In the fall of 2009, after a fifteen-year career in sales and marketing management, I began a new position with an international non-profit working to eradicate child slavery headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
Over the next two years, I traveled to Ghana, West Africa, on three separate occasions for up to two weeks at a time. I made some wonderful friends in the process, spent time at the US Embassy in Accra, helped write a US State Department Grant, and coordinated fundraising and marketing events stateside.
I also fell in love with the children I met in Ghana, and will never forget one small girl named Doris pulling me aside on my first night in the city of Tema to read to me. We sat together on the floor in a hot corner of a hallway and she tentatively uncurled her fingers to reveal a crumpled and worn pamphlet. She crawled into my lap and insisted, “I am small, but I can read. Listen, Mama Susan.”
Doris in 2010
For the next ten minutes she read a tattered and dirty VCR instruction manual to me aloud, in English. The group home where she lived—a safe haven that provided food, shelter, love and her education, had very few books, if any. They’d been lost, she told me, or destroyed. She shrugged, and shook her head. “No books. Only at school, and there, not many.”
I was jetlagged, exhausted, and moved to tears by her earnestness, but knew one thing in those quiet moments with her warm body nestled into my arms: learning is a gift. Reading—something I had taken for granted my entire life, was a privilege.
Two years later, when I left the non-profit world to work full-time as a writer, I knew I was making a leap into the unknown. At the same time I knew that my love for writing was inextricably linked to my love for reading. I remembered Doris, sitting in my lap on that sweltering night in 2010. Reading is a gift. And I knew that somehow, I could still do something to help.
The only problem was that I didn’t have any money. What did I have to give? I pushed the idea aside.
Yet the thought of sending books to Ghana wouldn’t let go of me. I began researching non-profits working to provide books internationally, and was thrilled to find the International Book Project in Lexington, Kentucky, thirty miles from my hometown. Here was an organization that could send a library to children like Doris.
I made phone calls, introducing myself. I visited IBP at their warehouse on Delaware Avenue. And even though I live in Texas, I committed to raising enough money to send “a library’s worth” of books—a full pallet— to Doris and many other children just like her.
I had no idea how I was going to fund it.
Doris in 2014
It’s been almost two years since I made that initial commitment, and I found a way to collect and deliver children’s books to IBP. I also raised the money to ship those books to Ghana. And after that, I shipped another library, and then another: over 5000 books in less than two years. Because of that little VCR manual, not only Doris but many others now have access to books, every day.
Want to help? I’m currently funding my fourth library—this one to go to Nigeria. Let IBP know you’re giving to one of Susan’s Projects and they’ll make sure your donation is well spent. Or better yet, start your own fundraising project with IBP. Contact them today to find out how.
Susan Ishmael-Poulos is a friend of the International Book Project as well as a long-time supporter of our book sending mission that currently resides in Texas.
Are you a volunteer or donor? We’d love to hear from you! Please contact Chassity Neckers at chassity@intlbookproject.