The library is one room with two thousand one hundred books, about four hundred of them in Dhivehi, and it is open through the school day and for an hour after.
Every grade has a timetabled library period. In grades one to five a book goes home every night in a plastic wallet, and the wallet matters: books came back ruined for two years before we bought them.
The programme that has made the most difference is the simplest. Each child has a card, an adult signs it when they have heard the child read, and the card goes home at the end of the week. Not a competition and not a chart on the wall, which we tried and which made the slowest readers stop borrowing. A card, in a wallet, seen by one family.
The parent teacher association buys about a hundred books a year and runs a stall at the end of the second term where families can buy the books the library is replacing for ten rufiyaa. That stall has put books into houses that had none.
What the library needs, always, is books in Dhivehi for children over ten. There are very few, they are expensive, and if anybody knows where to get them the librarian would like to hear from you.