While Americans squabble about whether drag queen story time promotes self-love and affirmation or is evidence of our country’s depravity and legislatures propose various laws meant to discourage or ban such events, people around the world just want to read. A story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that highlighted efforts by young people in Somalia to make civil society work in their country led me to read about several book fairs, notably in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Kismayo.

In  Afghanistan, another country wracked by decades of war and civil strife, university students founded a nonprofit, Read Books, that takes books into rural areas and distributes them to children. I’ve written before about library services for refugees in Greece. Another story caught my eye this weekend about an Afghan man who is opening a library at the Moria refugee camp, also in Greece, originally built for 3,000 people and now housing 20,000.  In Syria, a group of friends saved books and kept a volunteer library running through years of that country’s devastating civil war; one volunteer went on to run a bookmobile.

The most important thing to note about this last story, by Guardian reporter Sam Wollaston, is that “Moria is hell, a stain on 21st-century Europe, where bureaucracy, politics and simply not caring enough have left tens of thousands in limbo – people fleeing war and danger, looking for a future for themselves and their children and not finding it. Moria’s existence is a disgrace, a failure of morality.”

And yet, people make sure that “humanity survives in hell” as Wollaston writes. And wherever hell on earth exists, in war zones, in terrorized places, in corners of the world that many of us manage not to think about on a daily basis, people keep reading, and sharing books, and helping children learn, and promoting the values that libraries stand for: education and literacy for all.

These stories for me put into perspective how incredibly privileged it is for people in America to argue over what’s on our libraries’ shelves and who reads stories to our kids. I just finished reading The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and this sentence, published in 1951, seems incredibly prescient as I consider the world today: ” Yet to have more does not mean to be more.”

We have so much. We could be more.  The incredibly brave and selfless people who make these libraries and schools and book fairs happen in Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and overcrowded refugee camps in Greece are.