Original Story Published by: Jenny Kincaid Boone for Virginia Tech News
Photography by: Ray Meese
(Above) Amanda Milella, a Virginia Tech student and member of the library design team, talks with Felix Majawa, Mzuzu University librarian.
The ashes of burned books formed piles that looked like small mountain ranges. Melted metal beams lay in heaps, and broken glass littered the ground.
“It was eerie,” said Amanda Milella, one of five Virginia Tech architecture students who visited Mzuzu University in Malawi, Africa, in October. It was the first time that the students had seen the rubble-filled site where the university’s library once stood. A fire destroyed the structure in 2015.
Since then, an events hall has served as the university's makeshift library, filled with more than 40,000 books that were donated to the university, mostly through a book drive organized by Virginia Tech in 2016.
Nearly three years after the fire, Hokies are helping Mzuzu University turn a new chapter.
Seven students and an adjunct faculty member from Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies are creating the design for a new library for Mzuzu, a 4,000-student institution in the country's northern region and Malawi’s second national university.
The Virginia Tech students are not only designing a place to house hundreds of thousands of books, far more than the number lost during the fire — they are drafting a symbol of hope for the university and its surrounding community.
The library serves as an essential information gateway at Mzuzu because of the region’s poor technology infrastructure. Less than 10 percent of the people in Malawi have electricity.
“They have a greater appreciation of the book,” said Milella, a fifth-year undergraduate student who will earn her bachelor’s degree from the School of Architecture + Design in May. “It’s beautiful.”
This isn’t the first time that Virginia Tech has worked with Malawi. The university started TEAM (Technology, Education, Advocacy, and Medicine) Malawi in 2015, a program that works across academic disciplines to create research, development, and educational programs in one of the world’s most impoverished nations.
