How many books can you fit into a small, American economy car? A lot, as Amanda Ogden discovered last week when she volunteered to deliver several boxes of books from Charlottesville to Sweet Briar College for what’s being called “Books for Baghdad.”

“It was a little slow in the corners,” Ogden, an English major at the University of Virginia, said of her hunter green Dodge Neon. “But not too bad.”

Ogden was recruited for transport duty by her mother, Kris Ogden, who works in the dean’s office at Sweet Briar. The dean’s office was first to publicize the book drive and has arranged shipment of the books to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The effort was championed by Maha Kareem, an Iraqi and Fulbright scholar who spent the 2005-06 school year teaching Arabic at Sweet Briar. The daughter of a college dean and herself a graduate of the University of Baghdad, Kareem knows full well the challenges faced by educators in war-ravaged Iraq.

Kareem sorts books in the dean's office.“Because of what is going on over there …there’s not much concentration on educational books,” Kareem said, adding that economic sanctions over the past decade also made it difficult to obtain modern literature. “Our students have no idea of post-modernism or theories of English and American literature.

In mid-April, columns appeared in the Lynchburg News & Advance and Charlottesville Daily Progress asking readers to make donations. A wide variety of tomes were sought, including American and English literature, teaching methods, anthologies, critical books, texts, dictionaries, GRE books, linguistic books, translation books and modern theories of translation.

The response was great with approximately 500 books donated over a one-month period. Although most of the books were received from the Sweet Briar and UVA communities, a few boxes were donated by people from the surrounding area.

For one UVA professor, the book drive provided the opportunity to make a small dent in the “huge moral debt” he says Americans are incurring to the people of Iraq. Herbert “Chip” Tucker, director of graduate studies in the UVA department of English, saw Mary Alice Blackwell’s “Helping Hands” column in the Daily
Progress and rallied students, staff and faculty from his and other departments to donate books.

“A few dozen books aren’t much of a down payment on that debt, I admit, but the project offered a way of letting lots of people share in a civilized, and civilian, start towards doing something,” Tucker said.

Kareem is still trying to figure out how to get the books from the U.S. Embassy, in the so-called safe “Green Zone,” to the students, libraries and universities that need them. “It’s not a safe thing to do,” she said, joking that maybe she’d enlist some U.S. troops to haul the books for her. “I’m not thinking about that right now.”

As for going back home now that her Fulbright scholarship has come to an end, Kareem said she’s “a bit nervous,” having heard about conditions in Iraq. “I’m looking forward to seeing my friends and family,” she said. “I’m not really looking forward to seeing the situation, though.”