The Karama Library Project aims to facilitate the joint stewardship of a collective resource as a means of building trust and deepening community, while encouraging a spirit of agency and autonomy on the part of individual refugees. The Karama Library Project seeks to help refugees find their way as they seek a sense of home on the road. And it seeks to create a reading Commons for Arabic-speaking
communities of Athens that aim to remain. Reading in their native language can offer refugees an escape from alienation in a new land, and a way to return to their roots for a while. It can help them to remember who they are, and it can also help them orient them children to where they come from. Libraries not only welcome all those who can read, but act as a space for sharing and expanding literacy for those who cannot, providing the basic means for parents to resume educating themselves and their children. The Karama Library Project will feature a robust children's literature section. Syrians are a historically well-educated population, but in the past 6 years, pursuit of any level of education has been drastically curtailed. Most Syrian children aged 11 and under have never been able to attend school due to the war and have never learned to read or write. In this time of unrelenting rupture, reading to children in their native language can nurture a semblance of continuity, essential to their cognitive and identity development. Concretely, the Karama Library Project seeks to restore a sense of agency to parents by providing the resources they need to run their own library Commons and to deepen their personal role as their children's first guides and teachers.
*Karama: "Dignity", and "Wonder", two states of being that lift people out of hard times.
