out of a tree?
Books were a symbol of oppression in Peru from the days of the conquistadors. Not any more. Sarah Dunant joined the farmer- librarians who trek the sierra collecting and delivering books
Whichever way you look at it, the Rural Libraries of the Cajamarca valley in northern Peru is one of the more unusual aid programmes in the world. It is also one of the more surreal.
Some 15 000km2 of the toughest highland terrain is served by 600 voluntary farmer/librarians who travel down to the valley town of Cajamarca, collect up to 40 books at a time and then return with them to their remote rural homes, often as far as three days’ journey away.
On their backs travel copies of the Peruvian Constitution, books on law, medicine, local agriculture, plant remedies, history, stories and customs of the region, all for people who could never in a million years afford to buy them and who would otherwise never even see them.
In a subsistence economy where there is no electricity or telephones, this defiantly low-tech trade in words has, over the past 27 years, brought with it expertise on everything from health to bee-keeping, along with a remarkable sense of local identity and culture.
The scheme, funded by Christian Aid, was the brainchild of a mild-mannered young English Catholic priest. In the early 1970s, John Medcalf was fresh out of Kent and missionary college when he found himself plunged first into the horror of Lima’s exploding shanty towns and then the grinding, rural poverty of the northern Andes.
By his own admission overwhelmed and depressed by what he found there, he was on the verge of giving up when one evening a young boy arrived at his door in Cajamarca. “His name was Leonardo Ereria,” says Medcalf, “and he said he was 13, though he looked no more than eight.
“He said he’d heard I was the new priest and that I had brought something he and his friends wanted to see. It was made of trees and shaped like a brick, only there were words inside and it taught you things.
“I told him he was describing a book and asked him if he could read. He said he could a little. So I lent him a book – I remember it was a pamphlet on the history of the region – and gave him a pen and some paper, and asked him to read what he could and come back and tell me what he didn’t understand.
“At six o’clock the next morning I was awoken by him banging at the door. He had read enough to want to talk about it, and then he wanted me to give him another one. I think the idea for the Rural Libraries was born in that moment.”
If the task was Herculean, the spirit at least was strong. These were the days when liberationist theology was at its height in Latin America. Medcalf was one of a generation of Catholic clergy whose response to the overwhelming suffering they found was to embrace politics along with religion, and work for radical change.
“They were extraordinary days. After the Ecumenical Council of ’69, one Latin-American bishop came back here and sold his palace to go and live among the poor. A few years later, I remember Fidel Castro came down to Chile and addressed a stadium full of priests and nuns.
“In Peru, Jesuit priests infiltrated the army in an attempt to influence government policies. I think we all felt we had to do something. Saying Mass was not enough. We had to offer action as well.”
It’s the kind of fighting talk that would probably give the present pope acute angina. But all this energy just to give birth to a glorified travelling library?
While it might sound more home-counties than revolution now, the implications of Medcalf’s scheme in 1970s rural Peru were in many ways genuinely subversive. First there was the theory behind it.
Alternative educationalists, such as the Brazilian Paulo Freire, were arguing that, while the Western model of schooling might succeed in lifting a few bright kids out of poverty, it could never touch the great mass of peasantry who couldn’t afford to educate their children for long because they needed them to help work the land.
If education were going to be effective in such places, the system had to be tailored to the people, not the people to the system. If reading and books could be seen to improve life, to make a practical difference, then one might create not only a greater appetite for literacy, but a sense of self-esteem to go with it.
Second, there was the history. Peru was a country where, for the native population, the book had long been synonymous with conquest and oppression.
The thing made of a tree and shaped like a brick had first arrived with the conquistadors. It was in Cajamarca Square in 1532 that the Inca king, Atahualpa, was given a prayer book by a Dominican friar. Having never seen a book – the Inca civilisation, though sophisticated in many ways, had no writing – he looked at it, then dropped it to the ground.
This gave the Spanish the excuse to attack they were looking for. That afternoon, the soldiers slaughtered thousands of unarmed Incas and took Atahualpa prisoner. It was the beginning of the end for the Inca empire, and a decidedly brutal introduction to the written word.
Alfredo Mires lives not far from the place of that first massacre. He comes from a peasant family and was barely out of his teens when Medcalf picked him personally to work with the libraries when Medcalf himself returned to London in 1982.
Now, in his mid-30s, you recognise some of the same gravitas and humour that characterised Medcalf’s own approach, though, in Mires’s case, you feel, it comes less from religion than a commitment to grassroots politics. “For centuries native Peruvians have been afraid of books,” he says, “because they walked hand-in-hand with those in control.
“Priests, big land-owners, judges, all those who had power over the campesinos, used the book to hold on to that power. To keep us illiterate was to keep us quiet. As the novelist and anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas said, `An Indian who can read is a dangerous Indian.’
“That’s why the Rural Libraries have been so important here. For us, it’s been a way of putting an end to the conquest – of saying, loud and clear: `You haven’t finished with us. We’re still here.'”
To prove his point, Mires recounts a story of a dispute that took place nearby in the mid-Eighties. The local authorities interrupted a meeting of peasant farmers to announce that they wanted to build a road in the area, and that the farmers themselves were expected to construct it.
It would, the authorities said, benefit the whole community, though – as Mires is quick to point out – since the land- owners were the only ones with vehicles or with surplus produce to sell, “They were the only ones who would have gained from it”. The farmers agreed at first, and asked how much they’d be paid. The authorities said “nothing” – it was their obligation under the law to provide the labour.
Mires’s face lights up as he gets to the climax. “It was then that the local librarian got up with a copy of the Constitution in his hand. He said he could prove they were lying, because it was written down in the Constitution of Peru that no citizen could be forced to work without pay.
“The next day, the librarian was publicly denounced and threatened with arrest. But they never carried out the threat. And the road was never built.”
After three or four days of walking across the mountains in the footsteps of the librarians, one begins to realise that the real impact of their scheme is to be found less in the grand gesture than in the dozens of smaller, personal stories that come to you from readers and librarians alike.
Take Marcial Rumay Cortez, for example. By the Rural Libraries standards, he lives just around the corner. The journey from Cajamarca to his mountain community in Shidin is a two-hour bus ride, then a mere hour-and-a-half climb up a mountain.
Halfway up, there is a natural platform of stones where you can take a rest. This is where you discard one cheek full of cocoa leaves and substitute another. It is also where the locals stop when they’re bringing down coffins for burial.
Two years ago Cortez’s wife almost made that journey herself when she contracted a mysterious illness that no one in the community recognised.
“Nobody knew what it was, but in the library there was a book on health and remedies, so I looked up her symptoms. She had all the signs of bronchial pneumonia. It was right there in the book. There were also some instructions for a remedy.
“I did everything it said, found all the right plants, collected them up, boiled up the leaves and made her a tea. I gave it to her, stayed with her and nursed her over the next two days. Gradually, the fever went down and she got better. She would have died without it.” Either way, it was all the help Cortez could afford. The nearest hospital was four hours away and, with no government health service, he didn’t have the money to pay for treatment anyway.
It’s no surprise to find that the book in question, a health guide called Donde no hay Doctor (When There is No Doctor), is so popular that most Rural Libraries have a permanent copy of it. When it’s not on loan, you can find it, like the rest of the books, in the librarian’s house, either stacked on a makeshift shelf by the beds (most houses have only one or two rooms) or, if the weather is damp, in a waterproof bag.
Each librarian keeps a meticulous record of who takes which book, on which date, and when it’s due back, though given the distances between houses and the seasonal work patterns – people read more when they are not harvesting or planting – late returns are treated benignly.
For the rest of the Top Ten Most Borrowed Books, you have only to check out these registers. High on the list is the practical stuff. Alongside the medical guides, there are books on local plants, bee-keeping and – a constant chart-topper – how to make natural dyes for use in weaving.
There is also a voracious appetite for stories. In 1982, responding to huge local demand, the Rural Libraries started producing their own books: 20 volumes of local knowledge and personal testimonies put down by those who could write, or dictated to them by those who couldn’t.
Known locally as the Peasants Encyclopaedia, much of it is used as advice – collective wisdom on country living. But it also acted as a kind of freezing of oral history: a gathering together of people’s recollections of parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts, of what they did, things they said, half- forgotten stories of their lives.
The chemistry of memory and imagination produced some enormously popular storybooks. It is the fact these people were real that makes the stories come alive. The power comes from recognition, rather than escapism. For the reader of the Rural Libraries, the trick is to find yourself – no doubt because for so long no one else was interested in who you were or thought your history worth preserving.
The librarians believe passionately in what they do. These 600 men and a handful of women are the barefoot doctors of the movement.
The analogy is deliberate. With his quiet wit, Medcalf always saw the scheme as a deliciously unlikely marriage between the staid British library system and chairman Mao Zedong’s Chinese foot soldiers for health. Their work is voluntary and unpaid, though the fact that librarians are elected from within the community illustrates the respect in which the post is held. They are both a reason for the success of the libraries, and one of its achievements.
There is no doubt that, in the current political debate about the efficacy of aid, when it comes to the impact of grassroots politics, the Rural Libraries of Cajamarca are almost romantically impressive (though God knows there is little enough romance in the reality of their everyday lives).
Nevertheless, you can’t help noting that, even with all this passion and commitment, the going has been tough. While there is no question that the libraries have done an enormous amount to spread literacy and information, it has obviously been a slow process, especially the literacy bit, and especially when it comes to women.
Medcalf, now back teaching in missionary college in London after nearly 30 years working in the Third World, never had any illusions about how hard it would be. “We founded a library programme, not a literacy one. For a really effective literacy programme, you need a great deal of money and full government support. We didn’t, and couldn’t, ever have that in Cajamarca.”
For Medcalf, what was essential was to create the appetite to read and, most importantly, to involve adults as well as children. But he always accepted that it would take longer to reach the women. It is a difficult one for the politics of aid. Like many charities, Christian Aid is committed to fostering gender equality in its work, but you have to be sensitive to the prevailing culture.
The machismo of Latin American society is, in some ways, less pronounced among the Andean campesinos, but with women working on the land as well as keeping house and rearing the children, you’re not going to find many of them with the time or the resources to become librarians, even if their communities elect them.
But the most invidious threat over the years has come not from machismo or the deficiencies of education, or even lack of money, but from politics.
For much of its life the Rural Libraries scheme has found itself a quiet, local voice within a raucous political climate that had seen a disastrous rise of extremism, on both the left and the right. The darkest days were those of the Eighties, when the radical Maoist guerrilla group, Sendero Luminoso – the Shining Path – exploded into action, focusing on the urban poor and the rural peasantry as fodder for their revolutionary cause.
Violently intolerant of any existing kind of democratic or left-wing grassroots initiative, the Shining Path was responsible for the assassination of some of the country’s most effective trade unionists, elected mayors, left- wing academics and activists.
The government’s response, through states of emergency, military and security services, was equally brutal. Over a 12-year period, some 30 000 people were killed in the violence, with many peasant communities caught in the political crossfire, punished and terrorised by the rebels and the military at the same time.
Had the Rural Libraries been operating in the middle of this fighting, it is almost certain they would never have survived. As it was, Cajamarca was far to the north of the Shining Path’s most strategic areas. That and a powerful local peasant militia protected the region from the worst of the slaughter and intimidation.
Nevertheless, Mires and the other librarians lived for a long time under the shadow of violence from both sides. “There were guerrilla groups operating in the south who burnt our books because we were writing about the past, and they wanted us to embrace a different kind of politics. Then there were the authorities who accused us of raising peasants’ expectations and encouraging them to fight for their rights.
“There have even been evangelical Christian sects who’ve burnt our books because they said they went against the word of God. There’ve been times when merely by doing a job like this we’ve been considered subversive to everyone.”
The situation in Peru has improved somewhat over the past five years. Since the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman in 1992 (and, earlier this year, his second-in- command), the threat of violence, at least from one side, has diminished, while the economic shock tactics of the Alberto Fujimori government (now in power for a second term) has stabilised the economy. But largely at the expense of the poor.
Official figures show that 49% of Peru’s population live on or below the poverty line. There is little point in the peasants of Cajamarca looking to the government for improvement in their lives. For that they will have to depend on themselves.
More likely than not, there will always be aid programmes in operation. But the worry about conventional aid is that, just as it can come, so it can also go, in some cases leaving behind precious little long-term impact.
While no one, least of all the farmers themselves, is under any illusion that books can stop poverty or heal all illness, the amazing achievement of the Rural Libraries is not only that they have survived, but that they are expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
For Mires, it is living proof that some kind of aid is better than others: “Some aid is almost like humanitarian tourism. It appeases other people’s consciences, but never roots itself in the soul of the community.
“The great success of this scheme is that it grows out of the community. We have been running it ourselves right from the start. It reflects who we are, and the books have given us what we need – a way of being ourselves, a way of preserving our culture – rather than trying to impose another one upon us.”