The Harry Potter Alliance

By Karen Bernstein

May 8, 2009

Sorting through "Accio Books!"

This Blog Post was written by Lexington High School HPA Chapter Organizers Jenny Bobrow and Matt Elyanow.

See more pictures here
On Easter Sunday, three of the members of the Lexington High School HPA chapter went to sort through the books that had been sent there for Rwanda. Our task was to open the boxes and choose the best 200 to send, and we only had four hours to finish.
Two hundred sounds like a lot. But when you have to choose 200, out of thousands, well that makes it a bit more difficult. How were we ever going to decide what to pick out? Do we send The Chronicles of Narnia or The Golden Compass? An Abundance of Katherines or Nancy Drew? The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or the Twilight series? Well, the answer to those questions was to send them all. But with each book that went in, other books could not.

The hardest part of choosing books was diversity. We wanted books that could appeal to all types of people at all different reading levels, and we wanted to choose books in a variety of genres and topics.

We found some interesting surprises while opening the boxes of books. At random, the first small envelope that we chose to open had a return address that said…”HARRY AND THE POTTERS” which was exciting to open. That was a great start to the day. We also opened quite a few packages from out of the country! There was one from Australia and one from the Netherlands. It was amazing to see so many people from all over the world getting involved with this amazing book drive.

While boxes containing books covered the floor, there was one box that stood out from all the rest. We had picked up a small box, it was much heavier than others its size, and we could not understand how it weighed so much. Upon opening it up, we found a couple of books, but we also found a wicker basket, and most mysterious, a very heavy solid metal wheel. While the mystery of the wheel intrigued us, we were forced to move on, leaving this mystery to Nancy Drew.

We also had a bit of a situation with the Harry Potter books. For the first few hours, we found multiple copies of all the books, except, we had no copies of Deathly Hallows. It seemed like DH was avoiding us, and we began to worry Rwanda would be forever left without book seven. They would be stuck feeling as we did spring 2007, waiting eagerly for a conclusion. Just as we were about to give up, we came along the box from the Rose Wand HPA chapter from Oregon and as we tore open the brown box, we began to see a corner of an orange sky. WE HAD FOUND IT! The Rose Wand chapter had broken the anti-Deathly Hallows curse that had surrounded us, and it was the first of many copies that we found.

After packing up the 200 books that we chose, we looked back at all of the books that were left and the boxes that hadn’t even been opened. There were hundreds left sitting on tables, and with all the boxes left on the floor it seemed as if we hadn’t done anything at all. Even though we could not send every book, we are confidant that in Rwanda, they will enjoy reading the books just as much as we all had.