School Board member sends books to Malawi

Art Rutkin and others plan to ship a container filled with books in September

By Barbara Sherman

The Times, May 31, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jaime Valdez / The Times

SHARING STORIES WITH MALAWI — Emily Hill, a sophomore at Tigard High School and the daughter of a teacher and a librarian, started a random act of kindness by holding a schoolwide competition to collect books for Malawi students.

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TIGARD – A retired Tigard-Tualatin educator is now on a mission to help educate the youth of a far-off African country.

Art Rutkin, who retired several years ago as the principal of Mary Woodward Elementary and now serves on the Tigard-Tualatin School District Board of Directors, is hard at work arranging for books to be sent to Malawi.

The goal is to fill a 20-foot container with 500 to 600 boxes of books and ship it next fall, according to Rutkin.

His friends, Fowler Middle School teacher Dale Hill and his wife Lucy, have been involved in the project to send textbooks to Malawi, and their daughter Emily, who attends Tigard High School, started her own drive at the school.

“We re-boxed the books collected at Tigard High and are storing them in the central office warehouse,” Rutkin said. “Emily said that there was no club at school behind this – it was taken on as a random act of kindness.

“It’s kind of neat. Emily put this together and made it into a contest, and the winning class got a donut party.”

Rutkin’s roots in Malawi go way back – he was a Peace Corps volunteer there in the 1960s and met his wife Lois while on the job.

A group of former Peace Corps volunteers formed the non-profit group, Friends of Malawi, and about 10 years ago, former Peace Corps volunteer and Portland resident Shannon Brown started shipping books to the country, one box at a time.

“While I was at Mary Woodward, I got her some books,” Rutkin said. “Last fall, Lois and I wanted to do more, and we’re now collecting books and also raising money to ship the books in September.”

Rutkin estimates that shipping the container will cost about $8,000, and he hopes that people will want to contribute to this worthy cause.

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