About a year ago, we asked you, our faithful Breadpig legion, to decide where we should donate $53,000 of profits from the XKCD book sales. We're now proud to show you where your money has gone: into a cheerful new preschool in Sri Lanka and an awesome new library in Nepal!
Breadpig would like to give a big thanks to our awesome partners, Room to Read, for turning our donation into sustainable educational institutions for communities that will enjoy them AND for sending us such amazing write-ups!
The Preschool: Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka
Students at the new XKCD preschool in Sri Lanka
Nuwara Eliya is located in the center of Sri Lanka, and ranks second out of the nine provinces in Sri Lanka for absolute poverty. It is also the only district in the country where Indian Tamils form the majority of the population. Although I could not visit Nuwara Eliya on my trip, I was fortunate enough to witness some other preschools in action in Bibile and saw what a great impact these institutions have on education and the community at large. The XKCD preschool in Nuwara Eliya is a cheerful 1000 sqft building that currently serves 43 students (16 females, 27 males) under the supervision of two teachers.
Best of all, in a supplement to our donation, the community itself donated 12% of the resources needed for the school, including the land, the construction materials and tools, and skilled and volunteer labor. For a detailed breakdown, please see the report Room to Read prepared:Â Tharumal Singhithi Preschool (Nuwara Eliya).
The best excerpt from the report? A description of the playground:
A two-seated swing, a math-themed slide, a four-seated see-saw, and a four-seated merry-go-round.
The opening ceremony
Breaking ground during the rainy season: no easy labor!
The dedication plaque
The Library: Bardiya, Nepal
Students studying at the library
Bardiya is a province of Nepal located in the Western Terai, the lowlands on the Indian border. It is famous for its national parks, which are home to royal bengal tigers, elephants, and rhinos. Its majority ethnic group is the Tharu, a tribe of people considered the direct descendants of the Buddha.
I was lucky enough to visit Shree Yuvak secondary school on my trip to Nepal, where I was treated to a spectacular opening ceremony for the library full of traditional Tharu dancing and lots of flowers: many pictures here. The secondary school is grades kindergarten through 10 and houses more than 1500 students and 25 teachers. In addition to constructing a reading room for the crowded school, Room to Read also has a Girls Education Program there which is truly remarkable; many of the girls involved had previously been sold into slavery as "kamlaris" who were moving past their difficult childhoods through education.
Breadpig all wreathed up
Girls Education Program scholars at Shree Yuvak Secondary School
Thanks to the new library, students now have access to books during their leisure time before and after school, as well as dedicated "library periods" of at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted reading time. The community is incredibly excited to have this resource: they provided the doors, windows, locks, lighting, flooring, and paint for the building. The report is here: Shree Yuvak Secondary School CRR CR and more pictures below!
This is interesting. I was just reading SMBC and noticed the link to breadpig, which I followed because I liked the name. I was very surprised to learn about all that breadpig is doing. In particular, I was surprised to see that they are working with Room to Read, in Nepal of all places.
Two months ago I was volunteering in Nepal, and the two schools in my town had been given a library by Room to Read. The first school (at which I was working full-time) was very happy to have the books and to have the “library” (really a small, musty room with no windows) given to them by the program. The second school was named Shreekhandapur Primary. It had a really fantastic building, a well stocked library, and basically a great looking school. Great looking.
But at Shreekhandapur Primary there were only thirty students from ages 3-9 wandering aimlessly about the school. And the real kicker? The teachers would sleep in the library. I’m not trying to say that Room to Read isn’t a great program, but the fact that they were operating in this school is a concern. As westerners, we tend to equate helping the poor with giving material goods. Even when it is books we are giving, it’s just not that simple. At Shreekhandapur primary, for example, half of the kids were too young to read even in their mother tongue. So the donation of the library by Room to Read, though absolutely good intentioned, was a mistake at this school. When operating on a large scale, working in many different countries as Room to Read does, it is so easy to lose control.
Recently Greg Mortenson, writer of Three Cups of Tea, was in the news because of this same issue. He built hundreds of schools in the Middle East with the flood of donations his foundation received after writing his book. What he built were hollow shells, though. Many of the school buildings are completely non-functioning. Some communities chose to keep cattle in the buildings. The thing is, it sounds really great when you hear that this guy built 100-and-some schools in the middle east. But it’s just not that simple. The villages that received these buildings obviously needed more in order to educate their children. They needed teachers, they needed textbooks, and they needed individual attention, not just for someone to sweep in a erect a concrete square.
I’m not sure what to make of large-scale charities. Perhaps there is a right way to do it, but in the end it is nearly impossible to know whether things are being done right. Helping people in other countries requires a rather deep understanding of their culture and their needs. That’s why I get really worried about any charity that treats different countries in the same way. Education is important all over the world. But you have to work with communities in order to really make a change. Room to Read has projected that they will donate 240 more libraries to Schools in Nepal in 2011. (stat found here : http://www.roomtoread.org/Page.aspx?pid=281) This worries me. I wish they would donate 10 libraries to the right schools instead of aiming only to reach as many schools as possible.
At least with Room to Read, there are books in the hands of these kids. I have immense respect for what they are trying to do, and it’s great to see breadpig contributing to it, but the moral of the story is that you have to do more than give gifts. Sometimes giving books is the right thing to help a school, and sometimes you need so much more.
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Thanks! It’s been fabulous working with Room to Read and watching this all grow. The xkcd community made it all possible, though.Â
This put a smile on my face. Keep being awesome :)
 This is truly wonderful. Thanks Randall and everyone else involved. Thanks for being awesome.