Yesterday, was such a wonderful day for me.
At about 1 pm, there was a kind of gathering at Taboo community. There were people from about 6 small libraries, that came to the gathering + plus friends from other communities such as Amalthea Library, Pustakalana, Reading Lights, Kalyamandira, 1001buku Bandung, and Pesat.
The pupose of the gathering was that we can all share experiences about taking care of each library.
The first thing we did together was play a game. The game is difficult to describe, but the game was fun, because we needed to run from one place to another.
The second thing we did, was we made a drawing of each library on a big piece of paper. We draw the picture of each library, where the books are putted, where the carpet is, where the children reads the book, after that each library sticks the picture on the wall and make a presentation abot their library.
I think the presentation was one of the most fun part. From the presentation i knew that most of the library are very simple. A library is located at Desa Mekarwangi, Lembang in a elementary school. It is opened about morning until day time, and the one who takes care of it are still very young about middle school students.
There is also 2 libraries that are located at home. One of the library is located at the living room of a lady. Children come to read.
The most interesting library is owned by a man, and her daughter helps him to take care of the library. they don't have a place to make a library so, at night the books are put in the daughters room but at day time, the books are brought to the garden in front of the house so the children can come and read.
Anyway, the library might be very different from the library that are in your mind. Some started a library with only 30 books, and started adding books so now there are more.
Each library shared their problems, and how are the conditions of the children that come to their library. A lady told me that a child come to their library and knows the alphabet but cant read at all, and that the books are to little, others told that at the beginning the library was full, but because the some children had read all the books, not many came anymore. A man told a story that near the library there is a play station rental, and some children are more interested to go their
There were a few suggestions made by the group. Like, it is good to make the library more attractive, we should try reading the books to the children, we could ask the children to make their own books, we could ask the children to do other activities such as taking a walk, making drawings, and much more.
After sharing, we had a break.
Before starting the next session, we had another game. After that we saw an example of story telling. The story telling was done by my friend Jody. He used a white board and a marker to do the story telling. He made unfinished pictures related to the story and asked the audience what it was, and then started finishing the pictures, he also asked what the name should be, and always ask the audience things. This made the story telling very attractive.
After that we grouped the people into several groups with 2 members in each group and a facilitator. Each group had 1/2 an hour to make new ideas for each library. After that everybodymake a presentation of their idea.
A group had an idea to ask the children to make drawings and than make a simple exhibition by putting the drawings an a string in front of the garden. Besides that, the idea was to ask the children to make trash bins using old stuff for the library.
The other group made an example of decoration they would make for their library.
The other group, did an example of story telling using pictures made by paper, they hope they can do the story telling at their library to.
And there were other ideas.
Actually that was the end of the gathering. We will all gather again about a month from now. Before going home, there were presents for each library from reading lights. The presents werer paper, a box of crayon, stationary, and a plastic of books for each library. After that we had a picture together.
what was fantastic of the gathering was that each library, although small, had a fantastic story, and we hope that one library can learn from one another. Lovely!
