Written by Joanna Philip (Intern from Azim Premji University, Bangalore)
As Mobile Outreach Program (MOP) facilitator, Sonali and I trekked down the road one sultry afternoon, a little girl peeked out from her home. She looked at Sonali, smiled and ran inside. Minutes later, she returned, cradling a small bottle of chilled water, shyly offering it to Sonali: “Aapko thanda paani pasand he na; aapke liye rakhi thi” (You like cold water, na, I had kept some for you)
That image has remained etched in my mind.
I was interning with Bookworm Trust as part of a three-week fieldwork component of my postgraduate studies in Education at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. This interaction took place during a session at Sada, a community site in South Goa. The session was being conducted as part of the Mobile Outreach Program – one of Bookworm’s initiatives – that takes books to communities with first-generation learners who may have limited socio-cultural and economic resources.
Long after Sonali and I returned to Mala in the Travelling Library van, I kept thinking about the little girl in Sada. For me, her gesture reflected the relationship she had built with the MoP facilitator. MoP was not simply a process of lending and returning books; it had also become a relational space where the children had come to know their facilitators and care for them in their own way. In my university coursework, we have often looked at education as fundamentally relational. Nel Noddings, in her work on the ethics of care, argues that caring relationships are truly caring when the cared-for responds to the carer. In this instance, Bookworm’s MOP program as a caring space was visible in the way the child, in turn, became a carer herself.
Growing up in north-east Bihar, I studied in a small, low-fee private school. Here, students did not visit the library which was itself repurposed into a staff room! Hence, these encounters that demonstrated the library/library work as relational were new for me. Conversations with children at the Saligao Library revealed how deeply they valued this kind of space. Some recounted making up multiple excuses (“fever”, “death of a relative”) to skip their parent-mandated tuition classes so they could attend the library’s activity sessions!
When I asked them why they liked the Bookworm Library, they gave me three points:
- The teachers don’t scold us
- The teachers play games with us.
- The teachers let us read the books we like
Many of them came from schools where the library period was either repurposed as a Physical Education (PE) period or the library was under lock and key, kept away from the “prying” hands of the children. At Bookworm, they had found a space that gave them freedom to talk, freedom to play and freedom to choose the books they liked. It was this sense of freedom, where their interests and voices were heard, that saw them coming to the library day after day, even in the sweltering Goan afternoons.
Over the course of three weeks at the Trust, my understanding of a library took a 180 degree shift! Conversations with the founder, Sujata, also helped me rethink what a library could look like and how it could be extended to reach different communities. Through Bookworm, I realised that a library could be a van of books parked on the South Goa highway; it could be a jute mat spread with books on the threshold of an abandoned home in a village; it could be a box of books and toys sent to a homebound child suffering from Thalassemia or it could be a temporary room set up in a hospital. This dynamism that resisted conventional definitions of a library helped me realise that the library need not be a physical space merely. Library work is a practice of creating access to stories wherever children are.
What surprised me most was the amount of administrative care that preceded a child picking up a book. From categorizing books for a particular age group in a particular theme, labelling, repairing, packing, updating book-lending information onto Bookworm’s in-house tech system and multiple documentation processes, I realised the invisible work of all the Bookworm members that goes on behind the scenes to make books available at a MoP site, a library, a hospital or a school.
Across conversations with Bookworm members, one sentence surfaced repeatedly: “We want children to experience the joy of reading.” In a time when national education policies focus on libraries as means for increasing FLN numbers, where reading is solely seen as means to an instrumental end, this insistence on joy, what many parents often dismiss as “mazza”, as being the center of Bookworm’s work felt very refreshing and radical.
Having recently transitioned from an MA in English Literature to an MA in Education, I was especially grateful to work in a space that saw the coalescing of both these fields together.
I was able to savour rich children’s literature from diverse independent Indian publishers, expanding my myopic experience of children’s literature as only Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews! From seeing handmade books made by children in collaboration with Bookworm facilitators to sampling books with textured or sensory materials, my understanding of what a book can be has also transformed. The library sessions showed me how whole stories (instead of merely isolated sentences or paragraphs) can support literacy-building, while also becoming anchors for invested conversations and critical reflections amongst facilitators and children.
Looking back, I think that little bottle of cold water carried within it much of what I learnt at Bookworm. It reflected not only affection for a facilitator but also the trust, care, and sense of belonging that had been nurtured over time. The gesture reminded me that library work is never only about books. It is also about relationships that work within an ecosystem of administrative and organisational care, book-care, and people-care.
Thank you, Bookworm, for helping me see that sometimes, the success of a library cannot be measured through the number of books borrowed or sessions conducted. Sometimes it can be seen in a small act of care—when a child remembers that someone likes cold water on a hot Goan afternoon.