Building Community with Books and Bikes

It all started at the end of 2018, when Patrick Mahoney ’87 visited his sister in Rwanda for the first time.

“I didn’t know where Rwanda was on the map, I just knew my sister lived there, and I needed to go be a big brother, check on her, and make sure everything was ok,” he laughs, adding that his sister warned him that he would fall in love with the country. “She was right, I did.”

So much so, that Mahoney was inspired to find a way to be of service. During his inaugural visit, around the time that he was turning 50, he was at a point in his life when it was time to change gears. Mahoney wasn’t quite sure how until his sister brought him to the Nyamirambo Women’s Center (NWC). “It’s this collective of seamstresses working on old Singer sewing machines that are foot operated, and they make really beautiful things.”

Located near downtown Kigali, the Women’s Center is a Rwandan NGO that is aimed to address gender-based violence, gender inequality, and discrimination. NWC launched a product line known as Umutima, which means “heart” in Kinyarwanda (the local language), and currently employs over 50 women as seamstresses working to create a large variety of women’s accessories, children’s clothing, and home decor products.

“While I was there, they showed me, with great pride, the library that they had put together for their kids.” He pauses, noting that it was a large group of thirty to forty women working there, a lot of whom had children, so they wanted to build this resource for the youth. “When I walked into it, I was kind of crushed,” Mahoney admits. “They were very proud of it, but I mean, my daughter has more books in her bedroom than this whole library that is for this entire community.” An idea started to take shape; Mahoney was inspired to help these hardworking women in the capital city.

He went on to meet the librarian at the Kigali Public Library and learn more about the current state of Rwanda. “We realized that most people know the history of Rwanda with the genocide, but that’s a generation ago and now here we are, with a whole new set of faces and they’re just starting to come out of that trauma,” Mahoney explains. “What we noticed was an obvious lack of playtime and colorful books for the kids; everything, for obvious reasons, had been so serious for so long, and so we figured this is a place where we can be helpful.”

Mahoney went back to the states, and with the help of his son, flew back over to Rwanda with 10 suitcases filled with children’s books. It was a trip they would repeat time and time again. “We ended up stocking probably the biggest library in the country with children’s books,” he says. “The reception we got was amazing, so we knew we were going in the right direction.”

As the journey to build up the library continued, Mahoney’s network grew. “It was a cascade of introductions to the most amazing people living in gratitude,” he says, noting that Rwanda was peaceful, calm, and safe. “It’s palpable there; it’s very different than the U.S., and I liked the feeling of it, so I just kept going back.”

As the initiative grew from Mahoney and his family into something larger, he tapped into his networks and expanded his reach— eventually including the First Lady of Rwanda, who helped open a lot of doors for them. This allowed Mahoney to officially form the Rwanda Bookmobile, based in Kigali City, Rwanda, spearheaded by his sister. Simultaneously, he founded the U.S.-based Reading & Writing Ventures Foundation 501(c)(3), which supports the Rwanda NGO.

The next step was to make the books more accessible, so they imported a Toyota HiAce van. “We were literally driving the Bookmobile around, from schools to community centers and so on, reading to kids, like the Pied Piper. It was amazing; we even commissioned a local artist to make us a theme song, so it’s kind of like the ice cream truck driving around the neighborhoods. Kids everywhere knew the theme song; they’d hear it playing and come running to hear stories.”

Mahoney notes that, more than just making books accessible, the organization focuses on inspiring students through storytelling, training their rising storytellers how to read aloud, perform, and captivate audiences. When COVID hit and many businesses struggled, Mahoney remarks that it was an opportunity for them, a new beginning.

“We moved to radio, which reaches everywhere in the country. Some of these kids barely have electricity, but everyone has a crank radio or a charge radio, so we switched and haven’t looked back.” With the move to the airwaves, the Rwanda Bookmobile went from reaching, at most, 100 children a week to millions of children every week. “We work with three different radio stations; their footprints overlap and cover the whole country.”

The storytellers read aloud on the radio to the children at home, and at the end of each story there’s a session when they ask the kids questions about what happened in each story. “It’s so precious; they borrow their parents’ phones, and they call in … the kids voices make it all worthwhile; little high voices chirping on radio, and they know the answer, they sing the song, and it’s really a beautiful tradition of storytelling.”

As the organization grew, particularly post-pandemic, Mahoney says they added Riding Readers, storytellers on bikes. “It’s a lot of fun, and another 500 bikes are arriving via Tanzania very soon,” he shares, noting that this latest donation of bicycles will double their current fleet. The Reading Riders are all over the country, traveling around and telling stories. “They are basically performers and it’s really adorable. They never take off their helmets, and we’ve gotten them all shirts that say Reading Riders, so you’ll see crowds of fifty kids and then this young person holding a book and very excitedly reading.” Sometimes the Riders bring a surplus of books in a milk crate attached to the bike, allowing the kids an opportunity to read themselves, but most often the Reading Rider will tell stories, and on occasion, invite one or two of the kids from the crowd to try their luck telling a story to everybody else.

Drawing from their own childhoods, Mahoney and his sister use the examples of Sesame Street and Disney to develop recognizable and lovable characters with whom the children can identify. Mahoney says the children look up to their beloved storytellers, Papa Yambi and Mama Nina, and some of them even say they aspire to be like them when they grow up. “I know that what we’re doing is building a set of positive role models and providing a service for families, on the weekends in particular, to spend time listening to the radio with their kids and enjoying these stories.” The stories are told in three languages—English, Kinyarwanda, and sometimes French. Mahoney says he can’t back up his claims that this is working with science yet, but he believes this is creating a love of reading and an aura of adoration and respect for storytellers.

Rwanda is a small country, and Mahoney and his team have been able to have a big impact. When asked about how he measures success in this endeavor, he says there aren’t great metrics, admittedly. “I can say, to the credit of the government and the education board, that these kids can read, their literacy skills are high. But we are not engaged in reading instruction so much as reading inspiration. When it comes time to measure success, I hear it in the voices of the kids on the radio. I see it in the enthusiasm and excitement when we arrive at any given town, and no joking, hundreds of kids will come running to swarm the bus.”