When Noa Oberman traveled to El Salvador with her mother a year ago to volunteer in a small elementary school, something about the classroom jumped out at her: There were no books.
“It was pretty devastating,” Noa recalled. The ones that they did have were child-authored books written by students a year older, “with scrawled handwriting and illegible sentences.”
Noa, a rising junior at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, had gone to Suchitoto, El Salvador, to volunteer with second- and third-grade students in the community where her mother, Michelle Oberman, had been traveling and volunteering for the past five summers.
Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, began doing research in El Salvador for a book she is writing about abortion (El Salvador is the only country in the world that bans the procedure under all circumstances).
Oberman began volunteering in an arts center, teaching crafts or music, and later in the local schools. Many refugees from El Salvador’s civil war live in Suchitoto, and there is a high level of need in the local community.
Noa, who had brought pipe cleaners into the classroom to do arts and crafts, was concerned that the children lacked any classroom books that would help them as they learned to read.
“It’s a huge problem in the third world,” Michelle Oberman said.
Noa discussed the issue with the U.S.-born nun who runs the arts center and landed upon an idea well suited to a girl from Silicon Valley — e-readers. She vowed to ask classmates and others from her community to donate used Kindles, and other e-readers, in order to create an entire library for the Suchitoto classroom. Thus, Project ReKindle was born.
“I had gotten one for a birthday years ago that I never ever touched,” Noa said, noting that she was not alone. She discovered many of her classmates were in a similar situation, receiving Kindles as gifts over the years but quickly moving on to iPads or other devices. One girl said her family had five Kindles that weren’t being used.
“We’re so privileged here,” Noa said. “We have these kids with these things lying around that mean nothing to them.”
Realizing the disparity in resources between Palo Alto and Suchitoto was “devastating,” Noa said. “It’s incredible to see the difference.”
Noa and her mother decided to partner with ConTextos, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve literacy and the level of instruction in El Salvador by providing teacher training and books to schools. And Amazon agreed to load the donated Kindles with free books.
On July 11, the mother-daughter team returned to Suchitoto, armed with the 50 “gently used e-readers” they had collected. A day later, the Kindles and Nooks were loaded with age-appropriate, Spanish-language books, and this week schoolchildren began using them in a summer book club program run by teachers who have undergone teacher training with ConTextos.
Michelle Oberman said the teacher training is essential because schoolchildren in El Salvador aren’t typically encouraged to engage in close reading of the texts.
“School down there tends to be taught by rote memorizations and drilling,” she said. “The idea of a classroom where everyone’s reading Huck Finn and wondering about the concept of slavery is a foreign concept to them, not just because Huck Finn is in English, but because you don’t interact with texts in that way.”
Noa and her mother are planning to spend three weeks in El Salvador, volunteering in the schools and staying at a women’s hostel run by Sister Peggy O’Neill, the nun who runs the nonprofit Art Center for Peace in Suchitoto.
If the Kindle program is successful, it could pave the way for a new, altruistic mode of recycling.
As Michelle Oberman put it: “This actually feels like we’re bringing our junk down there in a way that’s going to be very useful.”
Project ReKindle offers blog updates from Noa and other information at www.project-rekindle.weebly.com.