This morning Ruth and I were going to go visit several libraries, both on the hospital complex where Tidziwe is and in the City Center of Lilongwe. We left Osman, the IT man who’s been helping us, to install Koha and went downstairs to catch a ride over to the city center. Partway there, Ruth grabs my arm and told me to look – I looked, and she told me there was a baboon! I looked again, and this time i saw it, too late to grab my camera. I had had no idea there were wild baboons in Lilongwe – incredible. He was just sitting there by the side of the road, thinking baboon thoughts. Very cool.
So, we drove through Lilongwe. Lilongwe is much more like a US city than is Lusaka – it has many very standard large business buildings and shopping strips. It also, however, has people burning things at the side of the road, homeless children begging or playing at one or two corners, many more people walking around, and baboons!
We arrived at the National Library, which is a circulating library as well as the central point for cataloging in Malawi, and also a distribution point for donated books from all over the world. We started our tour in the Children’s section, which has children’s books and tables, and met a librarian who had also been at the SCECSAL conference – we’d had lunch at the same table on the last day, although I was so distracted that day that I didn’t remember meeting him. 
He was very nice to us, showing us all over the building – there is an incredibly full and crowded back room full of books being processed for distribution, an overworked tech services department, and a warehouse full of books donated by various international organizations, such as Book Aid. I think that there were more books in the back than in the front! There were reading tables in the big main room, and also in an atrium outside – all of them full, mostly with people studying for exams. They’re using a freeware version of a library management system from UNESCO, called ISIS.
Also, the UN had recently closed their library and dropped all of their materials on the National Library – so we saw that area, already set up in a big front room so that people could use it. The British Counsel had also closed their library, so many of those books were waiting to be added to the circulating collection or distributed.
Not nice – too many libraries closing. At the SCECSAL meeting, the president of the Malawi Library Association, had asked a representative of the US State Dept’s American Corners library facilities several pointed questions about whether it would close – that makes sense now. Maybe the library owners think they aren’t needed now, with the Internet, but a lot of people in Malawi don’t have much access to the Internet, and books are still very heavily used.
We also walked around the corner to visit Ruth’s sister Allena – it’s nice that she has family so close. I’m almost envious.
The next place that we went was the American Corner in Lilongwe – this is a service provided by the State Department that involves a small library with a reading room, books about the US, and cheap internet access. I never knew they existed before this conference and visit, but I think they’re a great idea. Ruth studied at this one in secondary school – people definitely use it. I knew it belonged to the US when I had to go through a metal detector to enter it – the first one I’ve seen in Africa. That’s sad.
We walked back to the British Counsel for lunch – they have a small cafe in their garden, with a woman selling the same types of Malawian food that we’d had for lunch the day before. I got beef stew, Ruth Chambo, and we ate in the garden. It was very nice.
So, after lunch, we went to Kamuzu College of Nursing to meet their librarian and see their library. To get there, we took a shortcut through the hospital’s pediatric wing.
The hospital is blue, and smells of some sort of iodine. There are many, many patients – it’s a free public hospital. The children’s wing’s entry was full of parents and children – they looked at us, then lost interest when we walked through. We walked past a yard full of parents and patients sunning themselves, another outdoor area where women were washing clothes in outdoor sinks, a naked little boy being washed off too, and then through an empty play-yard with old empty cribs stored in it. There were swings, but no children were using them – I don’t know why. We walked on through it to see a big building that would have been perfectly at home in Austin – and saw why. It was Baylor’s version of the UNC Project. I think that UNC’s looks like it belongs here more, and there were a lot more people around it, too.
There was a beautiful view over the edge of the hill that the hospital complex sits on – there was a chance of rain today, and there were dark clouds chasing behind the low hills. We walked down the road, past people pulling live chickens out of their trunk, down to the Kamuzu College of Nursing, or KCN.
It’s a relatively large campus, neat and orderly, and we walked all the way through it to the library. The library has a nice big building, with lots of study carrels, but a relatively small collection of books. It’s still much larger than ours in Tidziwe, and is entirely focused on nursing. The librarian is still on leave, so we were shown around by an assistant, and we spoke to the IT staff – they’re using The Library Company’s system.
We walked back to the other side of the hospital, and then through to the Malawi College of Health Sciences on the other side of Tidziwe. It seems to be a school for the Allied Health Sciences, and it’s one of the schools whose students take turns using the UNC Project Library, as do KCN’s. It’s also fairly sprawling, with the library in a big building all of its own. That’s where the similarities end – this library has very outdated books in no very recognizable order. Regardless, there are many students studying, and using the computer terminals. As in the other libraries, they have to pay for internet access – ours is free, and our books much newer, adding to our appeal. If I am donated any allied health books that HSL can’t use, I’m going to send them to Ruth to give to this library – it needs them.
After that last distressing visit, we walked back to Tidziwe, and went upstairs to ask a question. We found a group of people giggling over a computer – some stupid person in Blantyre took a lot of naked photos of himself and his married lovers, and then left them on a computer. An IT person took the photos and made a CD, which he then happily sold all over the country. Some of the people are recognizable, and the staff were looking to see if they did recognize them – they did, to everyone’s horrified glee. I walked in to see a certain portion of female anatomy that is not usually displayed on office computers. Porn is illegal in Malawi, and the police want to arrest the people who filmed themselves – they want to know for what purpose that was intended (!) – and also the distributors. This was on the front page of the newspaper, so everyone is looking up the webpage and waving around the newspaper. Well, it broke any tension.
