Being a Peace Corps Volunteer in an exotic, developing country like Kenya you see some truly amazing sites. Many of those are beautiful, many are uplifting, but unfortunately many more are just heart wrenching. The rural parts of this country, like the area where I'm stationed, are still rife with poverty and human suffering.

It did not take me long to figure out one of the root causes to my new community's problems - poor education. There is a world of difference between working with locals who have some semblance of an education and working with those who have little to none. In general, the more educated someone is the more likely that person is able to solve the problems that he or she is confronted with. And in a semi-arid (read: extremely dry) climate where the average person lives on less than 70 cents a day, the problems are many and the problems are severe.

One of the initiatives that I've undertaken is improving the education opportunities in my town. The most obvious place for me to do that is to get books in an empty room at the local high school adorned by a simple sign letting people know that they're standing in the "library." Luckily an experienced organization called Wings of the Dawn has agreed to provide books and educational materials for the so-called library, and help me turn it into a valuable resource center for my community.

This has fast become an intensely personal project of mine. I attribute most of what I've been able to do at this point in my life to the fact that I grew up in the U.S. where there is abundant access to learning materials, namely books and internet. Take those resources away and who knows what I'd be doing and where I'd be doing it. This library is bringing some of the opportunities I had, and if you're reading this, opportunities you likely had, to people who have never had much of anything. And once the library is up, I'm sure we will have made a big contribution towards enabling some of the world's most underprivileged people to begin to pull themselves out of poverty.

Best,
Alex Schaefer
Peace Corps Volunteer

**All money donated through this site goes directly to costs associated with shipping the educational materials provided by Wings of the Dawn and getting them into a proper library. If you prefer to donate by check, please send the check with a note indicating that the money is for Alex Schaefer's A Library With No Books project to the address:

Wings of the Dawn
808 Throckmorton Street Suite 102
Fort Worth, Texas, 76102