When given the opportunity to crate our belongings from the United States to Mozambique, we were certain to bring many, many books. Thanks to my sister’s research and hard work coupled with homeschool funding through the IMB, my girls are given the gift of English reading in our Portuguese world!

Since access to English books is quite challenging in a non-English speaking country and access to any literature at all is also quite challenging, we came up with a fun idea:

🎉Stauffer Library! 🎉

Stauffer library began with measuring the kid books, measuring the wall space, doing a little math and hand drawing the blueprints to three happy bookshelves. Proce negotiations, logistics for retrieval and three weeks later, the local carpenter produced some happy (and heavy!) book shelves. The girls and I then alphabetized all our chapter books by title and shelved them. Picture books were organized into topics and shelved. Sections were divided and labeled (yay, happy laminator machine). We also filed a section for magazines and a handful of newspaper articles (again hard to find in English so we picked a paper up after waiting for a few months for our trip to South Africa) which was also laminated for durability.

The girls each have their own small basket for the books they are reading each week. Once per week the girls get to rotate being the librarian, serving their library patrons who come in to switch out their books, and reshelving each book alphabetically (for chapter books) or according to topic (for picture books). While waiting for another patron to borrow their books, the girls have enjoyed reading magazine and newspaper articles.

My librarians have been ECSTATIC to get the chance to recommend books that they have read to their sisters and have been perfecting their alphabetizing skills (the littles with adult help).

At the end of library hours everyone has enjoyed returning to the homeschool shelves with their small basket of new books for the week as the library is closed up.

The library has also proven lovely in selecting books to share with English-learning friends and English-speaking teammates as well as making it easier to pull books for homeschool use.

And we even have a library cat! 😉

(This library is cat approved, for sure.)

It’s fun to see my girls still get to “go to the library” while living at least a day’s drive from any potential English library (though we’ve never yet found one).

My bookworms are VERY happy. ❤️