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Letter From Manila
‘I don’t wait for books to be returned’: Filipino granddad starts library to get kids to read
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Mr Hernando Guanlao, also known as Mang Nanie, always welcomes his library visitors with a smile.
ST PHOTO: MARA CEPEDA
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MANILA - The first thing that caught my eye was the perfect absence of order, a jumbled mess that oddly felt like home.
In a quiet corner in Makati city, close to the Philippine financial district’s towering skyscrapers and gnarly traffic, I stumbled upon my slice of heaven: an open-air library with no membership fees or late-return penalties – just piles of books stacked on rusted shelves or heaped higgledy-piggledy in old wooden crates, along the driveway to Mr Hernando Guanlao’s two-storey dwelling.
