Keeping a community library alive during times of COVID 19 lockdown
As the country came to a near halt during the COVID 19 lockdown in late March 2020, like many library educators across the nation, I wondered what the lockdown meant for libraries, their functioning and purpose. As hunger, displacement and the pandemic gripped the nation, books and reading were defined as non-essential services. I joined my team at Hasiru Dala in relief work for waste-pickers and other informal workers in Bangalore and witnessed some of most disturbing sights of my life. While waste management was listed as an essential service by the government, informal waste pickers who remain on the forefront of the informal solid waste management framework of any city were not recognised as essential service providers. With no way to work, the looming uncertainties around the restarting of the recycling industry, and the threat of coming in contact with medical waste that exposes them to the corona virus, their lives were quickly spiraling downwards. Further, their own community saw them as people who might potentially bring the virus into the community because they worked with waste. The children felt this marginalisation and ostracisation the most, among other issues of poverty and hunger. Domestic violence and the aftereffects of substance and alcohol withdrawal were other issues that children were becoming witness to. It only showed me why there is an even stronger need to enable access to libraries and spaces for our children. With no sight of when and how the libraries could reopen in any meaningful way, we were left to make sense and respond to these highly uncertain and frightening times through the only way we knew – reading, thinking and reflecting.
Among many other articles, I saw myself re-reading the article ‘Bringing Books and Children Together- The Croatian War Experience’ by Ivanka Stričević where she shares details and insights on how libraries helped children, families and communities cope with the most difficult of circumstances and the repercussions of war. Stričević says as adult educators, our primary responsibility is to mediate information– to ensure access to reading materials and offer reader development services because reading has a twofold role: to provide information and to facilitate social and emotional healing. While these words hold good in any circumstance for a library educator, reading it in an article that detailed the response of libraries during times of war assured me that that our roles as information providers and facilitators of social and emotional healing should and must continue, especially during the pandemic. There was a need for a space for children to continue to read and engage with stories, express their spoken and unspoken distress, have access to fact-based, child-friendly information and be in touch with familiar ways of being, even in uncertain times like these.
Moving Library Programs Online
The three Buguri Community libraries in Bengaluru, Mysuru and Tumkuru are located in communities where waste-pickers and informal waste collectors reside. The libraries primarily cater to children of informal waste-pickers through reading rooms and book circulation programs, arts-based workshop and arts therapy programs. The libraries are open all seven days a week in the evening. Buguri, which in Kannada means the ‘spinning top’ is a place for children to read, discuss, think, play, engage with new ideas and just ‘be’.
During the lockdown period, all library activities onsite ceased and we planned to run the programs remotely. The Buguri team grouped on calls to ideate on ways we can reach out to children and be in touch with them through books and stories, we knew that we would be highly dependent on technology. While access to the internet may be difficult for many, mobile penetration is quite high in India. We wanted to see if that could be a way forward. While this seemed like the most apparent/obvious way to reach out to children, we were taking a complete U-turn on our earlier approach. We had always resisted the invasion of technology into our libraries and kept it to the bare minimum. We believed in the analog ways of being and had seen the benefit it had on the children, their connect with the library and educators. The question then was how do we, to the extent possible, try to recreate that using the technology available?
The team quickly got down to making a list of children from each library and figuring out what mobile technology their parents had access to – smart or semi-smart phones/ feature phones, or no access to phone at all. We planned to have different approaches to reach out to children according to the technology available. Once we had this data, we created sibling groups and started to plan our approach to the online programs. For example, we realised that most homes had more than one child, usually three to four, and on calls we could use the conference call facility to reach out to at least two homes at a time, a group of six – eight children at a time. We drew schedules for each program, and we reached out to each parent to share details about the programs and keep them informed.
Library Educator, Chaitra Acharya reads aloud a child friendly COVID 19 Manual
Some responses from the children
For children who had access to smartphones and the internet, each library formed WhatsApp groups with their parents’ numbers. Books were shared every morning and children were encouraged to read and engage with them – through a Q&A, read aloud and activities. Children replied in these groups through voice notes, pictures and videos. We shared and read aloud over 75 books and received over 500 responses from children enrolled in this program during this period. The read alouds were recorded and shared which meant that the children could go back to them any time they wished to.
The team pushed to try different kinds of activities ranging from drawing, writing, making crafts and music to children creating their own stories. The children took to the different styles readily.The questions asked with the stories gave space not only for reflection on the story but also reflection of the self. The response to the latter was telling of the needs and wants of the children. For example, one of the children wrote that he would like to become water so that he could provide for the rest of the community. In another case a child wanted to have four hands so that he could help his family and community. In some cases, parents got involved to help their children with the questions and activities. This bridged the gap between the library and the children in multiple ways. It gave the parents an insight as to what kind of work is being done with the children. Before the lockdown, parents remained busy with their work and life and gave little attention to what the children did at the library. But during this period, they held a shared space with the children and many readily participated with them in the various activities. We introduced COVID 19 related information and stories which allowed us to check in on the children’s mental and physical health during this period.
For children who did not have access to smartphones, every evening our library educators made conference calls (with sibling groups) and read aloud to them/or shared a story and discussed it. Children who didn’t have access to phones at all joined their friends in the neighbouring houses for these calls. Calls not only included read aloud and storytelling, but also singing songs and playing book-related quizzes.
Our in-house arts-based therapist, Pallavi Chander was on weekly calls to make sure that children who are under stressful situations had access to someone outside their homes to talk to. This was largely to address the distress the children were going through because of changing home dynamics and lockdown uncertainties.
The team designed and developed a radio drama Maya and Thonga that helped children understand COVID 19 in a child friendly way. This idea emerged after we spoke to the children on calls and collected questions that they had about the COVID19 crisis. In the drama, Maya a young girl, frustrated by the situation strikes up a conversation with Thonga, a raintree in front of her house who answers her questions about the corona virus and the subsequent lockdown. Our therapist used Maya and Thonga as a starting point to start conversations on her calls. The discussions with the children became an input to build subsequent content for this radio drama. Each radio drama episode ended with an arts based activity that children could try at home. This included puppet-making, drawing, collage-making etc. The activities focused on helping children witness, communicate, and engage with their emotional needs.
Children share their emotions during lockdown through drawings
The Buguri Podcast, an exclusive radio show became our outreach program for children with stories, songs, activities and child friendly COVID 19 information aired on Radio Active 90.4 Mhz Community Radio Station. It reached not only the children of waste-pickers but a wider audience including those without smart phones and internet. The show ran thrice a week in multiple languages – English, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and Assamese. We have finished the first season of the podcast with 15 episodes. We are planning subsequent seasons which will include participation by children as well. We had over 25 staff members and volunteers contribute to the first season. One of volunteers, who is on the autistic spectrum converted his love for languages into a small segment on the podcast, making him the ‘Language Guru’ of the season. In this segment, the Language Guru taught others how simple words like ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’ can be said in over 20 languages across India and the world. This segment mostly featured lesser known languages like Dzongkha, Tulu, Konkani, Bhojpuri, and Kashmiri.
Switching to working through online mediums was not easy for our educators. It required us to work on our resistances; adapt quickly to the need of the hour and pick up new skills – audio/video recording and editing; conducting online calls with children; creating data light resources to be shared online; and find engaging activities with easily available and found objects at home. It also required helping children access these resources keeping in mind the screen time they were being exposed to. For children who did not have basic stationery at home, we distributed stationery kits, and special permission and passes were arranged to make such distributions possible. Soon we saw children offering to read aloud, creating audio/video content that was giving information on COVID 19 to their friends, urging them to stay at home, wear masks and play with their siblings.
An Covid 19 awareness video by library member Prajwal S using puppets
As the lockdown eased, with parents moving out to work, we saw a drop in the engagement in online classes. Understandably, the children no longer had access to their parents’ devices. However, we continue our work, through a hybrid model with small group contact sessions keeping in mind the safety requirements. With smaller groups visiting the library we are able to have a deeper engagement with children. Our reading room, therapy and art sessions continue. When the children were asked what they missed during the lockdown period, many answered that it was the library.
The library has once again become a space of refuge, for the children and for us.
With inputs from Chaitra Acharya and Noor Sengupta.