Her Royal Highness Princess Anne, the Princess Royal visits the Fountain of Hope Lubuto Library
On 24th September, Fountain of Hope was privileged to receive a visit from Her Royal Highness Princess Anne, the Princess Royal. As part of the visit, she came into the Library (I was told in advance that I would have 4 minutes to give her a tour, which amused me since I have been operating on Zambian time for so long now!) and was very interested to hear all about Lubuto and our programmes. She asked lots of questions and was happy to meet our staff and library users. Kasela (the Library Assistant at FoH) has been doing some craft activities with the boys recently - he found a good crafts book on the shelves and I provided some materials which I had brought with me 'just in case' when I first travelled to Zambia, but we had never used them before. There is a small group who are very keen on making cards, masks, Christmas trees (!) - and we made a little bouquet of paper flowers for the Princess. Mwiya, one of the key members of this crafts group, presented them to her on her arrival in the Reading Room, and she accepted them graciously. She carried them all morning and even refused to give them away when somebody offered to carry them for her!
I thought it would be difficult to top such a level of excitement but we have managed to at least equal it with the launch of the LubutoDrama programme. Members of the Barefeet performing arts group come each Friday afternoon to run the sessions, and we have two Lubuto staff members who are being trained as facilitators. The drama group are working towards performing a story from the LubutoMentoring programme, and have 6 weeks to prepare it before presenting it in public. Following this performance they will begin another 6 week unit, working on another story. The excitement which accompanies the rehearsals is certainly infectious - not to mention the warm up games at the beginning of each session! Yesterday they were playing various games involving balloons and several people came into the Library to see where the strange banging, popping, squeaking and cheering noises were coming from! We are all eagerly anticipating the first performance...