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Advocating for Books

   I pulled out an article from the Financial Times on Wednesday night before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. It was about Room to Read, an organization I had recently heard about but which I really did not know much about. It was going to be my relaxing subway ride home reading and I was looking forward to it. I look forward to my reading about things that interest me as the subway winds it way to Brooklyn. Turns out that Room to Read is the FT’s seasonal appeal this year. Now I understand why. It is the story of an advocate extraordinaire. Here is what the article said about how it got started.

“Room to Read started out nearly 10 years ago with smaller ambitions. It all ?began with a trekking holiday to Nepal. A casual encounter with a school inspector led Mr Wood, then Microsoft’s head of business development for greater China, to a Himalayan school three strenuous hours up a mountain path. There he found a classroom so bereft of educational materials that the only books available – a few cast-offs from trekkers, including the absurdly inappropriate Finnegan’s Wake – were precious objects kept under lock and key.

It was there that the headmaster uttered a phrase that was to change Mr Wood’s life: “Perhaps, sir, you will some day come back with books.”

Back in Kathmandu, the Microsoft executive furiously dispatched e-mails to his friends, urging them to send him picture books. The following year, he returned to Nepal with eight donkeys bearing 37 boxes of children’s stories. He was so overwhelmed by the reception at Bahundanda school, where children decked him in marigold garlands, that he quit to devote himself to the cause of education.”

Literacy is a basic right and alters individuals and communities.  The San Francisco-based charity builds and stocks libraries, constructs schools, offers scholarships for girls and publishes books in local languages. What could be a better advocacy appeal. As an avid reader, mother of girls, author and education advocate, I was moved and intend to contribute this season.