It was a real thrill for me to meet not only Dashdondog Jamba at the IBBY Congress last month, having interviewed him last year, but also Anne Pellowski, who worked with him on the Libraries Unlimited edition of Mongolian Folktales. Here’s a photo of us all:
Dashdondog was a member of a superb storytellers’ panel with Michael Harvey telling a tall tale in a mixture of Welsh and English and Sonia Nimr recounting hers first in English then in Arabic. It was fascinating in both cases how much audience participation was possible, regardless of the language they were speaking, simply (and of course, not simple at all really) becasue they were such fine storytellers.
Dashdondog’s story-telling in Mongolian was accompanied by a slideshow that provided the necessary context and I loved his verse rendition of the work of the Mongolian Mobile Library that he founded in 1990 – the onomatopeia could be universally understood. You can watch part of it here. As well as his gift for storytelling, this part of Dashdondog’s presentation provided an indication of how committed the Mobile Children’s Library is in ensuring library books reach as many children as possible, regardless of the challenges of terrain, distance and weather conditions they encounter.
Do read Dashdondog’s article about the library here – and you can read some of his vibrant poems translated into English on his blog.
Abigail Sawyer regularly reviews books for us here at PaperTigers, and she’s also, in her own words, “a lifelong library lover and an advocate for access to books for all”, so who better to write an article for us about “unconventional libraries” and the children’s books they have inspired. Abigail lives in San Francisco, California, USA, where her two children attend a language-immersion elementary school and are becoming bilingual in English and Mandarin: an experience that has informed her work on the blog for the film Speaking in Tongues. I know you’ll enjoy reading this as much as I have.
On Traveling Libraries and Heroic ‘Book People’: Inspiring children’s books about getting books to people in remote places and difficult circumstances
My sons and I paid our first-ever visit to a bookmobile over the summer. For us it was a novelty. We have shelves of books at home and live just 3 blocks from our local branch library, but the brightly colored bus had pulled up right near the playground we were visiting in another San Francisco neighborhood (whose branch library was under renovation), and it was simply too irresistible. Inside, this library on wheels was cozy, comfortable, and loaded with more books than I would have thought possible. I urged my boys to practice restraint and choose only one book each rather than compete to reach the limit of how many books one can take out of the San Francisco Public Library system (the answer is 50; we’ve done it at least once).
The bookmobiles provide a great service even in our densely populated city where branch libraries abound. There are other mobile libraries, however, that take books to children who may live miles from even the nearest modern road; to children who live on remote islands, in the sparsely populated and frigid north, in temporary settlements in vast deserts, and in refugee camps. The heroic individuals who manage these libraries on boats, burros, vans, and camels provide children and the others they serve with a window on the world and a path into their own imaginations that would otherwise be impossible.
Shortly after my own bookmobile experience, Jeanette Winter‘s Biblioburro (Beach Lane Books, 2010), a tribute to Colombian schoolteacher Luis Soriano, who delivers books to remote hillside villages across rural Colombia, arrived in my mailbox to be reviewed for Paper Tigers. I loved this book, as I do most of Winter’s work, for its bright pictures and simple, straightforward storytelling. Another picture book, Waiting for the Bibiloburro by Monica Brown (Tricycle Press, 2011), 
tells the story of Soriano’s famous project from the perspective of one of the children it
We are delighted to welcome author Dashdondog Jamba to PaperTigers. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the amazing Mobile Library he founded in Mongolia some twenty years ago and we also featured a reprint of an article he wrote for IBBY’s journal Bookbird. Dashdondog has published more than seventy books, some of which can be read in English on the ICDL; he also has a blog, which includes translations of some of his poems, as featured in a recent Poetry Friday post. I’m grateful to Ramendra Kumar for putting me in contact with Dashdondog initially, and to Dashdondog himself for taking my inability to communicate in Mongolian in his stride – as well as for sending some great photos.
You have devoted your life to making it possible for children to have access to books. Can you give us some background to what Mongolia was like when you started out as a writer in the 1960s?
In 1958 the agricultural collectivization policy, which entailed handing livestock over to cooperatives, was almost completed in Mongolia. And even though my family didn’t like it, we delivered our livestock to the agricultural cooperative. It was a difficult time for rural herders to part from their beloved livestock. I clearly remember the moment when my grandma was crying about the “pitiable livestock”, and breeding lambs and kids were bleating and trying to run back to their shelters. Yet writers had written that herders had given their livestock to the agricultural cooperatives voluntarily. At that time my first book was published by the State Publishing House. I was 17 years old and in secondary school. From my first book you can only feel the heart of a boy who loves his lambs and calves. So I am always glad that I chose children’s literature as a career far from politics.
What changes have you witnessed, and indeed been instrumental in over the years?
For me who has been witness of two different societies there is opportunity to compare their weaknesses and advantages. I thankfully welcomed democracy, which brought us the freedom to think and have our own opinions. The freedom declared by socialism was limited, like wearing tight clothes. I can bear witness to it because I was considered as anti-communist and punished by losing the right to publish books.
What prompted you to start your now famous travelling library?
In 1990 Mongolia renounced communism and chose democracy with a free-market economy. During the privatization of property former children’s organizations were not taken over by anybody because they were considered as profitless and uneconomic. The formerly state-run children’s book publishing house became a private school, the children’s library became a private bank and the children’s cinema became the stock exchange.
Even though I had fought against it, my efforts didn’t work. Then I asked myself what we should be writing for children in this new society to read. It was unthinkable to present them with books w
Our current focus on Mongolia would be incomplete without a full mention of poet, writer and librarian extraordinaire, Dashdondog Jamba, who set up Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library more than twenty years ago in order to bring books to children even in the remotest parts of the country. We are delighted to be able to bring you a reprint of an article from IBBY’s Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature written by Dashdondog, “With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons“. Do head over to the main PaperTigers website and read it for some fascinating insight into the Mobile Library service, through this detailed description of one of its journeys. Originally the library was transported by oxcart or camel; now there is a van which clocks up thousands of kilometers every year. The library won the 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and features in Margriet Ruurs‘ book My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World.
As well as ensuring that Mongolian children have access to books from all over the world, Dashdondog Jamba (sometimes also written as Jambyn) is himself the author of more than seventy children’s books. Not many are available in English but you can get a tantalising glimpse of some of them here, at the ICDL. A collection of his retellings of Mongolian Folktales was published recently and is currently our Book of the Month. Dashdondog was instrumental in setting up the Mongolian sections of both SCBWI and IBBY.
You can read an article by Dashdondog, “Children’s Literature in Mongolia Needs Renovation” written for ACCU in 2001, and his speech to IBBY’s 30th Congress in Macau in 2006. Indian author Ramendra Kumar recounts his meeting with Dashdondog here, including an unexpected prelude – and some great photos.
