Today, a man and some military wives showed up at one of the elementary schools to donate books to the school library. They had filled a station wagon with boxes that came to over 200 children's books. I helped carry the boxes into an empty room where we spread everything out on several tables.
I think this would be a nice thing to do...in America. The problem with all these books is that they are in English and the only person who can read them is me. It would be like a group of Japanese people showing up at a school in America to donate over 200 books in Japanese. Also, some of the pop-up books were ripped, some of the sound-making books were broken, and some books had crayon colored in them. I was told the man running this book drive is very passionate about what he is doing, but I couldn't help feeling the school was just used as a dumping ground for military family's unwanted stuff.
I feel bad for the librarian who has to go through them all.
5 comments:
So, if you canceled your Internet service, how are you updating this blog? At school?
He's burning books, and his lackie in Nago is reading the smoke signals. It's quite a good system, except on windy days.
Yep, I get (slow) internet at school!
i encountered this when i was in palau. the military on guam would do these mail drops at christmas time and they would fill big wooden boxes full of unwanted military crap and drop it via airplanes. i could only think that the military families were saying 'oh those poor people' when they were throwing in their year-past-expiration pringles and ripped, ugly clothes. over half the stuff went straight into our island's garbage dump, which hardly had room to serve that purpose.
Yea, it was that 'oh those poor people' sentiment that some of the wives were expressing. I believe they said something to me like, "We're trying to reach out to the schools that are less fortunate."
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