is the title of this column by Nicholas Kristof. It is about an American, John Wood, who has now built almost 5 times the number of libraries as Andrew Carnegie,
even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries.
Kristof went
to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.
Kristof tells us Woods story, that 13 years ago he was a Marketing Executive for Microsoft who encountered a school in Nepal with 450 students but no books.
Wood blithely offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys. The local children were deliriously happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.
Please keep reading.
My wife insisted I write about this. As she pointed out, I know something about changing one's direction in midlife in the direction of service of others, something I did when I became a teacher, albeit when more than a decade older than Wood was when he left Microsoft, and something I may do again at the end of this school year.
Further, this is about education. It is about opening up worlds of possibility to young people.
What Wood does is not merely put up buildings. His organization finds books in the necessary languages. That is not always easy:
“There are no books for kids in some languages, so we had to become a self-publisher,” Wood explains. “We’re trying to find the Dr. Seuss of Cambodia.” Room to Read has, so far, published 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.
Stop and consider that for a moment - Room to Read has published almost 600 books, a remarkable achievement by itself. Think of finding authors and/or translators for languages suc as some of those listed.
Wood and Room to Read
also supports 13,500 impoverished girls who might otherwise drop out of school.
Kristof tells of one Vietnamese girl, and I urge you to read the column if for no other reason than to learn about Le Thi My Duyen.
The effort to educate young women is important. And it is not that expensive. Kristof has several paragraphs about this, starting with this one:
The cost per girl for this program is $250 annually. To provide perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; that sum could have supported an additional 40,000 girls in Room to Read.
If that is not a sufficient context, he goes on to remind us of all the billions we spend on war and its accoutrements and on propping up puppets with little positive effect before writing bluntly
The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.
He quotes Wood saying
If you can change a girl’s life forever, and the cost is so low, then why are there so many girls still out of school?”
There is more from Wood, who is passionate. Wood talks about the frustration he feels knowing there are more then 3/4 of a billion people who are illiterate, yet the cost of addressing that is so low. He expresses his desire to have built 100,000 of his small libraries by the end of 20 years.
What Wood is doing is notable, positive, and might well accomplish more than all the guns and bullets. It is likely to do far more to spread the idea of human rights, of democracy, that we claim we would like to see around the world.
I look at his efforts, and I think of America, in the past, and today. For a chunk of its history the American South made it illegal to let slaves learn to read and write. If anyone wonders why, think only of Frederick Douglass, who learned to read perhaps largely on his own and then became one of the most powerful and persuasive voices advocating for Abolition. That is part of our history.
And our present? Sadly we see government closing libraries, or restricting the hours they are open, in the name of balancing budgets. Somehow I think higher taxes on the wealthy and having corporations pay for the services that provide them with workers and safe environments - schools, libraries, fire, police, and roads - is a better way of building our economy and our nation than is slashing budgets in the name of a fiscal authority that seems to benefit only those who already have wealth and power.
Kristof ends with a paragraph by Wood, the one where he talks about his aspiration for 100,000 libraries, which he hopes will serve 50 million children. Let me end with the rest of that paragraph:
"Our 50-year goal is to reverse the notion that any child can be told ‘you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and so you will not get educated.’ That idea belongs on the scrapheap of human history.”
Peace.