You Gotta Help Me Out, Yea-eah

I have a couple requests for assistance today, no stories about death spiders or bad English or anything.

First, our campus is pretty large, maybe the size of an average high school campus. Except where other schools have parking lots and sports fields, we have grass. Now, most schools also have groundskeepers (sometimes of the Scottish variety) to keep what grass they do have at a reasonable length. Ihungo is lacking two things in this regard: a groundskeeper, and any sort of lawnmower. Instead, we allow a travesty to occur. I'll elaborate. Every day, after classes end and the students get lunch, it is time to do what we call "usafi". This means general cleanliness, but is especially related to how the campus looks. So what ends up happening is that every day, a shocking number of students are sent to cut the grass for an hour or two. Yesterday, it was the entire enrollment out there cutting. The reason this bothers me so much is that the kids are using hand sickles to perform their task. Not sickles with long handles, no the little crescent kind that are less than a foot long. So I walk around campus in the afternoon to be greeted by hundreds of students bent over the grass, working. It is a monumental waste of time. I imagine yearly, tens of thousands of students' hours are spent cutting grass alone. This is no overestimate. So what I'm thinking is that, if my school could get several, maybe five or so, of those old rotating push-mower things, they could do this work in a small fraction of the time, and this would free them up to do things like study or rest. I don't know the logistics of finding a way to get those grass-cutter things over here, but if anyone has a benevolent soul and wants to save these kids from an insane amount of time-wasting work, any information would help me. I don't want to get a gas-powered mower because it would not last for as long, there are too many working parts. But these old things, they would be perfect... Let me know.

The second thing is again with my library. I'm in the process of writing some organizations which coordinate shipping books to African schools/libraries, but I don't really know the process, and I'm not sure how they will respond. I was talking with a girl teaching at a school nearby, and she gave me a great idea. She said she wrote home and asked her family/friends/associates/people-like-Davis to try to plan book drives, especially at places like her old elementary and high schools, churches, and local libraries, etc... What she called it was "Book and a Buck", and each person that donated a book also gave a dollar, to help pay the shipping cost. I thought this was a pretty dang good idea, largely because of the response she said she received. She has gotten dozens of boxes of various types of books, so many that her library is running out of shelf room and she had to write and say "No more!" For those of you who are looking to help me out in an easy way, this would be it. If you don't know anything about old lawnmowers, then maybe you know something about rallying people for a small book drive. If you are wondering what types of books to send, anything is good, really. Our library is really shoddy now, the most recent books were printed in the '60s. I have talked to students about it, and they are pumped. They come into the library, look around for something to read, and end up disappointed and leave with empty hands. So yeah, I don't really know what else to say. If you want to help, drop me a line if you have any questions. Thanks a lot (preemptively) for any of you who even try to help. Its much appreciated. Really. Thats it for today, lets do the thing and create some readers. Maybe this will help their English skills huh?