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Happy Ramadan Librarians!

by Naomi House, MLIS

Happy Ramadan Librarians!

AUE 7Happy Ramadan!

Many of you know my husband, Sana, is Muslim and from Pakistan. Usually Pakistan is a day behind the US for starting Ramadan, but only the moon shall tell. 🙂  I have observed Ramadan 3 times, only once successfully, and certainly not in the heat of summer.  So sending safe vibes to all observant Muslims this month!

This isn’t really meant to be an instructional or deep post on the observance, just a friendly, hey there, thinking of all y’all and wishing you well.  The years I did it were very humbling.  We fasted from food AND water and other pleasures from sun up to sun down.  We were reminded through this of those globally who do without access to clean water and nutritious food and how blessed and lucky we are.  Each year it moves back 10 days so that in one lifetime you experience and practice this observation all times of the year.

Last year we were blistering away part of the Holy Month of Ramadan in the Las Vegas heat at ALA, and this year I will be here in the sweltering heat of New Orleans.  Don’t tell me air conditioning makes it better, it dries you out even more.  Nothing but the pure mountain air will do.  Must plan better next year. 😉

 

photo is from our 2013 visit to the UAE and my presentation at the American University of the Emirates, and UAE’s very first MLIS program! 

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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