Third spaces come first

As this new column takes shape, a city is under siege. Not just any ordinary city, among the hundred or so that draws the best and the brightest to its gates. Flames and firefighting threaten to engulf Marawi, seat of education of the Bangsamoro, and the Maginot line that divides enlightenment and entropy in this powderkeg of a country.

It is, understandably, a favorite target of hoodlums who disguise their evil in the name of religion; their lust for power and impunity all but drowning out the calls for peace from a proud Meranaw community.

This is a city with magnificent minarets that crown the shores of its legendary lake — but also enshrines, at its center, the most immaculately powerful statue of Rizal: our national hero pensively aloft on a pedestal as his brethren fight for the future.

This happens to be the area which the Library Renewal Partnership (LRP) has declared, apart from its Tausug counterpart in Sulu, as ground zero for its push towards a fully empowered Mindanao — and Philippines.

Before the clever keyboard warriors tar this as an outdated institution at worst, and a quaint undertaking at best, libraries do make a difference. More than an anachronism, this is the answer.

The meta- data from cities across the US to the UK, Kenya to Korea, San Francisco to Sao Paolo, Philadelphia and increasingly in the Philippines, show that

for every dollar, won, pound, peso, or rupiah spent on public libraries, the community’s economy gains a fourfold economic return from the combined effects of: • literacy — curated access to

knowledge for students, out-ofschool youth, and lifelong learning for adults; • livelihood — job searches,

knowledge resources, free maker spaces for MSMEs; and

• gentrification — with corresponding higher property values — and taxes, and on the flipside, lower chaos and criminality versus other library-less areas.

More to the last point and more telling for developing, magical realist countries like the Philippines, these Third spaces (after home and school, or work) play a vital role. Community libraries can and have gone beyond the call of duty as: • Disaster relief centers in

Leyte and Aklan during Yolanda and Frank’s visit to the country (a clean, well-lit place that would make Hemingway and Heneral Luna proud); • Collab and makers’ spaces by

entrepreneurs and inventors in Santa Ana and Balanga; • Multi- purpose venues for

weddings, mid- wifery classes,

physical therapy centers, and sanctuaries for peace talks in Nepal and Bhutan; • Havens and buttresses

against crime, violence, and despondency — from the reading rooms of favelas in Rio de Janeiro to the New Bilibid prison’s oasis of a library and fellowship center; and soon, • beginning in the Rizal Library at the Ateneo, workspaces for visiting scholars, investigative journalists, and novelists to forge transformative work.

The above hew closely to the exigency of Third, public spaces: democratic, empowering areas that remove barriers to inequality on their way to building the spirit of a people, one community at a time.

Architect and Historian Spiro Kostof said it best: “The fundamental aim of the public place is to ensconce community and arbitrate social conflict.” That isn’t just a fact: it’s a clarion call for leaders and citizens to climb out of the hole of callous commercialization and chaos, where a people’s soul is ultimately at stake.

In the final analysis, it is about the community taking ownership with these efforts serving as mere catalysts, not charity pits. Because within and beyond the walls of these centers, is the transformative, healing power of reading. A mentor once said: “the best moment in life is when a child opens a book, sees a whole world open up, and she imagines, then commits herself into being. The second best? When you’re there to witness it enough to change yourself.” Here’s what we’ve seen so far: In the Sulu archipelago — in one of our partner libraries in Patikul, Sulu — the other eye of the storm. Teacher Vanessa Malbun happily tells us over FB messenger that the community rebuilt the library within days of the makeshift library being torn asunder in the cross fire between the AFP and Abu Sayyaf. And, within a few weeks, new villages, community reading centers, and livelihood projects from partners GK and Go Negosyo to win the peace for good.

In Upi Maguindanao, where the ravages of dynastic politics and mind- numbing inequality and impunity remain: LRP’s founding partner, Synergeia foundation’s pioneering efforts show us the way. Using a simple mobile library and reading program — picture a teacher-driven, multicab armed only with books and bravado scaling hills that still ring with armalite and screams — leapfrogging literacy rates from 53% to 10% and school dropout rates from 70% to 20% in just a two-year period.

Within the besieged city, our partners Sor Latifah Sy and her fellow professors are trapped within the porous, majestic campus of Mindanao State University, separated from their families. And

When the firefighting dies down, trust the proud Marawi residents to take their community back and reclaim their heritage on their own terms.

until this massive outrage, this band of sisters and brothers were making headway against poverty and illiteracy with their Soar High mobile libraries and children’s reading rooms. Heaven can’t wait.

Or, closer to home, in Barangay 105, Smokey Mountain: one of remaining informal settler communities in Tondo that continue to defy relocation due to the sheer size and density of it. Think of the valley of ashes in Gatsby’s wasteland, with thousands of families struggling nobly, in less than one square mile. ALS instructor and maternal health advocate Remy Cabello sounded the alarm over SMS saying, in no uncertain terms, that she would lose her makeshift classroom to the slum lords if she couldn’t show proof of donor support. Then, in two weeks, a ragtag caravan of volunteers trudged their way through Christmas traffic and flooding to bring what they could scrounge. And, after two years, a brightly painted learning center — with a proper library and kitchen — nourishing new scholars’ minds and bodies. Perhaps in two decades, these adolescents will leave the shanties for good, only to come back to rescue their families from this wholly avoidable squalor.

It’s a story that we see replicated in communities where we’ve helped build libraries — from the Bangsamoro to Benguet, Bataan to Bhutan, over 200 and growing — that share very little in common except the ineffable belief that education is a God- given, people-centered right, and that third spaces empower everyone.

Beyond the shameless plug for this movement is a truth that eclipses a declared interest. As a prime minister once dared, believe in your own experience. Facts bear this out, but experience makes it actionable. The root of the conflict, even one as layered and seemingly intractable as the Bangsamoro’s, is one of agency: the power to make choices, the capacity for self-determination, the richness that awaits with empowerment. Knowledge is the linchpin of our former and best selves — what can make us whole again. Writ large, we as a country are only as good as the prospects of our most vulnerable communities. As our national hero so painfully recognized and forcefully wrote: before true nationhood, we must have an educated citizenry.

So when the firefighting dies down, trust the proud Marawi residents to take their community back and reclaim their heritage on their own terms. And with you, the readers’ help, fill their own third spaces — from an architectural wonder of a provincial library without a collection, to village centers that lay in wait to become beacons of hope in this benighted but beautiful region with the kind of light and learning that brings on lasting peace. Maktub. Shukran. Masha’Allah.