A North Vancouver Rotary Club has discovered just how much it takes to move a whole library of books, not to mention the library itself, to a remote First Nations village on the B.C. coast.
This month, the books and a modular building to house them will be barged from Richmond to Wuikinuxv (Oweekeno) village, a community of about 100 people located 300 kilometres north of Vancouver on the Central Coast, near Rivers Inlet.
It's the culmination of a project that began in September 2011, when members of North Vancouver's Rotary Club of Lions Gate and the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, Steven Point, got in a Coast Guard helicopter and flew to the tiny village.
"They were very welcoming and very kind to us, and they gave us gifts and made us lunch, they were wonderful," said Elizabeth Chong, a member of the Lions Gate club.
"We had a meeting with them, and explained who we were and what Rotary was, and (said) if you want us to help you, let us know and we'll see if we can help you."
The community embraced the project, and is now eagerly awaiting a library of their very own, said Wuikinuxv band manager Rick Yellowhorn. The library will also be a place where both children and adults can access computers and online learning.
"I didn't know (Rotary was) into this stuff as much as they are," said Yellowhorn. "It was a pleasant surprise. They're definitely the right people for the job."
Yellowhorn said the remote, isolated community just doesn't have the connections or resources to do a project like this on their own.
The community can only be accessed by boat or plane, and its small school teaches children from kindergarten to Grade 8. After that, the students need to go to Port Hardy to continue their schooling.
The idea for the literacy project came out of a conversation between Point and his aide, Bob Blacker, who is a Rotarian.
"Bob often would talk to (Point) about the projects Rotary is doing and one day His Honour said to him, well you're doing all these international projects to help people abroad, but I think people are maybe not aware of what's going on in our own backyard," said Chong.
Point, who is from the Skowkale First Nation near Chilliwack, recognized there was a problem with literacy in many remote B.C. First Nations communities. Blacker started visiting different Rotary Clubs to see if any of them were interested in taking part in the literacy project. Lions Gate was one of the clubs that bit.
The North Vancouver group put out a call for donated books, and now have a warehouse full. They got free shelving from the now-closed Book Warehouse store on Lonsdale. Britco, a Langleybased company, is donating and renovating a 10 foot by 40 foot modular building for the library, and two employees from the company will travel up with the building to help set it up. Firefighters from Richmond will help build a foundation for the library and a sports court.
Next fall, two members of the Tsawwassen Rotary Club who are experienced literacy teachers will travel up to the community and offer literacy assessments to community members. Rotary's goal is to leave literacy-supporting libraries that can be run by the communities themselves, said Chong.
"We're helping them up the first rung of the ladder so they can then take flight and run with it, and at some point we need to back out and we need to ensure sustainability."
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