Looking back at the year just ended, it is almost hard to believe how much things have changed from the original plans, and how many projects we have managed to achieve under pandemic conditions.
We started the year off strong with two physical meetings at OBA of the BiebRO Children's Book Club. Then, for the Christmas event, we held an exhibition of a number of titles from the BiebRO collection, giving people the opportunity to browse and get to know them better.
The spring was looking interesting with a book launch with Petronela Rotar, a flash-mob at OBA with some small Romanian dancers and the launch of the Dutch writer Janneke Klop's book "The Mountains of Romania". Unfortunately, all these events were put on stand-by due to the lockdown and the pandemic.
In June we successfully organised an online meeting with Petronela Rotar about her latest novel Help Me Not Disappear.
And since then we've completely changed our approach by not focusing on all the things we couldn't do, but focusing on new opportunities.
We've launched a series of weekly Facebook Lives every Monday at 7:30pm. In the Biebro Mondays series, we talked about our choices for the BiebRO collection, talked about books, and generally sought opportunities for regular meetings and interactions with our audience.
Shortly we decided to move the BiebRO Children's Book Club online, replacing the monthly meetings with weekly ones. In this way we were able to reach more children, from different parts of the Netherlands and even Romania, culminating at the end of December with the project "Winter Story. The reader is you" in collaboration with the storytellers from C@rte in the Villages.
A window to relax the rules related to COVID-19 allowed us to physically participate in the "Sail a Future" event organized by OBA.
We had the artist Ștefan Postol who coordinated a painting workshop where a group of children painted the sail of a boat. Being in the year of Brancusi, Ștefan chose as theme a reinterpretation of the Infinite Column.
We hoped until the last moment that we would be able to physically organise the third Kinderboekenweek: Children's Book Week. This was not possible, instead we indulged ourselves with 5 online evenings with guests K.J. Mecklenfeld, Fabulafia magazine, Frontiera publishing house and the Boovie book-trail festival.
And, because we wanted to end the year on a high note, we organized two exceptional meetings during the Christmas Vibes Online festival in December: an interview with actress Oana Pellea (a discussion facilitated by the collaboration with the For Children and Crystal Children Foundations) and an interview with physicist and inventor Cristian Presură and co-founders of the Romanian Science Festival: Eliza Casapopol and Sandor Kurk.
But many of these events would not have been possible without the support received from Department for Romanians Abroad through a grant awarded between August and November.
