IT’S a pleasure to end the week with some good news.
Papua New Guineans should be more than grateful to the organisations working in our country that never hesitate to donate materials and funds for good causes.
And there are few better causes than the establishment and furnishing of libraries.
There’s little point in using rose-coloured glasses to look back at the pre-independence era.
For while it is true that our country benefited from an administration determined to open and maintain libraries throughout the two territories, we should now be building on that initiative to meet the requirements of our current population explosion.
There’s equally little point in stating the obvious: libraries in PNG, whether public libraries for the whole community or libraries in schools, are indeed few and far between.
Successive governments have failed to see libraries as an integral part of the education system and they have also failed miserably to recognise the importance of libraries as a community resource.
But let’s applaud two significant gestures at the beginning of this year and hope that they may point the way towards better developments to come.
First, we want to congratulate Rotary in the Morobe province and at the same time throw our support behind their current initiative, related to the visit of that legendary old passenger liner the MV Doulos to PNG.
The Doulos is approaching a century on the high seas of the world and is surely the oldest motor vessel afloat in the world today.
In recent years, she has visited PNG on a number of occasions as part of a world-wide campaign to get books at reasonable prices to populations for whom that is a rarity.
The Huon Gulf Rotary Club wants to purchase as many books as possible from this remarkable ship. To make this possible they’ve asked for companies to donate a minimum of K200 for purchasing titles to be given to a school in their area.
On a previous visit of the Doulos, the club had considerable success in purchasing sets of encyclopaedias and other reference books for schools; and this year they want to build on that initial effort.
The ship normally carries many primary level books, as well as atlases, dictionaries, thesauruses and general reading material.
It’s a sad fact that PNG has few if any surviving general bookshops and many much-needed publications are no longer available in our country.
Rotary contact details are at the foot of this article.
The second good news item about books and libraries comes from the National Research Institute; they’ve come to the assistance of communities living in the Ambunti area of the East Sepik province.
The NRI has donated books to help the community set up a library.
The books come from the institute and are destined for the Apo resource centre, which includes the HELP resources organisation, the Apo Youth Group and some staff from the Ambunti district administration.
With the support of the World Wide Fund (WWF), the centre provides training on social, environmental, economic and development issues. The books cover topics such as youth and crime, rural development, sustaining the environment and conservation.
These two initiatives are a healthy sign of a community determined to help fill in the shortfalls that are inevitable within a developing country.
We hope that at the same time they may act as a stimulus to the Government to be the first since independence, to set up a national project to create and maintain public libraries throughout our country, to ensure where possible that they have an internet component and to staff them with highly skilled Papua New Guineans.
The tertiary courses are available but there is little incentive to study library administration when there are so few opportunities to put knowledge into practice.
Our National Government should set a goal to establish dozens of basic libraries in schools throughout the country and fill their shelves with appropriate books.
As it stands, we are failing to even create a love of reading among the younger generation, who abandon books as rapidly as they can after leaving school.
It’s time we opened the doors to the vast world of information and entertainment that stands waiting to be discovered.

Huon Gulf Rotary can be contacted through PO Box 3178 Lae.