For the last 21 years, José Alberto Gutierrez, a 55-year-old former employee at the Bogotá recycling center, in Colombia, has dedicated his life to recovering discarded books from the garbage so that they can be reused by children and young people in the country's most vulnerable areas.
The will to transform these regions through the power of reading led him to create the Fundación La Fuerza de Las Palabras (the Strength of Words Foundation), through which he has managed to fill over 450 reading centers and libraries around Colombia.
The “lord of books,” as locals refer to him, has rescued some 50,000 books, spanning subjects such as science, literature, business and medicine, from the trash.
“The most valuable inheritance we can leave our children is education,” Gutierrez said, adding that, in a country where only four out of every 10 children will graduate from university, dozens have accessed higher education thanks to the foundation.
Today, Gutierrez and his family are working to build a library museum in Bogotá, with the aim of continuing to bring reading to the most vulnerable sectors.
