His Libraries, 12,000 So
Far, Change Lives
By Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times
CAI LEI, Vietnam
I came here 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.
Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many
libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look
nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s
fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing
clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08
days.
It all began in 1998 when Wood, then a Microsoft marketing director,
chanced upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem:
It had no books to speak of.
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.
He faced one challenge after another, not only in opening libraries but
also in filling them with books that kids would want to read.
“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.
It also supports 13,500 impoverished girls who might otherwise drop out
of school. In a remote nook of the Mekong Delta, reachable only by boat, I met
one of these girls, a 10th grader named Le Thi My Duyen. Her family, displaced
by flooding, lives in a shabby tent on a dike.
When Duyen was in seventh grade, she dropped out of school to help her
family out. “I thought education was not so necessary for girls,” Duyen
recalled.
Room to Read’s outreach workers trekked to her home and cajoled the
family to send her back to class. They paid her school fees, bought her school
uniforms and offered to put her up in a dormitory so that she wouldn’t have to
commute two hours each way to school by boat and bicycle.
Now Duyen is back, a star in her class—and aiming for the moon.
“I would like to go to university,” she confessed, shyly.
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.
So many American efforts to influence foreign countries have
misfired—not least here in Vietnam a generation ago. We launch missiles,
dispatch troops, rent foreign puppets and spend billions without accomplishing
much. In contrast, schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we
spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.
Wood, 47, is tireless, enthusiastic and emotional: a motivational
speaker with no off button. He teared up as girls described how Room to Read
had transformed their lives.
“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?” he mused.
The humanitarian world is mostly awful at messaging, and Room to Read’s
success is partly a result of his professional background in marketing. Wood
wrote a terrific book, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World,” to spread the
word, and Room to Read now has fund-raising chapters in 53 cities around the
world.
He also runs Room to Read with an aggressive businesslike efficiency
that he learned at Microsoft, attacking illiteracy as if it were Netscape. He
tells supporters that they aren’t donating to charity but making an investment:
Where can you get more bang for the buck than starting a library for $5,000?
“I get frustrated that there are 793 million illiterate people, when the
solution is so inexpensive,” Wood told me outside one of his libraries in the
Mekong. “If we provide this, it’s no guarantee that every child will take
advantage of it. But if we don’t provide it, we pretty much guarantee that we
perpetuate poverty.”
“In 20 years,” Wood told me, “I’d like to have 100,000 libraries,
reaching 50 million kids. 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.”
