The Fishers in La Paz, Bolivia

I haven’t written too much about my job at Highlands since I’ve been on a brief sabbatical, but as of next week I’ll be back half-time in my role as Elementary Principal. I’m in charge of the Christmas program, which I must get to work on soon. . . I’ve been working with the teachers to create curriculum guides and to improve the way we assess the children throughout the year, which I really enjoy. But my main project right now is to “redo” our library. We actually have quite a nice collection considering the school is only four years old, and we live in a country where you cannot buy books in English. However, there hasn’t been a plan in place over the years and so work that has been done hasn’t amounted to a whole lot of progress. At the beginning of the year, you couldn’t even walk into the two small rooms because there were stacks of books all over, in addition to bags of P.E. equipment. By nature, things here are dusty, which means the books and shelves are kind of dirty all the time. As I sort and shelve books, I have to stop every 20 minutes or so and go wash my hands because I can’t stand the grittiness.

But anyway, I have five parent volunteers who are wonderfully determined to help me get the library in a state where teachers and children can actually check out books. The hard part is that they don’t have too much experience in libraries, so we have to have discussions about things like the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I’m having to do much more of the hands-on work of reorganizing the books than I thought I would. After we get the library in working order, then we will have to go back and put an inventory of all the books in the computer. I really hope to not have much involvement in that part of the process! I’ll have to post a picture once we get the project complete.