For the Love of Books

By Guest Author Jennifer Burley

In late fall of 2010, I felt God calling me to establish a library for the children at New Life Children’s Home in Jalaca, Honduras.  I recruited help from church members, fellow librarians, relatives and friends to raise the funds necessary.  I asked my Facebook friends to tell me what books they felt every child should have an opportunity to read or to have read to them.  That is how we happened to take Go, Dog, Go and The Cat in the Hat and Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, among other childhood favorites. My goal was to take 100 Spanish books for those children on our trip in Summer 2011 and we did. We also took a few board books, just because we found them in Spanish.  At the time there were only two preschoolers at New Life.

When we left Honduras in 2011, I promised to return in 2012 with 100 books for the older children.  Through an Adopt-a-Book campaign at our church and donations from friends and relatives, over $1300 was raised for the book project.    With those funds we purchased such titles as The Chronicles of Narnia,  Little House on the Prairie,  The Mouse and the Motorcycle,  Sherlock Holmes,  Stuart Little,  Gulliver’s Travels and many other children’s novels – all in Spanish.  We also ordered individual Bible stories (David and Goliath, Noah, Jonah, Daniel, Esther, Moses and others).  Some of these could only be purchased in sets of six copies, but we bought them anyway.  At the time, only God knew why we needed multiple copies!

In addition, there was what we call the “amazon.com” miracle.  Most of the books were purchased in batches, using my personal account and then having the church reimburse me.  About a week after the last books arrived in November, a shipment of the same titles arrived again.  Not being a frequent online shopper, I assumed I had double-clicked somewhere and would need to pay the difference. A few weeks later, I received a message from amazon.com saying that my recent order had been duplicated due to an error on their website.  They would be crediting my account (Whew! - $350 on my personal Discover Card!), but we did not need to return the books!  Again, only God knew that we would need duplicates.

With some additional funds we received shortly before our departure, we purchased about thirty board books, suitable for preschoolers, even though at the time we thought there were only two four-year-olds living at New Life.

By the time we arrived in Honduras this summer, 16 more children had joined the family at New Life Children’s Home.  Now the number of preschoolers had grown from two to nine.  Most of these children had never seen a book.  The first time someone read to the group, they sat enthralled for over an hour.  If you know anything about four-year-olds, you know that their attention span is usually about 20 minutes.  Members of our team looked at books one-on-one with the children and pointed out things in the pictures and read the names of colors and shapes and counted with the numbers, doing all those things that we had done with our own children at home during their formative years.

During one reading session, little Christian Daniel spouted off at another child in Spanish (which we could not understand.)  The interpreter with our group said that he was saying, “If you don’t hurry up with that book, I won’t get to read it today!”  Oh, the joy of wanting to read!


We watched little Sandra Lucia, a book in her hand, following her tia (caretaker) who was hanging out clothes on the fence.  She wanted her to read with her.

In the evenings, we watched children sitting all around the porch area, reading.  An intern shared a couple of chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with two boys every night after supper.

And those duplicate books?  An older brother sat with his little sister, each of them with the same book.  He read to her and turned her pages so she could follow along.  That’s how the best reading teachers teach!



One night there were 14 children reading on the porch.  When they were called to dinner, not one of them stopped reading!  A second and third call finally moved them to stop long enough to eat.

Seeing the joy that these books have brought to these children has filled my heart to overflowing.  I am so thankful that God gave me this mission for my retirement years.  I have already started a list of books for the next team to take.  Yes, I do believe that God will inspire another team to go back to Honduras to continue His work there.