An under-utilised community building in Annai Village, Region Nine, will soon be transformed into a library, thanks to the collaboration between Alabama-based Guyanese Oslyn Rodriguez and students from the Sand Creek Middle School in New York who collected over 12,000 books to support the library.

Rodriguez is the founder and executive director of Backpack International Inc. (BPI), a non-profit organisation she started in 2016 with a global mission to equip students in need with overall academic success.
She returned to Guyana after being away for 14 years and wanted to offer her assistance anyhow she could. “I was really moved and wanted to do something to give back to the children of Guyana,” she said in an interview with Pepperpot Magazine.

Being a certified English teacher with a passion for education, Rodriguez, who was born in Linden and grew up in Region Five (Mahaica/Berbice), wants to be able to help children obtain the essentials of being successful at school. The goal, she shared, is to equip students with what they need for school, such as books, shoes, clothing, hygiene products, bicycles and more.

She visited Surama Village last December to donate 118 brand new bicycles and backpacks filled with items the children needed to care for themselves at home and school. During this visit, she became connected with the Annai Village Council.

“They currently have a community building that is not being used to its capacity, so our chairman suggested we can put a library there. We came back and started on a plan to renovate the building into a library,” she related.
BPI and the South Colonie Central School District subsequently hosted a book parade to celebrate the philanthropic efforts of the students at Sand Creek Middle School. The Student Council had launched a school-wide service project to collect 5,000 books to benefit the new library in Annai.

The students quickly surpassed this goal and collected more than double the target number. On June 22 last, they participated in a celebratory book parade to transport the books from inside the school and load them onto a shipping truck. Students from each class carried books from inside the school’s temporary pop-up library and walked the parade route with books in make-shift floats before they were loaded onto the truck parked outside the school.

Rodriguez and Angel Rodriguez, Chairman of BPI, visited the school to accept the donation of books and personally congratulate the students and community for their outstanding acts of service. Students had created a beautiful ‘pop-up’ library to display the books during the collection process.

Rodriguez presented the Student Council with a plaque and the Global Impact Award to English Teacher Melissa Moskov, who co-ordinated the project with the students. The event concluded with remarks from BPI’s Chairman, who reminded the students of the impact of their efforts. “Every book you collected shows every child in Annai that they are loved, respected, important and that they have friends in America,” he said.

The children in New York were happy to help, Oslyn Rodriguez shared. “They were so excited. They wrote posters to the children of Annai, and we are overjoyed and grateful for what they have done for the children in Guyana despite never having met them.”

The next phase of the project is to be able to raise enough money to send the books to Guyana. The books will be shipped in a container from Hudson, New York, to Guyana and the organisation is seeking the community’s support to raise US$20,000 to complete the project. A trip to Guyana is scheduled for December 26-31, 2022, to dedicate the library.

BPI is also looking to train a librarian and help the residents at Annai develop a catalogue system to assist the library users. Furthermore, some 200 chairs will also be donated to the library.

Since the organisation came into being, Rodriguez said they have been able to provide assistance to five of Guyana’s 10 regions. “My goal is to be able to help children in all 10 of the regions. We also have a huge donation of medical uniforms and lab coats that we would like to donate to healthcare workers; about 12,000 pieces,” she disclosed.