Almost twelve years ago when we began to reach out to communities on the margins, our intention was simply about scaffolding. Children on the margins of social, economic, health, literacy, identity, language, caste, ethnicity , development and perhaps more indicators are compromised for fuller life experiences. We imagined some story joy, some book joy will enhance their life experiences and we have innovated, practiced, despaired, celebrated and trudged on through our Mobile Outreach Program ( MOP).
The pandemic since 2020 was a catalyst to continue. When insecurity revealed the gaping disparities in our society to even more prominence, it was unquestionable that the Mobile Outreach Program had to grow stronger because our children’s lives were unanchored and getting strongly tethered to small screens and received texts of alleged learning material. I suspect across the breadth of this diverse country it has been the socially committed organisations who have enabled children’s worlds to be less robotic, more humane and anchored in life because of the interventions they continue to drive.
At this almost surreal time we undertook a seismic shift at Bookworm of inviting and enabling a new leadership position. Our work at Bookworm has been deeply mired in a mosaic of beauty and madness and so for the past 100 days and more we have danced with and around a new potential way of growing our organisation. Evidences of change are unlikely to show up so early in our cosmos because the eco system and culture of Bookworm continues to pervade rather strongly but I seek signs.
The crises around the lives of children irrespective of other indicators will be one of the biggest fallouts of the pandemic. It is true that children and young people are resilient and we have sterling examples of communities who have risen after devastating and inhuman experiences of war, genocide and trauma. But we also do not hear all the stories and they are never told to us in their fullness because as human beings we all need hope and it is often the stories with hope that continue to circulate and grow in the way that stories do. This kind of a point of view compels me to think that certain practices, certain foci have to be nurtured because darkness pervades.
Our MOP program has always been the proxy indicator of hope for our organisation. When everything fell apart or threatened to, it would be the one child who waited for the van, or the one response that indicated a critical thought , or the one joke that was saved for library circle time, or the one experience of being present for someone else that provided the light. 
Yesterday the small beam of light came through at a fairly new site that our new leadership has chosen to be engaged with. From racing through the community to bring in the children, to being present for the children and with the children, holding book browsing time and being able to praise, laugh and observe, I saw that amalgam of beauty and madness that coheres with the Bookworm mosaic. I hold onto hope that decisions for our work may be seen not only in light of whom we work with and why but also how we work and for what purpose. But mostly I hold onto to the hope that a realisation of not being alone as we look forward and trusting that we can only move forward together will dominate our vision into 2021 for MOP and beyond.
