Charity’s Mission Is to Build Schools and Break Down Cultural Barriers

In 50 schools, from Nicaragua to Nepal, the cultural chasms between the United States and other countries are slowly being bridged.

The schools, mostly in villages with no running water or electricity, were built through partnerships forged by Building with Books, a charity in Stamford, Conn. The group runs community-service programs in the United States with a global twist — in addition to tutoring, serving in soup kitchens, or cleaning up parks in their own American neighborhoods, high-school students choose a village in a remote part of the world and learn about its culture, history, and residents. The students also raise money to help build a schoolhouse in that village, and in some cases travel overseas to help construct it and to immerse themselves in the local culture.

The founder of Building with Books, Jim Ziolkowski, got the idea for the charity in Nepal, where he encountered a celebration of a new schoolhouse that British mountaineers had helped to build in a tiny village. The excitement the residents had for learning, and the potential of the new school, made him want to help other communities that lacked decent classroom space.

A key part of the charity’s mission is to build not just schools but also self-reliance. Building with Books, which is operating on a $1.6-million budget this year, sends a coordinator to each site and supplies construction materials and money to hire skilled construction workers. Village residents are required to provide 10 men and 10 women to carry out unskilled labor for each day of a construction project. The charity’s project coordinators use their time in the village not just to supervise the school construction but also to prepare materials to help develop a global-studies curriculum for American students. For instance, they have shot video clips of the deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region, and they use a satellite telephone and laptop computer to link students from developing countries with American students in the Building with Books program.

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Building with Books hopes to construct as many schools in the next two years as it did in a decade. Mr. Ziolkowski says the September 11 terrorist attacks have left him more convinced than ever that the organization has to accelerate its building schedule — even though safety considerations forced the group to cancel plans to take American students overseas in February. “Education can end the ignorance and hatred that we saw on September 11,” he says, “and that makes us want to work as hard as we can to promote tolerance.”