国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語(yǔ)Fran?ais
China
Home / China / World

Garbage collector rescues books for children

By Associated Press in Bogota, Colombia | China Daily | Updated: 2015-08-27 07:39

 Garbage collector rescues books for children

Cristian Orjuela, 5, searches for a book at Jose Alberto Gutierrez's home last week in Bogota, Colombia. Garbage collector Gutierrez started rescuing books from the trash almost 20 years ago. Fernando Vergara / Associated Press

A second-grade education has not stopped garbage collector Jose Gutierrez from bringing the gift of reading to thousands of Colombian children.

Gutierrez started rescuing books from the trash nearly 20 years ago, when he was driving a garbage truck at night through the capital's wealthier neighborhoods.

The discarded reading material slowly piled up, and now the ground floor of his small house is a makeshift community library stacked from floor to ceiling with some 20,000 books, ranging from chemistry textbooks to children's classics.

He said books are luxuries for boys and girls in low-income neighborhoods such as his, as new reading material at bookstores is too expensive. There are 19 public libraries in Bogota, a city of 8.5 million, but they tend to be located far away from poorer areas.

"This should be in all neighborhoods, on each corner of every neighborhood, in all the towns, in all departments, and all the rural areas," Gutierrez said. "Books are our salvation and that is what Colombia needs."

The 53-year-old has a love of reading he attributes to his mother, who always read to him even though she was too poor to keep him in school.

"She used to read me stories every night," said Gutierrez, who has traveled to book fairs in Mexico and Chile to share his experience of starting a library with discarded reading material. "To me, books are the greatest invention and the best thing that can happen to a human being."

While Gutierrez still sifts through the rubbish for additions to his library, his fame as Colombia's "Lord of the Books" has also brought him thousands of donated tomes that he's sent to other libraries around the country because he doesn't have room for them all.

Gutierrez is an avid reader of works by authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Mario Vargas Llosa.

His favorite books include One Hundred Years of Solitude and The General in his Labyrinth by Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

He said he doesn't reject technology that allows books to be read digitally, but prefers to read the printed word on paper.

"There's nothing more beautiful than having a book in your pocket, in your bag or inside your car," he said.

 

Editor's picks
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
陈巴尔虎旗| 西藏| 北碚区| 亚东县| 华阴市| 崇左市| 邹城市| 绥棱县| 房产| 长宁县| 成武县| 长治县| 青海省| 武隆县| 林口县| 云龙县| 庐江县| 永昌县| 祁门县| 图木舒克市| 白玉县| 孙吴县| 锦屏县| 阿荣旗| 五指山市| 乾安县| 普定县| 平陆县| 高要市| 东光县| 唐河县| 酒泉市| 和林格尔县| 榕江县| 乌兰察布市| 康定县| 黔东| 江都市| 利川市| 甘肃省| 大城县|