OSC’s Room to Read Reaches Out to Children in Need

By Raina Lockwood

Faculty Supervisor

OSC’s Room to Read service group has been operating during the challenging times of the COVID pandemic and country-wide lockdown. The group's mission is to facilitate, support and provide resources for local school libraries. Recently, we have started a new effort to provide underprivileged children in a rural community with books and school materials.

This effort began when we partnered with Mr.Mahinda to provide books donated by the OSC community to needy children in local schools. Mr. Mahinda is well known as the “motorbike librarian” whose passion is to make books accessible to children living in isolated locations. From the goodness of his heart, he visits different areas in the Kegalle area on his motorcycle and distributes donated books. OSC’s Room to Read has been working with him for over a year now and we have successfully delivered several loads of books.

In August we heard about three remote villages in Kegalle that had been affected by the 2016 Samsara mountain landslide. Some of the families had lost their homes and then been relocated to Isurugama village. This is the place that we identified to work with. Our group reached out to the OSC community for support and many generous people responded with donations for school supplies. Last Saturday a small group of us packed up the school van with books and supplies and travelled 3.5 hours to reach the village. We were given a warm welcome and distributed 69 packs of back to school supplies to the children of Isurugama, Parmbe and Wadumulla villages. The community was very grateful for our outreach and sent us home with bundles of fruit.

OSC’s Room to Read will continue its efforts and looks forward to a resumption of normal service activities.

UPDATE FROM THE PE DEPARTMENT