By Simela Petridou
LLL South Africa applied for the grant offered by the Friends of La Leche League as we planned to donate the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (WAB) book to municipal libraries throughout South Africa.
Buying the WAB is far more expensive when you literally live at the end of the world.
The price in online bookstores is high, just like everything else that needs to be imported and has to travel a long way to reach South Africa. We were therefore so grateful when we received the grant and at the same time could agree on a generously discounted price from the UK publisher that allowed us to import a big shipment of books directly.
Due to some unfortunate circumstances that were beyond our control, we waited from January – when the books were supposed to be sent to the shipper – until July before our shipment finally arrived at the Cape Town harbor.
We stamped 100 WABs with our name, logo and website details so that readers would be able to find local support and information when they borrow the book from their library. Distribution started in Cape Town and reached Kwazulu-Natal, which is 1700 km away and will, by the end of this week, also reach the Northern Cape, about 1500 km from Cape Town.
All Leaders will receive a WAB for distribution, and some might distribute more than one as they travel to more remote areas where there is no LLL presence. We try to hand over the books in person where possible. Leaders drop off the book with a letter from LLLSA, should the library consider purchasing some of our books in the future.
We are so very grateful that the Friends of La Leche League were happy to extend the deadline for us, seeing as how there was nothing we could do about the unfortunate delay of our books’ arrival.
We have been sending updates regularly and hope that we can finally complete our project by September 2019.
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