Haiti: from story boxes to Ideas boxes

“What is a man, a woman, a child, once his life is saved,
his food and shelter found, if, without activity, he cannot read, write,
draw or communicate, to better project himself into the future and rebuild himself?”

Patrick Weil, founder and president of LWB

As our Ideas Box celebrates ten years of impact this month, LWB takes you back into the history of its mobile media library and the stories it has helped create. From libraries installed under tents urgently after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to the collaboration with the creator Phillippe Starck, discover the beginnings of a project that redefined humanitarian aid by placing knowledge at the heart of crisis response.

On January 12 of 2010, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, killing 300,000 people, injurying as many, and displacing 1.5 million. Numerous houses, schools, libraries, and hospitals were seriously damaged or even totally destroyed. In Port-au-Prince, the majority of international emergency aid efforts naturally focused on vital needs such as food, water, and healthcare.

Already present in Haiti for a project with the Haitian Univeristy Library, and encouraged to stay with the emergency response organizations, LWB installed libraries under tents in twenty camps for the displaced around the capital, only a couple of days after the earthquake. These were called « story boxes ». Our objective : preserve access to eduaction, culture, and information, all while giving them psycological support. Emilie Deschamps, then lead of the LWB mission in Haiti, remembers :

 “Three hundred ‘story boxes’ were created with the support of UNICEF. At first look, they are only large metal boxes. However, they provided a warm space, bringing together children and adults around books, comics, and documentaries in Creole and French, chosen in collaboration with haitian editors, librarians, and psychologists. Within the reading shelters, each person can dive into new stories and share their own. Despite the difficult condtions, these fortune libraries have allowed Haitians to connect, express their emotions, their apprehensions, and to see a glimpse of possible reconstruction.”

After the disaster, which destroyed schools and has made teaching impossible for many teachers, these open-air libraries offered them a precious tool to continue supporting their students by reading them stories and poems and organizing their cultural activities around books

While rumors inevitably spread throughout the camps due to the lack of reliable collunication channels, LWB set up information panels where the residents could access accurate and useful updtaes like the bus schedules, water access points, psychologist consultation times, legal aid services and community events.

At the same time, LWB enriched the book collections of the Haitian State University’s faculties and supported the development of training centers, the School of Magistrates, the Port-au-Pribce Tribunal , and the central women’s prison by providing books.

In 2012, LWB and the Haitian Society for the Blind created an audio library for the visiually impaired and illiterate people, highlighting Haitian literary heritage. With the help from the European Union and from other local partenrs— including the National Library of Haiti, FOKAL, and the National Directorate of Books—three mobile libraries, the ‘BiblioTapTap’, were launched. These traveled through Port-au-Prince’s most affected neighborhoods, as well ar rural and remote villages.

“The BiblioTapTap has introduced the ‘outreach’ approach, which remains central to LWB’s expertise today : instead of waiting for the people to come to us, we went directly to them. In the village squares, we organized cultural and recreational activities alongside local artists. Our ‘beyind the walls’ tools quickly became valuable resources for the population.“ Emilie Deschamps

Following this first humanitarian experience in Haiti, LWB launched an international advocacy campaign in 2012, L’Urgence de Lire (The Urgency of Reading), aiming to recognize intellectual needs as a priority in emergency aid. The campaign was supported by over a hundred intellectuals, including Nobel Peace Prize winners like Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing.

“Our intervention in Haiti helped define our humanitarian response strategy for preserving access to knowledge based on community needs. The mobile and adaptable solutions quickly created with minimal resources allowed local communties to come together in safe spaces, outside of time. The true impact lies not in the library’s structure, but iin tge richness of its content and the poeple who bring it to life!” Emilie Deschamps

This emergency response paved the way for the Ideas Box . In 2012, LWB contacted renowned designer Philippe Starck, who agreed to design a mobile media library with support from the Pierre Bellon Foundatio and the Alexander Soros Foundation. Two years later, the Ideas Box was born.

“When you’ve lost everything , when you hqve nothing left , the only thing that cannot be taken from you is your dreams.”

Since 2010, LWB’s programs have benefited over 100,000 Haitians. While LWB direct presence in Haiti has become more occassional since 2015, our teams have continued to send books- as they did in 2016 for the community libraries in Gonaives- and the support of projects like the Bibliomoto of Youth in Developement in 2017. Fourteen years later, the BiblioTapTap continue to travel across Haiti, run by local partners , bringing precious access to reading and knowledge to the heart of the communities.

Today, 161 Ideas Boxes are deployed in 25 countries. Whether in refugee camps, war zones, or underprivileged urban areas, they give millions of people the chance to keep learning, dreaming, and rebuilding their lives in even the most challenging circumstances.

Libraries without Borders facilitates access to knowledge for everyone. In France and in over 30 countries, the association has created cultural and educative innovative spaces which allows people that have been affected by crisis and precariousness of learning, having fun, and create a connection to construct their own avenue.