MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Fall 2024

Josh Wetmore, El Salvador

Camila, the first happy client of our new children’s library, shows off The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I have fond memories of sitting with my mom on a red IKEA loveseat in the playroom of my childhood home as she read books to me that we had borrowed from the local library. Our house was right across a parking lot from the library, so accessing books, and all the other benefits provided by public libraries, couldn’t have been easier for us.

Thanks to that invaluable resource, and the importance my family put on education and reading, I was able to read a little before the subject was covered in school, and the habit of reading books was built on a solid foundation.

I learned about history; I still remember the child-level biographies of Annie Oakley and Harry Houdini. I learned about people with divergent lifestyles from our own; there was a particular book about cowboys and ranch hands I made her borrow over and over. I learned that books can be fun and interesting, and I learned how to empathize by hearing stories told from someone else’s perspective.

Cuddling up with my mom and a library book remain some of my favorite childhood memories.

Sadly, most children in rural El Salvador don’t have those kinds of memories and haven’t received the benefits of a culture where reading is normal, encouraged, and accessible.

This is true for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest is quite simple and quite sad: Books in El Salvador are hard to find and expensive when you do find them. There is no Amazon.com or equivalent websites here, and even the few used bookstores that exist aren’t well stocked or cheaply priced. Public libraries, despite the hype of the capital’s new National Library, are even rarer. Most books must be bought new in the fancy shopping malls in urban centers. They simply are not for the rural poor.

That is no longer true in Canton El Cedro.

If you’d like to help us buy books, bookshelves, internet access, and more, please donate today.

As of Aug. 10, the people of El Cedro, as well as the neighboring communities of Quesalapa and Mil Cumbres, can come to the new Biblioteca El Cedro. The library has been a joint project with me and the staff at Centro Escolar Roberto & Marziano Marzari. It has been in the works since the start of 2024.

In its first week, over 25 individuals have borrowed over 60 books from the library. Middle-schoolers are borrowing age-appropriate chapter books to read for fun, high-schoolers are borrowing textbooks to help study for upcoming college-entry exams, women in the community are asking where the books of poetry are, and yes, mothers are coming to borrow books to read to their kids.

All of this is great news—but it’s just the beginning. Organizing, culling, fixing, and labeling the books we already had, preparing the library room, and creating the systems for borrowing the books was a long process. Doing so, and opening the library, are only the first steps. There’s a lot more that needs to be done.

Leg work needs to go into promoting the library and encouraging more and more people to take advantage of this new resource. (Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @bibliotecaelcedro.)

We need to buy more books. Mothers are asking for children’s books on the Spanish alphabet and numbers that we don’t have.

We need new bookshelves as we’re already running out of space, and our largest bookshelf is wooden and has lots of termite damage.

In order to open for more than the eight total hours a week that we are currently open, we need to find, encourage, and train more people from the community to be librarians.

These are part of the second phase of the library project aimed at turning Biblioteca El Cedro from a room with some books to borrow into a vibrant cornerstone of the community’s culture of reading, learning, growing, and advancing.

A key to this stage will be setting up the first WiFi access in the community. As of now, the only way to access the internet is through cellular signal. The realities of that method, including inconsistent cell signal due to geography and the absence of unlimited data plans from Salvadoran service providers, make the almost limitless resource of the internet rather limited in practice.

Thanks to recent developments, we are confident that fiber optic cables will be run within arm’s reach of the library free of charge to us. We still need to pay for the service as well as the upgraded router and signal extenders that will support the number of people and the space we want to accommodate, including all the kindergarten classrooms in the rest of the facility.

From filling out online job applications to allowing students to research and study more easily, the WiFi access in the library will be a game-changer for the community. Not only will those activities and more be possible, but as more people visit the library, we’ll be able to introduce more people to the joys and benefits of reading.

In the future, we also have dreams of movie nights at the library, literacy classes, typing classes, and a prize system for students who are particularly voracious readers.

All these things are possible—but to do it we will need financial support. If you’d like to help us buy books, bookshelves, internet access, and more, please donate today.

Please consider joining our circle of COMPANIONS IN MISSION. Companions in Mission are generous donors, like you, who give financial gifts on a regular (usually monthly) basis. For more information, visit Become a Companion in Mission. Thank you so much for your generosity!