"Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books."
The headmaster of a school in Bahundanda, Nepal spoke these words; he was faced with educating 450 students without having any schoolbooks. He was speaking to John Wood, a Microsoft executive who was spending three weeks trekking in Nepal, and who was confused when he visited the school and saw no books. John agreed to help.
"In my mind" recalls John, "It was incomprehensible that you've got 450 kids in a school, showing up eager to read, eager to learn, and to have the library be missing. And I thought, this is not an intractable problem. This was just one very simple problem that seemed like it would be solvable. It was a vacuum that would be easy to fill."
Days later, John found a cyber café and sent over 100 contacts an email plea with the subject line: Books for Nepal - Please Help. He expected to receive donations of perhaps 300 books, and then to return to Nepal, hire a donkey, and hike up to the headmaster's school with the books he had promised. But things went a bit better than he initially planned.
By a week after his return from Nepal, over 3,000 books had been sent to his father's garage, the collection point. It took a year for John and his father to return to Nepal, hire eight donkeys, and deliver the books.