Donate with Love

When I first entered our school library I took a quick glance around and though wow this seems to be a pretty good library (of course in comparison). The relatively small room was full of books and many of those seemed like text books. Looks can be deceiving though. As I started to peruse the shelves, I realized that many of these books had never been touched and with good reason. The library has a random assortment of donated books that have little to no meaning to anybody. For example, what on earth could the school do with 10 copies of Business Code for the State of Texas or 8 copies Making DOS Work For your Family or 5 copies of a history book about Wisconsin? There are many irrelevant titles like these two that I feel will never see the light of day.

Overall, Rwanda is kind of a culture of used or donated things. It’s very difficult to find new any type of clothing. I’m starting to gauge that almost all clothes are donated from mostly Europe then sold again in the markets. This leads to a wide array of people wearing an assortment of wonderfully ironic and random t-shirts. For example: I didn’t lose my mind, I sold it on ebay, worn by a little boy who lives a million miles away from ebay. Our silly t-shirt from fifth grade actually do go somewhere other than a black hole.

My friend k-ray works for Habitat helping manage their used book store and she was describing to me how many people donate books that are just pure junk and there is no way they can be resold. Then not only does Habitat have a bunch of junk books they have to pay money to have the useless books recycled. That’s a double bummer.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is, make sure your donations are donation worthy. It is very nice that places like Goodwill, Salvation Army and Habitat take in donations but I think it can really be a hassle to weed through the junk to actually find good things to give to people. Trust me, I know it’s hard to recycle or throw away things but if they cannot have use to anyone else it might be best to toss it and not donate it. So save these good organizations some headache and money and think about what you are donating.