plodding thought through hooting traffic and chickens meander aimlessly through people’s legs.

It seems as though an enormous fiesta is going on all the time.

 

I felt like I had wandered into the true heart of my city in all its techni-coloured brilliance.

In the middle of all of this lies the Alexandra Community Library, a quiet sanctuary in the bustle of township life.

Over 3 500 people regularly use the library and asking directions culminated in a crowd of people happy to point me in the right direction. A veritable swarm of school children helped to carry the boxes into the library itself.

Inside its doors rows of students sat hunched over textbooks devouring knowledge and no doubt battling though complex high school mathematics.

The fact that schools are on holiday made their commitment all the more worth praising.

I think I can say with some certainty that I didn’t spend my holidays studying!

 

The Alexandra Community Library falls under the Alexsan Kopano Educational Trust established in 1986 to bring the community together.

The multi-purpose community resource centre lies adjacent to the sports stadium.

As well as sports and recreation it also includes the library, a computer centre, clinic, careers guidance, skills training, counselling and a range of educational experiences for all ages.

My boxes were spilled open and the contents examined with enormous pleasure. Knowing my beloved books are going to be read and enjoyed makes parting with them a little easier. I hope that they will enrich others’ lives the way they enriched mine and open a whole new world of possibilities.

This Mandela Day (18 July 2013), why not have a look at your shelves and give someone else the gift of reading.

Any donations of books, desks, shelves or monetary support is welcomed.

If you have books you’d like to donate you can contact them directly or send me a message and I’ll arrange to collect and drop them off.

There was a special request for comic books!

Find out more about the Alexandra Community Library

URL:                          http://www.alexsankopano.org.za

Address:                   Corner of 12th Avenue & Selborne Street, Alexandra

Tel:                            +27 (0) 882 1673 / 1142

Email:                       info@alexsankopano.org.za / alexsan@iafrica.com

Fundraising number:   01 100638 000 5

Friday Fictioneers – The Girl in the Library

(c) Clair Fuller

I can hear them whisper as I pass by. Long forgotten conversations. Echoes of love won and lost. Listen to the quiet sobbing of a girl broken-hearted and the soft laughter of a child in a field of flowers.

I can lose myself in these pages. Follow well trodden paths into worlds of magic and mystery. I can travel the world. I can walk a mile in another man’s shoes. I can shrug off the dust of today and lead an army into war.

Here I can do anything, be anyone.

Perhaps, even I can find a happy ending.

I found this link today from The Day After and thought it might be fun to give it a shot. Every Friday there is new picture and you have 100 words to write a story.

B is for Bloody Hell the Internet is Dead!

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as irritating as my Internet access dying.

I suppose I have the parastatal behemoth of Telkom to thank. Thanks Telkom, you really know how to make a girl’s day.

I got the Internet in 1994. It was necessary because my boyfriend was moving to another country and I would just die without being able to email him. I had a dial-up modem, used Pegasus Mail and searched using something called a worm.

Since then, it has become more necessary to me than a mobile phone (which I can happily dispense with).

Nowadays people don’t even know what the Dewy Decimal System is, let alone know how to find something in an index card file system.

In fact, I have my doubts most kids even know what a library is.

Now that is a fact I find terribly sad. When I had a school project my mother dropped me off at the Johannesburg Reference Library. She showed me to the door and said, “Everything you need to know is in here.” And then she left.

As a result I can find a needle in a haystack, even on Google.

The answers you find are all in how you phrase the question.

It is a metaphor for life really. How profound. I should copyright that.

Not having access to the Internet now feels as though I have lost my right arm.

Even my ability to think seems to slow.

A fast beat of panic rises like bile in my throat.

What if someone sends me an email?

What if someone tags me on Facebook?

What if one of the bloggers I follow posts a new article?

Will my carefully constructed virtual world begins to crumble around my ears?

It sounds as silly as it is, but my real world has become increasingly small. Family, work and maybe a tiny fragment carved out for friends. Sadly, most of the latter are spread across the world and have lives as frantic as mine, so our friendships are reliant on the Internet and time zones.

The Internet has introduced me to friends I have never even met, but probably know better than many of the people I see face-to-face every day. It has made my insular world a little less insular.

To throw down the gauntlet and be perfectly honest, I suffer from social phobia. Don’t get me wrong I love people, I love meeting them and chatting to them, I just don’t like lots of them in an environment totally out of my control.

I also have crippling anxiety attacks in supermarkets, restaurants and shopping malls. Online shopping was invented for me. If only it was a little better in my neck of the woods.

The Internet for all its foibles, psychopaths and weirdos is just a mirror image of our society. If you don’t like it online, have a look around you. What you dislike may be a little harder to see in your nice suburb, but it is still there.

Damn, now it occurs to me that I can’t post this article and will have to save it on a flash drive and take it to work with me tomorrow.

How very droll.