NEWSLETTER FROM LAOS -- July 2008
By Bob Anderson, CLI International Director

One of the areas where Laos trails the developed world is books. While the US may be moving beyond the world of ink-on-paper books, most of Laos has yet to enter it. In most villages here there are no books. By which I mean: NO books. Even in the school (if there is a school.)

Why no books? Laos is still overwhelmingly rural/remote, a country of villages. Most people are engaged in a life centered on subsistence or near-subsistence agriculture. People are poor. People don't have cash money. People make what they use and consume. People grow what they eat, and sometimes struggle to have enough to eat. Books are thus a luxury, unaffordable, even at the typical price of about $2.

But there are anyway not many books to buy in Laos and not many places to buy them. There are only a handful of small book stores and they are found only in the three or four largest towns. And they don't have many titles, because there are few books written and published in Laos. In the late '90s there were less than 50 new titles published in the Lao language each year, usually much fewer. Now there are more, but far less than 100 per year. And only a hundred or two copies are printed of most titles.

What does this mean for Lao children? They study in schools with no library and no/few textbooks. They have no access to books to read at home. There are only a handful of community libraries (all small) in the country. Lao kids, with a few exceptions, simply have no books to read. You can imagine the impact this has on their educational development. What if kids in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were the only ones in the US who had ever had books to read?

What is Community Learning International doing about this problem? We are trying to make some kids circumstances the exception to the national pattern. We are doing quite a lot, for a small NGO:

We operate the Lao Children's Library Boat, the only one in Laos. It brings books to children and others in 75 Mekong River villages, as well as circulating 50 book bags (100 books each.) to river village primary schools.

We have established the only province-wide system of district town small community libraries in Laos. From these rural centers, our staff, two in each district, also take book bags to more remote primary schools so those students can have access to books.

We have established several high school libraries and are working to set up more.

We have begun to provide school vacation training workshops for high school students who are interested in writing. We have inaugurated an annual prize for best short pieces written by high school students. Later this year we will publish a collection of Lao student writing.

CLI supported the recent awards for Best Lao Books of 2007 and is leading a project to publish 25 recent titles (not published for lack of funds) of special value by the end of 2009.

CLI is small and under-funded. But we have taken on a big piece of the books challenge in Laos. Help us give kids books to read. $50 buys 25 books. $200 buys a whole book bag. $500 sends the Library Boat out on the water for a month.

Does this matter? Maybe Lao kids don't want to read anyway, right?

No, given the chance, they love to read. One example, the small library CLI set up in Noy District in May 2007 with 400 books. By November the library had more than 200 dues paying (just a few Lao kip to join) members and book borrowing totaled more than 9,000. That's 9,000 books read in a few months where there had been NO books.

If getting books to kids makes sense to you, and you can help, please make a contribution to CLI. The kind of kids you see in the CLI video will appreciate it and our world will be better for it.