Sustainability...

Reading about blueEnergy.org, an outfit that builds wind and solar arrays to bring power to low-income communities, I noticed that they are going through the same growing pains as FAVL in terms of the "business model" and careful attention to the long-term. My colleague Alex Field has (coined?) a wonderful phrase for what you want to avoid: "the install and go syndrome." At FAVL we tell people we are in the 50 year game... that our measure of success is when our first generation of readers comes back to their village and their children and grandchildren read the same books they enjoyed now.

Blogging from Sumbrungu

Anne and Christi are two students volunteering in Sumbrungu, Ghana. They are helping to set up some reading programs in the libraries, and have started a blog... they only have about 10 days left though... so much to see and do though!

A cautionary tale....

A library supporter involved with a stand-alone project in Kenya writes:

The library is stagnating a bit because the mother of the woman who runs it has fallen ill and she has returned to her home village for a while-- it's amazing that it really can be something as simple as that that can affect a whole project like this. I can't even get in touch with the woman...

Building the institutional counterpart to the physical building, so that there is a whole mesh/web/network of people involved in assuring/securing a local community library is way more difficult than starting up a library with four walls and 2,000 books... As FAVL gets more experience I realize this more and more every day- that our mission isn't really about "building libraries" but rather about setting up the "servicing company" that will endure for decades as a friend to these small libraries, ensuring that they survive the thousand and one obstacles to small-scale projects in rural villages. African villages have so much risk and change- completely different from the image most people in developed countries have of an unchanging village...

[in French] Opening of "mask exhibit" in Karaba

This report is from our Burkina coordinator Viviane Nabie:
Exposition de masques a Karaba. La deuxième exposition des masques qui entre dans le cadre de la promotion des bibliothèques de villages, a eut lieu ce Dimanche 22 Juillet 2007 à Karaba. Etaient présents a cette cérémonie la population de Karaba, les chefs de services, Monsieur le Maire de la commune de Houndé, Monsieur Maurice DOMBOUE et son épouse, ainsi que deux étudiantes Belges, Ann et Helen. Le discours des Belges s’est accompagné d’un don d’une dizaine de livres à la bibliothèque (confer rapport a venir de la gérante). A l’issu des discours, se fut la visite de l’exposition des masques. Cette visite fut d’une importance capitale pour la population et les invites de part les multiples questions qu’ils posaient aux gérants. Les questions n’étaient pas seulement posées sur les masques, mais aussi sur le fonctionnement de la bibliothèque. Au regard de certaines questions posées et de l’attention que la population accordait aux explications, on pouvait aisément deviner que certains n’avaient jamais mis le pied dans la bibliothèque. Par exemple, quand on expliquait les conditions d’abonnement à la bibliothèque, un vieil homme répétait exactement ce qu’on disait en secouant la tête pour dire qu’il a compris maintenant. Il a été demande aux vieux de souvent s’asseoir avec les enfants sous le hangar et raconter de histoires, ou simplement causer avec eux car les portes de la cour leurs sont également ouvertes. Les jeunes quant à eux se regroupaient au tour des jeux de puzzle pour essayer de jouer. Nous pouvons dire donc par toutes ces réactions que les objectifs de FAVL ont été atteints, a savoir, faire comprendre a la population que l’accès de la bibliothèque leur est donné et qu’il peuvent chacun selon son age trouver son intérêt en fréquentant la bibliothèque.

What books by African authors can FAVL use?

Turns out the readers of Amazon.com have many many lists of fine novels by African authors... here is a sampling
African novels list 1
African novels list 2
African novels list 3
African novels list 4
African novels list 5

How to participate in development?

A friend writes (paraphrasing and some editing)...
Michael, it is the old retail vs wholesale question. If you are Bill Gates, you think big picture. If you have $1000 to give, you take on a precise project. I took a generator to Rwanda in 1994 for an orphanage; very fulfilling project. Big help to them...If my friend and I have say, $25,000 to spend on Darfur, how should we spend it? Give to Oxfam for village aid on the Chad border, give to African Union for troops, give to Save Darfur divestiture campaign, give to lobbying to pressure US to aid a military intervention, enforce a no military-fly zone over Darfur. (It is funny that we are appealing to the US govt. like it is so limited a power, like France, not the world's superpower. Nick K's reports from Rwanda are most informing to me.) The world, UN does not want to take over running Darfur like it has in Kosovo.

I think there are limits to the big change model: you get a model project funded, then if successful, you apply it to the big picture. When you know the big picture problems are so overwhelming, is it good faith to embark on a Sach's-like project, which by the way a Harper's article a few months ago (for subscribers only; a free description is here) was very critical of in Kenya, knowing that you cannot get funding for big picture. Is it then enough to say, "Oh, we tried." I don't have the answer here, just concerns.

Reading is related to drawing

Kids reading illustrated books have an irresistible urge to draw the illustrations themselves, if they have paper and pencil, and especially if they have crayons and markers. Guess what? Almost no kids in African villages have crayons and markers, let alone a clean sheet of paper. In a world where used newspaper and cement bags are recycled as wrapping for street food, it is almost too frivolous to buy a clean sheet of paper just for a child to scribble on. Or is it? Perhaps early exposure to scribbling, drawing, coloring, tracing... helps you succeed in school so you won't have to earn your living selling roadside food wrapped in a piece of old cement bag... We'd like to run some programs, if we had funding, to see whether there are some significant longer-term impacts. The academic literature seems sparse on this question.

Reading a book in Sumbrungu Community Library

Would Jean Hegland let her children sit on a crocodile?

This is the obligatory picture from a mare sacrée (crocodile lake)... they are all over Burkina and northern Ghana, and the crocs eat a lot of chickens... Elliot has watched a lot of the late (and missed) Steve Irwin, so he was psyched... Now, I am reading Jean Hegland's Windfalls. The first five pages I started thinking uh oh... but about page twenty I got that sinking feeling that if I exercised no willpower I would stay up all night. So I put it down, reluctantly, and am very ready to start reading in a few minutes (it is late here in California).

Just where on earth is the Sumbrungu library?

You can find it as the east wing of the Sumbrungu Community Women's Center on Google earth by putting in the latitude and longitude in the photo at right... can you find it? The Women;s Center is not yet marked in the community layers... apparently they update only once a month.

The day the roof blew off...

Violent storms are a commonplace in Sahelian Africa, and a particularly nasty gust of wind took off the rook of the Bereba library last week. The "A Team" leapt into action and contracted the local masons to repair the roof with new "tin sheets"... and the mayor of Bereba mobilized resources to provide a temporary home for the books while the repairs were underway. Back in the reading business, are we... (Yodaspeak?).

How much has Africa changed in 30 years?

Somehow I find myself simultaneously reading J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K published in 1983 and Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des Independances published in 1970. Both are uncompromising and beautifully written bleak portraits of the human condition (what do you make of being, essentially, alone) in a particular context (Africa spiraling out of control). They both make me think back to Cormack McCarthy's The Road which I read earlier in the year. The sheer physical toll on the bodies of the characters is what is so true, commonplace and yet so absent from the life of the person/reader in a wealthy society. It is interesting how many people try nevertheless to recreate that human body experience with excruciating endurance feats... climbing mountains, etc.
Kourouma's writing is so assured... he's just totally in command of what he wants to say, you feel his prowess rippling through the pages. He can transition from sentence to sentence in a way that makes you realize, "He wrote that deliberately, that way, and he thought about it a lot, and it works beautifully."