Next Tuesday, Oct 25, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Y4Y Quebec is hoping to transform the Bistro Kaapeh on Frontenac Street in Sherbrooke into a living library for the first of three Meet Your Neighbour / Salut les voisins gatherings the organization has planned over the next few months across the province.
“It’s an adaptation of the Human Library Project,” said Gabe Steinbach, who has been coordinating the new project along with Adela Kwok. Steinbach clarified that the Y4Y project has no formal link to the storytelling project that came out of Denmark in the early 2000s, but was inspired by their approach. “What we’re doing is adapting that concept by making it focused on bilingualism.”
Kwok explained that the basic idea is to have a series of “human books” available for conversation at the event; people who can share perspectives and experience that might be different from what the “readers” – participants, may have lived in their own lives. In the case of the Y4Y gatherings, there is a specific goal of reaching across linguistic communities, although the coordinators also said that the selection committee was tasked with finding a diverse and challenging set of people to work with.
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Y4Y Quebec building a bilingual human library in Sherbrooke
By Gordon Lambie
