Thant flew from Yangon to Seattle to meet donors and arrange future shipments this past week. Thrift Books‘ CEO Hector Rivas offered one million books to our project, a portion of which will be sold in Myanmar to fund purchase of Burmese books to replace those destroyed by cyclone Nargis. The bulk of the second shipment will be children’s book, useful in all libraries for kids and adults trying to maintain English learned in school. Clair Jenkins, VP of UNITUS and major investor in Reading Tree, among other philanthropic activities, also attended our lunch meeting at House of Hong, as did Dave Richards, who hosted the event, and Carolyn Aamot, Gifts Librarian, University of Washington. Dave has contributed mightily with time and funding to get this project off the ground; Carolyn nurtured a donation of 5000 titles by the University of Washington. Both are serving as advisers, along with Allen Bjergo, VP, Institute of the Rockies
Thant no sooner returned to Yangon than his bookstore arranged a book fair to raise funds for shipping our next container, as well as buying Burmese language books needed so desperately in village and town libraries destroyed by the cyclone. He called this morning to report $2000 raised, plus donations and probable sales today and tomorrow of an added $1000. With contributions already in our bank account, this is enough for our next shipment of 50,000 books donated by Thrift Books, most of which will be high quality children’s and adolescent readers
The Institute of the Rockies and Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation are the only NGOs permitted by both governments to carry out a book project on this scale. We received our license from US Department of Treasury on January 26, and can directly fund reconstruction of libraries, buy equipment, help train staff, and supply books. We are preparing a site so smaller contributors can use PayPal or credit cards to also pitch in. Our cost is 20 cents per book to ship and distribute, so a donation of $20 pays for 100 books delivered to a library in Myanmar. We hope to rebuild at least 10 libraries this year, the average cost is $25,000 for the structure, equipment and books. We’re looking for donors at both ends of this scale.
In librarians lingo, our conspectus includes the following subject areas:
- English language and ESL text books and teaching guides;
- Biographical, historical and humanities literature;
- Science, social science and agriculture, to exclude politics;
- Comparative studies and public administration;
- Technical & text books on mechanics, engineering & electronic technology;
Medicine, health and public health; - Law and business;
- Childrens literature;
- Good quality fiction and science fiction [no pulp fiction];
- Literary and art criticism;
- Select academic periodicals in these fields, if they include good runs of five years or more;
- Selected popular science periodicals such as National Geographic, Discovery &
Scientific American.
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