Look South Column
Fancy borrowing a homeless person?
Recently, I read that it will soon be possible to ‘borrow’ living people from a public library in Holland. The library, based in the town of Almelo, will ‘lend out’ people of various descriptions, including drug addicts, physically-disabled people, homosexuals, asylum seekers and Roma people. The idea is that you can reserve a person and meet them for 45 minutes, asking them anything you want and hearing their story. Jan Krol, the library’s director running the programme, hopes it will reduce prejudice and break down barriers between groups as people learn more about the lifestyles of others. Moreover, for those of you worried you might forget to return ‘your book’, or perhaps ‘your book’ might have such a good time with you it forgets to return itself, resulting in a hefty fine, you can only meet the person in the library café for safety reasons. Also, in case you are wondering, Krol says you do not have to have a library card to take out a person.
Krol, who based the scheme on a project running in Sweden, is swamped with requests and has had to get his team of ‘living books’ together hastily. He told London’s Telegraph, “I’ve got several gay men, a couple of lesbian women, a couple of Islamic volunteers. I’ve got a physically-handicapped woman and a woman who has been living on social-security benefits for many years in real…
