Okapi School Notebook

Kizito and I did community service projects for Telecel, a telecommunications company in Kinshasa. We identified a school that trained girls in sewing as a trade. Their machines (sewing machines were hand operated, due to the lack of electricity throughout the country) were old and worn, so we talked Telecel into sponsoring a half-dozen new machines. We held a ceremony and gave each student okapi notebooks and pencils, to commemorate the gift of the sewing machines.

This notebook was the first one we designed, and the text was simple, "The Okapi: unique in Zaire," and "Telecel likes Zairian Animals." These booklets had a few dozen pages inside with lines (for text), grids (for math problems), or blank (for art) and were used to copy the lessons off of the blackboard. The schools did not have textbooks, so the completed notebooks were kept for years.

The okapi, a beautiful black and white striped animal related to the giraffe, occurs only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire). It is one animal that the population recognizes as "special."