By Khalida Sarwari
If you’ve got books lying around that are no longer in use, Saratoga teens Eshna and Divya Narayan want to get their hands on them.
The twins, age 14 and freshmen at Lynbrook High School, are short 100 books to reach their goal of collecting 1,000 books for the African Library Project, a nonprofit group that brings gently used books to African communities that have eager readers but few books.
Since December, the twins have collected about 900 books from their own collections, as well as from their friends, classmates and family members. Their next move is to post fliers at churches and middle and elementary schools in the area.
The teens are looking especially for books on science, history, geography, children’s literature, architecture, autobiographies and life skills. The books would have to be appropriate for pre-schoolers to students in the eighth grade.
Divya and Eshna are collecting specifically for the seven book cabinets and four bookshelves that are sitting empty at Kadzuwa Primary School in the Savala Village in Malawi, a primary school attended by more than 300 students. The nearest library, according to the twins, is more than 4 1/2 miles away, so the library will serve also as a gathering spot for the community to come and check out books.
“There are so many books that people have just lying around and getting caught in dust and no one does anything with them,” said Divya. “There are a lot of people in Africa who could benefit from the books that no one here is using.”
The girls became involved with the project after researching opportunities to volunteer and learned about the lack of education and high literacy rate in Africa.
“That’s the part that caught my eye. They don’t have many books there,” said Divya. “We kind of take a lot of things for granted.”
Eshna drew a comparison between the plight of the African citizens and the characters in Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451.
“This kind of relates to that,” she said. “If these kids get an education, it would solve a lot of their problems and they won’t get in as much trouble hopefully.”
Once the twins reach their goal, they will begin the task of sorting through all the books that they’ve collected to organize and filter them based on their usefulness, said their father, Arun Narayan. Then, they will ship the books to a warehouse in New Orleans where they’ll get consolidated and from there, the books will go directly to Malawi.
The cost of shipment to New Orleans and Malawi is about $500 and will have to come out of the Narayans’ pocket. To raise that money, the twins are fund-raising and plan to hold a bake sale in the near future.
They aren’t sure how long they’ll continue with the project, but Eshna and Divya want to help at least a few more schools in Africa.
“We believe that these books could really impact people’s lives,” said Divya. “I remember there’s this one girl who was determined to be a doctor and this project helped her a lot. She started learning more and she became even more determined to become a doctor.”
The African Library Project was founded in 2005 by Portola Valley resident Chris Bradshaw, and since then has completed 985 libraries in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Cameroon, Lesotho, Nigeria, Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi and Ghana, as well as created 750 partnerships with U.S. schools and other organizations. In January, the organization sent its millionth book to Africa.
For more information about Eshna and Divya’s project and to learn how to help, visitafricanlibraryproject.org/book-drives/book-drives-in-action?alpdetail=316.
