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Former Microsoft executive delivers books on a yak
« on: Aug 1st, 2003, 8:23am » |
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LOS ANGELES (AFP) - A former top executive of US software giant Microsoft Corp has traded his high-flying job to deliver books to remote villages in Nepal on the back of a yak.
John Wood, a 39-year-old senior executive at the Washington-state based company quit his 300,000-dollar-a-year post and launched a charity in 2000 to boost literacy in remote Asian communities in countries such as India and Nepal.
The firm's former director of business development for China used the substantial cash cushion he had built up while in the technological fast lane to set up the non-profit Room for Read which focuses its energies on Asia.
"People thought I was crazy, but I think it's how you use your freedom that counts and I wanted to do something for other people," he said of friends' reaction to his transformation from executive to educator.
His life change came after a backpacking trip to Nepalese Himalayas where he was horrified to find that none of the children in one isolated village, which was a two days walk from the nearest road, could read.
The school's library was empty and the only books it possessed had been left behind by foreign backpackers and were locked up so that the children would not damage them.
Wood began persuading friends to ship books to his father's garage in Colorado to be sent on to Asia, but the project gathered a momentum of its own and soon filled the space, forcing his father's car out of the garage.
"What started off as a hobby became a bit of an obsession for me when I saw how many children were unable to read," he told AFP.
In 1999, Wood quit his job to work on the scheme and a year later formally launched Room to Read, which supplies books to isolated and underprivileged areas and helps local organisations build schools.
"Because I had grown up as a public library kid and wanted kids to have the same opportunities so I decided to take the plunge and do something radical with my life.
"I had achieved a certain definition of material success, but I wasn't going to stick around to see if I could continue to run up the score on stock options," he said.
After launching his drive, Wood soon realized that getting supplies to the areas in which they are most needed was no mean feat, and soon turned to the Himalayas' main beast of burden for help.
San Francisco-based Room to Read uses yaks and donkey trains to carry books and building materials to remote areas such as the Annapurna and Arun peaks of the Himalayas where a school can be built for just 5,000 dollars.
The group has built more than 50 schools and donated 200,000 multi-lingual books for children in Cambodia, India, Nepal and Vietnam in a bid to achieve its goal of helping 10 million youths to become literate by 2010.
Early next year, it plans to launch a scholarship programme in New Delhi and in northwestern Indian state of Rajastan that will help girls who do not have the opportunity or resources to attend school.
"To each girl in the program, we will make a 10-year commitment to support her education through high school," Wood said of the scheme that will coat 100,000 dollars in its first year.
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