This document demonstrates how to read and write ESRI shapefiles in R, including points, lines, and polygons. It requires Rstudio, rgdal, RColorBrewer, and sp packages. The document uses shapefiles containing administrative boundaries, roads, and community clinics to generate a map visualizing the different features. Code is provided to read in the shapefiles, plot the layers on a map, and write the shapefiles out of R using rgdal functions.