Photo: © Roman Soumar/Corbis

Lofty Reading

How libraries are jump-starting local economies in Nepal
By Jacqueline Mitchell

On her first trip to Nepal, in 1983, Antonia Neubauer, J65, sat on a god. “I thought it was a rock,” she explains. That misunderstanding prompted her to start a new kind of travel company, one that would immerse people in the culture of the places they visit. She also hoped to improve the lives of those who hosted her globe-trotting clientele, and eventually she hit upon a model for development that she thinks could catch on worldwide.

Her concept has already worked wonders in Nepal, which the United Nations has identified as one of the least-developed countries on earth. Per-capita income is below $300 a year. Until 1951, only royalty went to school, and even now the literacy rate is just 50 percent. Yet by the end of 2007, this remote, ancient kingdom will possess 45 comprehensive libraries, many with Internet access—thanks to READ (Rural Education and Development), the nonprofit organization Neubauer launched in 1991.

The key to READ’s success, according to Neubauer, is a bottom-up approach. Each village must write a formal proposal and commit to raising 15 to 20 percent of the $50,000 it costs to build a library (READ pays the rest through its fund-raising efforts). The proposal must specify a small business venture—a rickshaw service, for instance, or ambulances, hotels, or orchards—whose proceeds will support the library. Once built, the libraries require no further outside help.

Neubauer, who graduated from Tufts with a double major in French and economics, is a teacher at heart. She studied French literature at New York University, then earned a doctorate in education administration from Loyola University Chicago. After 15 years teaching French and Spanish to middle schoolers, she authored Philadelphia’s first citywide study on literacy and collaborated with the Philadelphia High School Academies—a joint venture between schools and businesses—to strengthen the city’s worst-performing high schools.

With her travel company, Myths and Mountains, Neubauer now designs itineraries for those who want to “get inside the people’s lives” in Asia, Antarctica, Africa, and South America. “I am still a teacher,” she says. “Taking people on a trip is like running a class. It’s creating an experience from which people can learn.”

As for that other goal—the goal of helping people in the countries where Myths and Mountains goes—it took Neubauer a few years to find the right approach. In Nepal, she started a nonprofit that supplied desks and benches to rural schools. She raised money for hospitals and scraped together scholarship funds to send the occasional student to school in the United States. But these acts of charity were, she says, “Band-Aids on bleeding arteries.” So she finally asked a trusted Nepalese guide, Domi, what he would do to improve his village. The answer: build a library.

“He actually just meant a place where he could read lots of newspapers, but a light bulb went off over my head,” says Neubauer. She knew of one library in Nepal that supported itself with the proceeds from a lemon orchard. The expat who built it was happy to hand the project over to her (particularly as he had just been run out of Nepal by a romantic rival). Then, in 1991, on a 13-hour flight to Nepal, Neubauer found herself seated in the same row as the schoolmaster from Domi’s village. Out of this chance encounter, READ was conceived. Nine months later, eight porters carried 900 books down a mountain path into Domi’s village to start a new locally sustained library.

Today, each READ library in Nepal houses sections on women’s health, pre-school education, entrepreneurship, and computer and multimedia training. More than a million Nepalese have access to the libraries and the 300,000 books they contain. Neubauer credits such resources with raising the numbers of rural children who pass the School Leaving Certificate Examination.

On average, the libraries and their supporting businesses create five jobs per village, no small benefit in a nation where unemployment hovers at 42 percent. Profits from the businesses also underwrite services such as literacy classes, preschools, clinics, and stipends for the poor. “We don’t go to the villages. They come to us,” says Neubauer. In fact, she says, neighboring hamlets often try to top each other’s libraries.

With a new two-person office and two library projects under way in India, READ is going global. Neubauer has plans to bring it to five nations within five years. “A lot of people in a lot of places will do this,” she says. “Everyone wants their children to be better off than they are.” In Nepal, the venture even received an odd sort of endorsement from Maoist rebels. They burned government buildings but left the libraries—and the offices of READ—untouched. To Neubauer, it was a sign that while some buildings “belonged to the authorities, the libraries belonged to the people.”

JACQUELINE MITCHELL, a senior health sciences writer for Tufts’ Office of Publications, has worked as a science journalist in Boston for nearly 10 years. She spent a year exploring the world aboard a three-masted schooner, the Kathryn B, out of Rockland Harbor, Maine.