Dear Rafiki,

8 years ago I moved to a wonderful country, with long winters and hot summers. Little did I know, this country would soon become my second home. Moving to Canada from Uganda on my own as an international student was ironically a very easy and light decision, made with little thought on my part. I didn’t spend too much time picking a university or researching what I would need to survive the snow. As an African I knew that when you get such an opportunity you don’t think about it or ask questions, you just go!

What fascinated me the most about living in Canada was having access to so much information. I could find every book I needed for school in the library, I had free internet on campus and could google every North American-centric phrase that was foreign to me. This type of “information opulence” was so normal to everyone here that within time it soon became normal to me. That was, until I went back home.

In June of 2012 I embarked on my most impactful journey thus far, I joined the Global Health Corps – A 1 year professional fellowship that aims to address health inequities using a global partnership model. I was partnered with an American professional peer and the two of us were placed in rural western Uganda working with an international organization on a public health program. Our role blessed us with frequent interaction and work with the local community of which I was proudly from. I learnt so many important and necessary life lessons that year but one thing that caught a hold of my heart was just how impressive and eager to learn everyone was! I was surrounded with rural Ugandans full of ingenuity, intelligence and most of all eagerness to learn more! I was looking in the mirror, this was me 7 years ago so I knew that this feeling would not loosen its grip of my heart. I started asking myself, how could I use my privilege to try and address this gap of lack of access to information that in turn can cause a terrible cycle of de-motivation within our youth, drop outs in our school children, uninformed decision making in our leaders and so much more.

Chimamnda Adichie speaks about this feeling of how reading a book provided her with a lens view into the foreign interesting and intriguing world of the other. As a child in East Africa reading books taught me so much; I learnt about the west african – kola nut from Chinua Achebe’s stories; I learnt about “tree houses” from Nancy Drew books and before I even knew what snow was; I learnt about the Canadian prairies from my dad’s random geographic magazines.

Like me, many of us Africans are highly motivated and want to learn but just need the tools to do so. This is not a false story of providing aid to the poor desolate Africans. This is a story of giving tools to the literate, educated people in rural Uganda simply because we here have Kindles, iPads and definitely more than we need. If I could, I would start a book cycle going both ways so we can both learn from each other… But for now, let’s do what we can and send some books to those who will read them, love them and dream from them!

In solidarity, Viv.