Cynically Asked Questions

Just how cynical are you?

Isn't this just more work for teachers? Schools change text books every couple of years and where do you think all the surplus ones go? That's right – teachers have to hire a skip and have them tipped into a landfill. We're actually making teachers' jobs easier.

Aren't you just dumping rubbish in Africa? Just because you didn't like maths at school, doesn't mean its rubbish… The truth is, we spend ages sorting through the books we collect to weed out the ones that aren't relevant to their syllabus or have pictures drawn in them. More importantly, they actually want this stuff.

Wait a minute, don't they speak Swahili? Last time I looked, our textbooks were in English. Yes, they do speak Swahili and I'm impressed that you knew that. But all their high school lessons are taught in English! 

Isn't this just stealth colonialism, man? We only take stuff like maths, physics, chemistry and that sort of thing – we avoid history, politics, religion and anything that could be seen as having an agenda.

But like, is it, like Western maths man? Quite possibly. Could you describe to me what any other kind of maths looks like?

Don't they have their own text books? They have some, but not enough. The problem is that it would actually cost more for publishers to print text books than it does for us to take them over there.

Is this just students mucking about? Of course we have fun because if we didn't, nobody would want to help – and it's actually the best way to get people interested in us. Our volunteers do pretty much everything on their own initiative, so while they enjoy themselves, they're building skills like 'being entrepreneurial' and 'organising things'.

It's never going to work. We've been doing it for five years and have distributed 286,000 books already, direct to the schools. We were there when the schools got them, so we kind of know that it does work