School Board member sends books to Malawi

TIGARD – A retired Tigard-Tualatin educator is now on a mission to help educate the youth of a far-off African country.

Art Rutkin, who retired several years ago as the principal of Mary Woodward Elementary and now serves on the Tigard-Tualatin School District Board of Directors, is hard at work arranging for books to be sent to Malawi.

The goal is to fill a 20-foot container with 500 to 600 boxes of books and ship it next fall, according to Rutkin.

His friends, Fowler Middle School teacher Dale Hill and his wife Lucy, have been involved in the project to send textbooks to Malawi, and their daughter Emily, who attends Tigard High School, started her own drive at the school.

“We re-boxed the books collected at Tigard High and are storing them in the central office warehouse,” Rutkin said. “Emily said that there was no club at school behind this – it was taken on as a random act of kindness.

“It’s kind of neat. Emily put this together and made it into a contest, and the winning class got a donut party.”

Rutkin’s roots in Malawi go way back – he was a Peace Corps volunteer there in the 1960s and met his wife Lois while on the job.

A group of former Peace Corps volunteers formed the non-profit group, Friends of Malawi, and about 10 years ago, former Peace Corps volunteer and Portland resident Shannon Brown started shipping books to the country, one box at a time.

“While I was at Mary Woodward, I got her some books,” Rutkin said. “Last fall, Lois and I wanted to do more, and we’re now collecting books and also raising money to ship the books in September.”

Rutkin estimates that shipping the container will cost about $8,000, and he hopes that people will want to contribute to this worthy cause.

“If people are interested, we will give them a thank you note and receipt that shows they’ve made a tax-deductible donation,” Rutkin said. “We’re hoping to get more kids in the schools involved, and we’re also collecting school supplies and hygiene items to send along with the books.

“We’re committed to doing this. (Superintendent) Rob Saxton has been supportive of this effort. It’s going to happen. We’re trying to monitor the books we get, making sure they’re in decent shape. A lot of schoolbooks get discarded when they get out of date and new ones are purchased. You can’t sell them – there’s no market for them. Schools store them, and they just sit – that’s what got us going.”

Rutkin still remembers the primitive conditions he found in Malawi while volunteering with the Peace Corps.

“Books to them are like gold,” he said. “The saddest fact it that bad as it was then, it’s worse now. The schools have dirt floors, openings in the walls for windows, no screens, no desks, nothing.”

Malawi is a land-locked country about the size of Pennsylvania and located in Southeastern Africa. Great Britain annexed the area known as Nyasaland in 1891 and made it a protectorate in 1892.

Britain combined Nyasaland with the colonies of North and South Rhodesia between 1951 and 1953, and in 1964, the country became the independent nation of Malawi.

In 2005 Malawi faced its worst food shortage in more than 10 years, leaving more than 3 million people – 34 percent of the population – without adequate food supplies.

In this third-world country, old books are better than no books.

According to Rutkin, the Tigard-Tualatin School Board recently adopted a new series of reading books, so schools in the district will no longer be using the old ones.

“We’re trying to get them into the hands of those who need them,” he said. “In addition to reading books, there’s also old math and science books that are still relevant. Because Malawi is a former British colony, everyone speaks and reads English. We’re pretty excited.”

People may send checks made out to Friends of Malawi to Rutkin, 14040 S.W. River Lane, Tigard 97224.

For more information, call him at 503-590-5104.