Millions of children around the world are hungry to learn, but are illiterate and have no books, schools, or libraries. Instead, they spend hours each day carrying heavy containers of water on their heads for miles, or working hard to support their families. Poor children in Nicaragua with disabilities have it worst as they are often invisible even to their families, and the government cannot provide any social services.
Since 2008, Dos Pueblos has been supporting community organizer and library founder extraordinaire Rosa Lilliam Gómez (pictured below) and her daughter Karen, with donations of books and school supplies. Begun in 2006 with support from Wisconsin/Nicaragua Partners of the Americas, the “Biblioteca Rosa” caters to a burgeoning demand. Every Friday several hundred children come to the narrow, book-filled room along the side of her house to return books and check out new ones. Some of them fill out a withdrawal card and leave quickly with their plastic bag full of books. Others stay for hours, playing games, reading and being read to, and talking with the trained volunteers who provide them with a haven from their often hard lives.
In 2010, Dos Pueblos opened a second lending library called “Tesoros del Rey,” in the community of Ciudadela San Martín. This library, in addition to providing books and a safe, caring space for local children to play or do homework, also focuses on welcoming and fully integrating the large number of handicapped children in the community, and responding to their special needs. These children are able to enjoy books, storytelling, arts and crafts, and freely interact with their peers, and their parents get help in understanding how to realize the potential of their differently-abled children.
Every time we visit Tipitapa, our New York delegations arrive with suitcases full of materials for the libraries, supplied by generous book drives, talent-show benefits and donations from Public School 87 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, adult and teen collectors in Brooklyn, Fisher Price Books and the New York Public Library, to name a few. We are immediately surrounded by happy children whose love of books has been stoked by the patient and dedicated volunteer librarians and assistants, children who have been given not just a community space but also the chance to learn and gain access to a better education.
See also our June 2009 blog article, “Little New Yorkers Make a Big Difference.”
