24 November 2008
GSUSA Girls Give Books to Botswana
Posted by admin under: community service .
Eureka California’s Times-Standard has a story about a couple of young Girl Scouts helping other kids on the other side of the world.
Two 11-year-old McKinleyville Girl Scouts have completed a service project that will make a difference in the lives of hundreds of African school children for years to come.
Jasmine Allard and Stephanie Kingham, both Cadettes in Troop No. 70536, began earlier this year collecting gently used or new children’s books for students preschool age through the fourth grade to start a library for a school in Botswana as their Bronze Award project.
A nonprofit agency, the Africa Library Project accepted the girls’ commitment and assigned them a primary school in Hebron, Botswana, a school with no running water or electricity. It serves 286 students and has 14 teachers.
Allard and Kingham then reached out to members of the community and fellow Girl Scouts to collect the minimum of 1,000 books for the library as well as approximately $500 to mail the books to Botswana via a cargo ship leaving in June.
Through speeches, flyers and posters around town, the girls gathered books and cash donations until they were able to ship 1,256 books weighing more than 600 pounds on May 8 to the Marojane Primary School in Hebron, Botswana. Their library was the 74th library shipped to in Botswana through the Africa Library Project, which is hoping to put libraries in all primary schools in Botswana.
The project was so successful that even after the girls fulfilled their requirements and earned their Girl Scout Bronze Award, they continued to collect books and were able to sponsor a second library in Africa.
What a great story. You should click over and read the rest. You can’t believe how much work these girls and this community put into improving the lives of African kids. It’s truly inspiring.
I’m not sure if this is the same charity that the girls worked with, but if not it is very similar.
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