Refugees and books (event)

„A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us“ Franz Kafka

          On the Wednesday 9th of august we (volunteers from CID) organized event on the main square in Kumanovo, which purpose was to collect books for the refugees living in a transition refugee camp in Tabanovce, small village just a few kilometres from Kumanovo and Serbian border and also make people of Kumanovo aware that despite closed borders, there are still refugees living in macedonia, not only in Tabanovce camp, but also in Gevgelija camp on the Greece – Macedonian border.

 As a volunteers, we have opportunity to work in the Tabanovce camp two days during every week. Some of us are here for two months, some for one months. It is not very long period, but  we could find out how camp works and how is life there. Refugees have covered their basic human needs like place to sleep, food, water, medical help. But what we identified as the biggest problem is the lack of activities for them. They have a lot of free time in the camp, but not much to do and they can easily fall into passivity of thinking and acting. It is possible to do some sport activities, for example like playing volleyball, or table tenis, but during the hot days it is not only uncomfortable, but also dangerous, when temperature is keeping around 45 degrees during the day.

          One of the possible solutions how to defeat a boredom at one time and at the same time learn something (for example at least improve or learn english) is to read books. That is main reason for organise the event.

       

          At first we planned the basic things like what we want to do during the event? where? when? what material do we need? how many of us should participate? After the answering these questions we started to prepare our materials and of course we needed to inform police about our event. The date 9th of august was not picked like coincidence, because this day we celebrate the national book lovers day. But dont take me wrong, we love books every day for the whole year. We decided to build three corners with various activities for the event. The first was book donation corner, where people could come and donate books (prefered in english or arabic, but every book was welcome) and of course talk with us. The second corner of interviews, where we prepared wall of photos from Tabanovce, wall of facts about refugee crisis and question wall where people could stick the sticker with the first world they think when they hear word refugee or migrant. The third was frame corner where people could make a photo with our handmade frame and to show their solidarity with refugees this way. Very important task we had to make was make people aware that this kind of event will be in the town. So we made a invitation poster in both macedonian and albanian language and spread it around the town. The first places where we came and remained there poster where of course local bars, where people usually socialise, but also in bus station and town pool, during this activity we had great oportunity to practise our knowledge of macedonian language.

          A few days of planning, preparation and hard work passed we woke up at 9th of august, when we had to come to Multikulti youth centre a little bit earlier than usually, because we needed to finish last details and at 15:30 we started to collect all our stuff to car and we left the centre at 4 pm, although event started at 5pm, we needed some time to build the tent and corners. Some problems with building of the tent occured, but we built it on 12th attempt J. After a couple of minutes we removed our main tent into the shadow, cause stay at the square right on the sun was almost impossible.

          At 5pm there were no many people on the square, but like time ran, more and more people (of every age) started to come to the centre and they were interested in our event. Some people came to donate books, some took photo with our frame, some for the interview about refugees and some just to drink or eat something (yes we were prepared for it J). Very pleasant visit was also reporter from TV Nova, who made an report about our event and inteviewed our coordinator and two volunteers.

          The event didn´t last for a long time, official time was from 5pm to 8pm, still during that short time a lot people spent their time with us exchanging opinions. People seemed to be curious and interested about a refugee situation, their answers to our questions just proved it. At the end of the event we all were satisfied, we collected 11 books in english and macedonian language and more denars than we expected, so event was sucessfull. 

         At 8pm we packed our thing and returned them back to Multi kulti youth centre. We just hope that this event helped to make awareness about refugee situation (not only) in Macedonia. Amount of people who showed their solidarity with refugees at wednesday make us a little bit positive in that way. We were happy to see that some local people care, of course we know that they are not representant of all inhabitants of Kumanovo, or Macedonia, but we are very thankfull, that they participated for a while in our event.

          At the end I would like to thank to great employees of CID and to all volunteers who helped us with organisation and with running of the action. Thank you very much for promoting humanity. 

More photos from the event: