If anyone wants a few book recommendations...

I feel like expanding on an email I wrote to my dad a few weeks ago.

I was “warned” before I came to the orphanage that one of the biggest problems that previous volunteers have had was boredom. Specifically, boredom during the ten (yes, ten) hours of the day that the children are in school. No problem, I thought, I’ll just do what I’ve always done—read. In order to solve the problem of fitting six months worth of books in under the international baggage allowance, I purchased a NOOK—Barnes and Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle. I’m a bit of a hypocritical eReader owner. I scoffed, I continue to scoff, at the existence of such a product (and not just because I’m living somewhere with no running water).

I grew up with a PhD in English rhetoric and a librarian for parents. Our house is stuffed with books, real books, and most of them have even been read. We are a family of Readers, surrounded by a community of Readers, with an understood etiquette and culture that comes along with that. One shouldn’t dog-ear pages, but it can be forgiven if it’s a paperback and it belongs to you. If you borrow a book from someone else, it should be returned in approximately the same condition. If some disaster happens to befall the book while you’re reading it, then it is your responsibility to purchase a new copy. “Let me just finish this chapter,” is an acceptable excuse in almost any situation. Reading at meals is fine as long as you don’t spill something on your book. Reading for the entire day is not doing nothing. It’s reading. A good book is always an excellent gift option. Talking about books is always a good conversation option. A pile of books on the floor is not a mess, it’s a (much anticipated) to-do list. Spending money on books is an investment, not a waste. Growing up this way instilled a reverence in me for a well-told story, for the thrill of turning the page, for the smell of old books, for a well-made bookcase, for people who know all kinds of information, for knowing that information myself.

Keeping a collection of books on an eReader isn’t the same. That being said, it is one of the top three best items I brought to Kenya. Kenya is not a haven for book lovers. The country’s bookstores are few and far between. A person has to go to Nairobi to find a bookstore that sells more than school textbooks and the Bible. That is not even the slightest bit of an exaggeration. Even in Nairobi, most of the bookstores merely stock a collection of bestsellers from the last two or three years, a smattering of classics, and a handful of East African travel guides for good measure—a Wal-Mart style nod to literacy. The day I found a bookstore in the Yaya center in Nairobi that was run Book People-style, with books of all types stacked to the ceiling and an owner who had the entire catalog in his head, was one of my proudest moments. I even found a book that the current president of Barnard wrote that was published by Harvard University Press. It was out of my price range, but still, talk about a small world. I was so excited by my find that I promptly bought two real books, despite the metaphorical pile that exists on my NOOK. I spent the next few days pouring over Race of a Lifetime (American title: Game Change) about the 2008 presidential election. It was in the shrine-like section of the bookstore dedicated to all things Obama. When I was reading it back in Stella a couple of days later, I had the following conversation with the nurse and “head Mama” of the orphanage, who is currently studying every night for the business classes she takes at the local branch of the University of Nairobi.

Mamdogo: “Can you finish that book?”

Me: “Sure, see I’m already halfway done. It’s about how Obama won the election in the United States.”

Mamdogo: Flipping through the pages of the book, “It’s like the Bible. Me, I am afraid of such a book. If you finish this, you must tell me, in very short, how he did that.”

This is an educated woman in a very well-off Kenyan family. Her husband is a co-founder of the orphanage and is considering a run for an MP seat. It says something about the general lack of reading culture that even at the highest level of society in this area, the only substantial book that most people know is the Bible. Novels in Stella are truly, well, a novel idea. When I was reading the Diary of Anne Frank one afternoon downstairs, one of the fourth graders asked me if Anne (one of the other volunteers) had written it because that is the only Anne she knows of. When I explained what the book was about she said incredulously, “A girl?! Wrote that whole book?!”

I have never been so grateful for my education, for my books, in my life.

I spend several hours every evening with kids clamoring for my help with their homework. They have officially discovered that, unlike the non-native English speaking volunteers they’ve had before, I can read everything in their books. I can explain any English word they don’t recognize and describe how it relates to words they do know. I can do other things. I can read maps. I can look things up in my English-Swahili dictionary. I can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in my head. I understand AM and PM. I can write with my left hand. (It’s like black magic!) They don’t have any reference books outside of their textbooks, but I have a computer—with internet access—and I know how to use it. I refuse to do any part of their homework for them, but I have endless patience for explaining why and how because watching their faces when they finally understand the problem they’re trying to solve is the best part of every day.

I realized when I was helping several students with their long division last night that I have some thank-you letters to write. I was privileged enough to have many teachers in my life who were willing to sit next to me explaining, with endless patience, how a problem worked until I had my Eureka! moment. I am privileged with a family that values education so much that they were willing to make sacrifices to ensure that I received an excellent one. And they’re still always willing to send me a good book.