Masha Hamilton

“I realized right away that books could take us out of ourselves, and make us larger. Even provide us with human connections we wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Fiona Sweeney has a passion for books. She works as a librarian but as she reaches her late thirties she feels like her life is in a rut and that she wants to do something with her life that will make a difference in the world.

She embarks on a six-month placement with a traveling library that brings books to the people of scattered communities using camels in the north eastern part of Kenya. These tiny settlements have no roads or schools and the people live their lives fighting hunger, disease, and drought. The library has one strict rule, anyone not returning books will cause the bookmobile to stop visiting their settlement.

At the nomadic village of Mididima Fi meets Kanika, a young girl living with her grandmother Neema. Neema can read herself and believes that children need the books to educate them so that they can move on in life. Fi meets the school teacher Matani and his wife Jwahir. Jwahir sees the bookmobile as a threat to their old world customs, and tries to get her husband to make the bookmobile leave. Fi meets Abayomi, the drum maker and the father of two young boys Taban - or Scar Boy, (so called after he was attacked by a hyena as a toddler)- and Badru.

Fi is passionate about the project but she is soon surprised to discover that it divides friends and neighbours. To Kanika, who reads every book she can lay her hands on, the Camel Bookmobile brings hope of escape and a brighter future. But others fear the loss of their traditions and that the bookmobile represents the inevitable destruction of their fragile way of life. Tension escalate when Scar Boy fails to return his books, threatening future visits. Fiona returns to Mididima alone to try and recover Scar Boy's books for the library.

Fiona spends five days this tiny African settlement and during her time there she comes to realise that it shared many similarities as the outside world. Some people want to leave to better themselves, others think they would be happier with someone else, and others do not want and fear change. When Fiona tries to recover the books from Scar Boy she discovers that she could fundamentally change his and some of the settlement's inhabitants' lives forever.

'The Camel Bookmobile' is on the face of it a heart-warming story of people reaching out to help others. However, it also asks some pretty tough questions. Is the West right to interfere in these poorer nations and their inhabitants? Would the benefits of learning to read outweigh the loss of knowledge of the land that these nomadic tribes lived on, knowledge passed down verbally through many generations? Would an education simply mean that the young migrate to the cities where they would live with the threat of crime, destitution and prostitution or would it actually open doors to a better life?

Personally I thoroughly enjoyed the first half to two thirds of this book as it discussed the pros and cons of the project even if Fi came across as evangelising at times. However, the latter section rather slipped into romantic melodrama I felt which let the overall down somewhat. On the plus side it is a quick read, the characters were generally well drawn and it did make me realise it is based on an actual organisation that I look forward to learning more about, now that can be no bad thing.… (more)

I'm not quite sure how to feel about them. I was intrigued by the concept of a mobile library and its impacts but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I think a large part of this was the inclusion of the American librarian since it gave a bit of a white saviour feel to the book, which I didn't enjoy all that much. I think it would maybe have been stronger had it been written by a local about a local librarian running such a project. There were maybe also a few too many perspectives for the length of the book, meaning the characters could have been more fleshed out.… (more)