English homework

Changing Lives, One Book at a Time

In his 05 November 2011 article in The New York Times, “His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives,” Nicholas Kristof tells the story of how John Wood has opened 12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools around the world. According to Kristof, Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has stocked those libraries and schools with over 10 million books. Kristof states that Room to Read opens six new schools a day, or, Kristof points out, six times as many as the number of outlets McDonald’s opens.

Kristof writes that since Wood quit Microsoft and founded Room To Read in 2000, Wood has also self-published 591 children’s titles in a variety of remote and diverse languages. Kristof quotes Wood that some languages don’t have children’s books. Thus, Room To Read has ferreted out children’s authors in languages such as Xhosa, Chhattisgari and others. Kristof informs us that Wood is currently seeking “’…the Dr Suess of Cambodia.’”

Further, Wood, Kristof emphasizes, has changed the lives of 13,500 otherwise impoverished girls by keeping them in school. Kristof relates how he met one such girl, Le Thi My Duyen. Floods had forced her family to live “…in a shabby tent on a dike,” Kristof reports, and those floods had also forced Duyen to drop out of school. According to Kristof, Room to Read paid for Duyen to not only go back to school but to live in the dormitory and avoid a four-hour daily bicycle-and-boat commute, all at a cost of a mere $250 per year. This tiny amount, Kristof points out, dwarfs in comparison to the billions and billions we spend on missiles and troops for our foreign interventions and, as Kristof quotes Wood, that tiny amount“…can change a girl’s life forever….”

Kristof argues that Wood succeeds because of his hard-headed, business-like approach. Kristof explains that Wood utilizes his marketing background at Microsoft to spread the word to 53 Room To Read chapters around the globe. From these 53 chapters, Kristof proclaims, Wood attacks illiteracy “as if it were Netscape,” aiming for 100,000 libraries and relegating illiteracy to “…the scrapheap of history,” all within 20 years.