Man & his mules: Colombia mobile library on 10 legs………Simon Romero. La Gloria (Colombia)
In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterlands, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.
Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included Anaconda the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s Jungle Book; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia. In doing so, Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even further removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another of the region’s native sons.
Unlike Marquez, who lives in Mexico City, Soriano has never travelled outside Colombia but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world.
His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendon Zipaguata.
The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child. NYT