Her eyes welled up and a few drops rolled down her cheeks when 35-year-old Kusuma Devi wrote her name for the first time. She hugged her 10-year-old teacher, her daughter, Anju. She is a Grade 3 student in one of Room to Read’s intervention schools i.e. Primary School Nanoorkheda, Dehradun.
Room to Read has built 20,000 libraries across Asia and Africa. And to celebrate the achievement, the NGO is organising a ceremony led by its CEO and Co-founder, Erin Ganju, Founder; Scott Kapnick, Board Chair; and Sourav Banerjee, Country Director of India on November 1 in Dehra Dun. Donors and community members are expected to attend the ceremony. They will place a single book on an empty shelf within a Room to Read library.
Anju is the second-oldest child with two brothers and two younger sisters. Anju’s parents – Kusuma Devi (mother) and Ramachandran Paswan (father) – are daily wage labourers they are both illiterate. It was this support of the school and the resources that made the family, particularly Anju, firmly choose the school. The Library, in particular, played a crucial role in helping Anju break the family tradition of illiteracy.
The journey of 20,000 libraries started in 1998, John Wood, a Microsoft employee who was trekking in the Himalayas, visited the library of a government school in Nepal. “Just imagine a room with empty shelves,” he says. Backpackers had donated a few romance novels but Wood was shocked to find that there were no children's books. "Thankfully, the headmaster gave me a homework assignment to return with books," he recalls. He went back to school in Nepal with books loaded on yak (only means of transport) and the response John Wood got from the people of the village changed his life. In 2000, he started Room to Read with two other founders Dinesh Shrestha and Erin Ganju.
