Libraries are more than just shelves of books. Books are just a tip of the iceberg of what is a space for learning and sharing information, community building, belonging, escaping, ways of navigating through different worlds, and creating a brand new world of possibilities.
 
That is exactly what the Mayalaya- a library and the meditation space at Ascend Education Ecosystem will be all about.

That is what we want the space to be all about.


Mayalaya-Kenya will be inside the premises of Ascend Ecosystem- an innovative childcare and education facility that provides disadvantaged children with a safe and loving environment to learn, live, and grow. The children belong to families who live in one of the worst slums in Kenya-Giotto, a shanty town close to a garbage dump site.


https://www.gofundme.com/f/build-a-school-for-kenyas-worst-slum


Our vision for Mayalaya and for the children who will be benefitting from it is simple.

We want to develop young readers, to begin with. The culture of learning and sharing information begins through love for reading. My love for reading purely began because I had a great library in school and the best librarians who did not mind picking out books from the highest racks and recommending good ones when I didn´t know what to pick.
Everything started changing when I started to enjoy reading, and that is the culture we want to build, to let the children experience what reading does and why it is good to begin with.  The output vision of this step is to develop a love for reading :)

Reading anything that fascinates you forces you to learn new words, think new thoughts, and keep looking at the direction of your interest long after you have finished.
The reading space then becomes about sharing conversations, meeting like-minded friends who love subjects you love, discussions regarding your interests, and a hub that is centered around learning and development.

I have used libraries (and I still do!) as escape rooms to find myself, and that is what I dream about for the children at Ascend.

Using imagination creates a unique world where they get to feel things, visit places they would have never known otherwise. They can be anybody out there, and once you have been someone else when you come back to your own world, it always manages to change you, slightly, somehow.

Everything changed with the power of imagination for me, and that is what we want the children to learn that they are able to travel around and between different worlds, in this space we have built for them and bring back that world they find a home to reality.

The space will be a bridge to close the gap between worlds where imagination in these young minds should serve as a realization that their world does not have to be like the way it is. It can be different if they want it different. If it is discontent, they feel after seeing a potential world; we want that discomfort and discontent to be used to modify and improve their worlds, to leave it better, and to leave it different for everyone.


Mayalaya-Kenya will be so much more than just another library or a place with shelves. In fact, there are no conventional shelves in the design itself!

It is about freedom-to read, communicate, educate, entertain, be informed, inform, escape, a community space where they feel they belong to, a safe haven, and a space to dream.

We want the children to dream, to imagine. The space is an inspiration for them to believe that as children and as individuals, they make the future, the first step being imagining that things can be different. They learn that they have the power within themselves to make things beautiful, change the world, and leave it a bit better than they found it.

And so how can you help bring about this change from the grassroots level itself?

By making sure that there are books around the children to develop their love for reading and the space to read it. The library and the meditation space is important, as once built, it will be the only one in the vicinity as a resource center for the children in the school.

Your donations for this cause is important for all the “whys” explained.

Your donations for this space will help build up a generation of children from the slums whose lives would be completely reimagined and changed forever.


I hope we can all give these children a world where they can read, imagine, be read to, understood, and just BE.

*All fund updates will be posted as it comes and in our official social media handles: @mayalaya_aee and http://www.mayalaya.org/. Follow the pages to know about our other ongoing projects.