Mobile Libraries Reach Valley Schools

ARSHA-SAY — The children of the primary school in Arsha-Say were waiting at the gate yesterday morning when the van arrived. It carried about a thousand children's books in Iradi, English and Russian, a folding table and a librarian, and it will now call at the school every two weeks.

The van is one of the mobile libraries funded by an educational charity chaired by Zara Toktarova, the Governor's daughter. This school year the charity's vans and reading programs will serve village primary schools across the Talas valley. Ms. Toktarova, a doctoral candidate in education at Stanford University whose research concerns mother-tongue literacy and bilingual schooling, attended the visit to Arsha-Say during a stay in Talas.

She did not make a speech. Asked by the Herald about the program, she said that children in villages "should not have to wait until they reach the city to find books in their own language", and that the charity hoped to add more titles in Iradi as local publishers produced them. She did not take other questions.

Teachers at the school said that it had a small collection of Soviet-era readers and a few donated English books before the vans began. "The children fight over the Iradi picture books," one teacher said. "There are never enough."