Books

In a region where books can be quite rare, IAIA and the Sister Village partnership between San Pedro Columbia, Belize and Athens County, Ohio have collaborated to provide thousands of books to our sister village and to the nearby regional high school.

In 1999, before IAIA was formed, Jerry Moomaw and Sandy Plunkett from the Athens-Columbia Sister Village Program delivered 750 new and used textbooks to the village elementary school, donated by Bridges of Learning, based in the U.S. There were very few books of any kind at the school when the textbooks arrived. It was an exciting moment when the boxes of books were unloaded from the truck.

In 2002, IAIA facilitated another large donation of books. Partnering with the Atlanta-based organization, Children's Literature for Children, a collection was held at The Wesleyan School and over 1,000 quality children's books and reference books were shipped to San Pedro Columbia. See our September 2002 newsletter article about the village library.

Recently, a new high school opened in the Toledo District, primarily to serve more of the Maya students in the rural villages. The Julian Cho Technical High School is operating with very limited resources, and the principal asked us to help the school build its library. Our friends at CLC and Wesleyan School again agreed to collect books, and a large shipment arrived in Belize in July 2003. See our November 2003 newsletter article about books for JCTHS.

Again, in May 2006, about 700 more books were donated, this time to the primary school in San Pedro Columbia to help kick off the opening of a new school library.

The books have been very welcome in a region where there were so few, and many children are benefitting from our book projects. Schools and individuals in the States can find homes for their good used books in the Toledo District of Belize. If you have books to donate, please contact us.

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