Promoting a sense of belonging...

As part of Grade X CAS activity, we went to the State Central Library in Afzalgunj, Old City on 6^th July, 2012. The State Central Library is a library built into a monument. Not many people in the class knew about the library until we were informed that we would be going to the Library as part of our CAS activity. It was fun and heartwarming to help our National Heritage.

We were well prepared for the CAS activity i.e., going to the State Central Library to help with the book arrangement and other related activities.We left school at 9:25 A.M. It was pretty far, but still we got off on a high note. When we reached the library, our assumption of the library was that it was an old library. The whole place reeked of old scents and had a lot of dust. We all entered into the library and wore our masks and gloves. A few minutes later we started the work. We had to work on the English and Urdu sections of the library. The class was split into two groups and we started to arrange the two sections of the library given to us. We worked for four hard hours, setting books correctly and dusting all the rows and books. During the process we found many old great books that could be read, but we set them aside for later.

The librarian there says that most of the people who come there just leave the books on the table or don’t handle the books properly. It was sad to see that some of the books had their binding coming off.  Most of us worked very hard and did not even sit down till the very ending. The people in the Urdu section had an even harder as most of the books were in different shelves or on the desks. Few of my classmates even helped in putting the tags on new addition books to the Library. We worked in a systematic order, with two people per book rack. We had to make sure to dust all the books or else the books that are dirty would have spread the dust onto other books surrounding them. We had to work as a team sending books from one place to another, dusting the shelves and placing books in their respective shelves. The work in the English section and the Urdu section was operating simultaneously. They were just a group of ten or twelve people in the Urdu section but still they worked hard and tried to finish as much of the section on their own as possible. 

We all pitched in together and it turned out to be a big success. We all were tired in the end, but seeing our cleaned rows and books in order, we felt proud of our work. But, no success is great without a few ups and downs, so during our activity our major problem was we ran out of gloves, but we still managed to use what we had and pulled it off. After we finished our work we all sat down for a while and talked about our job. Slowly, we made our way to the buses happy and content with the work we had done that day.

It was great to know that we had helped a national heritage in arranging books that have been dirty for months together. It was a fun experience, I wish we could have stayed and helped around a bit more, but we all know that we could not have stayed any longer. We had cleaned about seventy thousand books that day. Both proud and tired, we made our way back home. All through the bus ride, we could only talk about the feats we had done in the library. We were satisfied and content with our contribution to the society.

To sum up “We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging.” Hunter Campbell "Patch" Adams (born 1945) Physician, Activist, Author.