Books For Hope

Hello, my name is Aaron Seidel, and I am a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I study environmental geoscience and applied mathematics. During one of my courses an article was brought to the class. The article was about the crisis in Nigeria. A group called Boko Haram has been responsible for numerous violent attacks on citizens, especially schools and universities. Many teachers have been targeted for violence with an emphasis on those who teach science. Both students and teachers have been killed and kidnapped and many schools have been destroyed by Boko Haram. Over 1 million children have been displaced due to the violence and many of the nation's teachers have been forced to flee the country.  I am deeply saddened by these events, and I have decided to develop a program which offers educational relief to the children of Nigeria. I am collecting educational books from universities, libraries, and churches. I am going to raise the funds to ship the books to a reputable source in Nigeria. I plan to ship in the fall, and will be spending my efforts over the summer adding as many books as I can to an already quickly growing collection. I set the goal to 25k, and any excess funds not used for shipping costs will all be donated to the "Books for Africa" charity. A family who is deeply affected by the oppression, and who works in the schools of Nigeria, has agreed to assist in the distribution of these books. I am hoping this small gesture will inspire many hearts and will bring further development to my efforts. I would like to make this a continuing effort and provide even greater relief in future shipments, perhaps even computers. For now, this drive will be sending books, a great start. One of the things which makes us uniquely human is our ability to build off of the knowledge of our predecessors. These children are being depreived the opportunity to access the collective knowledge the world has to offer. This is greatly hurting the future of the Nigerian people. I believe in the hearts of my fellow man/woman, I believe there are enough people who will be moved to contribute to this cause. I show my deepest gratitude to those of you who took the time out to read this message. The world has a bright future because of people like you.