KEY POINTS:
Thousands of Fijian children who lack books will benefit from the bright idea of a Tauranga librarian.
The office of Tauranga libraries manager Jill Best is overflowing with at least 5000 children's books after she made an email appeal to colleagues in other public libraries.
Her initiative followed a visit to Fiji last November at the invitation of the Fiji Local Government Association to assess the state of Fiji's libraries and make recommendations for the future.
She left dismayed at the run-down state of libraries caused by years of under-funding. The worst example was the Suva Public Library, which had been starved of any money to buy books for at least 10 years.
Having mapped what Fiji needed to do to save its libraries, and knowing it was unlikely to happen while coups continued to destroy the economy, she resolved to "somehow or another get decent stocks of books".
New books were out of the question, so she asked her friends around New Zealand libraries to think of Fiji's children when they did their periodic weeding-out of books. The word went out eight weeks ago and soon her office looked more like a publisher's warehouse.
Six cubic metres of books, all in very good condition and mostly about five years old, will be loaded into a container this week and shipped to Fiji, with costs met by the Commonwealth Local Government Fund.
- BAY OF PLENTY TIMES
