Fahrenheit 451

Nobody likes the idea of burning books. I know I certain;y don't, but sometimes you just have to.

Working for so long in schools, I have had lots of opportunities to be irritated by the “donations” that people make to the “less fortunate.” They pack their boxes full of the crap they don’t want anymore, drop it off at the door of a local charity, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and take a little tax write-off. Then, the school or charity has to figure out what to do with the donations. Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes people donate wonderful, useful things to schools. But too often they really just donate the crap that they don’t want and don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve had to face the question of what to do with unwanted, outdated, irrelevant books. My answer is always to resist the temptation to “save them because maybe some day someone will want them.” No, if we can’t use it right now, then I choose clean, organized storage spaces over the unlikely possibility that some mythical, future teacher will find a good use for the materials that all the actual teachers of the present think are useless. At PHA, this has meant that I have often led parades of boxes of books to the dumpster, or more recently to the curb where a non-profit recycling company picks them up. In Haiti, it’s not that simple.

On Thursday, a huge truck from Food for the Poor pulled up on Santo 5 and I watched as boxes and boxes of mysterious donations walked in the door of the school. Food for the Poor donates a lot of food to LCS, and this year they also provided us with 12 gently used, well refurbished computers for the kids’ computer lab. But in exchange for all the useful things they bring us, sometimes they bring us crap. I think I’ve written about the cases and cases of tiny leather cowboy boots, and the rejected cosmetics for white people that have appeared on our doorstep in the past. This time it was about a hundred boxes of English curriculum materials from some elementary school district in Ohio. There were a few boxes of reading anthologies, fifteen copies of three different books, which will be incredibly useful for the English teachers working with our youngest students. But beyond these ten boxes, there were 90 of teachers’ editions, answer booklets, catalogues, glossy professional development guides, and lots of other propaganda for the publishers of the “Storytown” reading program. The part when I really went through the roof was when I opened the box full of cardboard sleeves that looked like they contained some kind of DVD or CD-Rom … but no … oh wait … they were all empty. Thanks for that.

We sorted through the things we can legitimately use and then had to face that awkward questions about what we should do with the rest of it? I was a proponent of burning it, the way we burn all our trash around here. But the whole day as we sorted all the brightly colored spiral bound teachers’ editions on tables outside on the driveway, the kids were watching curiously as they passed by. They love books … any books … but especially books in English. I tried to show some that these weren’t books for reading – some were literally catalogues of additional curriculum materials. But as we started walking wheelbarrows full of materials back to the incinerator, the kids were begging us not to. So we stopped. What’s worse, giving poor kids useless stuff that will probably end up contributing to the momentous trash problem in this country, or the scandal of burning books in a school full of kids who are hungry to learn? We opted for the lesser evil behind door number 1.

So on Friday afternoon we set up tables by the front gate, and as kids were dismissed for the weekend, they took whatever they wanted. And they wanted all of it. Actually, despite our best efforts at order and discipline, they pretty much stampeded the tables to get what they could. Situations like this always make me – and pretty much everyone else who comes from cultures of wealth and privilege – really uncomfortable. When you’re so accustomed to not having anything, it doesn’t matter what the free thing being offered is – you’ll pretty much run over a kid half your size to get your hands on it because you know it’s not going to be there tomorrow.

By three o’clock the kids were gone and so were the unwanted books. We were left to burn the cardboard boxes and contemplate the weirdly complex ethical decisions that Haiti forces us to make. Sometimes the right answer is so obvious, and sometimes it’s a million shades of gray.