Children in Guatemala to Get Load of Books

A C-5 transport plane is scheduled to take off from Riverside’s March Air Force base Monday with a cargo of Spanish-language textbooks for Guatemalan schoolchildren.

The project is the proud achievement of SoundAid, a 9-year-old nonprofit group based in Laguna Beach that is dedicated to helping children in Latin America.

“This is the biggest project we’ve done so far,” said Richard Carroll, a Laguna Beach psychologist who helped found the organization. “We’ve done it on a shoestring, and now we’re able to do it with a little bit of a higher profile.”

SoundAid was formed to help get hearing aids to Mexican children whose hearing disabilities kept them from attending school.

The 50 volunteers who work with the group have distributed about 400 hearing aids, and doctors have volunteered their time in small villages of Mexico.

Carroll said he went to Guatemala to learn Spanish about four years ago and met a teacher who told him that hundreds of village schools there lack any kind of textbooks.

“The government does not supply books, and the parents are too poor to buy books for kids,” Carroll said. The teacher was trying to raise funds to fill about 200 small libraries across the nation.

Carroll spread the word, and SoundAid discovered that a Los Angeles group that helps immigrants gain citizenship had 60,000 brand-new textbooks sitting unused in a warehouse. The books are worth about $1 million, Carroll said.

“This is going to [stock] a minimum of 20 to 25 school and village libraries,” Carroll said of the airlift.

“I’ll meet with groups there to make sure the distribution system is a good one.”

Information: (714) 494-4777.