POCATELLO — It’s official. The Marshall Public Library now has a sister.

The Historic Downtown Pocatello Library will hold a kickoff celebration at 11 a.m. Saturday to celebrate its new sister library, the Kasama Provincial Library in Kasama, which is located in the south-central African country of Zambia.

The event will be part of the library’s multicultural story time, where children can expect to learn about the country from native Zambians living in Pocatello. The program includes listening to a Zambian story, writing letters to children from Kasama, enjoying African sweet rolls and more.

“It’s a really cool thing,” Marshall Public Library specialist Jack Garrett said about sister libraries. “You connect with another culture, meet new people and do all kinds of activities. Our intention here at Marshall is for each library to spread joy to a different community.”

Garrett added that the plan is to have interested children make pen pals to children in Kasama and start sharing talents, which may include exchanging artwork, short stories, videos and more.

Learning about and forming connections with another culture is one of the main focuses of the program, and Garrett chose Kasama because of its children’s programs that include alphabet learning, spelling bees, silent reading and story times that are similar to Marshall’s.

Another reason he reached out to Kasama was because of its focus on outreach.

“They wanted kids —and everybody — to know that the library is an important community resource,” he said. “So, they went to churches and talked about their (new children’s room) upgrade and encouraged kids to come to the libraries and come to story times. (Kasama) is pretty similar but they also do different things, so there’s something to learn.”

Zambia isn’t the only country the Marshall Public Library has taught about during past events. For the past three years, public services librarian Jackie Wood has held multicultural story times that involve bringing in someone from a different culture to read stories and to teach children about that specific region.

It originally started as a multilingual story time with American Sign Language as the first event, but eventually evolved to include cultures, with Pocatello residents from countries including Taiwan, Nepal, China, Haiti and more coming in to teach the youth about their homeland.

“Not everybody recognizes that we have so many people from so many different places,” Wood said. “So for all of the multicultural story times we’ve really tried to emphasize and have people from that culture or who speak that language coming in.”

Wood explained that the events have been a rewarding experience, especially seeing children get excited as they learn about more of the world and those from all over the globe.

“Almost every time when we’ve done these programs and we bring in these cultural experiences for the children, you can’t help but use the word ‘heartwarming’ to describe it,” she said. “It’s so sweet to see how much kids are enjoying themselves and learning about other people and how we’re different but also how alike we really are.”

The sister library celebration kickoff and Zambia story time will be the multicultural story time’s last event until this September, so those interested are encouraged to attend. It will be held in the library’s exploration center.