Christian sirouyan
07/26/2021 17:19
Clarín.com
Zonal
Updated 07/26/2021 5:19 PM
After more than half a century, the history of the Florentino Ameghino Popular Library continues to travel along the same lines. Just as, in 1964, Brígida Walsh de Ghibaudi and Elena de Flamarión led the almost impossible crusade that meant gathering more than a thousand books and being able to open the doors of that dreamed place to the rejoicing of the
Luis Guillón
community
,
today Anabella Manoukian - Walsh's granddaughter - sets out to recover the pleasure of reading in close contact with paper and nature, at a rather prudent distance from digital screens.
More than
30 thousand volumes
and a park decorated with native trees, flower beds, benches and the suggestive figure of the sculpture “Chaotic balance” - created by local artist Patricia Simek - await the public to suggest a relaxed generational crossing.
From the crowded shelves that make up the comic collection scenes from
"Patoruzú", "El Eternauta", "Superman" and "Mafalda"
emerge
,
while the sector of scientific and university texts protects the landmarks of the rural and desolate past of the party of Esteban Echeverría, where strong names linked to the area stand out, such as the landowner and landowner Ramón Santamarina and the renowned deputy, senator and leader of Avellaneda, Alberto Barceló.
About 30 thousand books make up the collection of the Florentino Ameghino Popular Library, in Luis Guillón.
On one side of the literary area, the Children's and Bebeteca Corner admits those precocious beings who are prone to discovering letters and their signifiers through play.
"A community with a library changes, it is not the same if it does not have one," Manoukian underlines as a mantra, a kind of founding slogan that he seems to have inherited from his grandmother.
A librarian and lawyer, the hostess leads - overflowing with genuine pride - the tour of the path that connects the main building with the
Brígida Walsh Cultural Center.
To the sides, the close-cut lawn is the bucolic setting where there is a kibon class for seniors, yoga sessions for children, gymnastics and tai-chi and a talk on solid waste.
None of this - not even the concert held in treble by the birds - gets to alter the ritual of reading in the open air practiced by a handful of neighbors absorbed in open pages.
Some of them are part of the
300 members of the library,
a mass of unconditional faithful who do not usually miss the folk clubs, the traditional Welsh Tea scheduled annually for October or November - promoted by the Scottish community of the area, which contributes its color of dances and bagpipes-, the “Coffee talk” meetings and the activities that are organized in March, within the framework of Women's Month.
Anabella Manoukian, in charge of the Florentino Ameghino Popular Library, in Luis Guillón.
At the foot of an elderly ombú, a plaque summons visitors for a moment to the only corner of the outdoor promenade reserved to remember “Mamana”, as Walsh was called in the family sphere.
Under that enormous cloak of shadow, the memories of the granddaughter's childhood are stirred.
The girl Anabella resurfaces through the story helping the grandmother to look for ant hills, watering the first plants, painting walls alongside brothers and neighbors with no interest other than a collective objective, labeling books, nailing shelves and loading the water motor before to turn it on.
Children's Corner and Bebeteca, in the Florentino Ameghino Popular Library, in Luis Guillón.
Brígida Walsh was the undisputed baton of that mission of solidarity.
He exercised his love for books for everyone and plants in that empty lot that he knew how to transform into a library until he turned 97, four years before his death, in 2007.
At that point, the co-founder of Irish roots had come a long way, since she slipped part of her idea by presenting plays and essays by Pericón Nacional on the porch of her house and began to shape her inclusive library project in a rented garage.
The Walsh epic was also sustained by a cast of neighborhood squires, people of simple habits and austere routines who donated books, mosaics and plates to shape the library, as their own patrimony that could only bring them gratification.
The scope of Walsh's legacy seems to extend to the mission of selecting repeated textbooks - initiated in the context of the pandemic - to contribute to the opening of libraries in community kitchens and picnic areas in the area.
Entrance to the Brígida Walsh Cultural Center, part of the Florentino Ameghino Popular Library, in Luis Guillón.
Men and women of all ages offer their hands for the new solidarity action.
Their voices are intermingled with the sounds of the ten guitars of Los Compadritos del Sur –supplied from the Luis Guillón Middle School of Art-, alternated with the rehearsals of the Library Youth Orchestra, the Adult Theater group and the band La Vagabunda.
The multifaceted library is also the fruit of Manoukian's revealing trip to Germany in 2016. “Everything at the hands of the people” he observed in those voluminous libraries in the European country.
But he did not hesitate to return to his place in the world, "The city of gardens" where he took the post left by his grandmother and the residents of Luis Guillón who knew how to value the unbreakable will of their illustrious neighbor.
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