Friday, June 26, 2009

Are you a FAVL or African village library promoter?

Consider spending $5 to buy a copy of Kathy Knowles latest book, Crocodile Bread, which FAVL translated into French and Jula for our libraries in Burkina Faso. (Or you can get an English-language version from Kathy's site).

The book makes a great prop when meeting someone that you want to talk to about FAVL and African village libraries, because it communicates easily three things:

1) We care immensely about literacy that is relevant to kids in villages- so we really try hard to have books that are developed for the African village audience, and much less attention is paid to shipping low priority book (my favorite example, bless them, is Berenstein Bears, which just don't travel well). We have several programs that we are developing to be producing even more books like these. We buy books in East Africa from Fountain Publishers and other local presses.

2) We partner with other library support orgs., e.g. Osu Children's Library Fund, African Library project, Under the Reading Tree, etc. We're "Friends", not jealous friends...

3) Kids in African villages love reading just as much as kids anywhere! It is hard to convey that in an office in New York, but when someone sees the books they immediately start smiling and thinking about a kid in a village reading...

1 comment:

Kim Dionne said...

it took some searching, but I found an online order form for anyone else who was interested in buying Crocodile Bread:

http://www.mts.net/~kknowles/Catalogue_web.pdf