Every one of them arrives in quantity, every one is sent in good faith, and every one costs the foundation money.
The store takes in a great deal and about a fifth of it cannot go to a school. All of it is sent kindly, so this is written without any complaint in it, but it is worth being specific, because the cost of disposing of what we cannot use comes out of the same money that buys books.
Textbooks more than six years old. These arrive by the box and we understand why: they are expensive, they look valuable, and throwing them away feels wrong. A school cannot teach from a syllabus that has moved on, and a classroom with forty outdated textbooks in the corner has a storage problem rather than a library.
Electronics that need repair. A printer that mostly works, a laptop with a broken screen, a projector missing its cable. There is nobody on most of these islands who can repair any of it, the parts do not exist there, and what arrives is a heavy object a school then has to dispose of. If it does not work when you hand it over, it will not work when it gets there.
Clothing. We do not distribute clothing at all, we have never said that we do, and it still comes in every month. It goes to organisations that do handle it when we can get it to them, and otherwise it is disposed of here.
Books with pages missing. This is the saddest one, because the person donating has usually checked the cover and not the back. A book with the last forty pages gone is not a gift to a child; it is a disappointment posted to somebody with less storage than we have.
What we very much can use: children's books in any language in readable condition, stationery, art materials, school bags, reading glasses and shelving. Bring it to the store on a Saturday morning and somebody will look through it with you while you are there and tell you honestly what will travel. That conversation takes five minutes and saves everybody a month of good intentions.
And when something cannot be used, it is not quietly shipped anyway to avoid an awkward moment. It goes to the waste site or it is disposed of here. We would much rather tell you that plainly than let anybody imagine a classroom unwrapping a broken printer.