Melville House Books

Thanks to the ongoing war between Maoist rebels and the king’s army, and to a poorly educated populace with only a 50 percent literacy rate (only 35 percent amongst women), Nepal had relatively few libraries, especially in its more remote regions. But, as Louisa Kasdon reports in a story for The Christian Science Monitor, “In the past 15 years, READ, a nonprofit organization spearheaded by Antonia Neubauer of Incline, Nev., has been building libraries in rural and remote Nepali villages and towns.” So far, the group has built 35 libraries in 35 different villages, all with an ambitious plan that requires the individual village to invest. Neubaurer says she could have covered the approcimately $20,000 of each library herself, but, she says, “I knew that if the libraries were to succeed in the long run, each Nepali village had to make an economic investment to build the library in the first place, and to maintain it in the long run,” she explains.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.