Campus collects and ships books to schoolchildren in Africa

By Melissa Borgerding
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Sedgebrook started off the New Year with a $7,000 donation to Bookfriends International, a non-profit based in Wauconda Illinois. The donation will underwrite a shipment of 15,000 books to more than 5,000 Tanzanian schools.

Supporting international education
The donation stemmed from the work of Sedgebrook resident Phil Wertz, who oversees the community’s 5,000-volume library. When Wertz heard about Bookfriends International, he was inspired to start collecting books to send to the schools in Tanzania. During the months of November and December, he and wife Mary collected more than 350 books.

“We’re donating encyclopedias, books about nutrition and health, textbooks, chemistry books,” Wertz says. “Mostly, these were things we weren’t using in our library here, but that students could certainly use.”

Local support for a global cause
According to Bookfriends International, shipping textbooks and library books from America to Africa is extremely expensive. Although the organization is able to ship them at economical rates, it none-theless takes thousands of dollars. Bookfriends needs the support of individuals like the Wertz’s and groups to help them provide modern educational resources to the young people of Africa. “People who live and work here are committed to giving back to the greater community,” says Ian Brown, executive director of Sedgebrook. “It’s exciting to be able to make a donation to an organization right here in the Chicago area, whose work has a global impact.”