Thursday, February 01, 2007

Want to borrow a living book or 12?

On Saturday on a event called Midvinterfestival (Mid winter festival (did you really need to read the translation for that?!)), a public library is giving the citizens here in Umeå the chance to borrow another citizen. Yes, up for lending is 12 people. You can borrow one of them for 45 min and you get to sit down and chat with someone often biased. The event is the 2nd annual "Borrow a prejudice - and get rid of it" The 12 persons you can lend is a Kurd, a lesbian, a female priest, a imam, a person with CP, a policeman, a animal rights activist, a former addict and criminal, a Sami, a muslim woman from Somalia, a middle aged white heterosexual man and last a transsexual man. They are called living books and the meaning of the arrangement is to help people not to judge a book by its cover.

The event was a big success last year and the borrowers specifically asked for transpersons when asked what could make the happening better for next year. So now they have a transsexual man and the other new books are the animal rights activist and the white man.

It will be very interesting. I'll probably report more about it on Saturday evening.

2 comments:

Maria said...

45 minuters lån går inte att fjärrlåna va? :)

Anonymous said...

It sounds like a good idea for an event -- a way of being able to ask all those questions you are curious about but it just wouldn't be polite to ask them in a normal setting ... looking forward to your post afterwards :-)