Welcome Matt and Cory Melaugh We are thrilled to announce the hire of Matt Melaugh as the new Program Director in Rwanda for Ready for Reading. Matt has had incredible experience working in the education and non-profit worlds for the past several years and has made a huge contribution in one of the most underserved neighborhoods in the Boston area. Matt will be arriving in Rwanda September 8^th and living out in Rwinkwavu with his wife Cory, who has been hired as a training specialist at the Hospital, serving as a nurse educator and mentor as part of a larger country-wide initiative through the Rwandan Ministry of Health. They will both be a wonderful addition to the community! Ready for Reading is so excited to have a leader of this caliber with a global perspective committed to making a lasting impact and difference. With his strong spirit of collaboration and teambuilding skills he will be an amazing asset ensuring the success of the Project as we move forward in this next phase. Matt is ready and eager to begin his work at the RCLLC and is looking forward to meeting and working with local community leaders and residents of Rwinkwavu.

Our 20 library apprentices, hired from the Rwinkwavu community, were well prepared to open the RCLLC’s doors to the community. Our first day open for business we had 423 people visit!! The building was humming with excitement and curiosity and the response was overwhelmingly positive as you can see from the faces in the photo. Currently, we are open one day a week to the public as we continue our staff training in ICT, English, story telling, read-alouds, customer service, library services/organization and management, curriculum and programming development. We will also be using this training period to further assess the needs of the community. In October we will be expanding our days of operation to include not only open library time but Kinyarwanda Adult literacy classes, e-reader classes, Sunday School, Mothers’ Literacy Group and a variety of cultural/social activities, …adding programming as we develop curriculum and train staff.

I am thrilled to announce that we celebrated a soft opening of the Rwinkwavu Community Library and Learning Center (RCLLC) on July 13^th !!  We could not have accomplished this without your generosity and steadfast support! Officials from the Ministry of Sports and Culture, District, Sector and local leaders, our Partners In Health family and the community participated in this much-anticipated event! The Library/Learning center buzzed with excitement as all our guests and community members, greeted by our staff on their arrival, gathered for the opening festivities. After touring the facility, there were many speeches, read aloud, and as is Rwandan custom, singing and dancing lead by students from the area schools. The day was truly the culmination of the planning, determination, collaboration it has taken and the community created along the way, to bring this vision to fruition as a vibrant and dynamic beacon of hope and transformation. In the words of one Rwinkwavu resident, Isaie Ndayisaba, who expresses the sentiments of so many in the community: “ I would like to say: “Big thanks” those people who brought that project! They knew exactly what was needed here. The center will be unique in the region, an important thing to the society.”