WENDY SAWATZKY:
Canada's gift of words
Updated January 1, 2007
The new Nima Maamobi Community Learning Centre opened in Accra, Ghana, in late 2006.
A thousand details need handling before the new Nima Maamobi Community Learning Centre in Accra, Ghana, opens to the public this week, so an uninterrupted moment with Kathy Knowles is a rare thing, indeed.
Knowles, it seems, must be consulted on every detail, from chair cushions to floor tiles to landscaping. In a small workshop room in the new building, Knowles's cellphone chirps constantly and heads poke frequently through the doorway as contractors, labourers, librarians, friends and relatives track her down to share congratulations and find out what exactly they can do next to help.
"My role, unfortunately, goes into everything," Knowles says with a tired smile. "I say unfortunately because if you pull yourself away, you'd like to think that it would run independently, but a lot of it is directed by me."
The Nima Maamobi Community Learning Centre is a striking two-storey structure off a main highway in Accra, looking out over the mosque and tin roofs of the eponymous communities it serves. The round, reddish building seems to swell out of the dust around it, and on its northwest side the roof opens over the city like the cover of a giant book.
A grand-opening ceremony was held a week ago for the building, designed by Ghanaian-Canadian architect Roger Amenyogbe, but it's not quite ready for the public. Tiles still need finishing on the floors, hand-hewn chairs are stacked in corners and shelves on the second floor still await their books.
Still, Knowles is clearly pleased. It's been four years since she made the first phone call to get this half-million-dollar project off the ground, four years of fundraising with private donors in Canada, wrangling with bureaucrats in Ghana, and working with planners and contractors on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kathy Knowles stands on the second floor of the newly constructed Nima Maamobi centre days before the building opens to the public.
The driving force
If anyone has the know-how to bring the project together, it's Knowles, founder and driving force behind the Osu Children's Library Fund, which has built five libraries in the Accra area and supported dozens more across Ghana and wider Africa over the past 15 years.
It's an astonishing accomplishment, considering the project's humble beginnings in 1989, when Knowles and her children moved to Ghana with her husband, an accountant with a mining company.
Knowles started a story-time for her four children and their friends under a tree in the family's backyard. As word spread, more and more children in the area began dropping in to hear Knowles's stories and read her books. Many of the children had never owned or even borrowed their own books, except for shared textbooks at school, if they were lucky enough to attend. Literacy rates in Ghana are around 60 per cent, and with average incomes of around $600 per year, many families simply cannot afford to send their children to school.
"We had about 70 children in our garden, but 70 children was unmanageable," Knowles says. "So I talked to my husband; we had a garage that had been converted into a guest room, and I talked to him about converting the guest room into a library, and that's what we did."
Many children who use the libraries run by the Osu Library Fund have never had books of their own, so all library patrons are schooled in how to handle books with care.
That first tiny library opened in 1991, with Knowles's housekeeper, Joanna Felih, installed as librarian.
"Within about three months there was a waiting list, and so we knew that the demand for the library was there," Knowles recalls. "By that time, my husband was returning to Canada the following year, so I was trying to think of a way of getting the library beyond our former guest room, because otherwise it would close."
After a long search, Knowles managed to raise enough money to put a shipping container on a donated piece of land. With the help of the community, she put in windows, raised the ceiling, brought in fans into the Osu Library, named for the street where the story-time readings began. In 1992, the library opened with some 3,000 books, all from Knowles's own collection or donated from friends and family in Canada.
When people in other communities learned of the Knowles's successful library, they came to her for help. She launched a training program for would-be librarians, assisting them in setting up their own library projects in Accra and villages around Ghana. Dozens of libraries sprouted from the backyard of a woman who was not a librarian, not a teacher, who has, in fact, no literacy background at all.
"No, no, I'm a nurse," she explains with a laugh. "The skills that I have now have come about from years of experience and making mistakes."
Tilers who worked on the floor in the library's main entrance surprised Knowles with these representations of flags and maps of Ghana and Canada.
Library work didn't end
The family returned to Canada in 1993 when Knowles's husband completed his work in Ghana, but her own work in the country was just beginning. Determined to see the library remain open even after she'd left, Knowles trained staff to manage her projects and set up the Osu Library Fund as a registered charity in Ghana and Canada.
Working from a spare bedroom on the third floor of her Winnipeg home, she continues to raise funds, collect and ship books, and organize the opening and management of more libraries in Ghana, including one at a local school for the blind. She returns to Ghana frequently to check on projects and to lend a hand.
As the libraries have grown, so has their programming, which now includes literacy classes for adults, art, dance and cultural groups, and feeding and scholarship programs for impoverished young patrons.
"Kathy has redefined the concept of community libraries," says Florence Adjepong, director of the Osu Library Fund in Ghana. "They're not just rooms that house books, but they are places where people — men, women and children — are transformed … where illiterate women learn to read, where petty traders or seamstresses find a new confidence, self-esteem, and the voice of participation. They are places where children develop their reading habits, acquire favourite authors, learn new skills, and unearth their potential."
Tiles in the counter of the library's lending library were hand-painted by children in Toronto as a fundraiser.
More than 10,000 Ghanaian children have benefited from the Osu Library Fund's projects, and they're not shy about singing their benefactor's praises.
"You made me somebody. Now I am a hero. Thank you, Madam Kathy," one young girl read from a paper clutched in shaky hands at the Nima Maamobi project's grand opening ceremony in November, which was attended by hundreds of dignitaries and community residents.
"Thank you, Madam Kathy, for building our cherished library," read another. "We praise your name on high. Hooray! Hooray!"
Their high regard was echoed by community chiefs, politicians and government officials at the ceremony. Knowles, however, takes a modest view of her contributions.
"You know that you've got the capacity to make a difference, and a meaningful difference, so why not?" she says, as she turns to answer yet one more query from the doorway.
"It feels good to give."
