Hundreds of laptop-toting professionals and students line up outside the public library in the Ukrainian town of Irpin, desperate to get plugged in and online amid the latest energy blackout.
Children use flashlights as they attend a meeting of their literature club in a public library during a power outage in Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, on December 23, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Genya Savilov/ AFP
With much of Irpin still in ruins, the library is also functioning as an alternative classroom for displaced schoolteachers, a makeshift office for psychotherapists or even a base for the town's Saint Nicholas to greet and take pictures with children. After a month-long battle marked by heavy urban combat, Russia pulled out of Irpin in late March, leaving behind hundreds of dead civilians, according to official estimates."It seemed to me there was no one but us in the city," said resident Victoria Voskresova, recalling the first weeks after the Russians fled, when some houses in her neighborhood were still ablaze.
With her 7-year-old daughter Maria in tow, Voskresova approached the entrance somewhat sheepishly, mindful she had three overdue books— checked out before the war—that she still had not finished."We received some sweets, and that's why we come with our children on this occasion, in order to lift our spirits," she said.
Yet these high-profile odes to Irpin pale in significance to the daily work of the library in boosting public morale.
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