The generator would come on and drown out any conversation that was going on. Yuvraj noticed me grimace and began to countdown and lo and behold when he got to 8, the generator stopped. I looked at him and indicated he had magic.
Every time during this library session which is a part of the MOP program, birthed during the ‘lockdown’ ,when the generator would loudly grind on, Yuvraj kept a silent finger count to reassure me. He got the shut off timing right 4 out of 5 times and the last time he mis timed by a second nothing less. How tuned in he was to the motor and to mechanics of the generator on site. It was no surprise therefore to me who was meeting him for the first time that a story about an elephant who is trying to escape the zoo keeper would not fully engage him. This despite a well planned read aloud by Jewel. Yuvraj’s mind is tuned elsewhere.
Later in the session he was part of the circle I had the joy of sitting with and as he hid his elephant in a dark sky to blend the colours, he looked up and told the group, the tanker is coming and I was not surprised to see the water tanker lumber down about a minute later and position itself at the construction site. He carefully completed his work, shared his story with me and said he now had to fill water and off he went. As these moments fall upon me I am reminded of the immense trust children show us when we enter their world and how we need to find books and library moments to capture their full attention and sustain their motivations.
On arrival this evening , the MOP site was child less as we began to lay down the mats but like ants who find a picnic in the park, from unfinished construction blocks, small shanties, steep slopes and across construction debris, children began to appear clutching books in their hands. It was an image so similar to children in a story called Biblioburro by Jeanette Winter, but the setting was the Taleigao Plateau in Goa, the library team was Jewel and Pranita and the children, ah well, the children were quite like the other, children are the same. And yet…
They had the routines down, they manage their own library cards with aplomb, they love asking about fiction and non fiction during booktalk, they struggle with reading but can read pictures so well that even I think they know the story because they have looked and thought and looked again and discussed with each other. It was clear however that their engagement with decoding and writing is slowing down. When filling their library cards, one act that children knew previously with great confidence was putting the date of return on their card. This was usually because after an entire school day they would have ‘copied’ the date in their note books at least four – five times but I noticed today there was confusion about this simple act. Their minds however are alive and full of ideas as they responded to the conversations before and after and during the story and the shenanigans they get up to whilst listening to the story was so indicative of how much mental energy they have and how much harder we need to work to channel it in this time.
It was Rohan who caught my attention from the start. As I pulled up my car, he was standing near the Bookworm car and told me whilst looking me straight in my eye, ‘I do not go for these sessions with the teacher.’ It was his stance and his tone that made my heart soar. I asked him to show me where the group sits, he indicated by pointing but walked behind me to see that I got the right path to the site. After that he ran up and down at least thrice at a fast pace, his green pants a blur and each time I shouted , “Rohan , come to the library.”
Around 30 minutes into the session he drew closer to the mat and then he was sitting down and had his hands fidgeting with someone else and apparently nudging his foot elsewhere, so I invited him to sit in front of me. He did so for a full 15 minutes, occasionally looking back to see if I was there. So I placed my hand on his thin frail back and I found he began to relax. He looked at the book more intently, mumbled some responses to himself when Jewel raised questions and brought himself into the circle for the paper pencil activity where he had to work on hiding his own elephant. I asked the children to please put their names on the paper and he looked up and I saw flight in his eyes. So I asked him to come to me and simply printed his name at the top and asked him to copy it down again.
About six or seven minutes later Rohan appeared with his sheet. He had copied down his name about eight – ten times , in varying degrees of size and direction but he was so proud. He said , ‘ abhi naam likhna aata hai ’ I can now write my name. It was true for him and so it was true for me.
Each of the children in the session live on the construction site and are a community brought together by a common project but each child is making sense of the world in his own way and we must , we simply must find ways to enable that sense making to come to its fullest as they enter the world of the library and then hopefully become fully part of the larger world that awaits them.
