RARELY do we repeat an appeal in these columns; this Friday is the exception.
Two weeks ago, we urged business houses to sponsor a school or better still, a number of schools by donating funds that would allow Huon Gulf Rotary Club to make significant purchases from the 6,000-odd titles available on board the mv Doulos.
The floating bookshop has now arrived in Lae.
But Huon Gulf Rotary has been given just K400 towards this vital project.
It is hard to believe, as one observer has already noted, that the business people of our second city, apparently so eager to finance sport, can be so cavalier in their attitude towards getting books to kids, to us a far more important exercise.
PNG currently has few if any general booksellers.
For school librarians to purchase a suitable range of books for their students is indeed a daunting prospect; importing from overseas is now a prohibitively expensive exercise.
The arrival of the Doulos presents a rare opportunity to acquire books at a reasonable cost – provided there are sufficient donors in the community prepared to back this initiative.
The majority of PNG schoolchildren has no access to books.
School libraries have become a rarity in our country.
That would be bad enough in a developed country such as Australia, where children would still have access to many other forms of educational input.
But in PNG it is disastrous.
The effect is already obvious.
Far too many Papua New Guinean adults, although fully capable of reading, have no wish to do so and will read only when it is essential to their careers.
The habit of reading for pleasure and for information has to be encouraged from an early age. Children of five and six should already be able to wend their way through simple readers and those in higher levels of primary school should have a great thirst for the printed word.
We need to remember that while children in urban areas may be lured by television, the vast majority of our school students have no access to that medium.
All the hype about installing internet facilities throughout the country is at the moment just that, hype.
The costs of keeping even the simplest of computer systems operational, and the need for an uninterrupted source of power are two reasons why blanketing PNG with computers capable of accessing the world, while highly desirable, is a long way off.
Books on the other hand provide a ready source of information and entertainment, and provided substantial funds can be generated in the next week or two, Huon Gulf Rotary can make real inroads into the desperate state of the Morobe province’s school libraries.
Keep in mind that there are few staffed and operational public libraries left in PNG; those that continue to open their doors generally have a pathetic range of ancient donated tomes of little practical value.
There are many substantial business houses in Lae and in the rest of PNG.
Some of these resource giants would find a substantial donation for this cause a mere fleabite; on the other hand, the benefits could be enormous.
It seems there is little problem for big companies to fund football teams, despite often atrocious behaviour on the part of team members; when it comes to issues such as sponsoring schools to access books, those generous donors are significant by their absence.
We urge Lae businesses and indeed large investors throughout PNG to recognise the worth of this exercise and give the hard working members of Huon Gulf Rotary the kind of major support they need.
At the same time, we can only wonder at the near total failure by provincial governments to back the revival of libraries for the public.
Lae is a perfect example; the once well-stocked Lae public library has effectively ceased to exist, and libraries in most other provinces are a facility of the past.
We challenge those enterprises with a heart for the school children of this country to consider deserting sports sponsorship for a year or two and swinging meaningful support behind school and community libraries that can help shape the future of our country.