David Opoku '12 Helps Establish
Library, Promote Literacy in Ghana

by Alisa Giardinelli
4/15/2011

David Opoku '12

"Books helped me develop a passion for what I want to do and helped make me who I am," says David Opoku '12, a biology major and pre-med student from Ghana. "I'd like to everyone to be able to find their passion that way."

With that goal in mind, David co-founded African Development on Organized Reading Education (ADOORE) and helped organize a campus book drive in order to start a library in Ghana. With 1,000 books now in hand and funding from the Swarthmore Foundation for some of the shipping, he plans to send them to Ghana in May through the African Library Project.

This is the beginning of an effort that ADOORE hopes will lead to book drives every year, at Swarthmore as well as at other college campuses. Advisor to International Students and Scholars Jennifer Marks-Gold is working closely with the group to help facilitate this expansion.

"The goal of the group wasn't just to create a library, but to generally give people of Ghana the opportunity to develop themselves by having access through reading and information," says Marks-Gold in the Philadelphia Tribune. "We want people to know that by working together, we are not only helping the community, we are helping with change. That's a message that not only the staff, faculty, and students of Swarthmore can live by, but so can people in the community."