Youths donate books to children

Dewi Santoso, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Concern that deprived children have limited access to knowledge encouraged nine youths to form the 1001buku community in January last year, with as its main goal the provision of as many books as possible for such children.

On its first anniversary on Saturday, 1001buku held a book- donating fair at the Harkat Bangsa Foundation office in an effort to see more people donate used books.

"Our task is to find more donors to enable us to distribute books to other libraries throughout the country," said the community coordinator, Dwi Andayani.

Some libraries that have received books from the community include the Pustakaloka Rumah Dunia library, Serang, Banten, the Combat library, Bogor, and the Tanah Merah library, Babue, Papua.

Dwi said that the 1001buku community only accepted children's books because they would be handed over to children aged six to 14 years old. She had to check comics before distributing them to libraries because sometimes they had adult content.

The community also has another scheme, Book-Drop-Box, where, at specific locations, people can drop books they wish to donate.

"The program is now running at some schools and office buildings," said Dwi.

Book-Drop-Box locations include the LabSchool in Kebayoran, The British Council on Jl. Jend. Sudirman and PT BASF Indonesia in Kuningan, all in South Jakarta.

The program has been successful in encouraging youngsters to donate books. One of the donors, Ratih from privately run LabSchool junior high school, managed to collect 11,000 books from her friends.

"I like to read books. I often think of deprived kids who have no access to books. So, I asked my friends at school to donate their used books," said the 13-year-old girl.

The community now has 62 boxes of books, or around 12,000 in total. The number of volunteers has also increased to some 800 people.

To find out more about the 1001buku community, people can access it through its website, www.1001buku.org.

"Everything in 1001buku is donated by people who are concerned at improving children's reading habits. The distribution has even been funded by a private logistics company," said Dwi.