Friday, April 20, 2007

Three Little Girls with a Big Dream

Arundel Elementary School students Hannah Blumen-Green, Amanda Breslauer and Madison Norman helped collect up to 6,000 books to help build libraries in Africa.

Since it's been such an awful news week, I found this story about three school girls and their group project to be particularly inspirational.
Building a library takes time, effort and a lot of books but three Arundel Elementary School fourth grade students — Hannah Blumen-Green, Amanda Breslauer and Madison Norman — decided to start a community book drive to start one for students in Africa.
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“When these girls contacted me to arrange a meeting, I was amazed,” African Library Project Founder Chris Bradshaw said in a letter. “We’ve never had a group of kids so young take on the African Library Project by themselves before. After I met with them — without their parents or a teacher — any doubt I had about their ability to handle the project disappeared. In fact, I felt better about the future of the planet. Organized. Articulate. Determined.”

It takes 1,000 books to start a library and the three young women would need to raise money to ship the books. Well over 4,000 books and $1,800 were collected in one month. There’s enough to start four libraries and the young women finished packing the books last night.

“We all like books, so we wanted to help,” said 9-year-old Breslauer.
Sometimes it takes children to remind us of all the good things in the world. Innocence is not a bad thing.

6 comments:

  1. A wonderful story that is so timely for this week. Also, a good reminder not only of the hope that children can inspire, but also how children can serve as models for us in our lives.

    Thank you, Sam, for finding and sharing this story.

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  2. Kudos to these Kids!!
    The USA has a GREAT future if you carry on turning out youngsters of this calibre.

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  3. That is so great, as a teacher I would feel incredibly proud if my kids did anything like this. Well done them!

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  4. Kids amaze me sometimes with what they can accomplish by simply not being intimidated by the things that would scare off adults. They never consider failure; their innocence makes them into optimists.

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  5. Young people get such a bad press usually, and this reminds us how great most of them really are. Go Girls! There will be some really grateful kids in Botswana. I provide books for readers in Africa too, and I know how much they are needed and appreciate, but these three lassies are so young to get this ball rolling, its wonderful, inspiring. Thanks for posting this.

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  6. It was the first thing that I spotted this morning, herschelian, and it put an immediate smile on my face. I think we all need to smile more these days, difficult as that is becoming.

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