By Becka | Project Coordinator
Hello dear friends of the library, we hope you are well and have enjoyed a refreshing spring.
ECHO has had a lovely last few months really embracing our ability to be flexible and offer the library space as something to be transformed by the people who use it. We have been incredibly lucky to have been able to host meals, community painting, birthday parties and music sessions, leaving us excited for the next few months until temperatures oblige us to stop for the month of August.
Our city sessions continue as the library has witnessed the return of families made homeless by the Greek asylum system to Victoria Square. We have become a first point of contact for various people on the move who are in the square on a regular basis. Using our language skills and solidarity network we supported a family of 9 people to find accommodation. Even though they now have a place to stay they come and hang out with the library at the square every Monday ready for colouring, games and books! We have also helped to coordinate food, legal and health support to the other families there.
In Oinofyta the library space has been turned several times into a venue for celebration with some fine cooking of Syrian kurdish cuisine on display for library users and librarians alike. a couple of weeks ago became an unintentional bake-off competition as we celebrated one little library user's birthday with four different types of sweet, including lemon cupcakes, carrot cake and two different forms of Syrian sweet delights. People have told us that it is so lovely to have a reason to leave their rooms and do things together like this, as such opportunities are not present in the camp itself.
At the start of May we attended the first ever iteration of the epic local football tournament Kipseli Mundial. With the help of many new friends we decorated a large banner with the words "the city is ours" in at least 15 different langauges all spoken by those at the event, including Amharic, Pigin, French, Farsi, Swahili, Arabic and of course Greek. It was so lovely to connect with our local urban community in such a festive atmosphere. We also finally managed to get hold of some new material to repair the library van's upholstery, photos coming soon!
With the continuing indiscriminate destruction of the Gaza strip and its entire educational, health and public infrastructure, the slaughter of thousands of innocent people and the continued inaction of the international community, we are seeing an increased number of people from Gaza passing through the camps here in Greece. It is incredibly disheartening to meet people who have, in many cases, escaped from an artificially-created hellscape.
As a library, a hub for those seeking information and a way of nourishing curiosity and creativity, we are devastated to see the destruction of Gaza's universities and the targeting of UNWRA schools which have become havens for thousands of displaced people. We continue to call upon everyone - national governments, individuals and wider communities - to condemn the actions of the Israeli government and to make a concrete intervention to stop more people from being killed through starvation, bombing or targeted killing.
We have been particularly lucky recently to meet new friends in Thiva camp in the form of 3 incredibly kind, intelligent and curious teenagers from Sudan. One of them has joined our kurdish friends and now every week we are treated to an extended music jam in the early summer evening as we talk about subjects including Sudanese music, censorship and the meaning of life with the other library visitors. They are an inspiration to us in their kindness, their curiousity and opennes. We have already shamelessly noted down some of their thoughts, including: "we will rebuild Sudan more beautiful than it was before," and, "true freedom is that which you hold within yourself, to be able to be open, to imagine, create and understand the world in a different way to those around you." Like the students protesting what is happening in Palestine, young people everywhere are showing us the way.
On a parting note, I wanted to share with you our most recent requests from library users that we have managed to fulfill. These include: Dostoevsky's "the poor" (Crime and Punishment is already on loan) in Arabic, Sapiens by Harari in Farsi (it was recently banned in some countries, but we still managed to find a copy courtesy of Giulio's impeccable online search skills), Toni Morrison's Beloved in French, Ibn Khaldoun's historical "Introduction" in Arabic and the books of Avesta in Turkish which should arrive shortly through a friend who returns from Istanbul this week. Although it is a small gesture, being able to find these requests, either in book form or printed out from a PDF, means a lot to people. They have often wanted to read this material for a long time and having the opportunity to do so makes a huge difference in a world where they are often treated merely as a statistic.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support for the library.
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