Next
October,2016, if everything goes fine, we will search for the most convenient site
to build Bubisher Library at Dajla. By the time, the library-bus will have
arrived. This bus will be driven to all its schools and neighbourhoods to
announce all the children and youths that human right, that of reading, the
same as that of education, health or decent housing, is theirs. Those youths´ homes
tumbled down and their adobe walls just turned into mud one year back, when,
all of a sudden, it started pouring down in Sahara like it had not rained in
the last 25 years. Dajla is the furthest camp, the least inhabited, the one
which has suffered exile´s scourge the hardest. The most loved, though. Those
who still live there feel they are Dajlians, have a group spirit, love their
poor landscape, stand against so much adversity. And Bubisher´s library will
become, if everything works out all right, their common room, a place for
pleasure, in a camp that lacks bars,
lacks everything which does not serve to the most immediate survival.
Some months
back, when we paid you a visit, we suggested you embrace each other so as to
guarantee a month´s wages to one of
those Saharan youths who have already become librarians at Bojador or Smara.
However, we have decided that we must be daring and that your effort will
enable for us to hire the first librarian at Dajla. You are just not aware of
how much we value your efforts, your imagination to raise funds. It is true
that the Basque Country has always been generous as well as supportive, that what you have
done has not been alien to you, such has been the climate that you have grown
up to. Some of you may think that what you have done has not been big deal,
that you might have achieved far more had you tried harder. But you have made a
new library possible, together with other people´s efforts somewhere else. 
Saharan
youths are no abstract beings; neither are you. They are Bachir, Mahyuba, the
same as you are Aitor, Aintzane or Maialen. And when you go to a library to
borrow a book and you don´t know why it´s there or why the librarian is doing
her work there, do please think that many a people once fought, risking their
jobs and even their freedom, for there to be books both in Spanish and Basque,
without any censorship or restrictions. There are people behind those shelves,
dead or alive, silent heroes who have paved our ways to those libraries. Well,
when Ebnu or Nuha make it to that library in Dajla and borrow a book in Spanish
or Arabic, you will also become a voiceless, anonymous hero. I don´t know
whether you will feel a breeze in your neck, the breath of someone from far
away. But that breath will exist and so will you.
We will
only be free if we know which path to choose. Your Saharan peers will be free
because you will have provided them the map of all those paths.
It is on
behalf of all our teachers, Bubisher´s two hundred members, on behalf of the
students who have also contributed with their effort at all the schools of the
state that we thank you.
This library
will also be yours. Who knows whether you, or some of you, or even many of you
will ever come over and see it, enjoy it. And also work in it, reading their
first tale a Saharan child who will not be able to read it by themselves. Maybe
one of your teachers will come over to teach techniques and ideas to the new
librarian. Your Saharan friends will be only too pleased to welcome you and
make tea under the stars. And there will be laughter and hugging. And our hug. Leid fi leidi: hand on hand.
Inés and
Gozalo, on behalf of Bubisher.
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