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Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Poetry Club in association with Human Library Organisation, Denmark, will conduct a human library event in the capital city July 15. The event will comprise a library of “human books”, who will be people with unique life stories struggles with stigma (people from LGBTQ community, single parents, former prison inmates, suicide survivors, former drug abuse victims etc). They will interact one-on-one with “readers” – people like you and me, who are interested in interacting with.
The original concept of human library was conceived by Ronni Abergel of the Danish youth organisation ‘Stop the violence in 2000’ and it is now operational in five continents.
It is a series of events, where a library of human beings, individuals representing specific groups in the community are somehow exposed to stigma, prejudice and/or discrimination, come together and interact with “readers” (audience) to make them understand their side of the story. Currently, this project is highly popular and has been organised across 66 countries so far.
The Human Library Project Bhubaneswar will have ten diverse human books, who will be interacting with around 300-400 readers for four hours – the time divided into sessions with adequate breaks in-between. The discussions and interactions will be based on the personal life stories, which can open multiple windows of thoughts in the heads of the readers.
Bhubaneswar Poetry Club’s founder member Bijaya Biswal said, “The objective of the programme is to establish a safe conversational space, where difficult questions are expected, appreciated and answered in order to promote understanding of social prejudices and increase tolerance and empathy between human beings, by making people share their realities with each other.”