Last year, she founded SHARE (Shoreline to Africa Resources for Education) and sent 15,000 books to Ghana. This year, Alex Moscovitz is asking everyone to SHARE again-and her friends at Guilford High School (GHS) have already come through.

On April 1, the GHS senior and past Courier Person of the Week wrapped up a two-week book drive that generated dozens upon dozens of bags and boxes filled with donated books. It takes only 200 books to fill a library in village schools in Ghana and Zimbabwe, where the books will be shipped, said Moscovitz.

Teachers and students in 30 GHS classrooms participated in the book drive after Moscovitz asked for help during a presentation she made to faculty members.

With assistance from folks who stepped up to help her last year, Moscovitz is prepared to deliver books collected at GHS and many more she hopes to gather during the coming weeks to a Brooklyn, New York, site where a container for U.S. Africa Children's Fellowship awaits shipping. Books of all types are welcome.

"The container goes over once it's full," said Moscovitz.

Right now, she's waiting to hear back from Guilford and other area school districts about receiving any discarded or out-of-date textbooks, of which she said there are hundreds.

"I've sent proposals to the Board of Education for textbooks in Madison, Clinton, Branford, North Branford, and East Haven. I'm hoping they'll get back to me. I would really love it if at least textbooks weren't thrown out among school districts on the shoreline," she said.

The abandoned texts are a real find for her purposes as they will handily help educate kids who traditionally learn in English in book-bereft village schools in Africa. There, some schools have "six pens for 60 kids" and "three kids sharing one textbook," said Moscovitz.

Moscovitz saw schools of that type firsthand during a family trip to Africa about two years ago. Her parents, both medical doctors, had previously lived on the continent for two years, assisting at a hospital in Kenya, and her mother, head of Global Health at Yale, still travels to Rwanda annually, said Moscovitz.

Alex's philanthropic roots were certainly planted by her parents' example, but she's also found several ways to help others on her own. A youth leader with Pilgrim Fellowship (PF), Alex travels to North Carolina with the Guilford-based PF group this April to assist with building and refurbishing homes and buildings in an impoverished Appalachian community. This summer, she'll spend three weeks with a Global Leadership Adventures team in the Dominican Republic, volunteering to assist villages by installing non-carbon footprint appliances including solar panels and bio-stoves.

"We'll hike to the worksites every day to help out and we'll also get to work with kids from the area while we're there," says Moscovitz, who so far has elected to attend George Washington University in the fall.

"If I'm at George Washington, I know there's so much I can do to help while I'm there," she said, adding her younger sister, Sofia, a GHS freshman, will take over her local SHARE efforts next year.

Moscovitz plans to study biology in college, but "I'll continue with service work. It just gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling."

To contact Alex Moscovitz for more information about donating books to SHARE, email amoscovitz@aol.com.