Our Cook Islands sister library

As the year 1997 rolled around, it found our library system in big trouble. The county bean counters had cut the system down to bare bones, so deeply that Michael Gaston, the newly hired Library Director, must have wondered what he would do to keep it going.

So did Eloise Mynatt of Sisters, one of the faithful Friends of the Sisters Library (FOSL) board members who loved the library and who was anguished as she watched the system slowly dying for the lack of money. Michael started "Bucks for Books" in an attempt to get some cash together to buy books and pioneered the successful campaign to create a Library District.

While Michael was working his tail off, Eloise, feeling very badly about the slow death of her beloved library, decided to get away from it all and take a trip to the Cook Islands. Why? "Because I had never been there," she said.

The Nation of the Cook Islands is comprised of 15 islands spread over 850,000 square miles smack in the middle of the South Pacific.

The nation consists of two groups of islands, one in the north and one in the south. The southern group of nine "high" islands - where the majority of the population lives - is mainly of volcanic origin. The northern group is comprised of six true atolls.

Rarotonga, located on one of the southern islands, is the capital, and that's where Eloise landed - and of course the first place she visited was the library.

"They had quilts, just like Sisters," she said. Moreover, just like Sisters, she discovered "they had a library that was also a cultural museum but with hardly any money to buy books."

Eloise asked the librarian how they purchased books without an adequate budget, and the librarian told her most are donated.

That's when that wonderful energy that volunteers possess went into motion. Eloise told the librarian about the FOSL Annual Book Sale. And it was during that discussion that another light came on in Eloise's head: why not make the Cook Islands library and museum a Sisters' sister library and ship surplus books from the FOSL book sale? The rest is history....

This year right after the Friends Book Sale, Zeta Seiple, FOSL treasurer, got together four boxes of books and shipped them by mail to the Cook Islands Library.

No matter what you do or where you go, books and libraries hold us all together.