I meant to write about this activity sooner, but as always, I wasn’t able to because I have too many things to do after this event happened. It’s kind of good that I got stuck in a reading rut now, so I have some time to blog. But since I don’t feel like writing any reviews just yet, I decided to go back to my recap of this because I want to remember this event, too.
So last April, our book club, The Filipino Group on Goodreads (GR-TFG) celebrated its third year of existence. ((By “existence”, it was more of an offline existence — the club has been alive since 2007 or something, but the first official meet-up happened in April 2010)) In the past years, we had an extra meet-up time for the anniversary, but this year we decided to do it a little differently because we had too many activities planned and too little time. We decided to move our book club’s outreach activity from February to April, so we’d have more time to prepare and because anniversaries are the best time to give back to the community, right?
This year, our group decided to adopt another community and help build their library. We wanted to focus on teens, and we wanted to share with them our passion for reading by providing them books and spending a day with them. We decided to team up with Kaibigan Ermita Outreach Foundation (KEOF). KEOF is an independent, non-profit NGO that works on taking care of and the development in the urban poor areas in Manila. They have various communities all over Manila, and last April 20, our book club had the chance to meet teens from these areas.
But before that — we had to do a lot of book collection first. I wasn’t with them on their activity last year because I was out of town, so I so I was organizing this without prior knowledge of how it was done before. We formed committees in the group, had several meetings and started collecting books from our members that we will donate to KEOF. So one of our first events was an afternoon of book-covering, since we wanted to make sure the books will last so more kids can read them.
Our group collected 374 books to KEOF. :) I love how everyone had books to give away, and some of them were even brand new.
Come Outreach Day, I was kind of a nervous wreck because like I said, it was my first time to organize something like this. I am used to organizing events that had only members of the club involved, and it’s easier because I already know the people. But for this event, we had more people with us, and people I don’t know and …well, I was just a nervous wreck.
But I did say our book club friends are awesome, right? I think we did a great job on that day. Everyone did their part beautifully, and we all had fun singing (an actual song number!), playing games (lots of them!), and talking books with the kids. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:
I always have fun with my book club friends, but I had more fun that day because we got to talk to teens about our passion: reading. There was a time when we were discussing about the books that we love with the kids when some of them took the books and actually started reading it there. Some of them even wanted to borrow the books immediately, but they have to wait because they still need to put library cards on the books. :)
Needless to say, I was terribly exhausted after the event, but it was such a fulfilling one. It was a wonderful way to celebrate our club’s anniversary, and I look forward to doing that again!
You can read some of the comments of the other members here. :) I can’t help but smile when I was collecting photos for this post, because I remembered all the fun we had that afternoon. ((Plus the comments on the photos are just as funny, heh.)) I have already said my thanks there, but let me say it one more time here, even if it is late (because I believe you can never really say it enough): THANK YOU to everyone who made this event successful. :) Happy, happy, happy 3, TFG! :)
* Photo credit: Louize and Aaron (who took pictures using my camera)
This event was a BLAST. I will never ever forget the games and our competitive friends! Hahaha!