At first glance, it is not much of a library: two shelves of about 1,600 books and magazines in a basement room deep into a dusty alley of adobe homes in rural Panjwai District, in southern Afghanistan. The mattresses and blankets stacked in the corner still give the vibe of the guest quarters the room once was.
But the register shows how parts of the community here, particularly younger residents, have come to value any chance to indulge their curiosity, in a place that was at the heart of the original Taliban uprising in the 1990s and became a watchword for the tragedy and deprivation brought by war.
Hassanullah, 18, checked out General History. Muhammad Rahim, 27, came for The Fires of Hell, which he returned the next day; it was soon borrowed by a 12-year-old named Nabi. Taher Agha, 15, preferred Of Love and the Beloved, keeping it for 10 days. Another young man, about to marry, called ahead to make sure there was a copy of Homemaking. He rode his bicycle six miles to pick it up.
The library here in Panjwai is largely the work of Matiullah Wesa, a 22-year-old student from Kandahar who is in India finishing a degree in political science. For about eight years, the Pen Path, the volunteer organisation that Wesa started as a teenager, has been working to reopen schools closed because of violence and to bring books to some of the worst-affected conflict areas.
After opening in January, the Panjwai library had about 24 visitors in its first month, said Muhammad Nasim Haidary, who looks after the library and whose family houses it.
But the interest of a couple of female readers, who approached women in the Haidary family about their interest in the books, has caused a small dilemma in a society that frowns upon even sharing the names of women in public: how can the library keep track of who took the books out if it cannot write the women's names?
One proposal was to use pseudonyms for the women instead of writing their real names in the register, but that would create another problem: how would poor Haidary remember which pseudonym belongs to whom?
The fighting over the past 14 years has disproportionately affected the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, and Kandahar Province, which includes Panjwai, has been among the hardest hit. As district after district changed hands back and forth between the Taliban and the Afghan government and its American allies, survival became the priority.
Recently, though, the district has been relatively quiet. Even as the Taliban exert pressure in neighbouring provinces, gobbling territory, the reach of the government has been maintained in Kandahar, though it has often been disappointing or abusive.
Wesa's journey into education activism began in his home district, Maruf, which is now contested by the Taliban. His father opened one of the first schools there, before violence forced their family to relocate to Spinbaldak, a border commercial hub. But the seed had already been planted. Wesa, one of 11 children, continued accumulating books for a family library they brought with them when they moved.
The family library in Spinbaldak, which is now open to the public as part of Wesa's volunteer organisation, has nearly 4,000 books organised on neat metal shelves. In the middle of the carpeted room is a gas heater for winter reading and an ashtray and a spittoon for those who may need a smoke or a pinch of smokeless tobacco.
The circulation at the Spinbaldak library runs largely on an honour system. Bookkeeping is minimal, partly because another brother of Wesa's, who is the library's caretaker, Atta Muhammad, has only very basic literacy.
When the books are not returned on time, Muhammad finds himself making phone calls or visiting the borrowers' homes. Despite his efforts, several dozen books have been lost, most of them never returned after being checked out.
Wesa plans to open several other small libraries in the coming year and to expand the book drive to a more organised network of volunteers across the country. How far he is willing to go to promote reading was best displayed in a recent conversation he had with a wealthy businessman in eastern Afghanistan. The man made an offer: he would donate 20,000 books to a library in his part of the country, on the condition that it be named for his father.
In his excitement, Wesa cared little about cultural taboos in giving his answer: "I told him I would even name it after his mother - whatever it takes to get the books."
©2016 The New York Times
