#bookbridge

I’d like to dedicate a post to a wonderful community partner I work with every Saturday: BOOKBRIDGE Library. BOOKBRIDGE is an organization started by the World Scout Movement. Sorry for the all caps but that’s how their organization spells it, so that’s what I’m doing!

According to their website, 

“In 2005, a group of European scouts traveled to Mongolia for the first time. With a Mongolian scout troop as their guide, they got to know the country and its people. During a visit to a rural elementary school, the scouts noticed that the children asked many questions in English and were very eager to learn. Upon visiting the school‘s library however, the scouts found an empty room. No books were available for more than 1,000 children. Remembering that a scout’s most important duty is to serve the community, the scouts started to collect English books upon their return home. In 2009, they returned to the little village and set up a learning center with the books they had collected. The learning center had a dramatic impact on the local community as 25,000 people in the region immediately gained access to education. By training 120 local teachers the quality of education improved as well. Many children and young adults began visiting the learning center and attending free courses and activities. Soon, local businesses showed interest in the center’s services and for a fee, the learning center began training local employees in English. Within one year of its opening, the center became financially self-sufficient and is now a local employer, offering salaried positions to three staff members. Back home in Europe, the scouts began to think about how they could help more people with their idea and how to apply a business model approach to improving global access to education. Together with the World Scout Movement (consisting of 28 million scouts worldwide), they setup the BOOKBRIDGE FOUNDATION to promote cooperative work and transnational understanding by building simple, educational bridges.” 

I teach English to 6th-10th grade students there every Saturday with my fellow PCVs Emily and Melinda and the Bookbridge librarian, Dulamsuren (affectionately known as “Duuya”). The classes are free and all students can attend whenever they can.

This is one of my favorite parts of my week. The children who come to the library all have such enthusiasm and drive to learn English. Their enthusiasm is quite infectious and no matter how tired I am, I leave feeling like I drank three cups of coffee! I also love that I get to interact with students from all schools in addition to mine. It’s now extremely common for Emily, Melinda and myself to be greeted by students all over town! We play all sorts of games, ranging from listening games to outdoor speaking games to American card games. We teach about American holidays as well as English for Mongolian holidays. We also hold competitions here and give away books as prizes.  And, best of all, the lessons are at a library, so not only can we make use of so many books during the lessons, but we can also encourage students to get library cards and take home English books.

Duuya (the librarian) lives not far from me in Shine Khoroo. She has been a huge help with my Mongolian and has always welcomed me into her home. I definitely relied on her a lot when I came to site- she was one of my first friends. She is also improving her English speaking and hopes someday to visit BOOKBRIDGE headquarters in Germany. 

I am so grateful to this organization for providing not only a space for us to have Saturday lessons, but also a hardworking and dedicated staff. BOOKBRIDGE is a fantastic organization- if anyone from that organization stumbles across this blog, thank you!!!

PHOTOS

Em, Melinda and I teaching emotions. Em draws everything for our classes. She’s wonderful :)

Duuya, one of my first friends here and our Bookbridge librarian.

My 8-10th grade class acting out fairytales.

Valentine’s Day Competition Judging

Teaching Tsagaan Sar vocabulary- Em is demonstrating our action for “greet family.” We try to teach all new verbs with action cues to help students remember!

More action verbs- push vs. pull. Got to make sure my Bookbridge students can open doors! 

Teaching Tsagaan Sar advanced vocab to our 8-10th grade students!

Sentence construction- how we open most of our lessons!

Explaining Uno this past week- Monglians LOVE this game.

My students with Em- they REALLY love UNO.

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Our TukTuk in BOOKBRIDGE orange with an integrated bookshelf, hence BookTuk, finally arrived... and to our surprise it did so two days early. Usually there is a delay in everything here in Cambodia but once in a while, just so that you can't rely on things being late all the time, they happen too early. In this case, unlike when showing up on time for a taxi, we didn't care.

Our transportation partner Kuehne + Nagel chose to ship the tablets with UPS on March 4. On March 9, we were notified that the shipment cannot be loaded onto the aircraft as UPS' local freight partner does not allow battery shipments on passenger aircrafts. Since then, it is stuck in Singapore.

Kuehne + Nagel has put in big efforts in organising the on-time delivery of the shipment for the opening ceremony on Friday. They organised a subcontractor who is able to fly the two packages from Singapore to Phnom Penh. To get the shipment, UPS Germany redirected them to UPS Singapore.

However, since 7 days, neither UPS Germany nor UPS Singapore made a move. The answer is always: "Sorry, I do not have the authority". The UPS Person being responsible for the key account Kuehne + Nagel has not been answering e-mails nor picking up the phone for 5 days.

So basically the tablets were sitting in Singapore for a whole week and UPS refused to hand it over to Kuehne + Nagel for further transportation to Cambodia!

It took a personal mail from Bookbridge CEO Dr. Carsten Rübsaamen to UPS CEO David Abney to get the UPS customer support to act:

Hi Carston!  I've received notification that your issue has been assigned to a case manager to address. David Abney has asked for our Customer Relations group to take care of your concern and the case manager will be contacting you very shortly! -April

Big props to Carsten and Kuehne + Nagel for their efforts!

PS: If the customer support can't even spell the name of the customer after the CEO personally told them to start doing something you might have a problem there.

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