Leo Nupolu Johnson still remembers his first visit to the Hamilton Public Library.
“I stood speechless for five minutes because prior to that, I knew a library to be a 40-foot shipping container with random storybooks in it. I couldn’t believe that this entire facility was a library,” Johnson said. “It left a mark on me forever.”
His perspective was informed by growing up in Liberia, which he left to escape war in 1998, and the eight years he spent living in West African refugee camps before coming to Hamilton in 2006.
With much of its infrastructure destroyed by war, Liberia lacks books and
