John Wood - Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy

ALSO BY JOHN WOOD

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World

FOR CHILDREN

Zak the Yak with Books on His Back

Zak the Yak and His New Friend Quack

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2013 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright John Wood, 2013

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Wood, John.

Creating Room to Read : a story of hope in the battle for global literacy / John Wood.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60612-4

1. Literacy programsAfrica. 2. Literacy programsAsia. 3. EducationAfrica. 4. EducationAsia. 5. Room to Read (Organization) I. Title.

LC158.A2W66 2012

374.0124dc23 2012019125

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions

This book is dedicated to Amy,

with love and excitement for all of our future adventures together.

Walk and move forward strongly. Your futures are in front of you.

Phuong Giang, librarian,

Ngu Hiep #1 Primary School, Tien Giang Province, Vietnam

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Ten Years, Ten Thousand Libraries!

I n the shadow of Machapuchare, a twenty-three-thousand-foot Himalayan peak, the only sound I hear is laughter. Hundreds of students fill the school yard. Each wears a uniform of dark blue pants or skirt and a sky blue shirt, in contrast to their jet black hair and gleaming white teeth. They range from tots to teens and are nearly evenly split between boys and girls. What they all have in common is what they hold in their hands: books.

The Shree Janakalyan Secondary School has more than six hundred students stuffed into a single-story school building. But until today they faced a problem familiar to millions of students here in Nepal: They had no access to books. There were fewer than twenty to share among the entire student populationa situation that is, depressingly, all too common across the developing world. Countless times Ive met parents eager to have their children be educated. But when the young students get to the local school, they find it desperately lacking in the most basic educational resources. A classroom without paper, pencils, pens, or books is not much of a classroom.

That situation had now changed abruptly at the Shree Janakalyan School, in Kavresthali, near the town of Pokhara, Nepal. A deluge of local people have gathered to help celebrate the opening of the schools new library. I am one small part of a very large crowd, one small light in a bright and populated constellation. In addition to the hundreds of students, there are at least that many parents, along with teachers, the schools headmaster, grandparents, government officials, and residents of the village. Grandmothers with pierced noses and faces lined with the crevasses formed by harsh sun and fierce Himalayan winds clutch newborns. Fathers hold aloft their three-year-old daughters, little girls eager to get a better look, anticipating the day theyll be able to explore the librarys treasures. The students energy level could power a village.

Were all assembled in front of a freestanding building newly bathed in an electric blue coat of paint. Its a small but cozy structure, about three hundred square feet. Across the door is a taut red ribbon, ready to be snipped by as many rusty scissors as the village can muster. Above the door and running nearly the length of the building is a banner celebrating the opportunities that literacy will bring to the village. It proudly announces an event that is not only game changing for the community but also a milestone in my life:

WELCOME TO THE OPENING OF ROOM TO READS 10,000TH LIBRARY

As I watch residents of the village continue to stream into the open courtyard in front of the library, I contemplate that numberten thousand! I recall how different things were just a decade ago, when a tiny band of volunteers and I opened our first five libraries in rural Nepal. We had a tiny budget, no employees, and only a handful of advocates.

From a mere five to ten thousand, in a decade: This is the steepest growth curve Ive ever been involved in, surpassing even my time in the technology industry. The number on that banner seems a bit surreal to me.

I feel a familiar hand on my shoulder. Turning around, I am greeted by my mother, Carolyn, a seventy-nine-year-old with a heart of gold, love of travel, and a crazed enthusiasm for the power of books. She is of hearty Norwegian stock and extremely healthy. Not many women of her age would insist upon flying halfway around the earth to the roof of the world to celebrate her seventy-ninth birthday. She attributes this love of nature, and of the cold, to having grown up in northern Minnesota.

Her eyes are as deep and blue as the many lakes of her native state: ten thousand lakes in Minnesota, ten thousand libraries around the developing world opened by her son and the organization he founded. I like the symmetry. She hugs me and holds me. Then she stammers through her tears: I am so very, very proud of you.

Me, too, interjects my eighty-four-year-old father, Woody, as he reaches out to shake my hand. Those two words are it for him. Like me, he is not one for overt displays of emotion; that short statement, piggybacked on my mothers expression of pride, is about as good as it gets with him. Knowing this makes his statement all the sweeter to me.

Pulled between the extremes of my two parents, I gravitate toward my loquacious mother. Her words and embrace have caused my eyes to mist up. Then I hug my father and share a thought Ive had for a long time but havent spken: None of this would have happened were it not for you two, who believed in my idea before the world did. You persuaded me to believe in this dream even during the tough times when it would have been easier to abandon it. Were only here today because of your faith in me.

Most parents would not encourage their son to leave a lucrative corporate fast track at age thirty-five to devote himself to a highly improbable start-up charity venture. Parents are genetically programmed to do whatever it takes to help their children survive. Their dreams and aspirations for their offspring typically focus on a good job, the predictable place in society that comes with it, and financial security. Yet in 1999 when I told my parents that I planned to quit my executive position at Microsoft in order to focus the rest of my adult life on the quest for global literacy, they barely flinched.