Quick back story:
The west African country of Mali is going through a civil war--one of those long stories involving multiple groups that you can learn more about here--not the least of which involves Islamic fundamentalists whose distaste for the Mali government is only matched by their distaste for ancient texts.
Fast forward:
Islamic fundamentalists overrun a variety of northern Mali cities, including the old, fabled Timbuktu--which just happens to have a fantastic library of ancient manuscripts. These same fundamentalists find Timbuktu to have a blasphemous Islamic belief structure, and that sort of accusation means thousands upon thousands of ancient texts were doomed to destruction at the hands of these fundamentalists.
Fast Forward Forward:
Local families, historians, and librarians in Timbuktu remove 296,000 of the roughly 300,000 ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu before fundamentalists have a chance to destroy them.
The quirk to all of this? The ancient manuscripts were moved to southern Mali, known for its tropical climate, heavy rain, and high humidity--in essence, weather conditions so harsh and moist to rag paper products, they might destroy the ancient manuscripts before the fundamentalists ever had the chance.
So they've established a website trying to raise money to create better packing environments for the protection of the ancient texts during this turbulent time in Mali.
And that's why you should care.
/end non-sarcastic blog post.
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