Wendy Saul, president of International Book Bank, visits a school in Liberia last January. All photos courtesy of B.D. Colen (http://socialdocumentary.net/photographer/bdcolen)

Liberian children will be receiving brand new books and educational materials before Christmas, says Wendy Saul, the president and executive director of the International Book Bank (IBB), a global literacy nonprofit in Baltimore, MD, which donates brand new books to charities in developing countries. In its latest efforts, with a focus on Liberia's Ebola crisis, IBB has raised $20,000 to ship a container of approximately 86,000 books bound for Liberia, which left the port of Baltimore on October 31. The container of books is bound for the We Care Foundation, an NGO based in Monrovia, Liberia, which “trains [Liberian] teachers, writers, and publishers, and produces engaging and relevant children[’s] books for the schools and the reading public,” states the We Care website. (The We Care Foundation was founded by Liberian national, Michael Weah, its executive director, who opened Monrovia's first and only public library.) Liberia, an economically under-developed country in West Africa where English is the spoken language, is a country seemingly accustomed to devastation with its Ebola epidemic and two civil wars in the last four decades resulting in over 500,000 civilian casualties. IBB has partnered with We Care before, including shipping books to stock We Care’s Library. However since the Ebola virus broke out last March, schools, and the We Care Library, have been closed, and the training that both IBB and We Care have been doing is at a standstill, says Saul.

Some students who received books from the International Book Bank have improved two to three grade levels.

“Every kid in the country of Liberia is out of school,” she says to SLJ. “We know what will happen when kids are out of school for two months in the summer. Imagine what will happen in 10–12 months.” The container of books is part of a bigger mission—to offer children education and reading material during the next few months in the form of approximately 10,000 “homeschool packages,” which the We Care Foundation will be hand delivering to Liberian schoolkids throughout Monrovia and its outlying areas. (Over half the population of Liberia reside in or around Monrovia.) The care packages will contain not just books but also Ebola prevention fliers, bumper stickers, copybooks, and pencils, which will not only help with home lessons but give the “younger ones the opportunity to ‘draw their experiences,’ a method of psychosocial counseling used in dealing with traumatized kids,” says We Care’s executive director, Michael Weah.

The library was started in Monrovia by its executive director, Michael Weah, during the first civil war.

The Ebola prevention fliers and bumper stickers also provide valuable health and prevention information dispensed in a simple, comprehensible format. Liberia is a country with an extremely low adult literacy rate—58 percent, according to a Liberian Ministry of Education 2010 census—with an even lower literacy rate among the young, shares Saul, who’d visited Liberia last January to collect children's literacy data as part of her ongoing work with IBB. (The U.S. literacy rate is 86 percent.) The fliers contain “simple pictures of monkeys, bush meat, hugs and handshakes are covered with X’s — indicating ways to prevent spread of the deadly virus,” reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Saul, a professor and children’s literacy expert at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has been invested in various threads of literacy work in Liberia since 2007, when a program called "Critical Thinking Liberia" (developed by the Canadian literacy nonprofit CODE) to train teachers in Liberia with teaching reading and writing for critical thinking, first brought her to the country in 2007.

All photos by B.D. Colen

The effects of Ebola are more than just life or death, says Saul. What is also at stake here, with all the schools closed, is a longer-term Ebola crisis—losing literacy. "Literacy impacts how you live a life...” says Saul.