A Blessing of Books
The Oru refugee camp is in southwest Nigeria, about 250 miles southwest of the capital, Abuja. The situation at the Oru refugee primary school is difficult. There are about 400 students who attend the school. They have six classrooms in the school and don't have enough chairs, tables, and books for the students to use.
RESPECT Nigeria started an effort to collect books for the children at the Oru refugee school. Madhuri Yechuri recently joined RESPECT Nigeria as a volunteer and is currently helping with this effort.
Madhuri is originally from India, and now lives in San Carlos, California, USA, where she works as a software engineer. She enjoys getting the chance to do volunteer work. For the last couple of years, she worked with a hospice. After her time there, she wanted a change of pace, so she looked through the onlinevolunteers.org site to see what might be a good fit. She saw a posting from RESPECT Nigeria, and learned of their desire to find sources of free books to send to the Oru refugee school.
Madhuri talked with a friend who works as a volunteer for the Palo Alto Public Library in California, USA. Her friend told her that the library regularly needs to throw away old books to make space for the new ones. Once they learned of the Oru refugee school's need for books for the children, they were happy to donate the books to RESPECT Nigeria.
At this time, Madhuri has four boxes of books she has collected from the library. She said she is amazed at the number of books this single library has to give away, and that before she goes much further with collecting books, she would like to figure out the most cost effective way to ship the books to Nigeria. Since sending the books in bulk costs a great deal of money, Madhuri's current plan is to ship the books in installments. She saw on the United States Postal Service web site that they can send around 25 pounds of books for $50. Madhuri is now trying to raise this money to get the shipments started.
If you would like to help Madhuri with this, there are two ways she suggested. The first is if you have ideas to share for bringing down the shipping costs. For instance, if you or someone you know works at one of the courier companies, and can arrange somehow for subsidized shipping, that would be great. Of course, contributions of any size toward the cost of shipping the books will be appreciated. If you are able to help Madhuri, you can contact her by sending an e-mail message to nigeria@respectrefugees.org. Contributions to the shipping costs can be made on the RESPECT website. Follow it up with an email to donations@respectrefugees.org to let us know that your contribution is to be earmarked for this project.