DOWAGIAC — The Dowagiac Rotary Club welcomed a special guest from South Africa to its meeting on Thursday to discuss how he puts books in the hands of South African children.

Craig Spitzkop from South Africa is a retired foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State, where he worked 30 years for the federal government. He is from Lowell, Michigan, and initially went to Lesotho in southern Africa to teach school as a Peace Corps volunteer. He worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development for many years, and then joined the foreign service in 1995. Spitzkop is also a member of the Ladybrand Rotary Club in South Africa.

Recently, Spitzkop has been working on a book project that will ship donated books to South Africa for distribution to small elementary schools located on farms in the Ladybrand area of the Free State Province. He found out that perfectly good books are being thrown away/recycled here in the U.S., and he started this book project to donate to schools in South Africa.

“While I was back in my hometown of Lowell, I started volunteering with Friends of the Library. They have quarterly sales and what not, and after a sale one day, there was a whole box of books left, and they were either going to be thrown away or recycled. Farm schools in school Africa don’t have access to books, many of them have not touched a book,” Spitzkop said. “It felt like this project fell in my lap. I thought, ‘well I’m going to start collecting books and shipping them to South Africa.”

I started getting the word out and collecting books. I’ve went to Monroe, Detroit and even up to Traverse City. To date, I’ve collected about 10,000 books. The books will be going to grades first through seventh. School is very expensive in South Africa. Some kids might be 20 years old in seventh grade because they can’t afford school some years. The literacy rates are really low.”

Spitzkop said he raised around $9,000 from private individuals to help with shipping and costs of books.

“My initiative is by the end of the month to continue to receive books and then palletize and shrink wrap them and then have a truck send them to Durbin which is a port on the Indian Ocean, and then get them to Ladybrand and then start distributing them to the farm schools there, as well as schools in Lesotho,” Spitzkop said.

Spitzkop’s book project will help many small rural farm schools and children in Ladybrand and Lesotho in southern Africa, he said.