I read
Doris Lessing's acceptance lecture for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature which
Nate the Great posted here (thanks, Nate!). I was quite moved. A quick web search and I see that there are several organized efforts to collect and send books to children in Africa. In the U.S., the largest organization is
Books for Africa. They're located in St. Paul, Minnesota but shipments of books to them can be mailed at the "media mail" postal rate of only $19.09 per 50 lbs. That's probably one bookshelf's worth of books. I have two or three shelves of public domain books that I will send them this week. These are all now available to me as ebooks so I have no reason to keep them. I also have my old college textbooks that are still relevant but would see better use if I sent them, too. It seems like a better destination than my local library, which has been reluctant to accept my offerings lately, or the dumpster. Boxing them up and shipping them should be a pretty trivial effort. And with the increasing supply of ebooks available, maybe I will be repeating this in the future. There are other organizations, too, like the
U.K. Literacy Association,
Books for Africa Library Project, the
Mona Foundation, and several others.
Here are a couple of YouTube videos about Books for Africa. I hope you'll consider sending some of your pbooks, too.
