Bridge to Asia -- National Geographic Drives

The Catholic Northwest Progress

March 19, 1998

Eight Brownies build bridge to Asia with magazines

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BELLEVUE -- The girls of St. Louise Girl Scout Troop No. 1060 say they feel proud that their efforts will help children in Third World countries, and looking back, they agree that the hard work was fun. Well, most of them say that.

If there's a merit badge for honesty, it should go to Tori Brown. "No, it wasn't fun, it was horrible," the freckled third-grader admitted with a bright grin. "We had to carry all those magazines and it gave me an arm ache, a backache. It gave me all kinds of aches."

Muscle strain aside, the eight girls of the troop, who all attend St. Louise School, pulled off a feat that is drawing quite a bit of attention. Between Feb. 1 and March 1 they gathered 20,000 National Geographic magazines, and 10,000 other magazines. The magazines will be packed into a shipping container and the "Bridges to Asia" organization will send them to Beijing, China. From there they will be distributed to schools in underdeveloped Asian countries, where they will be used to teach children English and geography.

The troop read about Bridges to Asia in National Geographic and adopted the magazine drive as its Feburary service project. They set a goal of 5,000 magazines, a goal that was surpassed the first weekend.

The girls persuaded local newspapers and radio stations to give them free advertising, and they established drop-off sites at churches and businesses throughout Bellevue, Seattle, Issaquah, Renton and North Bend. But most of the magazines flooded into St. Louise parish.

"Father Horatio (Yanez, pastor) was real thrilled about that," said the troop's co-leader Mary Kent. "We bought him a big box of chocolates."

Kent said some of the magazines dated back to the 1920s.

"These people have kept these magazines for years and they weren't going to give them to just anybody," she said.

The St. Louise Brownies will be featured in either the May or June National Geographic. Their photograph will appear in the magazine's "Behind the Scenes" section.

A Bridges to Asia representative told Kent that Cornell University recently coordinated a similar magazine drive. But it took them months to gather 20,000 magazines.

"So eight little Brownies beat out a major research university in just a few weeks," Kent quipped. "That's pretty impressive."

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