Monthly Mobile Library for Albanian Children

During December 2013, January and February 2014, the Mobile Library continued to provide its regular service to the children, educators and teachers in Tropoje District.  At the end of January the Mobile Library had 1,680 children registered as regular users and borrowers of books each month.  This is an amazing number of regular and interested children who before this invaluable service began had only a few books related to their school subjects to look at. 

In Albania, families celebrate the New Year on 31st December, and this is when children may receive gifts.  Many of the children the Library Assistant meets live in economically poor situations where families do not have money to provide enough for their survival let alone for gifts and celebratory foods for this festive period.  The Library Assistant and the driver prepared small gifts wrapped in shiny paper for thirty children in December and gave them to some of the poorest children and to children with disabilities in the villages.  The gifts contained pens, pack of coloured pencils, exercise books and mathematics equipment.  In January the children of Berishe Village, gave the Mobile Library staff a Thank You card that they had prepared, as a thank you for the gifts they had received.  In addition some other children recited poems and portrayed short dramas to demonstrate some of their activities from the festive holidays.

The Library Assistant has been increasingly loaning books, games and puzzles to kindergarten teachers to improve their resources and give a larger number of young children access to toys and books that they do not have in their homes or in the kindergartens.  In Sopot Village in January the Library Assistant spent an hour with the preschoolers and introduced them to the Mobile Library; how to put puzzles together; read them a story from one of the library books and left the educator three puzzles and some specially selected books for her to read to the children and to arrange activities around.

Helping children to be aware of dangers and to help them to preserve their environment, the Library Assistant has been working on the themes of fire prevention, how to cross the roads safely and how to respect the natural environment.  With the use of books purchased for these topics even young children aged four and up have learnt how to cross the roads and to listen out for oncoming traffic.  The Library Assistant on a regular basis will return to these important subjects.

100 new books were purchased in January 2014 for the Mobile Library adding to the stock and giving the children additional titles and reference books to widen their horizons.  The Library Assistant will also have his new laptop in March which will enable him to work more effectively and keep better track of the books and library resources.