Once upon a time when she was in her 50s, Southminster Resident Susan Aldrich spent three hours of her life riding a horse bareback through a jungle to get back to civilization after ferrying children’s books to start a library. She, her niece and two Peace Corps volunteers had gotten to the site on a mercantile truck along a precarious route without roads, expecting to crash over the side of a mountain at any moment.
It was broiling hot and the water in the nearby creek was laden with bacteria, so she and her niece ate mangos off trees along the road to try and stay hydrated. The packhorse carrying their passports and money got ahead of them, and when they reached their destination, somewhere she describes as “nowhere,” the truck driver told her he was not coming back to get them. Fortunately, another truck could get her out, but she would have to ride bareback to meet it.
“I got so sick there” Aldrich remembers, “but we made it out.” Even through many harrowing experiences like that one, this former stay-at-home mom never gave up on the wild idea she came up with to drive her future as an empty-nester at age 49. She created a non-profit she named “One Library at a Time.” Over the past 16 years, her passion for children’s literacy has resulted in the creation of 63 children’s libraries on five continents. Along the way, she and her other leads and teams, most of whom are women, have been willing to go to places that larger organizations deem too remote, facing challenges including scorpions, lack of power, no clean water, and even “suicide” showers with exposed electrical wires.
Aldrich says she is so fortunate to have had legions of help along the way. Father Davide, a priest from India, let her put her first library in a room at a feeding station he ran in a slum in Panama. When children came without clothes, they got some. “I did everything by the seat of my pants and learned from my mistakes,” Aldrich said. For example, when she began to catalog the boxes of books that had been donated for the fledgling library, she learned she needed to use a simplified version of the Dewey Decimal System. Everything then and now is focused on achieving three primary goals—to support literacy, expand children’s worlds outside their neighborhoods and villages, and offer them escape from the difficult worlds they live in.
Other non-profits have been tremendous resources for Aldrich in identifying locations for libraries and furthering her mission, especially the Peace Corps. She also tags along with other mission-oriented teams. One of the most important things One Library at a Time strives to do is to position the local community and other non-profits to continue to “feed” each library after its creators have moved on to other places.
Aldrich’s five-year-plan is straightforward – to recruit more leads and teams, build monetary donations, and create more libraries. “Literacy is so incredibly important for these children,” she said. “It’s key to improving life right now and for future generations in poverty-stricken areas. With help from teachers and community leaders, we put the right books, computers, maps and other resources into the hands of those who most need them.
It is amazing to see how carefully the materials are treated and how well they are used.
“In the short term, we give children access to the books they need in order to actively participate in school today and tomorrow. Over the long run, literacy empowers individuals, especially in the extremely remote and rural areas we have prioritized for our libraries. Nothing could be more gratifying for me.”
About One Library at a Time
Founded in 2010, One Library at a Time has created 63 libraries on five continents to support literacy, expand children’s worlds outside their neighborhoods and villages, and offer the next generation escape from the difficult worlds they lived in. The organization, under the leadership of Founder and Director Susan Aldrich has partnered with a wide variety of non-profits and devotes the preponderance of its budget to books and supplies. www.onelibraryatatime.org