12-year-old bookworm launches slum library

Lua has a hungry look on her face as she holds her new book on Nelson Mandela, one of the thousands the precocious 12-year-old has amassed for her new library in a poor Brazilian favela (an unregulated type of slum neighbourhood).

“I don’t read books. I devour them,” she says in Rio de Janeiro’s Tabajaras neighborhood, a shantytown perched in the hills overlooking the chic districts of Copacabana and Botafogo.

In a small tin-roof room at a local community center, she has amassed a collection of 18,000 books, hoping to help other residents access a world that can be all too remote from Brazil’s impoverished favelas.

“Lua’s World,” she calls the library, a cozy space lined with pillows and full to the brim with carefully arranged rows of books.

Lua, her nickname, means “Moon” in Portuguese.

But Raissa Luara de Oliveira — her full name — has her feet firmly on the ground.

“At 12 years old, I’ve done more for my neighbourhood than you’ve done in your whole term,” she recently told Rio’s mayor, the far-right evangelical pastor Marcelo Crivella, in a defiant video she posted online.

From favela to fame

The idea for the library was born six months ago, when Oliveira was at a book fair.

“I saw a mom telling her daughter she couldn’t afford to buy her a book for three reals (about 60 US cents),” she says.

“I said to myself, ‘You have to do something.'”

Surreptitiously using her grandmother’s cell phone, she sent out a Facebook post asking for book donations.

Then, pretending to be her grandmother, she sent a message to the vice president of the local community association, asking her to give her a space to create a library.

The woman, Vania Ribeiro, guessed right away it was Oliveira. But she agreed to the plan.

“If you run it, I’m in,” she replied.

“When I found out she was doing all this behind my back, I scolded her,” says Oliveira’s grandmother Fatima, 60, a seamstress who has raised her since she was a baby.

“But after that, I supported her all the way,” adds the woman Oliveira calls “Mom.”

Oliveira’s bubbly video message went viral, leading to invitations to appear on a string of TV programs.

Her project is so successful it has been receiving around 1,500 books a week — way more than her small library can hold.

Behind the shelves, she has boxes full of books she wants to donate to similar projects elsewhere in Rio and in Brazil’s poor northeast.

“A boy in Piaui state told me I had inspired him to open a library for the children in his city. I set aside 500 books for him, but we need money to send them. I’m going to make another video to ask for donations,” she says.