Passports with Purpose is currently running its last week of fundraising to raise $80,000 for building two libraries in Zambia. After 9 full days of raffle ticket sales the donation mark is only $25,000 or 31% of the way to this year’s goal.
Please contribute $10 if you can.
Hyatt Gold Passport sponsored Loyalty Traveler this year with a prize of 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points. Top hotels in the Hyatt chain offer a free night for 22,000 points. There are also about 10% of Hyatt’s nearly 500 hotels globally in the category 1 rewards group for only 5,000 points per night.
My World in a Library
I grew up as a dependent child of a U.S. Army sergeant. Nearly every year our family moved to a new military base and I attended a different school. I had attended 12 schools by the end of 10th grade. Many of the details of those towns and military bases have been forgotten. My most vivid memories tend to be the home where I lived temporarily and the local library.
Books were my anchor.
In the desert of southern New Mexico on the White Sands Missile Range I read Mark Twain’s  Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels and developed the wanderlust motivating me and other middle school friends to hike into the Organ Mountains and explore mountain streams and valleys and old mines.
In Germany when I was 14 I scoured U.S. military base libraries around the country for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac. Occasionally I could raise the money to buy a colorfully covered English langauage novel from a German bookstore, but that was an infrequent event. Libraries kept my house filled with books and music I could not afford, but I could take books home and experience places and ages while reading books in my possession two weeks at a time.
Libraries gave me access to books and places and experiences I might never have dreamed otherwise.
I found my dreams in books. Words let me access the world and the ages, no matter where I was living.
“Books invite all, they constrain none.” is saying etched in stone above the Los Angeles Public Library door.
Related post: Win 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points with a $10 Purpose. (Nov 30)
2 Comments
Comments are closed.