BY THE FALL OF 2001, I WAS CONVINCED THAT WE WERE ON THE right growth trajectory. Several more foundations had committed funding. We had hired a development director to bring in more capital. Our teams in Nepal and Vietnam were finding dozens of communities that wanted to work with Room to Read to set up new schools and libraries. Scholastic continued to give us regular donations, each one containing at least 30,000 new children’s books. We opened our 100th library and several press stories were written about our work. Some old friends from Chicago were starting a Room to Read fund-raising chapter and had convinced Erin and me to fly out to speak at their first event. There was also interest in starting chapters in New York, London, and Paris. As our goal was to eventually do fund-raising in every major “money center” city in the world, my globe-trotting continued at its usual pace.
On that fateful day of September 11, 2001, I was in France. My former Microsoft coworker Clarissa and I were taking a long weekend cycling through Bordeaux. She was on the phone, trying to arrange for me to meet with some moneyed friends in Paris, when one of them said, “If you’re with an American, you had better get to a television immediately.” We pedaled as fast as we could to a friend’s cottage, not knowing what to expect. The image of the Twin Towers on fire was shocking, but before I had even fully mentally processed what had happened, the first tower fell, then the second. The world changed in that instant. My only desire was to be home, immediately, in my country.
SHORTLY AFTER MY RETURN TO SAN FRANCISCO, ERIN AND I DEBATED what these events meant for our organization. We faced great uncertainty. We knew that the world had changed in fundamental ways. But nobody could comprehend exactly how it had changed. We debated whether our mission to educate children in the developing world would still seem relevant to donors.
We also questioned whether we’d be able to raise sufficient capital to fund our ambitious growth plans. We needed to increase our annual fund-raising from $150,000 to over $500,000. Could we triple the size of the organization during a forecast recession?
As we watched airlines laying off tens of thousands of employees, and economists predicting gloom for the economy, we questioned our ability to remain in hypergrowth mode. We also worried about Americans turning inward, or possibly xenophobic. Nevertheless, we immediately assured our teams in Nepal and Vietnam that there would be no layoffs and that their positions were secure.
Thankfully, we would soon have an opportunity to gain market feedback on these issues. Our new Chicago chapter had planned their first fund-raising event for September 23. On a call with the event’s host committee, we debated canceling the event. America was still a shell-shocked nation in catatonic gloom. This wasn’t really a good time to be hosting a cocktail party and asking people to donate money to a cause halfway around the world, especially given the charity world’s current focus on raising money for the families of the deceased.
I recommended that we stick with our plan:
“By September 23, people will have had two weeks of staring at the television in a state of disbelief. They may need an excuse to turn off CNN and get out of the house to socialize. Let’s give people at least a small dose of optimism and let them feel that even at a very sad time, we can still look out for our fellow man, especially those who are different from us.”
One week later, we convened at the Tavern Club, a somewhat stuffy old-money men’s club high above Michigan Avenue. We nervously wondered whether there would be any guests. Decades of cigar smoke clung to the curtains, and the walls were lined with old English hunting prints full of dogs, red-suited men on horseback, and fox carcasses. The location seemed somewhat incongruous with our organization’s image, but we were never ones to refuse the offer of a free venue. Room to Read could be “cheap and cheerful” in its approach, even while perched at an expensive club 37 floors above the city.
As I was setting up the projector and wondering how the crowd would respond to our slide show, I was interrupted by my old friend John Flynn. He was the club member who had secured the venue. He introduced me to his friend Ben Shapiro. Ben immediately gave me confidence that the evening would go well:
“I looked at your Web site and was really impressed. I plan to write you guys a check that is relatively large, at least for me. This work is exactly what America should be doing more of in the Third World. We are the richest nation on earth, and we want to sell everyone our products like Coca-Cola and we want to benefit from the cheap labor that makes Wal-Mart’s low prices possible. But we don’t do that much in return, especially for the poorest countries. We’re doing globalization on the cheap. As one example, we should have been building schools in Afghanistan over the last decade, because we’d have a lot fewer terrorists running around right now if we had only made an effort to set up an education system there. Do you know the story behind the madrassa schools in Afghanistan?”
John Flynn and I both admitted that we did not, so Ben explained. Afghanistan had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. The United States, fearful of a further expansion of Soviet influence, provided weapons and large amounts of cash to the Afghan resistance fighters. After tens of thousands of deaths and years of warfare, the Soviets realized that they were not going to win control of this fiercely independent country. It marked the end of eight decades of Soviet expansion, and the beginning of the implosion of an empire that had reached too far and stretched itself too thin.
“The United States watched the withdrawal and decided that with the Soviets vanquished, America’s job was done. The U.S. could pull out immediately and leave the Afghani people, amongst the poorest in the world, to live amongst their piles of bombed rubble. The American government did not so much as buy them some brooms to help start the cleaning.”
Ben’s voice rose, and his delivery quickened:
“This was such a major strategic error on the part of our government. Because guess what came next? There was the need to rebuild the destroyed buildings, including the hospitals and the schools. The Soviets had been merciless in their attempts to intimidate the Afghani people by bombing them back to the Stone Age. The U.S. did not stick around long enough to help in the rebuilding, because our reason for being there was not pro-Afghani, but rather anti-Soviet. So the Afghan government needed help in rebuilding, and the Iranians and the Saudis were only too eager to help.
“Both countries, neighbors to Afghanistan, wanted to fill the vacuum that had been left by the departure of the two superpowers. They each made a big commitment to constructing schools. The only problem is that these were not secular schools. They were madrassas, or religious schools, that taught a very hate-filled version of Islam. The Saudi schools taught their own anti-Western Wahhabi version, while the Iranians built schools that taught their students to curse ‘the Great Satan’ of America. The only difference between the Saudi schools and the Iranian ones was the degree of anti-Westernism in their curriculum.
“The CIA estimates that between them, the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia sponsored the opening of over ten thousand madrassas in Afghanistan. And you know the rest of the story, because we’ve been living it for the last two weeks. A large percentage of the terrorists at large today were trained in these schools. Can you imagine how different the world would look today if those students had been more focused on one-two-threes and ABCs instead of being taught to chant ‘Death to America’? We lost our opportunity to rebuild those schools, and we will be paying the price for decades to come. You can continue to count on me to support you guys. I don’t want our country to keep repeating the same mistakes.”
TWO YEARS LATER, WHILE READING ASNE SEIERSTAD’S MOVING PORTRAYAL of Afghan life, The Bookseller of Kabul, I was reminded of Ben’s comment by a particularly chilling passage in which Sultan, the protagonist, journeys over bumpy roads from Kabul to Pakistan on a mission to help his war-torn country educate its children:
“He sits in the back row of the bus, squashed between other travelers, his suitcase under his feet. In it is his life’s undertaking, written on a scrap of paper. He wants to print Afghanistan’s new schoolbooks. When the schools open this spring there will be hardly any textbooks. Books printed by the Mujahedeen government and the Taliban are useless. This is how first-year schoolchildren learn the alphabet: ‘J is for Jihad, our aim in life, I is for Israel, our enemy, K is for Kalashnikov, we will overcome, M is for Mujahedeen our heroes, T is for Taliban…’
“War was the central theme in math books too. Schoolboys…did not calculate in apples and cakes, but in bullets and Kalashnikovs. Something like this: ‘Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two-thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?’”
Seierstad’s book raised the question, how could we hope for a world at peace when these were the lessons being drilled into the heads of millions of children throughout their formative years?
BACK IN CHICAGO, A FEW DOZEN GUESTS WERE STREAMING INTO THE club prior to the event’s 7:30 start. As I conversed with old friends and new, I noticed that the crowd was less somber than I’d anticipated. People were obviously saddened and furious over the events in New York. They were also in a mood to take action. One woman told me that she had come because she felt insulted by President Bush’s advice that the way to help America was to go shopping. She and her roommate felt the need to do something more tangible to begin changing the world. Building a school or two seemed a great place to start.
This feedback buoyed me, as did the sight of over 100 people gathered for our slide show. A large contingent of young Chicagoans had come out in search of positive change. Many said it was the first time they had done anything social since September 11. Erin and I delivered a brief slide show highlighting the need for schools in rural villages in Vietnam and Nepal. We explained our challenge-grant model and our low overhead. I then went for the close:
“The events of September eleventh remind us that we live in a very confused world. I think that how we respond says a lot about our capacity as human beings to be optimistic in the face of nihilism, and to prove that light can win out over darkness. I am not saying that education is going to solve all the world’s problems. But it’s something direct, and tangible. We can do it right now. You can go home tonight knowing that within a year, a few new schools will be open. I hope you’ll choose to support our work.”
There was an encouraging round of applause, and more important, the heartening sight of checkbooks and credit cards being pulled out of pockets. The donation table had a line forming.
The energy in the room was overwhelmingly positive. We raised enough money to fund two schools. The crowd stayed so late that the club management had to kick us out. A small group moved next door to a grotty Irish pub to debrief.
Everyone was thrilled we’d exceeded our financial goal. We were also proud of our fellow citizens. Even in our darkest hour, Americans have a willingness to help people halfway around the world, even former “enemy nations” like Vietnam. It would have been easy for this group of Chicagoans to justify turning inward and adopting an us-versus-them mentality. They instead displayed resilience and generosity of spirit. These values are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that no terrorist could ever hope to wipe them out.
The positive and proactive forces in this universe will always defeat the dark and nihilistic ones. We simply must create the spaces in which concerned citizens are offered a way to take action.
THE ENHANCED AIRPORT SECURITY AFTER SEPTEMBER 11 MADE IT ALL the more difficult to be a road warrior. Two weeks after the Chicago event I was in New York’s JFK Airport feeling bleary-eyed. The airlines were recommending that travelers show up two hours before their scheduled departure. To assure that I could catch my 7:30 a.m. flight, I had been awake since 5 a.m. and at the airport since 5:30.
The check-in line moved all too slowly. After twenty minutes my magical moment arrived. Next to me, a clearly exasperated man was having a tense discussion with a JetBlue check-in clerk. The exchange was loud; I had no choice but to listen in.
In his heavy New York accent, the man was telling the clerk, “Your solution will not work. This is simply too small to be shipped as checked luggage, and I will never see it again.”
The clerk insisted that “sending it as checked luggage” was the only solution.
I could not figure out what “it” was, as the man had no bags with him; indeed, he looked to be traveling as empty-handed as Bill Gates did when his clothing was sent ahead for him.
The man insisted that his family was already at the gate, and that he had to go back to security immediately or he would miss his flight and his weekend away with his wife and kids. The clerk advised one more time that he could either “check it in as baggage, or throw it away, but they are not going to let you through security with it. The rules are very clear that no sharp objects are allowed.”
Only then did I realize that they were referring to the man’s key chain, on which was attached a tiny letter opener whose blade could be popped open with the push of a button. He had been turned back at security and had sent his family through while he searched for a solution. To the clerk he insisted, “But this is a family heirloom; it belonged to my grandfather and I cannot throw it out. It’s so small that if you stick a baggage tag on it there is no way I will see it again as it will get lost amongst the suitcases. It would be like sticking a baggage tag on a grain of rice, sending it to London Heathrow, and hoping that I could find it amongst a crush of several hundred bags on the carousel.”
At this point I intervened and told him that I might be able to solve his problem. If he could give me the letter opener, and a business card, I could put the letter opener in the bag I was checking. When I got home to San Francisco, I could drop the family heirloom in the mail to him.
His jaw dropped. Native New Yorkers may not be used to strangers going out of their way to offer favors. He removed the letter opener from the key chain and took a card from his wallet, saying, “I don’t know who you are, but thank you.”
With that, he dashed off, exit stage right, toward his waiting family and hopefully a short line at security.
The JetBlue clerk handling my check-in remarked that this had been a kind thing to do. In my own mind it seemed like something quite simple—just trying to help a stressed-out traveler at a time the nation was tense.
She insisted that I was a good guy. I smiled as I thought that maybe she’d upgrade me to first class as a reward. The six-hour flight to SFO would be much better in the front of the plane. My bubble burst as I remembered that JetBlue did not actually have a first class.
Instead of rewarding me, the clerk had a few questions:
“Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry anything?”
“No. Except, that is, for my new buddy”—I looked at his business card—Brent Erensel,” I replied with a laugh.
“Sir, I have to warn you that this is not funny. You have to be very careful about accepting packages from strangers.”
“But…but…you were here the whole time and told me that I was a good guy for helping him. So how can you be chastising me three minutes later?”
She shrugged and handed over my boarding pass.
The country was definitely in a strange state.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I RECEIVED A LETTER IN THE MAIL FROM MY NEW best friend, Brent Erensel.
Dear John,
Thank you for sending me back my letter opener, which as you know from our conversation has been in my family for seven decades. After receiving the package from you along with your business card, I went online to look up what Room to Read does. As I viewed the photos of the kids you are helping, I decided that both you and Erin must be angels. That would be the only explanation for what I have witnessed from meeting you briefly at JFK, and then viewing the slide shows on your site.
Enclosed please find a little something to keep the positive energy flowing.
With warm regards,
Brent
He had written Room to Read a check for $1,000. I shook my head in disbelief. My intention in helping Brent was not to gain a funder, but as a result of our chance encounter we had just gained half of what was needed to set up a school library serving several hundred children. If only those kids could know the story of how a random meet-up, combined with heightened airport security, had been turned from a negative into a positive.
Brent’s donation, combined with the success of our Chicago event, convinced me that we could continue to grow, even in the post–September 11 era. People seemed more eager than ever to find ways to bring some positive energy back to the world. I was grateful to all the donors who were sending us a signal not to shrink, but to continue to expand our work.