Open your school to the world by partnering with a library abroad

What school library media coordinator could resist the opportunity to engage students in a cultural exchange with a library elsewhere in the world? Not this one. When I saw I could use my library to inspire students in rural North Carolina to broaden their understanding of the world, I leaped at the opportunity. I linked our elementary school to a project at Appalachian State University (ASU) that helps keep the only children's library in Bolivia alive.

The driving force behind the partnership is the library science program at ASU's Reich College of Education in Boone, NC. Its Bolivian sibling is the Th'uruchapitas Library in Cochabamba, a city of about 500,000 people. Several Bolivian teachers created the library in an old warehouse in 1990.

Word of Th'uruchapitas reached North Carolina in 1998, when one of its founders visited ASU to talk about it. The story of the struggling library intrigued Linda Veltze, a library science professor. Soon Dr. Veltze and her students were filling suitcases with donated books in Spanish and taking them along on annual study trips to Cochabamba. In 2000, the short-lived White House Millennium Council gave this university-to-library partnership an official imprimatur by awarding it Sister Library status.

I learned about the project only last summer while taking Dr. Veltze's course in children's literature. When she invited us to link our schools to the project, I saw a perfect opportunity to teach kids in Morganton, NC, about another nation and culture.

I was glad to find that the teachers at Oak Hill Elementary thought so, too. I didn't have to do much of a selling job. Joining hands with children from another nation was an activity that fit snugly into our state social studies standards. And we could download lesson plans that correlated with the standards from the university's Web site.

To get us started, ASU's Belk Library lent us a multimedia kit that contained a short video on the project, hand-woven Bolivian artifacts, and some musical instruments. We used them to launch our program in December, when we introduced students to Bolivia's people and cultures. Children learned about the library, its shortage of books, and the varied population it serves, including the children of inmates in a nearby prison. We set up a "Giving Tree for Bolivia" in the media center, and it became the focal point of our program.

We sent letters home to explain the project to parents. With a contribution of 25 cents from each child, all 33 classes were able to purchase a book in Spanish. Each class put a class photo inside the front cover of its book before placing it under the "Giving Tree."

With that success behind us, we took another step. We asked each family to contribute a dollar to a drive to build a new home for the Th'uruchapitas Library. Every child in the school brought in a dollar in a decorated envelope. In return, they were given jingle bells with their names on them and invited to hang them on the Giving Tree. At the end of the drive, we had 33 Spanish books to send to Bolivia and a donation of $560 for the building fund.

Our fifth-grade students thought up a final component—tapping the generosity of local businesses. Suddenly our school project had become a community project. I taught the students how to write business letters, and their letters brought in $380. Now we had $940 to send to Cochabamba. Our money and books reached the city in May, thanks to students in the ASU library science program who took them there.

This year's project was so successful, we're going to make the Giving Tree for Bolivia a tradition. Reaching out to touch kids in Bolivia taught our students that they can make a genuine difference in the world. There aren't many lessons more important than that.

If you decide to strike up a partnership with a library abroad, visit the American Library Association's Web site (www.ala.org) and search for "Sister Libraries." You'll be glad you did.