His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives
is the title of this column by Nicholas Kristof. It is about an American, John Wood, who has now built almost 5 times the number of libraries as Andrew Carnegie,
even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries.Kristof went
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.
Kristof tells us Woods story, that 13 years ago he was a Marketing Executive for Microsoft who encountered a school in Nepal with 450 students but no books.
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.
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