Sri Lanka’s Barefoot Librarian
FEATURE
David Gardiner writes of an astonishing discovery in Sri Lanka Kanthi making steps up to her children’s library
Kanthi Pathirana
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When my partner Jean and I first encountered 54-year-old Kanthi Pathirana, on a minor road outside the town of Ella in the hill country of central Sri Lanka, she was digging steps out of the clay hillside with a metal spade in her bare feet. I asked her if this was a wise thing to do, wouldn’t she injure her feet, and she assured me in almost perfect English that she was used to it and I shouldn’t worry. A conversation ensued in which she explained that she was making the steps so that it would be safer for the children to walk up the slope to her Children’s Library. Was she the librarian, I asked? Yes, she told us, that was indeed who she was. Kanthi invited us up to see her library, which was also her family home, accessed by way of the steep slope where she had been digging out the steps. We
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were shocked to find that the ‘library’ consisted of one free-standing bookcase containing a few tatty children’s books of the kind people in England throw out. She assured us that most of the books were out on loan and what we were seeing was just the ones that nobody wanted, but she hoped some day to have a much better collection. In 2010, when Kanthi was 51, she had a serious medical problem and feared that her life was coming to an end. An operation restored her health and saved her life, but after this near-death experience she decided that she must do something worthwhile with her remaining time, and decided that education was where she could make the most useful contribution. In particular she could try to pass on her love of books and reading to the children of the poor, whose homes contained no books or newspapers and whose only contact with the written word was through dry and for-