What else do we need?

Neschen transparent contact paper to cover books. Want to send us several boxes? Please do. Amis des Bibliotheques de Village Africains, 09 B.P. 938, Ouagadougou 09, Burkina Faso.

Dohoun Village Library on Burkinabe television

You can't have an ambassaor and a minister and not get some tv coverage... FAVL VP Leslie Gray was prominently featured. And I appeared for a split second holding Sukie!

Letters we like to receive at FAVL. This one comes from Wisconsin. Thank you, Genevieve!

What are masks ?

Mask is the wrong word in French, and even worse in English, but no one has come up with a better substitute yet. Christopher Roy has an excellent online introduction. An extract, « At their initiation ceremony, initiates learn the meanings of the geometric signs that cover the masks, explained by elders, who use the masks themselves as models, and who also use rectangular boards on which the same signs have been painted. Initially, each of the signs is explained independently of other signs, using didactic boards. Then the meanings of the assembled signs on specific plank masks are explained. The combination of signs communicates a moral or historical lesson that is an essential part of the initiation. These lessons describe the virtues of the ideal, respected member of the community, and the dangers of straying from the path of social behavior marked out by the ancestors. They also illustrate the myths of the founding of the clans. The meaning of each sign can vary depending on the age and level of understanding of the initiate, for only the oldest understand the most profound meanings of the signs. »

Photo: U.S. Ambassador Jeanine Jackson next to an alligator mask, Dohoun village library

More photos from Dohoun

Mask exhibit in Dohoun

There was much celebration in Dohoun Thursday as Minister of Information Joseph Kahoun, a Dohoun native, welcomes Ambassador Jeanine Jackson to the village. The occasion was the opening, in the village library, of an exposition of Bwaba masks. The masks were mostly produced by the sculpting association of the village of Boni, under the direction of Yacouba Bonde and Abdoulaye Ouédraogo. Some of the masks were produced by the sculptors of Houndé. Ambassador Jackson took the opportunity to present to the library and both of Dohoun’s primary schools with sets of school books that the U.S. Embassy provides to educational facilities. The books for the village library have a value of almost $700, so FAVL and the village library committee were very happy! We try to have in each library several sets of school books for the school children of the village, so this is a big help. The mask exhibit will be up in Dohoun for several months, and then will move to one of the other libraries, and a new exhibit will be mounted in Dohoun.

Another drawing from Elisee

This is a small watercolor we are going to give U.S. Ambassador Jackson when she comes to the library for a visit of our mask exhibit. Wyoming in Burkina...

Delighful children's book ... The Golden Compass

If you read about the goat wedding (see below) then you know that there are a bunch of nine year old girls here in Ouagadougou... They all seem to be big readers; Elliot was loaned the Golden Compass... which Leslie and I promptly read, the back cover was very intriguing, and quite rightly so... a delightful book for children 8 and up and adults too (who can read it in about 4 enjoyable hours). The imagery is quite unforgettable.

Surveillance and control: Foucault sets up a village library?

FAVL co-director Kate Parry writes: It is important to give each member as well as each book a unique number and to record that number whenever anyone borrows a book; names alone won't do because many people give different versions of their names at different times. We give each book a simple accession number and write it on a label stuck on the front of the book. We also write the category of the book on the same label. By now we have about 30 categories, which is rather a lot, but it still seems to work (and when Valeda Dent, who's head of the reference section at the Hunter College library came to do research at Kitengesa she declared that it was a pretty good system!).

I may add that no discussions are more heated among librarians than the issue of how to organize books in a small village library staffed by local “level high-school or less” librarians (as opposed to librarians trained in library colleges, who are not available for hire in any case in a small remote village!). No flaming on the FAVL blogsite please! (And that applies especially to certain law librarians of my acquaintance…)

Books for libraries in East Africa

FAVL co-director Kate Parry sends the following useful summary of what kinds of books are useful in her experience working with Kitengesa Community Library in Uganda:

The most popular genre of all in the Kitengesa Community Library is Traditional Stories, and Fountain Publishers, in Kampala, produces a nice series of them called African Heritage Series; but what we call Modern Stories--stories set in modern times, generally with African protagonists, are also popular and are much easier to find. One should also try to get at least one complete set of textbooks in each subject at both primary and secondary level (the primary books for Tanzania will be in Swahili); and reference books such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases are much appreciated. Dictionaries are especially important, and Kitengesa students have found the Cambridge International Dictionary most accessible, but I think the later editions of Oxford's Advanced Learner's Dictionary are also good, and that one can be bought at a subsidized rate. Those two are monolingual English dictionaries, but for Tanzania one should also get one or two bilingual ones in English and Swahili. East African Educational Publishers is a good source for novels and also for textbooks -- and the short simple story books that are most popular cost much less than $5 here in Uganda they are more like $2 or $3. People keep saying that they also want practical books about rural occupations and concerns--horticulture, animal husbandry, skills such as carpentry--but our experience at Kitengesa is that these books are not actually borrowed much. Nevertheless, if people say they want them they should have them. A Catholic organization, Pauline Publications, produces many small books, mainly in English, about health education (from the Catholic point of view, of course, but the advice is sensible for everybody), social relationships, etc. We classify these books as Health and Morals and, apart from the story books, they are the most popular--girls, in particular, appreciate having simple books about the "secret" matters of sex and reproduction. Pauline Pubs. also produce a very good English Bible, the African Bible (the text is based on the American one but there are notes that are directly relevant to Africa), and in studies of adult villagers' reading in East Africa, the Bible also ranks high. So get that one, if many of your population are Catholic, and also, of course, get one in Swahili.

Beth Jacobs blogs about life in Burkina

And you can read about the goat wedding...

Drawing

Sare Elisee is making some drawings for us about people using the library. Here is one of his first attempts. He’s eager for suggestions and help, if you want to offer some advice and encouragement!

Making a village library (Part 2)

What books should be stocked in a village library? This is not a difficult question is one remembers two things.

(1) Few of the books donated by American or European donors will be read as much as books published locally. This is only natural! Imagine a teenager faced with the choice of reading a short novel about an African teenager who leaves the village for the city and finds tragedy, or reading a short novel about an American teenager who befriends the ‘mean girl’ clique in her high school and begins using drugs, only to realize at the end that she has taken the wrong path. The vocabulary, cover, inflection… everything about the first book says, “I am for you.” Everything about the second book says, “You are not for me.” So donated books have to be treated with care. But they have a gigantic advantage: they are nearly free. Shipping books via the U.S. postal service is about $2 per hardcover book by air about 50 cents by surface. Compare that with a typical cost (in Burkina Faso) of $10 per book. It is worth taking the chance on donated books, and even if the readership is not there yet, the cost differential means that only about one tenth of the readership is needed. What is our practice? Donated children’s books that are animal stories, or firmly multicultural or rooted in a pre-industrial setting (not about shopping in a big-box store, or dealing primarily with electrical appliances), are what we want for younger children. For older children it is harder to know where tastes will lie, but again the level of immersion in local popular culture (how much slang is used?, how many ‘product placements’ does the book have?) is a key factor. “He glanced at his Rolex watch while reaching for the Kristal as the Lear 458 soared above his McMansion in East Hampton… ahh, life was good.” Of course, if the next sentence were, “Little did he know, his plane was destined to crash-land in a baobab tree near Kenedougou,” then your donor has to get a gold star!

(2) What most young African students want to read are novels set in their own time, about themselves. If there were a strong African science fiction or fantasy genre then probably that would be read too, but like adolescents everywhere the immediate attraction of novels is for being able to digest one’s own life. You do not have to be a Benedict Anderson devotee to realize this!

So our experience is that about 500 donated books and 200 African novels, coupled with a complete set of primary and secondary school books, and appropriate reference materials (dictionaries, atlas) are more than enough as a base for a library that will have 100-200 regular uses, which is our experience in smallish villages of 1000-2000 persons in Burkina Faso, where most adults are not literate. Rounding out the library stock should be local language books, foreign language books and dictionaries, government documents, practical how-to pamphlets, etc.

I will write more about these later. Let me just say that if transport services and logistics allow, newspaper subscriptions can be a crucial leverage for support by key community members (educated and ambitious men!). But newspaper subscriptions are very difficult to manage in many cases, and full details should be elucidated from your local partners before approving newspaper subscriptions, as this is a major way to “eat” the money of the library.

Scary reading

Vincent Ouattara's book on the trial of 20 alleged coup plotters is a scary and revealing book. Unfortunately you cannot find the truth here: ordinary persons and authors probably will never know the truth of these murky affairs. But the process, the banality, the contortions... you are happy to not be a part of their lives...

So you want to establish a village library? (Part 1)

It is very hard to do harm by trying to establish a library. You, however, as an intelligent, advice-seeking human, want to do more than not harm. You want to be effective. You want your effort to leave a shadow, preferably one that lengthens as you grow older. Your children and their children should have something to be proud of. So here are my thoughts about how to be effective in helping to establish a village library.
I will say this only once: You are important. Of course, the people you are working with are important. But you are critical: if you were not, there would already be a library, wouldn’t there? I will say this many times: Think about why there isn’t a library, and whether you are truly prepared to be effective. Important as you are, establishing an effective library that endures will require years of your time. If you are not prepared to give that, then do not begin. Why waste everyone else’s time?
You may be wealthy enough to buy the time of someone else to manage the establishment of the library, or be working in a country where management already exists. But for most very poor African countries, let me assure you that promises of effective management by government officials are just promises. Again, we call upon the subjunctive: If they haven’t been able to get an adequate and regular supply of chalk into the school classroom, how will they be able to manage the library effectively? Worse, the promises are often not well-intentioned, but an effort to turn a library into a trough for feeding corrupt local leaders and officials. In that case, you may well be doing more harm than good. “Who would steal from children?” you might ask. Lots of people, is the sad answer.
Many aspects of establishing a library are easy. Perhaps the easiest is the infrastructure of the library: building, shelves, tables and chairs, books, desks and equipment. This is the turnkey library. It is the most satisfying part for the library entrepreneur. You get to cut a ribbon, watch traditional dancing and singing while sipping a lukewarm soda, make a speech, and share the photo opportunity.
First, the building. The idea of establishing libraries came after I saw how inexpensive it was to put up a mud-brick building in Burkina Faso. My wife and I build a small house, about 300 square feet, for about $3000. This is a very simple building, with a tin roof, a couple of metal shutters and a metal door. Very rustic; in fact, what we instructed the builders to do was build a house exactly the same as the home we had rented for a year, that had been build by a local railway worker as a house for his family when he retired. A small library, I reasoned, should not cost more than this, and indeed the first library we built, in Béréba, was slightly smaller than the house and cost less, since we used mud bricks instead of quarried bricks. Bricks, incidentally, cost 10 CFA each in southwestern Burkina Faso, or about 2 cents. Transporting the bricks costs as much as the bricks, an additional 10 CFA each. Each brick is about 6 inches high and 12 inches long. So how many bricks does it take to build a library? If the square of the building is 20 feet by 20 feet, and the height is about 15 feet, then you need about 2500 bricks, which cost about $100. A
building never takes longer than a month to build, so figure three people working a full month earning $100 each (triple the average income, but builders are skilled workers) adds about $300. The cost of the building thus is not where you think, the bricks and the sweat. The cost is in the tin roof (40 sheets for a typical building), the timbers (“Raise high the roof beam?”, but we could just call them long poles) for the roof, and the cement for the foundation (i.e. the floor; no village building has a proper foundation) and to plaster the interior and exterior walls smooth. The exterior has to be protected against the rain (and in Burkina Faso those who are short of money will just cement over the two sides of the building that face northwards, since the rains almost always come from that direction).

Something that we need... a paper drill

The quality of bookbinding in African presses is terrible- for one thing, they use single sheets rather than folded folio sheets... so of course, after 3-4 readings the pages start to fall out. One of our librarians, Sanou Dounko, has learned how to rebind the books, by punching holes through the binding edge and then threading the pages together. But you need a good paper drill to do that... can't punch holes through 200 pages by hand... Can you help? the machine costs 899 dollars! Yikes. But we really do need it. We are looking into a cheaper Chinese-made drill that might be purchased here, but I worry about its durability.

Volunteer help to build a village library

In the village of Dohoun, Omer and Lazare are two courteous gentlemen who care a lot about education. They have shepherded the library through village politics, and helping FAVL and the librarians at every moment. Here they are building the thatch roof of the ‘hangar’ where children’s story hours are held.

Mask exhibit

Guess what! We're preparing something new... an exhibit of Bwa masks for the libraries... We've budgeted about four hundred dollars to purchase a small collection for the local maskmakers, and then the exhibit can be on display at each library for a couple of months. Many of the people in the villages have never seen the big Bwa masks, especially women from other ethnic groups. So it should be very interesting, and we will keep you posted. Interested in sponsoring something really special for the exhibit? Do send us a check, and we'll send you a photo!

Die with honor

My brother and sister both highly recommended reading Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy, and what can I say- for an evening read (about 130 pages) it is gripping and the writing, even in translation, is so elegant you wish you also had been born on a large estate with private tutors and a sense of your own importance. Instead, you are a cog in the machine reading Tolstoy while swaths of destruction expand daily in Iraq, and commentators on the BBC mock common sense (« How many have died in Iraq ? Why don’t we call for intervention there ? Why does the West care so much about Darfur ? »). n.b. When I do the google image search for the book cover, what do I find but that Steve Reeves acted the part of Hadji Murad in a film... Reeves was a friend of my father when I was a child in Italy...

More photos... see below

Landscape tourism in Burkina Faso

Some photos for our three day trip to the south west of Burkina Faso. We spent an afternoon exploring with a very nice guide, Issa Gourou, who is affiliated with the Cane a Sucre hotel (where we stayed, very nice but expensive). The Domes de Fabedougou were fabulous, the Cascade de Karfiguela very refreshing, and the hippo lake of Tengrela revealed lots of hippo ears and eyes (they mostly stayed underwater) but also some beautiful lily pads and flowers.

Why oh why...?

Did I let myself stay up to 2:00am reading a murder mystery in Ouagadougou... Is it because I am helping run a library project that I feel the compulsion to read, and read again....

Five librarians at a workshop

Because that is what we at FAVL do… Dounko, Ivette, Hakahoun, Halidou and Sylvie are at our new ‘regional office’ (a room in a compound in Hounde that we rent for $15 dollars a month) where we meet every month to discuss library performance etc.

Keeping accounts

The long term success and sustainability of small community libraries depends on two things- the willingness of donors to keep funding these modest ventures that have such an important impact, and the ability of the librarians and local management to keep accurate accounting of those funds. Accounting is something we treat very seriously, even while we understand how hard it is in places like Burkina Faso and Ghana, where most of the population is not literature, and where our librarians have typically gone to school to the 10th grade level. Are you a retired accountant who wants to spend a year in Africa? Come on down!

Reading in national languages

Our emphasis in the libraries we support is to have books that people want to read, not books that we think are good for them to read (what librarians call the Jean-Paul Sartre vs Danielle Steele problem). In Burkina our readers by huge margins want to read African novels (and not Barbie goes shopping). In Ghana the schoolchildren want to read their school texts, and study in the library. In both places, there is a small but growing demand for books in local languages- Gurunya in the Bolgatanga, Ghana area and Djula in southwestern Burkina Faso. Trouble is, there are almost no books printed in those languages. So we stock what we can get, and watch them get read over and over… Here is Darius with a Gurunya text donated by the Ghana Regional Library Board to the Sumbrungu Community Library.

Hard or easy?

Visiting libraries looks easy (smiles, beers, Mercedes) but remember, it is 105 degrees, so your clothes feel like they have been in the oven. The Mercedes is a 1987 diesel, with no air conditioning. It is the car of choice in West Africa because the Germans (apparently) are giving them away for practically nothing, and once lots of people have the spare parts and mechanic expertise to repair, it is better to buy what everyone else has. The beer is usually warm (did I say it was hot? And these are villages after all). But the smiles are real!