I remembered, I was the one who came to that first event. I remembered we were going to talk about “What we are going to read.” I came as a new writer from that village, and I was ready to share all the stuff that I knew.
By the end of that meeting, someone raised a question: “We need to meet again. Should this session end up like this? We need more than this. We need to pull these people to come again for these events.”
So, that’s how we settled down and instead of just one occasional meeting, it turned into a collection of History of Our Village.
The idea came from people that share the same belief that reading is not just an exciting bustle, but it can be a reason to catch up, and see each other. So, we ran a small village library in Aik Bukaq, north of Batu Kliang, Central Lombok.
It used to be a community reading centre, known as Taman Baca Masyarakat (TBM) Mi’rajussibyan. This reading centre was owned by AjeYusron Asmawi, a high-school teacher, who ended up setting everything up and said, “Why not run a library?”
I saw that the children were very enthusiastic. I know I have been coming quite often. Pak Aje said that a reading centre is not enough; the place should be a hub. A hub for people to sit down and read, discuss, and share some thoughts.
And that is basically what we did. We tried to run a series of weekly discussions. But, you know, the plan only worked out on paper. Other schedules and some activities made this not work. But we are not stopping. We bounce back and we go again.
Pak Aje works a little extra miles. I remember that a few days after those meetings, a friend asked me to come to his house before Maghrib. When I arrived, I found Pak Aje with a stack of papers in his hands.
It turned out that while we had been discussing the outline of the book for several days, Pak Aje had quietly worked on the official paperwork to establish the village library. I didn’t even know that the process had already gone that far. An idea that first came up during a discussion was slowly becoming something real.
“I also once thought about building a book café by the forest over there,” I told Pak Aje when we first talked. Seeing that Pak Aje had already managed to build the TBM made me admire him. It felt like I had finally found someone who shared the same interests and ideas in this small part of life. I didn’t expect that conversation to help lead to something bigger.
Finally, on October 6, 2025, the Aik-Bukaq Village Library was officially established.
For us, the birth of this library is quite personal. Some of us grew up with limited access to books. Back then, if we wanted to read books for free, we had to travel around 30 to 60 minutes to the regional library.
For adults, that distance might not sound like much. But for children who simply wanted to read a book, travelling that far could be enough to make them change their minds.
That is why, when a library finally opened in our own village, it felt like bringing back something we needed when we were children.
“Actually, I had hoped there would be a village library for a long time. But if I were the one to start it, I was worried it would end up like BUMDes. It could end without going anywhere because the idea came from me, not from the community, the young people, or the people who would manage it,” said Pak Hamdan, the Head of Aik-Bukaq Village.
When the idea came from the village’s young people instead, he saw it differently. He believed that people who start an initiative themselves will feel more responsible for keeping it going.
“Because there is now an initiative from the village youth to build a library, I fully support it. At least I believe this library will keep going because it came from you, the young people of the village. So, of course, you will be responsible for what you have started. As the village head, I will support you and provide the facilities.”
The village government then allowed us to use a simple building as the library. It was an old former village health centre, located inside the village office area and still in good condition.
We cleaned it, arranged the room, organised the books, and slowly learned what it meant to manage a village library.
And it turned out that managing a library under the village government did not mean we could spend our days reading books. We still had to work. We had our own responsibilities and lives that we could not leave behind just to manage the library every day.
Some of the library managers were already working as teachers, while I worked freelance. So we had to learn how to manage our time.
The other managers came before or after teaching. I could do my freelance work from the library. In between, we opened the library, arranged the books, handled the administration, cleaned the room, and organised activities for the community.
Sometimes there was a lot to do. Sometimes there were not many visitors. And sometimes we were still unsure where to start.
But we decided to keep the library open.
From the beginning, we did not want the library to be just a room full of books. We wanted it to be a place where people could meet and talk. Over time, we also realised that the success of a library cannot always be measured by numbers.
The number of visitors, the number of books read, and the number of people joining activities are important. But they are not the only things that make us feel that the library matters.
Sometimes, success is much simpler: a child comes in and chooses a book by themselves, someone comes back after visiting before, or a small activity brings a few people together to talk.
The Aik-Bukaq Village Library is still very young. In October 2026, when this story was written, it had just turned one year old. We are still learning how to manage it and looking for ways to help it grow without losing the reason why we built it in the first place.
We never expected the library to become something big right away. We simply wanted to make books a little easier to access.
We were once children who had to travel quite far to find free books. Now, we are trying to make sure that the children who grow up after us do not have to go through the same thing.
Maybe the library is not perfect. Maybe we still don’t know what it will become in the next few years. But every time we open its doors, one thing feels important: we are building something we once wished we had when we were children.
And maybe, in the end, this library is not only about providing books for other people. It is also about providing the books we once needed for our own childhood.
About the Author
Pie is a writer from Lombok with several published works. She writes about stories, places, and everyday experiences from her perspective as a writer living in rural Lombok. She shares more of her writing and everyday observations on TikTok and Instagram at @tifa998_.
