The last drops of the thunderstorm were still striking the sheets of the forest like the redlobar of the drums of the war he announces the danger. The guerrillas and the paramilitary ones were still controlling this part of the Colombian forest. Luis Soriano, a simple teacher of language, knew to the danger to which it was exhibited crossing with his two donkeys the bordering footpaths to the village of La Gloria. It was not mattering. Luis was determined to take the goods that he was keeping in the saddle-bags up to his destination …
East might have been the history of the day in which Luis decided to begin his project to take books to the children of the remote peoples of his region: the Biblioburro. Every weekend, for already ten years, Luis mounts in his donkeys - alpha and Beto - and down the sun covers kilometers loading storybooks, novels and encyclopedias to bring them over to groups of children who wait for him exasperate.
“It began like a need; later it turned into an obligation and later in a custom” Luis says. “Now, it is an institution”. An institution that was born of Luis's admiration for the force transformadora of the reading on the children. Reading books, the children contact, not only other countries, other cultures, other ways of thinking; but also with “rights, obligations and commitments”. The children learn that routes exist to solve the conflicts that do not happen for the violence and separate from her. A little especially important in this region of Colombia.
Today, Luis has managed to assemble more than 4.800 books and financing to create a small center that finally remained to half for lack of resources. The books that have more success are the stories for children but Alpha and Beto also loads with novels, books of medicine or the Dictionary of the Real Academy of the Language. Sometimes, the books that it never gives return. That happened with a sexual guide and the book Like water for chocolate of Laura Esquivel. Perhaps the loss that better Luis will remember is a Bridle of Paulo Coelho that a few bandits took on having held it up in the middle of a way and to leave bundle bundle to a tree on having seen that it had no money, only books.
Fortunately that did not wrinkle to Luis who keeps on covering every weekend the villages of the surroundings of La Gloria taking the reading to hundreds of children and girls. There is no payment that costs the work that this young teacher is doing although perhaps he feels sufficiently rewarded when he leaves a village and someone asks him: "When will it return, teacher?”
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