La Biblioteca

Three years ago a group of avid reading gringas decided to start a library. The prime mover and shaker is a woman who was a professional librarian and embarked on the same task in Ajijic, a gringo-centrist town on Lake Chapala, near Guadalajara. Our original location was in the back of the internet café. We had no roof over our books, rusty, rickety shelves to house our collection of rather pathetic paperbacks, which numbered about 100. We distributed flyers to all the local hotels telling their guests that we were open for business and welcomed readers.

By the second year of operations we had about 500 books in our collection. Before we all went home in May we had pulled the shelves away from the walls and draped them with big tarps to shield them from the rain. The books had weathered the summer storms pretty well. During our second year in the internet café back room we signed up more members, collected more books, kept regular hours, and were generally pretty satisfied with our progress.

Then in September we learned that the owner of the internet café was moving his business to another location and the new tenant wanted all the space for storage for his shop. We had to get out before Christmas. A couple of our intrepid founders shopped around town, talked to La Presidenta, the elected "city councilwoman" for Cuyutlán, who suggested we might use half of the already-extant Municipal Library. The building has two large rooms, one of which is now a Spanish language library, a kitchen, two baños, and a large, airy foyer. After careful inspection by all of us, we decided it was a great deal and agreed to move. We bought paint and hired a guy to paint everything, got the space cleaned up, replaced broken windows, bought $400 US worth of bookshelves, boxed up all the books and loaded them in cars and took them to their new home. Now, after about three weeks of cleaning, cataloging and shelving books, we are almost ready for our grand opening. We now have well over 1000 books neatly cataloged and shelved a nice reading area, tables and chairs, a solid roof over our heads and a moderately organized staffing plan. It's amazing what 6 or 7 determined, hard-working gringas can do.

Today is our 42nd wedding anniversary. Amazing.