Ever since the third grade, Mira Wadehra knew she wanted to get involved with the African Library Project. In her freshman year of high school, Mira volunteered to host two book drives for schools in Malawi. Loving the experience so much, Mira did another Malwai book drive her sophomore year of high school and between junior and senior year, collected books to start a library in Sierra Leone. She has been an avid supporter of African Library Project since 2016.

It started when she realized how wasteful her peers and like institutions could be about books, especially public libraries. This injustice motivated her to take action. “We take books and literature for granted,” Mira said during an interview with ALP staff. It was for that reason why shipping the books out became her favorite part of being a book drive organizer. “[The books] were going to a new place and they were going to be used, valued.”

Go for it. There is nothing to lose in this situation. You can only help people and this will only help you grow as well.” Currently, Mira is a freshman at Chapman University in Orange County, California. She is a dancer, specializing in Hip Hop, Kathak, and Bollywood styles. In July 2018, she performed a solo dance routine that raised $5,000 that went to the orphanage she was adopted from. Her passion for purpose-driven work, which led her to volunteer for African Library Project as a teenager and ship 4,000 books to four different schools, has stuck with her.

Whether it be her interest in social science or her work as a teacher’s assistant, mentoring young dancers in the Bay Area, Mira is only getting started. We asked her if she had any advice for African Library Project volunteers and she had this to say, “Go for it. There is nothing to lose in this situation. You can only help people and this will only help you grow as well.”