Flying Library

CREATIVE TIMES

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

Let us introduce our volunteer, the amazing circus artist and great teacher, Maike (known also as Maikel or Maika)!

She decided to leave her well-organised and extremely accurate 'ordnung must sein' German country and come to 'impossible is nothing, just yavaş" lands to join our joyful company. A queen of heights, for most of the time we can see her hanging upside down on the circus aerial silks right below the sealing.

When she doesn't fly, she always has both feet on the ground, but if you offer her a chocolate (even better - pancakes with chocolate), she seems to forget about anything. She belongs to the kind of people who smile every time and are able to laugh for no reason! She claims that she doesn't have any favourite colour, we can see her always blue enjoying girl colours.

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

So we survived the first month!

Having a schedule that is working very well, the cutest children you can imagine and an amazing team we cannot wait to start the next classes. We make some decorations for the container and prepare the objectives for the coming weeks.

Goals for next days circus classes: build the strenght, stretch, practice acrobatics, practice partner acrobatics, start building human pyramids.

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

Meet our team!

Coming from cold Poland to 40°C Mardin for the third time already: Karolina

She is probably collecting the most hugs and kisses in Istasyon.

Making the live library classes inside the flying Library, she is a magician who can transfer the stories from the books to the children heads. Inside the container she is singing, drawing and dancing with her classes. Outside the container she turns into a hula-hop professional, breaking prejudices that hula-hop is just for girls. 

She likes to be perfectly prepared for her classes. Spending time after school, sometimes in the late night to make an amusing educational materials for next day. She has a talent to excite kids imagination.  As I already mentioned she truly is a magician!

Being interested in different cultures she started to collect local and Syrian recepies and cooks super delicious food at home. Falafel, hummus, maqluba and most loved by her, bulgur, cooked in different styles. 

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

Circus Habibi

We gather in a circle and start clapping our laps. Then we clap our hands. Faster. Faster. Even Faster. We stop, one arm up in the air pointing in the sky screaming “CIRCUS HABIBI”. Now we are ready to start our Circus Training. We do some warm-up and divide the group in Acrobatic and Juggling class. At the end of the week you can see people standing upside down and juggling material up in the air.

“”CIRCUS HABIBI” it is the joyfull call for opening and closing every day of classes in Flying Library.

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

First days at the Flying Library

They said it might be a little messy... 

We arrive in the middle of the day. There are many children age 3-12. They are curiously wandering around the container exploring all the small details.

It is incredibly hot. We enter the container. It is even hotter inside. There are many packages with magic inside. With a lot of excitement we start to open all the boxes and organize all the stuff inside the container. Meanwhile the children are making the yard of the flying library. They put stones for the space we will later call garden.

At the end of the day, we play ball games with the children. We are collecting a lot of hugs and kisses. Even though we are already so tired, we could play with them until forever.

 We had long sessions planing the schedule and organization of the flying library.

After the first day and another long meeting we realized, that we had to make changes to our plans. We adopt to the environment and finalized our plans:

Working in Istasyon we have to be quite flexible and spontaneous. We are facing some prejudice and cultural differences in general.

Nonetheless the children are very easy going and eager to learn new things, which is cheering us up all the time.

[flyinglibraryforkids-blog]

We are the Flying Library!