Teens, the same only different

When I was teaching classes in Young Adult Library Services in Croatia, I hammered home the twin mantras: "work with not for" and "listen to the teens." In both Zadar and Osijek, we invited local teens to talk with us about their lives; the photos show a panel of students in Zadar and two teens from Osijek. The library school students were surprised at the candor with which the teens shared details about their lives. This last weekend I read 30 papers from my library school students in Osijek, Croatia, and it was evident that they wanted to learn more. All but two of them chose the option of interviewing five teenagers, asking them the classic questions that Elaine Meyers and I posed in our book TEENS AND LIBRARIES: GETTING IT RIGHT.

1. How do you know when an adult cares about you?
2. What are the three things teens need to succeed at home, in school, and in the community?
3. What is the hardest thing about being a teenager?

Judging from the responses, there are some universal aspects to adolescence in Western society. Almost all teens talked about the ambiguity of being neither child nor adult. They realize that they are not grown but don't wanted to be treated as children either. They desperately want to be listened to and taken seriously. Like teens everywhere, Croatian teens complained that their parents make unreasonable (or unpleasant) demands on them and that they don't understand their lives because their own teen years were so long ago when life was so different. Drugs and alcohol are easily obtainable. Sex is definitely part of their lives.

What was different about the Croatian teens was the lack of caring adults other than their parents in their lives. There were some grandparents, but nobody else. No teacher, no athletic coach, no piano teacher, no neighbor, no priest, and certainly no librarian was there to care for them. Every single teen interpreted the adult in the first question as their mother and/or father, as though no other adult might care for them. In spite of their evident chafing under their parents' rules, they also saw the rule-setting as evidence of caring.

Croatian teens were unanimous in their dissatisfaction with school, a stressful place where teachers are cold and boring, where their own interests are ignored, where they must shut up and pay attention.

Like so many American teens, the Croatian teens read very little except when they must as a school requirement. They see the public library as an unfriendly, forbidding place (and all too often, it is -- for teens at least.) They are unaware of the one teen club in the central library in Osijek. The staff in the library's teen club see this as a problem of public relations and marketing.

Croatian teens are not optimistic about their future prospects. They are cynical about their government's ability or will to improve the quality of life in their country. They are gloomy about the economy and what it means for their own future employment. And most importantly, they have little sense of their own ability to improve things.

Social supports for teens are almost nonexistent in Croatia, but young people fill their spare time with all kinds of hobbies. They draw and build models. They write poetry. They sing and play musical instruments. And yes, they play computer games -- a lot. "World of Warcraft" is very big. A few, a very few, read.

The library school students rightly saw that the library might be a positive force in teens' lives by providing young people with a safe place to be with their peers and to develop a positive relationship with at least one other adult, the young adult librarian. However, like the teens, they were also pessimistic about their ability to change libraries enough to create the nurturing places that were needed. I can only hope that these students who have seen the need and crafted a vision to mitigate it will be empowered to do the small things that will begin to transform public libraries into significant suupports for teens.

Home sweet home

There is nothing quite like the comforts of home. Note the flip flop resting on the ottoman. The comfortable chair. The books. Out of the picture but definitely on hand: the TV showing my beloved "Law and Order" reruns, "House", and the network news. Other pleasures that I missed while I was away: cheeseburgers, hanging out with my grandkids, playing the piano, the LA and NY Times, celebrating Obama's sweet victory with friends and family.

Spending a month in Croatia was a memorable experience though. In some ways, it was like being a child again, in that state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. Most of my familiar frames of reference were missing, making it difficult to read the environment. Some of this was language-related. I could walk through busy streets without knowing what was behind the closed doors unless there were really obvious clues in shop windows. Then there were the unfamiliar cultural phenoma. The first week in Zadar, there was strange and beautiful music drifting up to my second floor room from the banquet hall below. Men were singing in multi-part harmony, without accompaniment, for hours. It sounded live, not recorded. It happened again the next night. I did a little investigating and discovered that these were bachelor parties, attended by men and boys. There is the usual drinking and celebrating at these events, but the singing is also traditional in Dalmatia. It is called klapa. Most men seem to know the songs and seem to be able to sing them in all of their complex five- to ten-part harmony. I now have a CD of this music, and it brings back that strange sense of wonderment as well as pleasure in the sound.

I will also be thinking about the memorial in Vukovar to the more than 200 victims of a Serbian massacre there during the war in the early 1990s, after Croatia declared its independence and Serbia disputed its claims to its borders. The town itself was almost completely destroyed and has been only partially rebuilt. They have left the damaged water tower standing as a monument to the suffering of the town. The memorial to the massacre, however, is at a distance from the town. It stands on the site where the Serbs had taken men and medical personnel from the hospital in town, shot them, and buried them in a mass grave. There is also a kind of museum nearby on which the names and faces of the victims who have been identified are illuminated on the round walls of an otherwise darkened room. While I was there, a busload of Croatians arrived. One of the group spoke in Croatian; it felt like a prayer, but I can't be sure. Then a woman began to sing a hymn which I remembered from my childhood church-going days: "Nearer My God to Thee." Everyone joined in, and the sound was heart-breaking in its simplicity and beauty. Tears ran down my cheeks.

Of course, as a pacifist, I cannot help but be moved by the many destructive faces of war. And like many war stories, this is a complex one. There is some suggestion that the Croatian President Tudgman may have deliberately sacrified Vukovar, withholding the limited Croatian troops as a way of strengthening his portrayal of brutal Serb aggression.

I will also be thinking about the relatively large space given in Croatian public libraries to playrooms for preschool children. Preschool education is seriously lacking in the country, and children don't start school until they are six and a half. So the public libraries have filled the gap with these bright, spacious rooms filled with educational toys. Many libraries hire people with both early childhood education and library degrees to plan and run activities in these centers, as many as three or four hours a day for different ages. I observed toddlers playing with foam blocks in Zagreb and five-year-olds acting out "Sleeping Beauty" in Karlovac. Our Family Place libraries are a step in this direction, but Croatia has outpaced us in this matter.

People often asked me what I thought of Croatia, its libraries, and its people. I had to say that it was a land of great unspoiled natural beauty and a long and complex history. Its libraries have great promise as institutions that can help to promote the skills and values needed in a new democracy. Its people are often cynical as they contemplate their place in the world, but they are also generous, kind -- and great singers.

First impressions of my first public library visit in Croatia

Martina is a doctoral student at the University of Zagreb, working as an assistant at the University of Zadar. She is passionate about public libraries and how they can transform communities and has wonderful stories to tell about how they did this in Zadar. Today she and her husband and one-year-old son Luka took me to Sibenik to see this beautiful old coastal city and to visit its public library.

Like many Croatian public libraries, the Sibenik library occupies a converted army building. Unlike many, it is in the center of town. The renovation results in a modern building of glass and steel. There are some oddities due to its former use. In the basement, for example, a former bowling alley has been turned into a storage space with compact shelving. For the most part, however, its former military function is not apparent. And isn't that a nice symbolic transformation? From a military operation to a library! I like that.

I wish Jonathan Furner had been there to help me make sense of what they called their scientific collection which to me appeared to be just nonfiction (books on winemaking, origami, and many other miscellaneous subjects). It used a classification scheme that originated in some Croatian academic setting. Because of this, the public was not allowed into this room but had to have books paged from here. When I asked if this worked for them, the librarians said it did. OK. Whatever.

There was a pleasant preschool corner filled with blocks and soft cushions and picture books. There was a children's computer lab crowded with boys using the computers the same way they do everywhere -- for games in noisy packs. There was another bank of computers with special software for children under the age of 8.

The collection looked like a collection anywhere, with books written in Croatian and others translated into Croatian. Harry Potter is still very popular, and the librarian showed me a scrapbook documenting a whole series of Harry Potter programs. Lots of children in wizard hats.

More impressive to me was a program on children's rights. Children from the ages of ten to fourteen had participated in a discussion -- or maybe a series of discussions, I'm not sure -- about rights and then produced their own Bills of Rights. They translated one of them for me, and it seemed very wise and also very childlike. This child included the right to eat candy along with a child's right to know his father and to visit both parents.

This library also hires an artist to work with the children on various creative visual arts projects. While I was there, the project was creating bookmarks; and the results were lovely. In an earlier project, the children had looked at incunabula from the cathedral library that is just a block or so away and then created their own illuminated alphabets.

There was so much to admire about the library and its staff who obviously care about the library, about their patrons, and about their city. What is missing? Teen services! After the age of fourteen, young people are "sent upstairs" to the adult section. There is no teen collection or programming.

Before I had come to Croatia, I had only read travel guidebooks about the country and the nonfiction accounts written by Rebecca West (BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON) and Robert Kaplan (BALKAN GHOSTS). I wondered in my last post how my impressions of the country would differ. In 1938, Rebecca West seemed to see this part of the world through a Freudian lens in which sex and death seemed to color her experiences. Robert Kaplan was influenced by Rebecca West and by his conviction that history dominated the present.

Yes, this country has a colorful and important heritage and a history that was often terrible. (My friend Ivanka's 96-year-old mother says she has lived through three wars and doesn't want to live through another one.) But there is something quite wonderful about a country that can turn its army bases into libraries and universities and recognize that its children have rights.

When I left the Sibenik Public Library, the librarians said they had a present for me. They gave me a gift bag. Inside were a children's picture book about a wonderful inventor from Sibenek who had devised the first parachute a very long time ago, a book the library had published about its beautiful old cathedral -- and some local brandy in a bottle that had been decorated by hand by one of the librarians. There is something quite wonderful about a country that produces books, inventions, and brandy.

What I'm doing when I'm not writing

I've been doing a lot of things: big things like visiting family in Minneapolis, preparing for my trip to Croatia in October, doing work for the Free Library of Philadelphia. Little things like hassling the UCLA bureaucracy in order to get my emeriti parking pass, organizing my collection of scrunchies, weeding my collection of flip flops. Ongoing obsesssions like reading and working on several needlepoint projects. Here is an update on all of them.

The family: kids are cute as ever. Gabe's into all kinds of sports, both as a fan and as a participant. He scored the only goal in his team's first soccer game. Natasha is a Junior Otter, a member of the Y's swim team. She hopes she won't have to compete in swim meets "but will do it if she has to."

Croatia: scary. I have now mastered about five phrases in the impossible Croatian language, tried to learn about the country's impenetrable and complex history, and prepared a syllabus for the course I'm supposed to teach. I have my flight reservations and a tentative itinerary. I think I need to buy a bigger suitcase; there's no way I can get enough clothes for a month in the one I own now.

The Free Library: my latest project was to develop a kind of all-purpose early literacy manual. The biggest challenge was finding good multicultural books for little kids. There are so many distinguished picture books with African American characters or themes for school-age children but almost nothing for two- to four-year-olds. Somebody please fill this gap!

Parking pass: the single most difficult issue of my retirement. Social Security and Medicare were a breeze. My UCLA pension payment came right on time, as did the 403B check. But just try to get an emeriti parking pass! It took me more than two months, one $45 parking ticket, many phone calls, and one trip to Parking Services -- but I think I am now set.

Scrunchies and flip flops: a case of too many objects in too small a space. I've got a plan for the scrunchies; the flip flops are hopeless.

Reading: The Kindle is a fabulous way to organize reading while traveling. (Now, if I could just put my scrunchies and flip flops in an electronic storage unit...) I've read several mystery novels now on long flights and in hotel rooms. Now why isn't the new Ian Rankin available through Kindle????? I have also read Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" in preparation for that Croatian trip. The subtitle is "a journey through history", and it really does seem as though history is a living presence in that part of the world. I'm looking forward to experiencing this myself in less than a month.

Needlepoint: This has gotten a little out of control. In the past, I have scrupulously finished one project before starting another. Lately, however, I have left some projects nearly done in order to start another one. For example, when I went to Quebec in August, I needed a project that would keep me busy for a whole week so I started a brand new one. Anyway, I find myself now with three canvases in their final stages and one finished and ready for framing. I know; this is boring.

The Book? You want to know about The Book? I heard from Stephanie Svirin, the new ALA Acquisitions Editor. That was good news; I will like working with her. I confirmed the renegotiated deadline -- February 1. I might even get it done by then.