donations’ destination

One of the eye opening features of living in Uganda is seeing the unfortunate overflow of many donations. There is a large container at the Bushikori Christian Center that contains tons of donated books and other stuff for the community to benefit from. But so far, it seems as if the rats have benefited the most. The unfortunate reality is that many of these gifts cannot be used. The Ugandan culture also contributes to the growth of the container. Whenever anything breaks or is useless, it goes into the container. In a culture where all garbage is burned, many objects are seen to be valuable even after deemed useless. So, for instance, in addition to the books in the container there are also piles of type writing paper, broken wheelchairs, and broken projector. Maital and I spent a week going through one of the containers a few months ago and made a major dent. But there is still a lot of work to do. It’s a shame there is not a poor school in America where we could send these donations… just kidding.

Working with the Abayudaya community has given me the opportunity to see another example of a collection of donations piling up in the Moses Synagogue on Nabugoye Hill. It is both wonderful and terrible. On the one hand, the community has hundreds upon hundreds of sidurim, chumashim, Hebrew language books, books in Hebrew, secular textbooks, novels, magazines, and so much more! From the Abayudaya’s point of view, it is such a blessing that Jewish friends from all over the world have given gifts to the community.

On the other hand, the amount of unread books is a little overwhelming and frustrating. For example, last week I was looking through the collection of Hebrew language books to supplement my Hebrew classes, and I found three copies each of 7 different Hebrew language textbooks. With 15 students and 3 of the same textbook, I am forced to either teach 5 different classes or continue using the blackboard as a textbook.

The most overwhelming and frustrating part of the collection, though, is that so many of the books are broken and torn and there doesn’t seem to be any order. Over the past few weeks, I have been waiting for a chance to get my hands dirty trying to organize the books in the sanctuary. This morning, after giving Isaac (a Mudaya service leader and Torah reader) a Torah trop lesson, he helped me begin by organizing the books that are essential to the services. There are over two full bookcases (6 shelves of 25 books each) of Hertz chumashim and two smaller bookcases (five shelves of 60 each – double stacked) of the old Rabbinical Assembly Shabbat and Festivals siddurim. Interspersed with the sidurim are the Silverman High Holiday machzorim. About 10% of each group of books is missing a cover and/or is badly damaged. Our first task was moving the broken books from the usable ones and removing other books and papers that have found their way into the shelves of the chumashim, sidurim, and machzorim and finding another place for them. There is also a bookcase of High Holiday Prayer Books that the congregation uses mixed with a number of other machzorim and sidurim by different publishers.

With the help of a number of students from my Hebrew class, we reorganized the books in the synagogue over a grueling two days! In the synagogue, there is now a section for sidurim, chumashim, sifrei kodesh, machzorim, siddurim and machzorim that are not used by the congregation during services, Israel, Jewish philosophy and literature, Hebrew language books, science textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other subjects. By the end, we all felt great satisfaction and everyone in the community mentioned how different it looked. Next, we will need to figure out how to make the most of future donations!