The ECHO Mobile Library

 

ECHO is an LDV van stocked with books in thirteen languages that serves eleven refugee camps and community centres in the south of mainland Greece. ECHO is in many ways a mobile education hub; they run everything from children’s activities and mother-and-baby groups to access for online University courses and adult language classes. But the most important aspect of what it offers is the books themselves. Visitors are permitted to loan books and take them away to read in their own time and at their own pace. The mobile library supplies children and adult fiction, as well as English learning books. One purpose of the library is to equip refugees with the skills they may need for their new lives in their destination country, but it also provides the psychological nourishment that only literature can provide.

Click here to read my peer-reviewed contribution to the Information for Social Change academic journal