About Us
La Querencia Community Library
Querencia is a Spanish word meaning something dreamed about, longed for, and that’s what Rodolfo and Lynn Cortina named the farm they moved to in Ecuador after retiring from their university teaching posts in the States in 2008. The farm is located in the community of San Antonio de Punge in Quiroga, one of Cotacachi County’s nine parishes in the north-central province of Imbabura. The Cortinas arrived with vast collections of works in both English and Spanish, accumulated over the course of decades spent learning and teaching, reading and writing. And now their personal libraries have become the seed from which a new project is growing: a community library that will serve a wide range of residents and visitors, with a selection of books for readers of all ages, and that will also offer many other services and activities.
Our number one objective is to instill in residents – especially children and adolescents – a love for books. We will do this through the services and activities described below. And these, in turn, in addition to children and adolescents, will involve a wide range of residents, both Ecuadorian and members of Cotacachi’s large foreign retiree community, as well as researchers, both national and international. Residents and visitors with special skills will be invited to share those with library users.
Library team
Creating a library is a big job. We are blessed to have the following people working with us to make this dream come true:
• Lynn Cortina, born in West Virginia, lived in Argentina as a child. She received her undergraduate degree in Romance Languages and her PhD from Case-Western Reserve University and subsequently trained teachers in bilingual education and English a second language (ESL), teaching at universities in Milwaukee, Miami, and Houston before retiring and moving to Ecuador.
• Nahuel Zafferey has been working for months cataloging books, creating the data base for our collection. He is the son of a Bolivian mother and a Swiss father who relocated to Cotacachi County and is half-way through his university studies in psychology
• Eliza Velata, our advisor on all library-related matters, is a librarian with 33 years of experience in the field. She graduated from the Escuela Politécnica de Chimborazo and is a native of the central-sierra Ecuadorian city of Riobamba. She currently works in Cotacachi
• Ana Belén Guzmán is a life-long resident of Cotacachi. She graduated from the Universidad de Otavalo with a law degree and then went on to pursue her master´s degree in Archival and Document Management from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito. She is the archivist of the Biblioteca Comunitaria La Querencia.
• Silvio Haro, resident of Otavalo, a city near Cotacachi, is a master book repairer. He has been returning to tip-top shape volumes showing signs of wear and tear.
• Mabeline Betancourt began the library’s cataloguing process last year. Then she graduated from high school and has recently begun training in cosmetology at a local institute. We thank her for helping get this project off the ground and wish her the very best in her new endeavors.
• Carla Betancourt is a high school student who took over cataloguing books where her sister left off. Welcome, Carla.
• Juan Carlos Betancourt will drive the book mobile. He began working the land at La Querencia after the Cortinas bought the farm, which has organic certification. Juan Carlos oversees production of a variety of vegetables sold at a weekly market in Cotacachi and the goldenberry crop which is purchased by Pacari, an international award-winning Ecuadorian manufacturer of fine chocolates and other organic products.
• Mary Ellen Fieweger, a US citizen, has been living in Ecuador for 40 years. She volunteers at the Biblioteca Comunitaria on tasks related to fundraising, something she does from her coffee farm in Plaza Gutiérrez parish, located in Intag, the subtropical región of Cotacachi County.