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Books for Belize Project |
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Friday, 05 December 2008 |
Dr. Nancy Blattner is the Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs at Fontbonne University.
 This summer my best friend Tammy and I were having lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s in Cape Girardeau, where she lives and where I commute on the weekends. We had been discussing Fontbonne University’s fall 2008 emphasis on the U.N. Millennium Goals and the progress that still would have to be made in order for the goals to be realized in 2015, the ‘end date’ of the project. Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the work left to be done, Tammy asked, “What can we do?” I certainly didn’t have an answer at that moment, but I thought about her question for the next several weeks.
For the past year and a half, my husband and I had been supporting the work of Fr. Dick Perl, a Jesuit who works in Punta Gorda, Belize, a city in the poorest district of this Central American country. Without the benefit of electricity or running water, Fr. Perl supervises the elementary education of 5,250 children in 13 villages. Fr. Perl, who has a niece attending Fontbonne, visited with me early this fall to talk about his work and to share his dream: that all 13 villages would someday have a library for the school children to use. I asked Fr. Perl about what these libraries would be like; he replied that they’d be modest structures about 8 x 10 feet, nothing like the libraries in our schools but nonetheless a luxury in these villages where the amenities of life are few or non-existent. Soon after this meeting, my husband Tim and I met with Tammy and her husband Henry to talk about how we could organize a book drive that would stock these libraries for Fr. Perl’s children.
 The result of that conversation has been nothing short of miraculous! As part of Fontbonne’s focus on one of the millennium goals, achieving universal primary education, Dr. Sarah Huisman, one of the faculty at Fontbonne issued a challenge to her colleagues to collect 25,000 books for children in pre-K to 8th grade. One of Dr. Huisman’s classes has already collected over 1000 books. Another faculty member asked her daughter’s school to collect, and she picked up over 850 books from the school a few weeks ago. Still another faculty member explained the project to her teenage daughter who asked all of the invited guests at her birthday party to bring books instead of presents; she received 89 books that she donated to the drive. A fourth faculty member drove several hours to pick up 12 boxes of books that a colleague in another state volunteered for the book drive. Students and faculty in the Department of Education/Special Education have been collecting books and delivering books on almost a daily basis to my office. Fontbonne’s sponsoring congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, have also announced this book drive on their listserv and hundreds of books have come from members of the congregation and their lay associates.
In addition to these efforts at Fontbonne, the National Honor Society at SLU High under the direction of faculty member Lauren Block have collected books for the past several weeks and delivered nearly 1,000 books to Fontbonne before Thanksgiving. The children at Little Flower Grade School collected books until Thanksgiving, bringing in over 1,500 books, and one of the parishioners who read the announcement in the parish bulletin has called and pledged a significant number of books when she closes her children’s book store later this month.
In Cape Girardeau, similar efforts are underway. The children at St. Mary Cathedral parish collected books and gathered almost 2,000 volumes, and the local public library is ‘weeding’ its children’s collection to donate books for Belize. The department at Southeast Missouri State University, where my friend Tammy is a faculty member, is also sponsoring a book collection, and Tammy herself has mailed out more than 50 letters to family, neighbors and friends who have responded with boxes of books. An announcement about the book drive was in the Southeast Missourian recently, and Tammy was interviewed on a local radio station, KRCU.
But the miracle is not only happening with regard to collecting the books. Free transportation has been provided by the owners of Genesis, a trucking company in Cape Girardeau that will transport the books to South Carolina, where Cross International will ship the books for no charge to Belize. Even the daunting paperwork that has to accompany such international shipments is being completed without any problem. The project from beginning to end has been blessed.
Will this dream of collecting 25,000 books for the 5,250 elementary children in Belize be realized? I believe that the answer will be yes when the last of the books are loaded on a tractor trailer on December 10. If you are reading this blog and have new or gently used books for children pre-K through eighth grade, please consider donating them to this collection. Books can be dropped off at Fontbonne University in Ryan Hall Room 103 until Tuesday, December 9.
Click here to learn more about the Books for Belize project.
Click here to view the Books for Belize release on Southeast Missouri State University’s news page.
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Archdiocese of St. Louis: Mission Office
20 Archbishop May Drive, Saint Louis, MO 63119 • missions@archstl.org
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