The Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, the American Friends of the Kigali Public Library, and Marshall Scholars for the Kigali Public Library are committed to building Rwanda's first public library in the nation's capital, Kigali. We decided to build a public library to counter the striking scarcity of books in Rwanda and the resulting lack of a culture of reading. For decades Rwanda suffered from isolationism, violence, and extremism, which finally culminated in April 1994 in a genocide in which approximately one million Rwandans were killed.