HOW IT ALL STARTED

So, how did I get myself into this, you might ask?

Last year, as I was flipping through a magazine whose name I fail to remember, I came across an article about an organization that was building libraries in developing countries at a rate faster than Starbucks was making coffee shops. At the time of the article, the organization was only in its 11th year, and had just given out its 10 millionth book, managed to build 1500 schools, and was building new libraries at a rate of six per day. That caught my attention.

The organization was called Room to Read - their tagline is "world change starts with educated children". The article outlined their goal of providing a quality education for all children around the world in order to enable them to reach their full potential and contribute to both their community and the larger world. Their aim is to do this through global literacy and gender equality in education.

A few months later, news broke that a 15-year old Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai , had been shot in the head for speaking up for girls' education under Taliban rule. I was sickened how a child could be shot just for wanting to go to school. I then began finding other stories of children, particularly young girls, who are refused education simply because they were born the wrong gender in the wrong place. But what could I do? The problem seemed too big and I didn't know where to begin, so I let it slip to the back of my mind. That was until another chance encounter a year later would bring this back to the forefront of my mind - but this time, I was going to do something.