Guest blogger, Uxue Sansiñena of Chamisa Elementary School K-Kids in Los Alamos, NM details their experience working with youth book drive organizers.

Dear African Library Project,

As a K-Kids member, I have been able to see how we have affected communities from here in Los Alamos, all the way to communities in Africa. The African Library Project has really helped us impact other people’s lives. To begin this project we watched a presentation that showed us where the books would be going. It was exciting to see exactly how far the books would go!

As part of this project, we collected and picked out the books we were going to send to the libraries in Africa. After picking out the books, we packed them into boxes with some posters we colored for the kids in Africa to decorate their libraries with and make them their own. After all the books were packed and ready to go we helped load all the boxes into the truck that would take the books to a ship that would then take the books to Africa, and celebrated as we saw our project on its way to Africa.

Once the books were delivered to Africa, we got to see footage of the kids there getting the books. It was so heartwarming to see the kid’s happy faces as they carried the books to their library. It showed us how fortunate we are to be able to help other people that are so far away.

After watching the footage, we heard about all the other things other people were doing to make the African Library Project possible. Volunteers were going to Africa to train teachers and show them how to teach their students to read and take care of the books. We heard about how the kids thought they had to read a whole chapter book during their break time because they didn’t know what the bookmarks were for. It was surprising to see how the kids had to learn everything from reading to using a bookmark!

Being a part of the African Library Project not only allowed us to help others so far away but also opened up our eyes to just how fortunate we are to have everything we have.

Thank you for all you have done to make this possible.

Start Your Own Book Drive

Read our Book Drive Guidelines to learn all you need to know to collect, sort, pack and then mail your books to our warehouse, where they will be containerized for shipment to Africa. Your goal is to collect 1,000 appropriate books and approximately $500 for shipping and related costs. Double this and you can start two! Triple it and… you get the idea. To get ideas from other book drives — how they’ve collected their books and raised their funds.

We ship books all year round.  Our typical calendar is:

  • Ghana in February
  • Botswana in March
  • Malawi in June
  • Kenya in July
  • Uganda in August
  • Lesotho in September
  • Sierra Leone in October
  • eSwatini (Swaziland) in November