PHNOM PENH – Access to books can be complicated in rural areas, causing potential limitations to children’s imagination and abilities to read in their adult life.
But the pupils of the Khum Koh Chivaing Primary School, who struggle to put their hands on the books they like at school, are lucky enough to see a mobile library stopping in the courtyard.
Every day, during their 15-minute break, a tuk-tuk comes to give students the possibility to read, surrounded by the school’s trees and greenery.
The school, located in Battambang province’s Ek Phnom district, is part of a network of five schools receiving a mobile library from Action Education, a French NGO that started working in Cambodia in the early 2000s.
Formerly known as Aide et Action, it promotes education and fosters reading habits for young children in rural areas by offering them books in free access.
Keng Samnang, a staff member of the organization, said this mobile library’s goal is to provide books for children who can’t afford to buy them and to improve their reading.
“Reading is really important because students only attend classes for three hours [per day]. So once the school day is over, students can keep on learning from reading,” Samnang said, adding that children have fun discovering books from every genre.
While she was holding a book, Tha Sreynit, a third-grade student, said she really loves reading and takes some time to open books at least twice a day, in the afternoon and the evening.
One of her classmates, Sambat Rabin, is also a book lover. Thanks to the mobile library, he gets access to fiction stories, his favorites, and takes every bit of free time he has to jump into reading, in the morning, afternoon and evening.
Five schools in Cambodia are part of the organization’s mobile library program, and each one of them receives books from different genres: picture books, nonfiction and fiction books.
To allow every pupil to get access to several kinds of stories, the books rotate regularly from one school to another. Every mobile library carries around 200 books on average.
(Article was published on Cambodianess / Publication date 19 June 2023)
