Traveling Library: Hands that tell stories
TRAVELING BOOKS
We travel to where we can connect, imagine and create together.
We are continuing our online fundraising campaign with DonorSee. You can find our first funding request here.
“Traveling books” reaches out to communities each year to serve children, youth, grandmothers and families.Through books we connect with the communities while exploring multiple subjects that foster leadership, critical thinking, empathy, inclusion and literacy. And so we kick off our Libros Viajeros 2022 campaign so we are able to maintain our connection with communities through books and creativity.
Hands that tell stories…
Throughout the year, Biblioteca Movil has reached a variety of homes with groups of grandmothers and families. Due to our dedication it has also persisted during the pandemic years virtually and in person.
During the visits, one cannot help but appreciate the connection that the stories and books generate with the children, young people and grandmothers. With stories and outreach activities, I have been able to hear and understand through their voices their impressions of what they remember, feel and live every day. But something else captured my attention allowing me to see how intensely they use their hands to express their emotions and transmit messages..
Storytelling with the body has been an effective way to connect even more with our community. When we have story hours, reading circles and story nights, the hands have been a basic tool to tell and transmit what we want to share through a book or orality. This has been the result of many years of hard work, experience and growth.
In a special way, I remember a fragment of my book Matz in the living voice of a grandmother who said: "Now my hands are dry and rough. They have served me well over the years ... they have put in hours of washing clothes on the stones on the lake shores, years of shoveling dumplings and forming round tortillas to feed my family, decades of sweeping dirty floors and dusty yards." -Conception - Matz book.
The impact that books convey and the connection they can make with children, young people and grandmothers is extremely significant. That's why with the Biblioteca Movil we encourage bodily expression and critical thinking in telling, reading, creating and writing.
When you support the Puerta Abierta library, you make reading and books reach many hands and more people in the community, such as, for example, the Traveling Books initiative.
