Many of you have heard of Edward de Bono, and his thinking hats. I'm not terribly familiar with these hats of his, but I have heard of them over the years.

Do you believe in fate?

 We have had an exciting thing happen in the last few months. We have been able to assist a school library to reopen its doors to the students and teachers.

 What do the children at Gleno kindergarten talk to each other about?

Some very generous visitors gave us a great book earlier last year. It is about World War II in Timor-Leste. Despite it being topical, even containing accounts of some events in our District, the book did not pass the screening process of library staff. The reason they didn't accept this book is that it was in high-level English, and therefore inaccessible to most people here.

Can you imagine if there were only four novels or novellas in English???

In the last four weeks we published the fourth literary work published in Tetun. That's right – four.

We've spent some time this week putting together a display for adults in our community who can't read. There are some good adult literacy books around, which we gathered together from amongst our collection. We put them together with the wordless picture books that we had sewn up for us during the year.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to meet with a delegation of Australian parliamentary members. They were in Timor as part of the Australian Joint Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

Beef is only available for special occasions in East Timor. I asked a child at the library the other day about what meats they liked. Beef was the definite winner. I went on to say how much I looked forward to Thursdays, which is market day and the only day you can buy fresh meat in Gleno. I asked how often they eat meat. The answer was: at weddings, engagement parties and funerals. I could have cried.

We have just had two long time supporters of the Biblioteka – a married couple – visiting for a week. Yesterday there was a small reception for them at the library, during which they were formally met by Cosme (Management Committee member), Adelino (Coordinator of the library) and Lucinda (Vice-Coordinator of the library).