A library: That was Ameena Hussein’s gift to her community in Puttalam. Generous donations from friends and family have allowed her and her husband Sam Perera to buy books, while the villagers themselves have contributed shelves and space for the library. Readers are flocking in, says Ameena, who dreams of setting up similar libraries all over Sri Lanka. Below are extracts from an interview where she shares her experience with the Sunday Times.

Tell us about the library. How did it come to be?

For the past six years Sam and I have been supporting the Karadipuval PubudugamaVidyalaya library by giving them books in English for the students. We must have donated close to 500 books to the library and one day I received a memoir of a Sinhala industrialist in Sinhalese and decided to donate that to the school as well. A fisherman from the village who saw this when he was visiting us, asked if he could borrow the book. I told him he could borrow it from the school library and then he told me that the school library was only for schoolchildren and he didn’t have access to books as there was no library close by. That was when the seed was planted in my head of starting a library for the village where adults and children equally had access to books.

Opening up a world of books: Ameena hands over books to Kumari

Then began the search for a location. We asked around and discovered the village while having a samithiya hall and a pre-school had no lockable room for the books to be stored in and more importantly had no person they could designate as librarian.

But you ended up finding an unusual space, in one of the village shops. How did you convince the owner?

I made a case with the shop owner that if she gave me two shelves in her shop and I stocked it with books, and if she managed the borrowing and returning of the books, her business could increase as well. She was agreeable and I asked the village carpenter to make two shelves, which he did. I believe that for a community venture to succeed the community must be participatory as well as enthusiastic in the project. We made an initial donation of 50 books bought from money donated by a close friend.We called it the Pubudugama Book Circle. And that was the beginning of the Library in a Shop as we call it.

What kind and how many books does the library stock? What are the logistics of its day to day running?

The library currently has 200 books. There is no membership. Anyone from the village can come and borrow and return a book in two weeks. If the return is delayed the borrower pays 50 cents for every delayed day that gets into a till the proceeds of which we will decide on what to do with at the end of a year. Now, readers from neighbouring villages have also started borrowing books. The shopkeeper keeps a tab on all books taken and logs it in a book.

The library caters to all ages. From 5 year olds to 95 year olds. The books are all in Sinhala because it is a Sinhalese village. Because of the varied ages and gender, the types of books range from local children’s books, folk tales, and translations of children’s books like Roald Dahl, Sherlock Holmes and Charles Dickens abbreviated of course to love stories by Edward Mallawarachchi to Russian novelists like Aitmatov to Spittel to Knox, books on ayurveda and health.

Have you heard back from your borrowers? Do they have special requests?

The villagers are over the moon with the library. Whenever Sam and I go walking strangers come up to us and thank us for giving them the library. After the initial donation by a friend, I got three more donations – two from my cousins and one from another friend. I took the books up in batches buying from bookshops like Sarasavi, Samayawardene, Suriya and of course my loot from the book fair held in September.

Now that they are comfortable about the idea they tell me they want more books by Sinhala authors rather than translations. More novels and more books for children of all ages. Little children write letters to us thanking us for the books and say how much they have learnt and how they love to read and to please give them more books. It is truly rewarding.

What progress would you like to see the library make in 2014?

My goal in the coming year is to see that the library has a permanent home in the village where it can grow and reach its potential. I have two hurdles to overcome, one is space, the other is finding and of course paying a permanent librarian to oversee the project. Both Sam and I feel quite strongly that the community needs to get involved so that they can feel this is also a part of them and their lives and their village. I do not endorse a hand out mentality as I believe in the long run it does not work.

I also have this dream of replicating this library all over Sri Lanka. Even if anyone who reads this article can get inspired to start a library in some part of Sri Lanka where it is difficult to access books, that would be a wonderful thing. Soon we will have Sri Lankans reading again and reading for pleasure, not for studies, or school or some exam but for the joy of reading and learning through reading of how the world works, how the world imagines and how the world can be a better place through the simple joy of reading a book.