LITERACY
IN A
BOX
EDUCATING
A WHOLE
COMMUNITY
BY CHRISTEL CHVILICEK
O
ne and a half billion people
visited public libraries in the
United States in 2014, according to the National Library
Association. It’s easy to take our access to
libraries for granted. For most, it takes only
a quick trip by car or bus to get there; some
people can walk.
But imagine that you are living in the
remote, rugged, and barren wilderness of
Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor. In this thin
panhandle, bordered by Tajikistan in the
north, China in the east, and Pakistan to
the south, learning to read and write can
be a struggle. With limited resources and
families to feed, schooling and literacy often take a back seat to the everyday struggle for survival.
While Central Asia Institute (CAI) cannot
put food on the tables of everyone in the
region, we can do something about the limited resources for literacy and education. In
an effort to help newly literate individuals,
CAI plans to purchase “mobile libraries”
from the Box Library Extension program of
the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University
(ACKU).
“These are libraries in a box, the books
being housed in purpose-built metal boxFALL 2015
es, which open to reveal shelves of books,”
says Dr. Sandra Cook, CAI board member
and former co-chair of the foundation that
helped fund and build ACKU. “The books
are written to the level of a person who is
newly literate. Once people have learned
to read, they then need something to
read.”
Each mobile library contains 500 books,
focused on subjects that affect people’s