Donkeys are just the ticket for mobile library

Published on Saturday 25 October 2008 19:27

SIMON ROMERO IN LA GLORIA

IN A ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade in Colombia's war-weary Caribbean hinterlands, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home.

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 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 it is an institution."

A whimsical take on the mobile library, 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 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.

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 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.

The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.

By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia's long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria.

Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.

A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, The Ballad Of Maria Abdala, by Juan Gossain, a Colombian journalist and writer. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.

After Gossain broadcast details of Soriano's project on his radio programme, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.

There is little money left over for luxuries on his teacher's salary of $350 a month. He and his wife Diana opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Politica, two years ago to help make ends meet.

Even among the restaurant's clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region's daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events. He said: "I learned that if I interest just one person in reading a mundane news item – say, about the rising price of rice – then that's a step forward."