Fiction from Sudan,,, Leila Aboulela, The Translator

Oddly enough, I'd just been talking with a friend about the apparent lack of Sudanese novelists accessible to English-speaking readers, apart from the recently deceased Tayeb Salih, and I literally "randomly" picked this novel from the stacks at my neighborhood library- I was browsing in the fiction section looking for African writers.

Judging from Aboulela's biography and an interview, it is a very personal novel. Definitely gives a perspective on Islam that you will not find in most novels. More Graham Greenish in it's explicit invocation of faith and crisis of faith (in religion, in one's self). She's an excellent writer, though not the same caliber as Salih, Achebe, Okri, Coetzee, etc., but then again, who is? I recommend the novel- it is short... but in full disclosure have to add that I was in the end disappointed. The ending is very pat. There was one wonderful passage, though. One about how Sammar, the main character, reconnects with her son who she hadn't seen in four years. I loved Aboulela's description of Sammar holding her son, now older, and playing "baby" with him, the only time he allows himself to enjoy that special intimacy between parent and child. Very moving.

What to do in summer reading camp? Collage!

Sare Elisee worked with some kids in Sumbrungu library, Ghana how to do it when he was there last May. He called the picture "fly eagle fly" and it's what we want kids to do!

Waah, why couldn't I be there....

A party to celebrate English and German translation of BD illustrated by Pov (left) and written by Jean-Claude de l`Estrac (right).

The amazing power of Lois Lowry

So I just paused for breath and found that I had read 123 pages of the semi-sequel to The Giver, entitled Gathering Blue. So far it is a beautiful children's story. It is a truism that the best stories always involve an orphan with a special destiny, who hears the voice of her mother in her dreams and times of stress, calmly evoking the warmth of the hearth. But Lowry takes that commonplace and makes you want to be that orphan.

Research based education programming

I found this blog post on a recent column by David Brooks to be very interesting. As FAVL moves increasingly into evaluation of programs, it is worth bearing in mind that even the best program evaluators (i.e. Fryer) can be subject to lots of immodestly... All of it worth keeping in mind the next time you read a study about the amazing power of books.

Just How Gullible Is David Brooks?
Gotham Schools ^ | 8 May 2009 | Aaron Pallas

Posted on Monday, May 11, 2009 4:46:09 PM by Bob017

Now that I have your attention … Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks touts a new study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academy charter schools, two celebrated schools in Harlem. Fryer and Dobbie’s finding that the typical eighth-grader was in the 74th percentile among New York City students in mathematics leads Brooks to state that HCZ Promise Academy eliminated the black-white achievement gap. He’s so dumbstruck by this that he says it twice. Brooks takes this evidence as support for the “no excuses” model of charter schools, and, claiming that “the approach works,” challenges all cities to adopt this “remedy for the achievement gap.”

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s release of the 2009 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) results, in which the HCZ schools outperformed the citywide white average in grade 3, but were well behind the white average in grades 4, 5 and 8, skoolboy decided to drink a bit more deeply from the datastream. The figure below shows the gap between the average performance in HCZ Promise Academy and white students in New York City in ELA and math, expressed as a fraction of the standard deviation of overall performance in a given grade and year. The left side of the figure shows math performance, and the right side shows ELA performance.

It’s true that eighth-graders in 2008 scored .20 standard deviations above the citywide average for white students. But it may also be apparent that this is a very unusual pattern relative to the other data represented in this figure, all of which show continuing and sizeable advantages for white students in New York City over HCZ students. The fact that HCZ seventh-graders in 2008 were only .3 standard deviations behind white students citywide in math is a real accomplishment, and represents a shrinkage of the gap of .42 standard deviations for these students in the preceding year. However, Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point — the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE’s) range from 1 to 99, and are scaled to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 21.06. An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics. The HCZ Annual Report doesn’t offer this as a possibility, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to admit that students didn’t take some aspect of their schoolwork and school accountability plan seriously. But the three explanations that are offered are not compelling: the Iowa test skills were not consistently aligned with the New York State Standards and the Harcourt Curriculum used in the school; the linkage of classroom instruction to the skills tested on the Iowa test wasn’t consistent across the school year, and Iowa test prep began in February, 2008; and school staff didn’t use 2007 Iowa test results to identify areas of weaknesses for individual students and design appropriate intervention.

If proficiency in English and math are to mean anything, these skills have to be able to generalize to contexts other than a particular high-stakes state test. No college or employer is ever going to look at the New York State ELA and math exams in making judgments about who has the skills to be successful in their school or workplace. I’m going to hold off labeling the HCZ schools as the “Harlem Miracle” until there’s some additional evidence supporting the claim that these schools have placed their students on a level academic playing field with white students in New York City.
1 posted on Monday, May 11, 2009 4:46:09 PM by Bob017

And killjoy Charles Murray (who I always understood to be a little weird) actually posted a sensible comment

I’m not being mindlessly pessimistic. The problem is that we have had 40 years of “Miracle in X”—the early Head Start results, the Milwaukee Project, Perry Preschool, the Abecedarian Project, Marva Collins’s schools, and the Infant Health Development Project, to name some of the most widely known stories—and the history is depressingly consistent: an initial research report gets ecstatic attention in the press, then a couple of years later it turns out that the miracle is, at best, a marginal success that is not close to the initial claims.
I haven’t seen the study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie that was the basis for Brooks’s column, but if I’m going to be such a grinch I might as well lay out the kinds of things I will be looking for (these are generic issues, not things that I necessarily think are problems with this particular study) when I get hold of a copy:

1. Selection factors among the students. Did the program deal with a representative sample? Was random assignment used?
2. Comparison group. Who’s in it? Are they comparable to the students in the experimental group?
3. Attrition. What about the students who started the program but dropped out? How many were there? How were they doing when they dropped out?
4. Teaching to the test. After seven years of No Child Left Behind, everybody knows about this one. Worse, there are the school officials who have rigged attendance on the day the test was taken or simply faked the scores—that’s been happening too with high stakes testing.
5. Cherry-picking. Do the reported test scores include all of the tests that the students took, or just the ones that make the program look good?
6. The tests. Do they meet ordinary standards for statistical reliability, predictive validity, etc.
7. Fade-out. Large short-term test score improvements have, without exception to date, faded to modest ones within a few years.”

Georgia teacher helps out!

Teacher Nancy Wilson and her mother recently partnered with African Library Project and FAVL to send off almost 80 boxes of high quality children's books that Nancy had been collecting following decades of service as an elementary school teacher. The books are now en route via container to school libraries being setup under a program organized by African Library Project and their local NGO partners. if you are a teacher or student in the U.S. and want to organize book drives for English-speaking libraries in Africa, then definitely get in touch with ALP- they are doing great work. And don;t let me not mention Books for Africa, another great organization that helps supply all sorts of libraries with books.

News from Uganda

Kate Parry writes:

Some good news. I’ve recently met two young men who have already launched library projects. The first is David Ssemwogerere, who heard about us through Mukhobeh Moses of the Randa Farmers Library. He runs an NGO called D+ (Development Plus) Uganda, which has teamed up with an Australian group called HUG (Help Us Grow -- www.hug.or.au) to establish the Suubi Community Centre, which does all sorts of things but includes a library, at Lubanda village in Kisekka sub-county in Masaka District (one of my relatives lives in that sub-county). The second is Simon Mugabi, a friend of David’s, who is working for Unicef at present in Kenya but is coming home at the end of this year and is well ahead with plans for establishing a Community Empowerment and Development Centre (including a library) at Lwampanga trading centre in Nakasongola District. He, too, has support from abroad – in this case from an American woman named Lori Peacock, who has set up a not-for-profit called Nziza (www.nziza.org) to work in Rwanda and Uganda. Both of them are eager to join UgCLA and have already paid their subscriptions! I’ve sent David the application form and will send Simon his now. I’ve also been in correspondence with Helen Brown, or HUG and hope to meet her when she comes to Uganda next month; and I will write to Lori Peacock to suggest she work with both FAVL and Ready to Read, which is the organization set up by my friend who’s working on libraries in Rwanda. Both David and Simon seem to be very able and experienced and will I’m sure be good contacts for us, as Board members, perhaps, in future, and as facilitators of workshops. So, Grace, expect their application forms, and remind me to give you the 40,000/=.

Simon’s CEDC is library member number 28, Ggaba is still in line to join (Mary is just raising the money from library subscriptions), and we still have all those libraries in Toro lining up (I’ll be writing to them soon). So I’m sure we will have more than 30 libraries by the end of the year.

Librarian trainings and workshops...

FAVL hosts the occasional workshop- it is a necessary part of any enterprise, and the issue is when is it taken to excess. (Many of my university colleagues know what I mean!) I found the following paragraphs from Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler particularly blunt:

(i) Training and the ‘‘Workshop Mentality”
In Malawi as elsewhere Sub-Saharan Africa, the supply of
‘‘training” has created a huge demand. In an incisive analysis
of family planning programs in Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith
(2003) has described the ‘‘workshop mentality,” arguing that
training and workshops provide the ideal intersection of donor
and recipient interests. Donors can believe they are doing something
self-renewing by providing training, while workshop facilitators
can build their patronage ties by providing access to the
per diems, travel allowances, and opportunities for networking
that workshops provide. But we argue that the predominance of
‘‘training” as a core donor-sponsored activity also arises from
the constraints of the sustainability doctrine. If donors are supposed
to help, but without funding substantive programs that
could breed dependency, then training and workshops are the
ideal donor-funded activity: experts will teach people skills, or
better yet teach them to teach skills, which will provide all with
the capacity to provide for their own needs.

The logic of sustainability reinforces the interstitial elites’
commitment to esoteric knowledge. If funders will not finance
substantive projects (VCT, nutrition supplements, paid healthcare
workers, paid teachers or counselors) on an on-going basis
because they would not be sustainable, then ‘‘training” is
one of the only fundable activities. And what is all that training
to consist of? Since the training is in some ways an end in
itself for both donors and those trained, the content of the
training becomes elaborate formalizations of what would
otherwise be common sense.

Swidler, A., & Watkins, S.C., ‘‘Teach a Man to Fish”: The Sustainability Doctrine and Its ..., World Development (2009), doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.11.002

I will add that a refrain that I hear myself repeating to a lot to potential library funders etc is, "It's not that hard to run a village library... a week working in one of our libraries is enough to get all the basic skills for administration." The harder part- storytelling, leading book discussions, imparting the love of reading, animation- is probably better imparted through one-on-one that through a formal workshop. Lots of learning by doing is needed.

World Music interlude... Amadou and Miriam from Mali

Chinua Achebe: Girls at War and Other Stories.

I've been reading Chinua Achebe's 1972 collection Girls at War and Other Stories. Beautifully written stories written mostly in his youth. The stories themselves often end abruptly; he had not mastered the art of the final twist that is so appealing of the short story format. But the excellence of writing is so very much there.

[French] Remerciement de Lecteur de Koumbia, Burkina Faso

Je tiens à vous féliciter tout d’abords pour cette idée à la fois géniale et généreuse de mettre cette bibliothèque si fournie dans cette commune de Koumbia, mais surtout de répondre au besoin si grandissant de nos frères et sœurs en livres d’études et de sensibilisation de la jeunesse (surtout pour les écoliers et les collégiens).

Nous, travailleurs de la commune, partageons aussi ce bonheur. Moi en particulier, en plus d’être profondément touché par votre geste, je trouve en cette bibliothèque d’ailleurs à côté de chez moi, une merveille, j’allais dire une divine providence dans laquelle je ne me fais pas prier. Cette bibliothèque me permet de me cultiver, mais aussi de dompter ma solitude surtout que je viens d’arriver dans cette commune où je ne connaissais personne. Je vous en suis très reconnaissant.

Je souhaiterais néanmoins que cette bibliothèque soit agrandie dans la mesure du possible avec votre soutien.

Merci pour votre attention.

Alexandre Sawadogo

Technicien Supérieur d’Agriculture

en service a Koumbia

Real email exchange, slightly edited

Michael: We wouldn't expand into another country at this point since we don't have the logistics for managing something. But we're partnering with another library organization that also works in East Africa... so between the two of us perhaps something will happen over medium term.

Bob: You are an economist, or businessman...! I am thinking of: Can I get seed money for a project? And you, rightly, can we have a management structure to keep it going as a quality service?

[French] A reader from Dohoun, Burkina Faso, sends his comments

Lecteur de Dohoun

La bibliothèque villageoise de Dohoun a été crée en 2006 par FAVL. En tant que lecteur fidèle de cette bibliothèque, j’ai saisi l’occasion qui m’est offerte pour vous transmettre des informations sur ladite bibliothèque. Elles concernent trois points essentiels qui sont les suivants : Les avantages de la bibliothèque, le profit que je tire de la bibliothèque et enfin mon point de vue sur la bibliothèque.

Les avantages de la bibliothèque
- La lecture : Etant un acte de distraction, cette activité a permis aux lecteurs de se cultiver, de s’instruire et de s’informer.
- Les manuels scolaires : La bibliothèque disposant de manuels scolaires conduit chaque année nos écoliers à obtenir des résultats très satisfaisants aux examens de fin d’année
- Réduit le taux de chômage dans notre village : grâce au patrimoine de la bibliothèque, les chômeurs qui ont des diplômes sont bien préparés pour affronter les différents concours de la fonction publique et les tests de recrutement. Ce qui nous laisse voir certaines personnes qui après avoir passé deux ou cinq ans au village se retrouvent dans des écoles de formation professionnelle.
- Pour terminer, je dirai que la bibliothèque est un véritable lieu de retrouvailles car disposant de ces différents jeux éducatifs, attire les analphabètes. Ceux-ci à force de la fréquenter pourront s’alphabétiser petit a petit avec le temps.

Le profit que je tire de la bibliothèque
Avant la création de la bibliothèque, j’aimais la lecture, mais les conditions dans lesquelles je me trouvais m’amenaient à me poser ces questions : lire quel roman ou quel journal et ou les trouver et ou les lire ? Depuis sa création toutes ces questions ont eu leurs réponses et dès lors je suis devenu un grand amoureux de la lecture car celle-ci dispose d’une variété de romans, journaux, bouquins, livres etc. En d’autres termes le profit de la bibliothèque pour moi est qu’elle m’a permis de me cultiver, de m’instruire et de m’informer.

Mon point de vue sur la bibliothèque
En ce qui concerne la bibliothèque villageoise de Dohoun, j’aurais sollicité à FAVL de bien vouloir penser a notre bibliothèque qui fonctionne depuis 2006 sans électricité, pendant l’hivernage, les gens passent toute la journée en brousse. Ce qui veut dire que c’est dans la nuit que les amoureux de la lecture vont vouloir lire, mais avec quelle électricité ?

Pour conclure, je sollicite à FAVL de doter chaque village africain d’une bibliothèque villageoise, car selon moi la bibliothèque villageoise est considérée comme un centre culturel de proximité. Or sans culture, il n’y a pas de développement.

Liehoun Dofinido
Dohoun

Finally finished Jean Marie Le Clézio's Onitsha

And I don't have much positive to say. For the first hundred pages I was in great admiration of the prose, but then he switches prose style when he gets to Geoffrey Allen's ruminations on scarification and mother Africa, and it got too weird and frankly boring. I forced myself to continue reading- it's a Nobel Prize winning author, after all. But maybe it was not his best effort- I've read a number of his shorter pieces and they are much more interesting. Indian blogger braindrain has a nice piece after reading a pirated English translation, but comes to an opposite conclusion....

A beautifully written book, about the intolerance and brutality of colonial powers and the destruction of native culture and exploitation of their resources. The prose is very clear and straight forward , and look at the events at difference perspective of the child, mother and the father. After a somewhat dragging initial pages of their voyage to Onitsha, the novel is a superb read.

A library founder in Uganda

Kate Parry writes:

One of the Uganda Community Library Association’s members, Michael Oguttu, has written the following account of his own motives in setting up a community library at Bugiri. I have visited it, and at present it has little to offer, while the need is evidently enormous. At the same time, it’s a shining example of the kind of local initiative that UgCLA is trying to encourage. Michael himself is the librarian of another UgCLA member library, Inforall, in Kampala.

From: Oguttu Michael [mailto:micoguttu@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 5:07 PM
To: kateparry@earthlink.net

BUGIRI COMMUNITY LIBRARY

Background:
After working for a community in Kampala, I realized how important libraries are to the promotion of reading culture, literacy and development and also improvement of education performance in the world. This also made me believe that books/information materials or information can change/improve the ways of living. From the fact that I studied from my home district(Bugiri) Uganda, where there are so many private schools and only few government owned schools. Most of the schools have no libraries and only few have books which are kept in books, which actually limit children/students access to books. Most of the teachers don’t have access to textbooks-this means that they only use the notes they copied during their study/school days, and yet the syllabus changes which has or is leading to poor performance in education sector in most rural schools. Another fact is that the income of rural based families is so low and they can not manage to buy text books for their children, this is also proved by many parents failing to pay school fees which have led to many school drop-outs in Bugiri and Uganda at large. Not forgetting that even if the government introduced universal primary and secondary education (UPE and USE) respectively, many children/students are not going to schools due to failure by parents to buy only scholastic materials which is due to poor states in families. Although I got the interest of helping my home district/nation by establishing a community library, I didn’t wakeup one day morning and put it in place. But it was a gradual process.

STAGE 1
I started by saving some of the money from my little allowances I got.
STAGE 2
In July 2008, I attended the workshop of people who were eager to establish a community library in their local areas which was organized by Uganda community libraries association (UgCLA).after which I learnt skills of how to start and run a community library.
STAGE 3
And it was from there that I got the courage to go and talk to the leaders in Bugiri district, residents, and my family members who all welcomed the idea. But their major worry was where the funds will come from. But I answered them that all will be solved. And now the library is operating helping both children and adults.

I believe that, ‘there is nothing good like serving my others in need’.

Mr. Oguttu Michael
Founder
micoguttu@yahoo.com
bugiricomu.lib@gmail.com
+256 75 1 935 054.

(Photo:
The Bugiri Community Library. Michael Oguttu, the founder, is on the right, in the back row, and the librarian, whom he pays from his own salary, is in front. Also in the back row is Michael's brother, who works as library assistant - and all the others are children who were playing around the front of the library and whom the library hopes to serve. )

Why not a little world music interlude... Los Aslandticos

An amazing song. If you don't understand Spanish this song should make you want to learn! The crowd is great, singing along. The lyrics are here.

Chambao sings about crossing the Atlantic to get from Africa to Spain

The refrain is "Some never make it, their dreams drowned, wet papers, papers without owners."

Brief report from Chalula Library in Tanzania

Thank you Aaron!
Kindly accept the March Report,

I am glad to inform you that the Mobile Library Exercise is the Secondary school has proved very successful. This has been so because three quarters of the school teachers have left school for farther studies so my presence and sending books to them has been a great relief to make them busy all the time. On my part it has been a strenuous but productive exercise because of moving to and fro (between Chalula and the Secondary School). But I am proud of the success and appreciation from the secondary staff and students. The Junior Readers are fit for them. We have not started charging them.

I have also included a short list of books which we need for our library. The mobile exercise I have started creates a great demand for more secondary books. Once they are motivated with our services due to various books, pamphlets, past exams, exercises etc we will start slowly charging them.

Joseph is compiling the yearly financial report which will be sent to you very soon

Attendance: March 2009

Adults	Primary school	Secondary school
Men 13	Girls 829	Girls 936
Women 9	Boys 869	Boys 740

Buying books should be given highest priority especially for secondary school services.

AARON

Dimikuy library almost ready!

Just got word from Élisée that the building is done, and now it is all the little things left.

"J'ai parler avec Donkui hier, il m'a dit que le bâtiment est achevé et il ne reste que l'aménagement interne. Moi je voudrais alors profiter de la visite de Amy pour m'y rendre afin de voir l'evolution et de faire les photos (si ce n'est pas trop tard !)"

I had hoped that it would be finished in time for the Steve Cisler Memorial Lecture at Santa Clara University, Thursday May 7 at 6:30. The speaker is Manuel Castells.

The library has been funded by generous donations of friends of Steve, who passed away last year. We'll have some pictures and details at the end of May.

Messenger

Just finished Lois Lowry's wonderful, but perhaps not quite interesting enough for ten-year olds, book Messenger. There's a very nice plot summary available here. We had been listening to The Giver, the Newbury-award book that precedes, by perhaps 40 year, the events this book. It was a pleasant surprise as I was reading to gradually realize the books were connected. The genre is hard to pin down- it is very small-scale fantasy, I guess, more heavy on the awe than the fantasy. The awe, in fact, is constructed by the reader knowing that the fantasy is metaphor, and not meant to be literal. The two books complement beautifully Alan Garner's Stone Quartet, which focuses all on the awe, with the fantasy only hinted at.

Kitengesa Community Library receives books (and paper cranes) from Japan

Kate Parry writes from Uganda:

Two or three years ago I was visiting a friend in her office at Makerere University when a young Japanese woman walked in. Her name was Robin Sakamoto, and she was studying in Uganda before going back to teach English in Japan. The conversation turned, as it often does, to my own library work, and I told her of what we were doing in Kitengesa. Then she wrote to me about a year ago saying that she wanted to arrange a book donation project with her students. I gave her the information she needed and forgot about it – but recently I got a notice telling me to pick up a parcel at the post office. I picked it up on April 28: it is a box of the most beautiful books, all in English, though one is a translation of a Japanese manga comic book. Each book is carefully covered in plastic and contains a note from the student donor saying why she (or he) chose it; and then there is a string of carefully folded paper cranes. I wrote to Robin at once, of course, to thank her, and yesterday, May 1, she wrote back to say that she’d like to do it again, with her present group of students , and inviting me to send a list of books that we’d like. I’m often cautious about book donations, but I cannot resist this one – the books are so beautiful, and it is such a marvelous example of international cooperation around a library.

How many books can you read?

Kitengesa library in Uganda has made it's 20 challenge program a regular feature of the library activities. Here's the proud winner of one of the challenge rounds! Kids get so much motivation from accomplishing goals; they start off by thinking this is something that can never be achieved, but once they get rolling and finish the task, they are raring to move on to the next challenge.

Book tour in Nigeria!

From the "I'd love to be there" category, by way of EverythinLiterature:

From May 2nd to Saturday June 6th 2009, nine Nigerian writers will embark on a book tour to 4 cities across Nigeria. The event is themed 9 Writers, 4 Cities: The Book Tour, and it is a series of book readings, book signings and discussions. Each event will be recorded and made available for download online. The series of weekend readings will hold in Benin, Ibadan, Lagos and Warri. The first event, which is to be hosted by Writers Anonymous at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos, will be followed by a ‘Book Party’. The participating writers are: Odia Ofeimun (poet and author of The Poet Lied), Toni Kan (author of Nights of a Creaking Bed), Lindsay Barrett (journalist, poet and author of several books, including Song for Mumu), Jumoke Verissimo (author of I am Memory), Tade Ipadeola (a lawyer and author of the poetry collection A Sign of Times), Joy Isi Bewaji (author of Eko Dialogue), Eghosa Imasuen ( medical doctor and author of To Saint Patrick), A. Igoni Barrett (managing editor of Farafina magazine and author of From Caves of Rotten Teeth) and Bimbo Adelakun ( journalist and author of Under the Brown Rusted Roofs).

News from Kitengesa library

April 23 was International Book and Copyright Day, and the National Library of Uganda asked all the country's libraries to celebrate it in some way. At the Kitengesa Community Library, the librarian and library scholars organized an exhibition of the library's most popular books, and children from two neighboring primary schools were invited to come and visit the library. They stayed for two or three hours, all reading hard. Their teachers came too and promised to join the library. They had never visited it before, demonstrating how important it is to keep inviting people to come.

An aborted village library in Zimbabwe

Kim Dionne sends a link to an interesting but too brief short article from a library friend from Zimbabwe who tried to start a library in his home village.

This (if it had succeeded) would have been the first ever library in Ruwa and Zimre Park 30 kms East of Harare. I could envision how this small step in the right direction was going to change the educational landscape in this area one child at a time. However this was the beginning of the end for the project as my contact ran into bureaucratic hurdles that are typical of our African culture and politics. The local councilor had to be involved, and the Member of Parliament for the whole district, the Education Ministry officials all the way down to the Zanu Pf youth league. It saddened me to know that although none of these people were paying a dime for the project they denied every poor child in the area a life long chance to read a book and improve themselves in their educational pursuit. Needless to say even their kids were going to benefit. These fat cats wanted to be associated with the project obviously for political gain. The books are now sitting at my friend’s house, and I hope his kids and their friends are reading them.

The politics and obstacles are all too real, but I do not see any lessons being drawn in how to go about doing things differently. It occurs to me that maybe one reason for "failure" (a word I intensely dislike when talking about development projects) is that there may have been too much talk, too much setting up expectations, and too little action. That is, if the books had been sent to the friend's house, and the friend had simply opened a room for reading, and hired a local secondary school student to sit and be the librarian, monitoring use, I wonder whether there would have been any opposition? The library would have been started, to no great fanfare. This is actually a lesson I take deep to heart. Although many of our libraries open with some ceremony, with visits from the U.S. Ambassador, myself and the local FAVL team know these are potential dangerous "shutdown" moments. So in general we eschew ceremonies and such, and try to just get on with day-to-day business, and not ruffle any local political feathers. Low profile, is the lesson.