Photo Illustration by KAVYA PATHAK

Piles of books spread over the lab tables of room E-7, spilling out of bags and boxes, and creating an enormous, brightly colored pile in the back corner of the room. Stacks of books of all shapes and sizes run along the back wall, a culmination of the month long book drive that NHS has organized. As this group’s first book drive draws to a close on Nov. 19, they have managed to collect hundreds of books, donated by students here.

“We’re not sure exactly how many books we’ve collected, since we haven’t counted them all up yet, but it’s at least 500, probably more,” NHS sponsor, Mrs. Penny Shelton said.

Offering suckers to those who donated, NHS managed to collect hundreds of books, all of which will benefit students nearby.

“All of the books we collect will go to the teachers at Sunset Ranch Elementary School, for their in-class libraries,” Shelton said.

However, NHS members encountered some problems toward the start of their drive, when the group realized that Invisible Children was also doing a book drive for their organization, Schools for Schools.

“In many cases when I asked people to donate books, they said that they already had donated for Invisible Children,” president of NHS, Saba Rahman, said, “ It was hard to get donations seeing as many people already donated all their books to Invisible Children.”

Despite earlier problems with the drive, the clubs managed to solve their problems by joining forces, which has helped both clubs tremendously. After Invisible Children failed to to meet their quota for the destination they were going to donate their books to, they decided to work with NHS. Teaming up with Invisible Children helped NHS get more books than they would have alone, all of which will now go to Sunset Ranch Elementary.

“Once both clubs merged into one drive, we ended up with a pretty large amount of books,” Rahman said.

Though this was the first book drive NHS has done here, it will not be the last.

“We do a different philanthropic activity each year, and this is the first time we’ve done a book drive, so it was a test run,” Rahman said, “But I wouldn’t be surprised if we did another one next year.”

By KAVYA PATHAK