Bay Area Volunteers Support Better Education In The Philippines

In the early 1980's, Dan and Nancy Harrington were raising their two sons in the Philippines when a local boy happened to wander by and pick up one of their books.

"He had a Mickey Mouse book and he would just open the pages, and it would be upside down," remembered Nancy. "And I turned the book around and all he would say is, 'Wow, wow!' He had never seen any written word, anything!"

From there, Books for the Barrios took flight. With no staff, but a lot of dedication and passion, the Harringtons opened the doors to education for tens of thousands of school children in remote areas of the Philippines by launching a non-profit.

"Every time we would go to a village, called a barrio, we'd go to the schools and we'd see the same thing," said Nancy. "Kids are exactly like American kids. There's no difference except when they go to school -- in the schools, there's nothing."

Dan Harrington was a Navy fighter pilot stationed at Subic Bay. Using his military connections, he and Nancy began having books shipped over from back home in the Bay Area. The project continued when they moved home, and now over 30 years, has resulted in 16,000,000 books donated to the poorest villages.

"This is a marshland where the children heretofore never went to school because they were seen as lesser kids," explained Dan. "But they're one of the 158 tribes there who we especially focus on because many times they are deprived."

Retired East Bay teachers Judi O'Toole and Charlene McPherson got involved with the Harringtons years ago.

"They are two people you really want to know," said O'Toole.

"We were collecting materials to send them for many, many years to send over to the Philippines from our classrooms," added McPherson.

In 1999, both traveled with the Harringtons to the Philippines to see the situation for themselves.

"We were just taken aback," said O'Toole.

"Eighty students in a class, three or four to a desk, no materials, a blackboard and a piece of chalk basically," McPherson said of the schools there. "It's a dark room (with) a little glass case with some crummy books in it that they couldn't touch because that's all they had."

Books for the Barrios has expanded to include more teacher training and the creation of "Model of Excellence" schools because the Harringtons knew it would take more than books. In fact, the Harringtons don't need books donated now, they've closed the warehouse to focus more on the teacher training and the education of Muslim girls.

"We just had blinders on, and that's what people do when they start up," Nancy explained. "You just have blinders on an you just go and you do it!"

So for helping educate children thousands of miles away, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Dan and Nancy Harrington.