Biblioteca Publica Copan Ruinas Roberto Sosa

(Photo, Children's Corner of the Library)

On Friday, we arrived in Copan Ruinas, Honduras (population 3,000; altitude 2,000 feet), a town close to the Guatemala border and named after the nearby Copan ruins, an ancient center of the Mayan civilization. Soon after checking into our hotel, I went to visit the Library, named Roberto Sosa after the Honduran poet. (John stayed at the hotel, recuperating from stomach troubles. Poor John).

The day of my visit was a busy one for the Library. A Riecken team from Tegucigalpa (Capitol of Honduras) was wrapping up a three day training event for local library leaders. In addition, a community event was being held in the conference room. Upon my arrival I met Dasil Eliosa Mejia and Francklin Eduardo Sierra (Riecken Program Officials), Gloria Zobeydan Romero (Local Coordinator for Copan), and Cinthia Xaniva Valdez (Copan Ruinas Librarian).

(Photo: Community meeting about environmental law and mining)

The first thing I noticed about the Roberto Sosa Library was the high quality of the book collection. Riecken funded and built the current library building in 2009 and supplied the majority of the 4,000 books. The library has over 700 books for children and youth, an up-to-date and quality reference collection (including an atlas of Honduras, a world atlas, and dictionaries-- resources valuable to the local students), and many works of literature by Spanish language authors including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. In addition to the books, the library has a periodicals collection with old and new issues mixed together, including one current subscription to a popular Honduran monthly magazine, Hablemos Claros, paid for by Riecken.

The library also houses a technology center with four computers with internet access (internet access donated by a local cable provider), as well as a laptop, projector, and photocopier.

Activities at the Sosa Library include a reading group; Zona X (a group of Maya Choti youth that act as leaders in regional literacy efforts); Proyecta Maya ( a group that meets once a week to learn about Maya Choti culture and language); and Maestro en Cosa Educatodos (a community program that meets Saturday mornings at the Library, adult students taking high school classes from home and meeting with instructors  once a week); and a book exchange (mainly for the many tourists visiting Copan).

In speaking with the Riecken and Library staff, they confirmed what I had heard from others during my library visits, that due to a change in mayors in Copan Ruinas, the librarian's salary was no longer being paid by the municipality. As initially stated in the contract with Riecken, the municipality was to provide the salaries for two librarians. Instead, Cinthia works as the sole librarian and receives a small token salary provided by the Junta, a local board that administers the Library. In my visits to other sustainable library programs, I have witnessed the same situation in both Ghana and Zambia: municipalities or partner organizations that either change their minds or are unable to meet salary agreements. Hopefully, with a future change in mayors, the municipality will once again pay salaries for two librarians.

Many thanks to Cinthia for her time and the wonderful tour of the Roberto Sosa Public Library.

(Photo, from left: Gloria Zobeydan Romero, Cinthia Xanira Valdez, and Francklin Eduardo Sierra).