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Community celebrates Book Day in museum
Tifa Asrianti , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Fri, 04/18/2008 10:05 AM | City
The book-lovers community, Forum Indonesia Membaca (Indonesia Reading Forum), will hold various festivals at Bank Mandiri Museum in West Jakarta to commemorate World Book Day.
The festival will run from April 23 to 28, involving more than 40 book communities and 20 book publishers from the city.
The forum's director, Dessy Sekar Astina, said Thursday the event would have around 50 activities all held by the communities.
"We focus on communities because they rarely get a place in a book festival," she said.
The activities include movie watching, quizzes, games, discussions and workshops. This year's World Book Day will also have day and night tours of Jakarta's Old Town as well as kite and culinary festivals.
"We want children to love books through the activities they enjoy, such as storytelling and games. We hope the five-day event will attract 50,000 visitors," she said.
World Book Day has been promoted by UNESCO since 1995 to appreciate authors, publishers, book distributors and book lovers around the world for promoting literacy.
Forum Indonesia Membaca has celebrated Indonesian World Book Day since 2006, with an increasing number of participants. In 2006, there were around 20 communities taking part in the festival. It reached between 35 and 40 communities last year.
This year's Indonesian World Book Day takes "Literacy Changes Lives" as its central theme.
Dessy said the theme is about changing a person's lifestyle through reading. She said the more people read the further they could increase their knowledge and avoid poverty.
A housewife club in Parung, Bogor, for example, learnt to bake cakes from recipe books available at a community library, she said. The baking generated income in the area.
Ambassadors promoting World Book Day includes celebrities Maylaffayza, Alena, Rachmania Arunita, Tantowi Yahya and Happy Salma.
Maylaffayza, a violist, said her love for books began because she was jealous of her sister, an avid reader, who seemed to know everything Maylaf did not. Maylaf then forced herself to like reading.
"I set the target -- I had to like books. So my love of books was something I gained through hardship. It was not something I loved suddenly," the 32-year-old violist said.
She spread her love of books to people nearby, such as her management staffers and driver, by giving books.
Rachmania Arunita, an author and scriptwriter, said she did not like to read at first because she had problems grasping the meaning of sentences. She said she had to read a sentence at least three times in order to understand.
The problem encouraged the author of the "teenlit" book Eiffel, I'm In Love to overcome it. She said she began to read even more.
"Reading and writing are more than educational. They are also forms of communication and part of self development," she said.
Further information: http://www.worldbookdayindonesia.blogspot.com
