With no fanfare our NLR/MBAPF project became the model for Myanmar’s national program to sustain rural libraries. MYANMAR TIMES By Sandar Lwin March 7 – 13,, 2011 NEW LIBRARY CARDS MAKE HAPPY KIDS THE task facing administrators and backers of rural libraries is immense. While lack of funding means many are under-resourced, a greater challenge, experts say, is simply getting people to pick up a book. “Rural society has basically been divorced from reading for a century. We have only [...]

  Report by our ad-hoc committee:  John Badgley, Roger Paget, and Jack Simpson, with appended comment by Dave Richards WE ARE A UNIQUE ORGANIZATION – AN ACCOMPLISHMENT IN ITSELF NLR’s greatest achievement may be simply “opening up” Myanmar to more involvement, showing that even with sanctions and the bad feeling between the US and Myanmar, a small lightly funded organization from the US can make a big difference. Our opinion is supported by these facts: We have developed constructive relationships [...]

Dear Bill, First of all your thoughts are very valuable.  I really want to know how you evaluated Myanmar’s current library development and what suggestions you have for the future.  These are the seeds and the plants can not come out without the seeds.  What follows is information for you as we did not have time for discussion during the trip. Partnership Concerning  our partnership, I would like to describe my role.  UNWG, Vienna, is not a partner with NLR [...]

Letter to Myanmar Library Friends February 10, 2011 Each of you asked if I would share impressions of Myanmar libraries and your efforts to assist them, formed as a result of the December tour. I’m sending these thoughts while the journey is still fresh in my mind, in hopes that there might be something of value to you, although I suspect that you will have already thought of and discussed most of these ideas. I focus on libraries in the [...]

Visit this Facebook page of some Montanan’s who visited Myanmar Libraries in December 2010.

You can see a list of books just delivered to Bogalay Villages.  

From Professor David Leuthold, Chair, Nargis Library Recovery Board of Directors This is an invitation to join Carolyn and me  on an inexpensive tour of Myanmar  this December.   Our tour guide will be John Badgley, a specialist on this country’s libraries.  John had  Fulbright fellowships to Burma in 1957-8 and 1987-8; he has returned frequently for research and to lead small seminar tours.  John and David were undergraduates at University of Montana, and graduate students at Berkeley together.  John has [...]