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A long time ago, when the roads were still bridle paths and the peasants roamed the mountains for fear of running into some stranger, a train of mules managed to cross the last mountain with the box it was carrying and inside of which there was something so powerful that It would be able to break the spell and take whoever had it in their hands to places that no one had ever trod before.
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The box that makes magic has rolled around every corner of the department ever since, it has entered the homes of 210,000 Antioquia families and has remained to accompany the classes of the students of 4,200 schools. The architect of this illusion is Secrets to Tell Foundationwhich was born 20 years ago with the mission of building libraries and planting new readers who could handle the “power” that travels inside the boxes: books of all colors and knowledge.
In these two decades Secretos para Contar has distributed some eight million books – it is possibly the largest publisher in the country – in the most remote places, at the ends of the map, where by dint of fighting the Hertzian waves and well-shod mules reach.
It doesn’t matter if you have to get there by boat, horse, goat or on foot, or if the schools that are the meeting places are two or three days away, a book of Secrets to Tell always arrives there.
—The scene that seems most beautiful to me is the one of the peasant who, after the meetings, gets on his mule with a book under his arm. There he carries his passport, because The books show him that the planet is not just the place where they live. Reading makes them inhabitants of the world, it has helped the countryside to know that we are not alone,” says Néstor Úsuga, professor at the Pedro Nel Ospina Educational Institution in Ituango, where the most recent meeting was last month in the town of La Farm.
That was the dream when everything was born in 2004. Under the direction of Lina Mejía Correa and several institutions and benefactor families, several questions were raised: what do rural families read, or do they not have books, or perhaps they don’t? Are there libraries in rural schools? After studying the matter in depth, they concluded that farmers learn to read the basics in school—recipes, official papers, notifications, market lists—but outside of that They have nothing to read and maintain the habit.
Another conclusion was that they have a deep respect and suspicion for the written word, it is a kind of something sacred and very distant for them. That’s why, as the years went by, people forgot to read.
The Foundation was based on studies that reveal the high probability that children read frequently when their parents have a library in their homes and reading is practiced as a family. They also visited schools and understood that the classroom shelves had little material, old guides, with yellow and worn pages that only caused yawns. Teachers had little room to make their students fall in love with reading, and after school, cooking, hoes, and machetes occupied the hands of the boys who almost never picked up a book again.
That is why the diagnosis and the solution began to be clearly outlined: the field deserved urgent attention in terms of access to knowledge and education; and the best way to start winning that pulse was to bring libraries that stayed in the homes and became another family member. The next question was what books to bring. There were introductory texts, colorful and didactic, but from Mexico and Spain that talk about maguey, agave, pistachios or cherry trees. It was necessary to reach those remote corners and speak the everyday language of the people of the countryside, of their corn, bean, and cassava crops, of the ravines, the puddles and the waning stream, of the Hojarasquín of the mountain and of the herbalist’s cures. That content had to be created to be able to throw the bait. So, in addition to obtaining donated books, the Foundation decided to create an editorial project that would produce content aimed at rural households, exploring their tastes and affinities to provide them with material that was of interest to them.
This is how the magic was born. This enormous publishing house has personally distributed in these 20 years some eight million books In 4,200 schools, it has gotten 210,000 rural families to adopt several books and has built a powerful network of more than 50 reading promoters who distribute the 250,000 copies of each new collection for two years so that the libraries are renewed.
They look like the family of gypsies from Melquiades who every March planted a tent near Macondo to make known with a great uproar of whistles and kettledrums the eighth wonder of the wise alchemists of Macedonia.
With more than 100 public and private allies, The Foundation has financed the production of 27 titlesedited by them and whose themes have been proposed by the same inhabitants to whom they have already given texts previously.
That is, families are the ones who decide what topics they want to address in the new volumes. That they are books contextualized for the public that reads them has allowed the parent who had stopped reading a long time ago to regain interest in learning.
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The texts address an endless number of topics, from first aid, gastronomy and health, to mythology and medicinal plants. A book with this last theme was requested in one of many meetings in the field. Secretos para Contar took on the task of writing it, entrusting the scientific support to Álvaro Cogollo, scientific director of the Botanical Garden, and the illustration to the Herbarium of the University of Antioquia. When he came out of the oven and they distributed it in the Cristianía en Jardín reservation, one of the taitas, who since then has carried that book in his backpack, said: “It’s the only good thing the white man has ever done.”.
Every detail of the collection is carefully planned, its layout, its content, the design, the quality of the paper and the binding. The thing is that that new smell when you uncover a book is what first makes you fall in love. That is why each delivery in a little school lost among the mountains is the social event of the year on the trails.
The farmers put on the best look, take the best mule and welcome the caravan with activities and food. Reading also became the pretext to recover the ancestral practice of sharing. The Foundation also distribute glasses for older people who have presbyopia and complements the offer with dictionaries to find your way if someone gets lost in the middle of a book.
The impact of this initiative has been measured every two years. The Foundation says that when they started, only 24% of families had a monthly reading habit. In the latest measurements more than 78% have a reading habit between daily and weekly. There are signs of increased reading frequency and literacy and reverse literacy processes, that is, children also help older people learn or resume their reading habits.
Professor Néstor Úsuga, from Ituango, says that the reading workshops are magical because they bring the word through play, they teach how to play from the word and not only from the written language. The promoters teach how to approach books, to find the myths and legends, the characters, the stories of the countryside, nature, the human body and people from other places.
—The reading was not going to come by the work and grace of the Holy Spirit. They had to be slowly brought closer to the words, from surprise, from magic. The way to travel is books. Reading is play. We are excited that together we can learn,” he says. The reading aloud exercises revive in the peasant, Néstor says, the love of telling his stories. That is the true magic, the one that breaks the spell of fear and silence in the mountains.
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—Once we were reading the book With the hair on end, about myths and legends from Colombia and other countries. That motivated the peasants to transmit their own stories, the exercise ends up opening the doors for them to tell what they know.
And concludes. —In the countryside there is a lot of oral tradition that is being lost because old people die with their stories. We have always been taught silence the hard way. Reading is also an effect of catharsis, of talking, so that stories never die again.
