Nursing students collect textbooks for Iraq

Nursing students may be known for their caring manner and ability to reach out to patients in need, but the efforts of some Penn nursing students to aid others has gone beyond that -- all the way to the other side of the world.

The Nursing Graduate Student Organization is coordinating an effort to collect books for Iraqi nurses who saw their own materials destroyed in the war last spring.

Nursing masters student Connie Smith first conceived of the project after reading an article that the nursing schools in Iraq had been ransacked.

"We got the okay from the dean, but we didn't have a clue at all how to go about finding what the school of nursing [in Iraq] actually needed," Smith said.

At that point, Smith and other volunteers found themselves searching the State Department website for charitable organizations whose efforts they could emulate.

"This was absolutely a zero-budget operation," Smith said. "We only called groups with 800 numbers."

One of those toll-free calls led Smith and other organizers to the Los Angeles-based international relief organization that would shape the direction of the project.

The organization "was very helpful in suggesting that books would be the most valued commodity right now," GSO president and Nursing graduate student Kathleen Birck wrote in an e-mail statement. "We also spoke to our Dean, Dr. Meleis, who was extremely supportive and also suggested that books would be the best idea."

Since then, the GSO has maintained a table -- manned several days a week by organization members -- to coordinate the book collection efforts.

"We take so much for granted here... publishers send professors really nice textbooks," Smith said. "The situation as we understand it in Iraq is that they don't really have any text books."

Smith noted that often, textbooks are discarded into forgotten corners after students finish using them -- but there are many in the world who would be able to make good use of them. As a former resident of Poland, she had witnessed problems similar to those in Iraq firsthand.

While the project has yet to finalize how the collected books will make their way to Iraqis -- although "several ideas [have been] given to us by various people," Birck wrote -- the books have been piling up.

Students do not have an exact count on the number of health-related books, but Smith said she hoped the already-large pile would continue to grow when undergraduates return in the fall.

Organizers encouraged anyone to drop off nursing-related textbooks on the fourth floor of the Nursing Education Building at any time.

"It's been really heartening," Smith said. "There's been such an outpouring of interest and books."

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