Los Altos Town Crier
Mountain View resident Eric Schmidtke recently led a successful effort to donate 2,000 books to the Bukembe Boys High School in Kenya. The Eagle Scout worked with fellow members of Los Altos Troop 30 to collect the books throughout the community.
The idea for the project came to Schmidtke when he first noticed that his neighbors left unread books outside that they didn’t want.
“I was walking by a house that was trying to get rid of a bunch of books just out on their lawn, and I personally really love reading, so it just hurt me a little bit to see that such interesting novels are just being thrown away and wasted,” he said. “So, I wanted to solve this problem of the inability to recycle books in a community. Originally, I wanted to recycle the books into my own community, but then I found the African Library Project, whose goal is to improve literacy in Africa.”