Our Neighborhood's Library

Since January our neighborhood has twice-weekly-free-library in cooperation with all neighborhood's chiefs and Pustaka Kelana. Every Tuesdays and Fridays a car comes to our RW's office bringing 3 boxes of books for the children to peruse. The two volunteers are there teaching them reading, arts and crafts and even simple science and maths. I thought the whole thing is superb.

Most days we see about 80 to 100 kids.

Typically, we start with reading a book, then we do things such as how to inflate ballon with out any pump. After that, they are doing math puzzle (and coloring) according to their education level. Each kids has to collect their works because at the end of the school year, the one who has the most work done gets a present.

Our Pak RT also promised to give present to those who excel at school.

In order to attract kids to come, we sort of bribe them by giving out snack and water at the end of the day. The most active RTs are my own RT (06) and RT 02. The mothers also show up each time, to read and help out the volunteers.

One funny thing: Since it's a communal hall, it is also function as neighborhood crèche and health clinic on certain day of the month. Kids are reading under posters of condom campaign and the volunteers didnt even notice until I pointed that out.

Any way, I heard AIA was very impressed by our neighborhood interest in this project and are coming to visit early next month. I was told we have the most kids and the most involvement of the neighborhood.

We had our down to0, actually. A week and a half ago, we caught one of the kids stole one of the volunteers' handphones. We also found out that the same kid is abused by her mom. At the moment we choose not to get the police involved but will monitor the kid because we have no evidence of child abuse at this moment. If the police is involve, we are afraid that hell will break loose in her house. It's a very sad story. I do hope the kid turns out alright in the end. For the time being, she's afraid to show up again at the library.