Approaching deadlines

This week I've found a fourth NGO to apply for assistance to, who supply native-language books, which is nice, and one of the ones I'd applied to who donate books has responded positively(for those of you keeping score at home, that’s one negative response, one positive response, and two responses still outstanding). These books are in English though, second-hand, and are shipped from America, with the organization who's receiving them fundraising to pay shipping/port fees. You get 22,000 books for just under $12,000.00, which is ten times cheaper than trying to buy that many books. The organization that does this is called Books for Africa, and they work with you to fundraise by hosting your project on their website and your job is to direct traffic to it, and get people to donate, and once it reaches enough to cover the costs of shipping, they send the books. My supervisors were excited when I initially told them about this organization, but after I told them that we'd been accepted and that it's time to take the next step, they're thinking maybe they don't want to go that big. That is a LOT of books, more than one bookmobile can handle, but heck, maybe we can actually DONATE the books to the schools nearby so they can have their own libraries like they've always wanted but never had the money for. The point of the library being mobile was because nobody here has anything and it would be unfair to give to one school and not another, plus we're in the middle of nowhere, so kids can't get too many places besides school and home. But now they're thinking of not going through with it, because it would be too many books all at once. I understand that, but it'll take a very long time to fundraise enough to bring the shipment over, and by then a plan can be made to properly deal with it.

The other thing is that before they go about putting the project up on the website, they require a down-payment of $1,000.00 towards the shipping, which is a lot in rand, that the college can't afford out of its own budget, especially since they've realized that they need to hire someone to run the bookmobile, thanks of course to my convincing. Otherwise it'd never get done since the people here at the college offices are already too busy, and you're not going to find a qualified volunteer who knows the area and is good with kids and with books who's here for any length of time. And the other argument is that say we do get enough money to send it over, it's more cost-effective than trying to buy books, but since they're in English not the native languages, aren't they worth less? Well, no, they're not. Because they're books that we won't have paid for, and the kids all learn English in school anyway once they get to like third grade.

Anyway, I have a meeting with Sunel, Kathleen, and Tania (two managers and the fundraising director) next week to figure out what to do. In the end, though, I'm not staying here, so if I don't like what they're going to decide, I'm out of luck.