Elementary students making books for African schools

It would be difficult to find a place in the world less like Bigfork than rural Uganda, but young students here now have a connection to that war-torn African nation.

Bigfork Elementary School teacher Marilynn Richter got her FOCUS class, a program for gifted students, involved with Books of Hope, a San Francisco-based organization that delivers books to schools in Uganda each year in an effort to improve education and stability in the east-African country.

“Teachers over there need all kinds of books from science and history to physical education,” Richter said.

Aside from the volumes her class is making, Richter said four other classes in the school have each committed to make a book.

Participating schools across America pick subjects from a list of needs the organization provides and then must create the books to very specific guidelines, as most of the Ugandan students are learning English as a second language.

In addition to the academic information contained in each book, Richter said the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has encouraged the program to write in some human rights-related information in the books as a way to explain to these children that the rest of the world is not subjected to the conditions that exist in Uganda.

Even on a continent regularly rocked by war, Uganda stands out as being particularly violent. Idi Amin ruled the country with an iron fist in the 1970s and visited a parade of atrocities on the country’s population. More recently, the country has been involved in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s civil war and the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army in neighboring Sudan. Because of the unrest in the surrounding countries, Uganda is known to be relatively dangerous, with militias, separatist groups and factions of armies regularly on the lam inside Uganda’s borders.

The Bigfork students will work on the books, which range in topic from astronomy to animals, until March, when they’ll be packaged up and sent to the Books for Hope organizers in California. Then members of the Books of Hope staff will travel to Uganda to hand-deliver the books.