As soon as the purple motorized rickshaw enters the alley, a girl in a headscarf starts running from door to door.
“Come outside!” he shouts, with a skip and a jump.
Within moments, the vehicle with a unicorn and dragon painted on the back is surrounded by neighborhood children.
Why do we write this?
Mobile libraries operated by the Alif Laila Book Bus Society have become a nationwide phenomenon, changing the belief among many Pakistanis that reading is a pastime reserved for the elite.
Rickshaws are a ubiquitous sight in Lahore, a sprawling Pakistani metropolis of 13 million people. Whether parked in alleys or wandering through bazaars, they form an essential part of the city’s chaos. But with the arrival of this particular rickshaw in Bihari Ahata, a working-class neighborhood in the populous center of Lahore, the Alif Laila Book Bus Society is announcing itself with unusual aplomb.
When the driver opens the rear door, it becomes clear why the children delight. The interior is filled with shelves with colorful illustrated books.
“The idea was that if kids couldn’t come to the library, the library had to come to them,” says Basarat Kazim, now in her fifth decade as director of Alif Laila, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the bookmobile.
“A tremendous boost”
Alif Laila was founded in the 1970s by American expatriate Juanita Baker, who created a children’s library from a decommissioned bus donated by the local government. Only under the leadership of Ms. Kazim, who became president of the non-profit organization in 1985, did Alif Laila begin to operate traveling libraries.
Today, libraries have become a national phenomenon, bringing books to children who desperately need them, and disrupting the belief among many Pakistanis that reading is a pastime reserved for the elite.
Tahir Mehmood is the principal of a school in Nabipura, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Most of the students’ parents are domestic workers from well-off households.
“These are children whose parents can’t even afford to buy the notebooks they need for class, much less books to read,” he says. “When Alif Laila sends his buses and rickshaws to this area, the children get very excited and it gives a big boost to their learning.”
Sadia Bibi, a third-grade teacher at the school, echoes his sentiments.
“My students have improved a lot in reading thanks to Alif Laila,” he says. “I can tell the difference.”
Learning becomes fun
Pakistan, a country of approximately 250 million people, has a literacy rate of around 60%, the second lowest in South Asia, after Afghanistan. Education funding often falls below 4% of gross domestic product (the minimum benchmark recommended by the United Nations) and an estimated 25 million Pakistani children are out of school, according to UNICEF.
There is also a large geographic gap in the literacy rate: rural Pakistanis are 22 percentage points behind their urban counterparts.
As Alif Laila expanded, it looked for more and more creative ways to bring books to children in challenging places. In remote areas of Sindh and Balochistan provinces, for example, the nonprofit frequently uses camels to transport books. Meanwhile, two of its mobile libraries are located on ships.
But libraries are only part of the nonprofit’s work. In one of its buses, called Techno Savari, the interior is equipped with robots and devices. The traveling science lab goes from school to school offering demonstrations of electronics and other technologies.
“What we’re trying to do is give these kids the kind of exposure to STEM-based learning that they don’t get in their schools,” says Muhammad Kashif, a staff member at Alif Laila.
Twelve-year-old Mehtab Waris is one of these children. The day a Monitor contributor visited, he saw a demonstration about the solar system on the Techno Savari bus.
“When I grow up, I want to be an engineer,” she says. “The things I see here make learning fun.”
opening doors
The nonprofit also trains teachers and publishes its own books, as well as hosting a physical library near the site in Lahore where it parked its first bus starting in the 1970s.
Muhammad Hussain Alam remembers visiting that library as a lower-middle-class boy in the 1980s. Now a history professor at Government College Township, Lahore, he credits Alif Laila for making him the person he is.
“Finding a place with so many books and so many things to learn was like opening a door to a different world,” he says. “It gave wings to my imagination.”
Mrs. Kazim says those stories make her cry. But what makes her most proud is seeing other nonprofits embracing the bookmobile concept.
“Ours was the first rickshaw library. Currently, eighteen organizations run rickshaw libraries,” he says.
“What we want is for this movement to spread throughout Pakistan. Because the work we have done does not belong to us. It belongs to the children of Pakistan.”
