Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

From mules to a bibliobus to a Toyota
April 30, 2008

Seeing's how I don't get to travel much these days, it's always fun to follow where in the world my globetrotting blog-buddy Loida will turn up next. Colombia is the place she's reporting from this week, with a great story yesterday about a diligent librarian who hikes for hours carrying a bag of books to isolated readers and schools, and who is patiently working to build a library in a town that lost one to a flood.

That story reminds me of another inspiring example. See, there was this cat in Mexico named José who loaded lots of books on mules and sent them...but hey, the venerable Earl Shorris tells it so well in his 2004 epic The Life and Times of Mexico. This story, too, is one of

 ...vast numbers of books, many of which were packed into crates to be carried by mules into the remote villages of Mexico.
          Since the literacy rate in Mexico after the civil was was under 28 percent...[i]f the people could not read, he would teach them with pictures. He employed a group of young painters...[t]wo of the painters were Communists...

The plot thickens, right?  And who would've guessed that in a few decades' time a rabidly capitalist president would be naming a national mega-library after this idealistic guy.

Meanwhile, back in Colombia, there was a report last week from the big Bogotá book fair about some ambitious library-building that's financed by Japan.  This year marks the 100th anniversary of bilateral relations between the two countries, and there've been nearly a hundred new Colombian libraries bankrolled by the Japanese government in the past five years in towns all over the country. 

Japan, the guest of honor at this year's Feria International del Libro, kicked off the event in style a week ago by giving Bogotá a big gleaming bibliobus--a bookmobile--that seats 21 readers, has room for 2,500 books and three Internet computers, and a 42-inch plasma screen.


There are some awfully nice multilingual, multicultural libraries in Japan, too, by the way.  Want to hear about one of them?  Turn up the sound and click the little gadget below.  You might be surprised by what they're doing for foreigners of many nations in the central public library of the Motor City--that is, Toyota. It'll be like a quick trip across the ocean.  And if the gadget doesn't want to take you there, click here instead.

 
powered by ODEO

Posted by Bruce Jensen on April 30, 2008 | Comments (0)