Biblioburro

Biblioburro is a library that walks. Luis Soriano, a primary school teacher from La Gloria in Colombia’s Magdalena department, loaded books onto two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, and took them to communities in the hinterland of the Caribbean coast. He started in the late 1990s with 70 books.

His reason was his pupils. Most had lived through violent conflict at a young age, and Soriano had seen what reading did for them. He knew it from his own childhood: books had captured him early, and he later earned a degree in Spanish literature from a professor who visited his village twice a month.

The collection grew by radio. Soriano heard the journalist Juan Gossaín read from his novel The Ballad of Maria Abdala on air and wrote to ask for a copy for the donkeys. Gossaín read the request out on his programme, donations poured in, and the stock soon ran into the thousands. By November 2009 a library building beside Soriano’s house, paid for partly by public donations, had opened as the first library in La Gloria.

The lending history has its own drama. Children’s adventure stories are the favourites. A copy of Like Water for Chocolate and a sex education manual were never returned. Bandits once tied Soriano up, found that he carried no money, and took Paulo Coelho’s Brida instead. In 2012 he lost a leg after an accident involving one of the donkeys; by January 2013 he was back at work.

Our guide to types of libraries counts pack animals among the forms a mobile library can take. Biblioburro is that form at its simplest: one teacher, two donkeys and a load of books.