SPOKANE VALLEY -- In most cases the saying "it takes a village" rings true but to bring literacy to children in Jamaica it takes one man with a big heart and mountains of recycled electronics.

Inland ReTech is Spokane's electronics graveyard. They have piles and boxes of discarded monitors, motherboards, printers and more. Inland ReTech is Brad Adams playground.

"They give me parts and they give me switches and they give me power supplies and CD-ROM drives and that kind of thing and so I'm able to take all the pieces and parts and put them together into working computers," Adams said.

Adams is a technology and business education teacher at Riverside High School in Chattaroy, Washington who has a flare for building computers.

Adams is also a volunteer with Great Shape! Inc. which is a non-profit born in Oregon and now based in San Francisco, California. The organization travels to Jamaica to bring dental and eye care. They also run the SuperKids literacy program, which is where Adams' work and Inland ReTech come into play.

"Reading is a problem, literacy is a problem [in Jamaica] and they just don't have access to computers and the outside world," Adams said.

Adams spends his summers and most after-school afternoons amongst the piles and boxes of desktop debris at Inland ReTech. He digs and digs and digs until he finds the components he needs to build an entire computer.

He does this so that the children of Jamaica will have a computer at their disposal as a window to the outside world. But most importantly the computers are there to teach them how to read.

Adams has built over 100 computers for Jamaican schools and more are on the way this November, when the teams that make up Great Shape Inc. travel to the island nation once again.

"I think the attempt is to reach out towards the kids and have these learning programs on the computers, some educational software and then it helps them learn how to read," Adams said.

He is not alone in his mission to bring literacy to Jamaican children, countless Spokane-area businesses have donated either equipment or money to his cause.

The Kim Hotstart Manufacturing Company helped Adams by allowing him to use their shipping floor to package up the thousands of pounds of equipment he gathers so it can arrive safely in Jamaica.

It's a group effort driven by the positive impact he has seen first hand when he delivers the computers to the labs in Jamaica and the children light up.

"All these kids are sitting there and it's pretty gratifying to see them... that they have access to something that they never would have been able to do before," Adams said.

To learn more about Great Shape! Inc. and the SuperKids literacy program visit www.gsjamaica.org or email them at pr@gsjamaica.org.