Luis Soriano is a primary school teacher in a small town in Colombia. He’s also chief librarian and head wrangler for “Biblioburro,” taking books to children in desperately poor mountain areas—via two donkeys.

Soriano fell in love with reading as a young child growing up in a violence-prone countryside. With that violence grown even worse now, the schoolteacher saw the power of books to show his students worlds different from their own. But what about the children who lived far from schools and books? Who was teaching them to read? Who was seeing that they had books, and ideas of lives lived in peace?

Passable roads are rare in Colombia’s mountains and bandits are all too common. But Soriano loaded books from his small collection into baskets slung over donkeys and set out to find the children in those mountains.

It works. When Soriano and his book-laden burros appear, children surround them, eager to hear stories, eager to learn to read themselves and to find stories and information in the burros’ baskets.

Teacher Soriano sees these children growing up with an understanding of the larger world and with plans for their lives that don’t include violence, drug-dealing and banditry. The children are so eager to learn that Soriano was soon running out of new things for them to read.

His teaching salary wasn’t covering the costs of his own family plus Biblioburro, so he and his wife opened a small restaurant in their town.

Unexpected help came when he heard a novel being read on the radio. Soriano wrote to the author, requesting a copy of the book for Biblioburro. The author was so delighted that he talked about Biblioburro on the radio, prompting a flood of book donations from all over Colombia. A bank offered some funding to start a small library next to Soriano’s home. Now a Colombian documentary about the work may well lead to all the funding needed to complete the library.

Luis Soriano is proud that he started with 70 books, and now has almost 5,000. His mission has grown to include diners in the family restaurant; Soriano sees every one of them as a potential avid reader, enticing them with useful information in newspapers, hoping to ignite the fire of learning in even more minds and hearts.