There’s a large shipping container sitting in the corner of the Penticton Wal-Mart’s parking lot. Not an unusual item to find at the giant chain store but this one is different — it’s painted in bright colours, with “Books for Children” in brilliant red letters.

The shipping container is the property of the One Person Project, an Okanagan organizations that’s dedicated itself to helping out people in the Kahama district of north west Tanzania.

“We’re in the area long-term and we’re supporting them at lots of different levels — education, health care, sports, and farming,” said Denise Whittaker, one of the directors of the project.

The shipping container is going to be in the Wal-Mart lot until mid-October and gradually filled with books and other supplies for a village school in Kahama. When it’s ready the container will be shipped directly to the village, where it will be retrofitted to become a functioning library.

Whittaker explains that the container is the first of several, part of the project’s education component.

“Eventually we’ll send one to seven schools,” she said. “This is our first crate that’s going and it’s kind of a learning curve. We will be sending more over a number of years.”

They’ve already had one open day with the library container, with another planned for Saturday, Aug. 29. They didn’t have a lot of people come down to that first one, she said, but Whittaker said that many people who passed by took a leaflet, and then went home to gather books to bring back.

The thinking behind the shipping container is just a matter of practicality, explains Brenda Lowe, the founder of the One Person Project. Local construction is usually done from mud brick, which is not the most durable of materials.

The shipping container will not only make sure the books and supplies get to the school, but once retrofitted as a library room, will provide a much more durable watertight and secure building to act as a library room.

Lowe has made three trips to Kahama. She said there are about a million people living in the district — 300,000 living in the main city, and the rest scattered in villages around it, farmers barely eking out a living, subsistence farming in the poor soil.

However, because of its remoteness and the amount of disease, the area doesn’t get much aid from the outside world, she explained.

“Our area is a lot more desperate because it’s not nice to work there,” said Lowe, explaining that besides endemic diseases like malaria, the HIV-AIDS rate, already high in Tanzania, is much higher there.

To give an idea of the challenges they’re facing, Lowe explains that for all those million people in the district, there is only a single doctor.

“Our whole idea is to go into one community and stay there long-term,” said Whittaker, adding that they want to help the children as they grow up, bettering their standard of life through the years.

“It is a major undertaking. We’re going into our third year, we’re taking major steps now but we built up to it slowly,” she said, adding that this was done with support of many elements of the Okanagan Community. “It is building slowly and we’re getting to a stage where we’re going to be applying for grants and corporate sponsorship.”