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Ofelia International

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Ofelia International

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Our NGO is dedicated to transforming the lives of children and youth from underserved communities.

We believe every child deserves access to educational resources to empower them to learn, grow, and become future community leaders.

09/10/2026

This September, our library in San Juan de Colón - on the Colombian-Venezuelan border - became a workshop.
While some of our members trained in AI, the children learned to knit, tell stories, bake bread, and discover how electricity works.

Because Biblioteca OFELIA has always believed the same thing: a child who creates something with their hands is a child who believes they can change the world.
That's exactly what a library should be.

And as an early Christmas present 🎁, a big delivery of games and toys arrived thanks to our generous donors who support our association ❤️

With $10 plus, you can help keep these doors open for the children of San Juan de Colón — books, materials for workshops, learning support, etc. Everything they need to match their big imaginations.

👉 Want to donate and help us? Click the link in our bio.

📍 Biblioteca OFELIA — San Juan de Colón, Táchira, Venezuela

05/10/2026

OFELIA & ARCHITECTURE: TO BUILD IS TO DWELL

For OFELIA, beauty in a space is never a luxury — it is deeply dignifying. A space becomes a place when people inhabit it, come together, and build connections within it. We believe people can rebuild themselves through the spaces they inhabit.

That's why our libraries are never built from a generic blueprint. Each one grows from the community that will live in it — through ancestral knowledge, local architecture, local art, and materials drawn from its own land.

Each OFELIA library is a dialogue between art and local culture. They invite visitors to linger, to discover, to feel at home. Here, books meet the arts, literature crosses paths with science, and the printed world embraces the digital. These are living spaces — where events unfold, relationships grow, and new forms of cultural sociability take shape.

On World Architecture Day, we want to say thank you.

To André Gonçalves, Matija Perić and Bridie — our architects — for turning intuition into space, and space into belonging.

To Ana Carpena, for creative guidance so human, so close — for listening before designing.

And to architects everywhere: happy World Architecture Day. Thank you for building the places where life — and dignity — can finally dwell.
📍 Tag a building that changed the way you see a city.

💬 What's the one structure you'd travel across the world to see?
👉 Want to donate and help us build libraries to help communities in need? Click the link in our bio 🙏

03/10/2026

📖✨ Ofelia reads | 🐜 Empire of the Ants 🐜 by Bernard Werber 📖✨
This month’s recommendation comes from one of our team members, Benjamin.

What if the most advanced civilization on Earth wasn't human? 🌍
Two worlds, one story:

🏚️ **The human side:** A man inherits his late uncle's old house, along with a strange warning: never go down to the cellar. One by one, people who venture down there disappear. The police investigate, but the answers lie in the dark.

🐜 **The ant side:** Deep underground, in a vast city of millions, a young ant sets out on a mission. She discovers a threat to her colony and a bold idea: the ants might be able to communicate with the giants above them, humans.
Werber weaves science, adventure and philosophy into a thriller that makes you look at every anthill differently. Politics, war, teamwork and survival are all here, told from an insect's point of view. 🤯

✨ Why read it?
• A page-turner that reads like a sci-fi thriller
• Fascinating ant facts hidden inside the fiction
• A humbling reminder that humans aren't the center of the universe

Have you read it? Tell us your favorite moment below! 👇

With warmth from the OFELIA team 🌱

👉 Want to donate and help us getting books for our libraries? Click the link in our bio 🙏

30/09/2026

✨ Let’s hear what the Pemón-Kamarkoto community thinks about the OFELIA Library!

27/09/2026

She is Pemon-Kamarakoto. 🌱✨

She grew up in Canaima — in the shadow of the tepuis, beside the lagoon that travelers fly thousands of miles to see, in a community whose language most of the world has never heard spoken.

And she has something to say about the library being built in her community.

In her own words. In her own language. On camera.
This is why OFELIA builds where it builds.
Not where it is easy.
Not where the roads are paved.

But where a girl like her deserves a place to read, to learn, and to know — without any doubt — that her culture, her language, and her story matter.
Biblioteca OFELIA Canaima is under construction right now.

The palm roof is being cut. The walls are taking shape.
And the children of this community are already waiting.
You can be part of what she is waiting for.

👉 From $10: www.ofeliainternational.org/donate
✉ [email protected]

Your donation is tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

🌿 Amazon

23/09/2026

In San Juan de Colón, Venezuela, a library is doing something unusual.

It's teaching children to make pizza.

And bread. And origami hearts. And paintings. And stories.

Because Biblioteca OFELIA has always believed the same thing:
a child who creates something with their hands
is a child who believes they can change the world.

This August, our team in San Juan de Colón — on the Colombian-Venezuelan border — turned the library into something between a kitchen, an art studio, and a place where a grandmother reads to twelve children who can't stop fidgeting.

In other words: exactly what a library should be.

These children don't have much.
But inside these walls, they have everything they need to imagine a different future.

You can be part of this.

From $10, you can help keep these doors open — funding materials, workshops, and books for the children of San Juan de Colón.

👉 Donate at https://ofeliainternational.org/donate/
👉 Or write to us: [email protected]

Every contribution, however small, keeps this library alive.

📍 Biblioteca OFELIA — San Juan de Colón, Táchira, Venezuela

14/09/2026

Step off the streets of Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda arts district and into a 175-year-old sanctuary.

The David Sassoon Library doesn’t announce itself loudly. It stands in Gothic Revival stone, quiet and patient, while the city rushes past. Inside: Burma teak ceilings worn smooth by generations of readers.
Outside: a secret garden where people have been reading under the trees since 1847.

A library that has outlasted empires, survived a city’s transformation, and remained — through everything — a place where anyone can sit down and belong.

That is what libraries do.
Not just store books.
Hold communities together across time.

It’s what we think about in San Juan de Colón, Venezuela, where Biblioteca OFELIA has become the living room of an entire border community.

It’s what drives us in Canaima, where we are building a library with the Pemon-Kamarakoto people — so that 175 years from now, someone might sit under a palm roof and read a story in their ancestral language.

Every great library began as an act of belief.
Belief that knowledge belongs to everyone.
Belief that the right space can change what a community becomes.

We believe that too.

📍 David Sassoon Library, Mumbai, India — est. 1847
🌿 Next month: another library. Another story. Another place where the world slowed down to read.

Where would you rather read — inside under the arches, or out under the trees? Tell us below 👇

And if you believe libraries matter —
👉 https://ofeliainternational.org/donate/

08/09/2026

750 million adults in the world cannot read or write a single sentence. ✍️

We think about that number every Tuesday in Geneva, when someone picks up a book in a language that finally feels like home.

We think about it in San Juan de Colón, Venezuela, where a grandmother sits with twelve children in a circle and reads them a story they will remember for the rest of their lives.

We think about it in Canaima, deep in the Venezuelan Amazon, where a library is being built right now — with palm leaves and community hands — so that the Pemon-Kamarakoto people have a place to protect their language, their stories, and their future. ✨

Literacy is not just the ability to read a sentence.
It is the ability to recognize yourself in a story.
To know that your language matters.
That your voice belongs on a page.

That is what OFELIA has always believed.
And it is why we build libraries in places the world tends to forget.📚

Today, on — we ask you one question:

What book made you feel, for the first time, that someone had written it just for you?

Tell us in the comments. 📖

And if you believe every child deserves that feeling — support our work!
👉 https://ofeliainternational.org/donate/

06/09/2026

This month’s recommendation comes from one of our talented architects André Gonçalves.

It’s 1954, and eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson has just been driven home from a juvenile work farm — expecting a fresh start with his little brother Billy, a beat-up Studebaker, and a plan to drive west toward California. But two friends from the work farm have stowed away in the trunk, and they have very different plans in mind: New York City, not California.

What follows is a sprawling, big-hearted road trip novel — except the road keeps bending in unexpected directions. Told over just ten days through multiple voices, it’s part coming-of-age story, part heist, part odyssey, stitched together with fables, forged fortunes, and unforgettable characters like the whip-smart, unstoppable Billy and the magnetic, morally slippery Duchess.

Towles does what he does best: elegant prose, deep empathy for flawed people, and a story that sneaks up on you emotionally. A book about brotherhood, second chances, and how the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with real life. 🚗🛣

And now we’re curious about you —
Which book are you currently reading?
Tell us in the comments 👇 We read every single one. 📚
With warmth from the OFELIA team 🌱

01/09/2026

Two weeks ago, we walked into an empty room.

An old schoolhouse in Le Grand-Saconnex — walls that once held generations of children learning to read, to write, to imagine.

We brought boxes. Books. Chairs arranged in a circle.
And people — from Switzerland, Venezuela, Canada, Argentina, Congo, Luxemburg, Peru, Colombia, from places around the globe.

We didn't open a finished space.
We opened a conversation.

And in two weeks, something extraordinary happened:
the room filled itself.

With stories shared between strangers.
With books unpacked by hands that couldn't wait to see what was inside.
With a table of food where no one asked where anyone was from.
With laughter in at least four languages.

This is Maison OFELIA — Maison des Langues.
Not a cultural center.
Not a language school.

A place where belonging is practiced, every Tuesday.

📍 Salle 1.4, ancienne mairie, chemin Torney 1, Le Grand-Saconnex
📅 Every Tuesday — join us

If this is the kind of place you've been looking for —
or the kind of place you want to help exist —
we'd love to hear from you.

Adresse

Geneva

Site Web

http://www.ofeliainternational.org/

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