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Students and Faculty Work Together to Send Books to Malawi

Lakeland College students and faculty joined community volunteers in working together on Saturday, Jan. 27, to prepare approximately 25,000 books and textbooks to be shipped to schoolchildren in , Africa .

Students and faculty involved in Core III classes at Lakeland College worked together this past fall semester on the project. Core III is a required course for all Lakeland seniors that includes a community service component.

This marks the third time that Lakeland has done a book collection for , and those combined efforts have collected over 75,000 books and textbooks for schools.

Core III Professors Jeff Elzinga and Mike Devaney were involved in the collection as well as student leaders Staci Abrahamson, Dino Mujakovic, Amber Kilawee, Ramsay Crawford and Crystal Iverson.

In the past, Core III students have worked with organizations such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America and Habitat for Humanity to fulfill their community service requirement. The students agreed last semester to work with the book collection this year.

The approximately 25,000 books and textbooks were collected from school districts throughout the region, including Cedar Grove-Belgium, Sheboygan Falls , Howards Grove, Omro, Oshkosh, Menasha, Sheboygan, Valders, Elkhart Lake and Plymouth .

About 100 boxes of books were stored in the Chase Science Center on Lakeland's campus, and another 600-700 boxes were stored at Champion Storage in Sheboygan .

Champion Storage provided free rental space to Lakeland, Georgia-Pacific Co. of Sheboygan provided free cardboard boxes for the books and the U.S. Department of Defense will cover the cost of shipping the books to Africa .

Members of the Core III classes, members of the Lakeland football team, Lakeland faculty and staff and some community volunteers spent Saturday morning cataloging the boxes and loading them for the shipment to .

Lakeland's relationship with started in 1999 when Elzinga, a writing professor, led the development of the college's Malawi Teacher Education Initiative. Lakeland partners with the and governments to annually bring five Malawians to Lakeland for three years of intensive study. A total of 25 students have graduated with a bachelor's degree in education and returned to to become faculty in 's teacher training colleges.

Elzinga, who joined Lakeland 's faculty in 1980, went on a leave of absence in 1991 to join the Foreign Service. He served as an American diplomat in until 1993, an experience that left an indelible impression. He has returned to three times since his government service.

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