Sticker supply boost thanks to Debbie Tanzer's book, Do One Nice Thing

FAVL has received many lovely stickers for our child readers upon a recommendation contained in Debbie Tanzer's book, Do One Nice Thing. She included a wonderful 2-pg write-up of our work and how individuals could help incentivize our reading program by sending cute stickers. We've received 5 packets, the most recent a delightful sticker and bookmark collection prepared by a grandmother and her grandkids as a summer project. The accompanying notes are heartwarming, too.

More photos from Summer reading camp in Bereba village... photo: Madelyn Bagby

Ricky Alexander report from Chalula library

The food situation is more than satisfactory. Henry is coordinating things on that front for me in the village as Aaron is busy with some local government business and has been ill with the flu the past week or so on top of it. Henry has been great, making sure I'm satisfied with everything and the food is great! I'm sure going to miss ugali and mchuzi when I get back to the US! haha Henry set me up very nicely in the guesthouse adjacent to the school and library and I'm sleeping there with the company of a few children who are very sweet. It works out well...I tutor them in English and they help me learn Swahili. So food/lodging are great! (Joseph has been very helpful with escorting me to and from transportation and helping me while I'm in town at Dodoma. He lives here in Dodoma and works with Habitat for Humanity but is very much in touch with Henry and Aaron and very helpful and responsible. He is a great contact and knowledgeable about development in rural areas in Tanzania.)

The library is a wonderful place for the children to read during school breaks and after classes get out for the day. It is a nice structure and the bookshelves and tables/chairs are in good condition. What is lacking are resources (as I'm guessing is the case with most if not all FAVL libraries and other educational facilities in sub-Saharan Africa). The 200 or so Swahili children's books are tattered from overuse and many are falling apart and need to be taped together. The English books do not get used much as the nearest secondary school is quite far and the teenagers rarely walk the distance to the library. (Also, many are not culturally relevant as they are American/Euro-centric). So...what is needed are more children's books in Swahili, beginners/intermediate level English-learning books, rudimentary English stories, bilingual materials would be ideal, and a comprehensive Swahili-English dictionary would be great. I look forward to discussing possibilities for utilizing FAVL funds and/or fundraising to send some of these resources to the Chalula library when I return.

While resources is the main issue, usage is very high. The library is usually very full with all the tables and chairs full and scores of children sitting on the floor/along the walls. The children understand the importance of education/literacy and seek it, when the facilities and encouragement are there to promote it.

Civic engagements...

SCU student Louise O'Rourke will be spending the Fall in Burkina on the Santa Clara University study abroad program Reading West Africa, that is operating in partnership with the FAVL libraries... Nice article about her and her sister in the Bellevue Reporter.

Great discussion of complex issue of poverty tourism

From Glenna Gordon... in her Context Africa series... an excerpt...

The debate about "poverty tourism" rages on the blogosphere on the pages of the HuffPo, Bill Eastery's blog, and elsewhere. But, as Jina Moore (previous Context Africa feature), who wrote a great, nuanced piece about this for Christian Science Monitor, says,

If it’s that easy to be flip, you’re probably missing something.

Part of my goal in Context Africa is to look at projects that aren't interested in easy answers. There are people out there asking difficult questions, and coming back with stories, photos, and other works that don't provide straight answers. There's a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

Today, I'm happy to highlight the work of Samantha Reinders, who is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her take on Township Tourism shows that nothing is as straightforward as it might seem and even something as divisive as "poverty tourism" can be looked at with nuance.

A video tour of UTRT's Mpigi Community Library!

FAVL's partner, Under the Reading Tree, has posted an enjoyable and well-made video capturing the activities at the Mpigi Community library in Uganda! Take a look!

Read UTRT's blog post about the library and the video here.

Easterly's forefather... Ivan Ilich... crusty, nasty, but ultimately like a teddy bear

Yikes I would have hated to have been in the audience... but he's right of course in emphasizing a the end of the speech that the idea is to be humble... reminds me of the wonderful but completely forgotten book by B. Traven, The Bridge in the Jungle...

IN THE CONVERSATIONS WHICH I HAVE HAD TODAY, I was impressed by two things, and I want to state them before I launch into my prepared talk.

I was impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the gift.

I was equally impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you: by the hypocrisy of the atmosphere prevailing here. I say this as a brother speaking to brothers and sisters. I say it against many resistances within me; but it must be said. Your very insight, your very openness to evaluations of past programs make you hypocrites because you - or at least most of you - have decided to spend this next summer in Mexico, and therefore, you are unwilling to go far enough in your reappraisal of your program. You close your eyes because you want to go ahead and could not do so if you looked at some facts.

It is quite possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. Intellectually, you are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate volunteer action overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968. "Mission-vacations" among poor Mexicans were "the thing" to do for well-off U.S. students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered. poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to much worse poverty at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual insight into the difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the spirit of Peace Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.

Today, the existence of organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. I wanted to make this statement in order to explain why I feel sick about it all and in order to make you aware that good intentions have not much to do with what we are discussing here. To hell with good intentions. This is a theological statement. You will not help anybody by your good intentions. There is an Irish saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this sums up the same theological insight.

The full speech is here... worth a read.

Easterlyisms... poverty tourism

Bill Easterly had a casual blog post about a serious subject, poverty tourism. In his post, he lampooned some effort by the Millennium Village movement to extract more money out of frequent visitors. Now, I could see myself, at some conference in Rwanda, thinking it might be interesting to go visit a Millenium Village, because after all, according to the website, they "are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape from the poverty trap." So it would be interesting to see. And why not have the MV charge me for that visit, instead of making it a freebie. After all, if I'm taking up project participant time while they explain their latest crop technology, why not earn something on the side? Is there really something wrong with this?

In Burkina Faso, all the guidebooks point visitors to the village of Tiebele, near the Ghana border, where women paint fantastic geometric designs on the houses. It is pretty clear, when you visit the village, that the steady stream of tourists means houses are painted more often and better, and that plenty of people make decent livelihoods through the tourism. I grew up in Puerto Rico, a tourist destination par excellence, and remember vividly the government's efforts to educate the population about what is in everyone's collective self-interest: Smile at the tourists! Is it such a big deal? Safeway famously does it in the U.S.; heck, my "customers" (the students at the university) get the treatment all the time. We want you to be happy so you give us your money.

But Easterly has a big problem with this- he thinks its sick. He's really worried about "patronizing attitudes towards Africans." As if a book (his) called "The White Man's Burden" wasn't a patronizing attempt to separate readers' from their money. Or have you noticed the paperback cover of "The Elusive Quest for Growth"? An old-time compass and map, patronizingly reinforcing the illusion that "explorers" read about darkest Africa... and the Amazon jungle too... Cast first stone, etc.

Easterly concludes, "Try looking at the poor Rwandans living in the MV not as anonymous and interchangeable exhibits for a “poverty trap,” but as individuals who possess rights and human dignity just like us. Then we maybe we will understand that the most impressive, knowledgeable, and motivated soldiers in the war on poverty are usually poor individuals themselves." But he's so hopelessly misrepresenting the MV or other development projects, which are usually 99% local (with a couple expatriate directors or experts or low-level volunteers or grad students etc.) At FAVL, for instance, 95% of the work on the ground in the libraries and camps is done by locals. And they, like in MV, are the ones explaining to visitors what is going on, and making sure visitors understand the purposes of the libraries and how they work. How can it be dehumaizing for a village resident who works for FAVL (or MV) to be explaining to an outsider what the project is doing in terms of reading or farming or whatever. What exactly does Easterly think is dehumanizing? Does he think a village resident is "dehumanized" when he or she sees a bunch of rich people step out of an air-conditioned bus and point at a goat sitting in a tree and take pictures?

To answer my own rhetorical question, an anecdote; When I lived in a little village in Sudan for a year back in the 1980s, one day a "development worker" came by to promote bee-keeping. He was a wild guy, with a big long beard. The NGO called a meeting, and everyone in the village came and sat around. Everyone politely listened. Afterwards, not a single person grumbled about wasting an hour. They all completely dismissed the bee-keeping as pie in the sky. But that weird khuwaja (westerner) with the BEARD... he was HILARIOUS. He was talked about for weeks. So where was the dehumanization?

Uganda Community Libraries Association holds its third workshop and its second AGM

February 27, 2009
Kate Parry writes from Kampala:
The Uganda Community Libraries Association, FAVL’s affiliate in East Africa, has just completed its third workshop, held on February 23-24. It was a tremendous success. Eighteen participants were there on the first day and the number increased to more than twenty on the second. Most of UgCLA’s member libraries were represented and so was FAVL’s library in Tanzania, by Aaron Chomolla, the librarian of the Chalula Community Library. The workshop was attended as well by representatives of the US Embassy’s Resource Center and of TASO, an NGO that works with AIDS patients. Both brought resources for display and distribution, which stirred great interest among the participants.
The facilitators of the workshop were mainly members of UgCLA’s Board of Directors—Margaret Baleeta, Head of the English Department at Bugema University, Kate Parry, one of FAVL’s Executive Directors and a Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College in New York, George Openjuru of the Institute for Adult Education at Makerere University, Gertrude Kayaga Mulindwa, Director of the National Library of Uganda, Phenny Birungi, former Director of the Public Libraries Board and now with the National Council for Higher Education, and Grace Musoke, UgCLA’s coordinator. Each took one session, while one was facilitated by an “outside” person, Craig Esbeck, who is an educational consultant with Mango Tree Educational Enterprises (www.mangotree.org).

These facilitators covered a wide range of topics in a variety of different ways, so that the participants engaged in general discussions, carried out different group assignments, filled out individual worksheets, played with Mango Tree’s educational toys, and listened to some hilarious stories.
Everyone was fully involved and went away excited and full of new ideas for library projects. The bonds among the librarians are becoming increasingly strong as they meet again in successive workshops, and an encouraging spirit of voluntarism is developing; on this occasion, for instance, the Mpigi librarian, who happens to be an artist, offered to design a new logo for the Association, and the librarian from the Adult Education Centre at Njeru brought a bunch of leaflets for distribution and sold participants little Luganda books that the Centre had produced for the princely sum of 500 shillings (a little more than 25 cents) per book.

One session of the workshop was devoted to UgCLA’s Annual General Meeting, and this, too, was enormously encouraging. Over the past year UgCLA’s membership has increased from 20 to 46, and of those 46, 26 are libraries—ten more than a year ago, and four of them founded as a direct consequence of our last workshop in July 2008. We have distributed small grants to six libraries and have followed up on them to ensure that the money has been spent as proposed. We have held three workshops. We have hosted one volunteer, with great success, and expect at least two more in 2009. And our financial position is fairly sound, with enough funds in our Ugandan account to sustain us for ten months at any rate.

We do not have any small grants to distribute in 2009, but we are maintaining the tradition of competitive access to benefits by organizing a competition to present in a colloquium on community libraries in Uganda at the 6th Pan African Conference on Reading for All, which is to be held in Dar es Salaam from August 6th-10th (information about the conference is available at www.reading.org). We plan to take four library representatives, who will present together with Gertrude Kayaga Mulindwa, Kate Parry, and Grace Musoke. The competition rules require each library to produce an essay describing its most successful project; the essays will be read anonymously and will be chosen on the basis of their quality and of the variety of projects that they represent between them.

As part of the Dar es Salaam trip, we are hoping to arrange a visit to the community library at Kwekitui in Lushoto District in north east Tanzania on the way (the Kwekitui library is supported by FAVL’s partner in East Africa, Under the Reading Tree). There we hope to hold a mini-conference, in which perhaps other Tanzanian libraries will be able to participate. The trip will have to be paid for, of course, but we are going to seek sponsorship for each representative, and for Grace, from individuals and companies here in Uganda. We expect the whole jaunt to cost about $500 per person, a cheap deal since we will travel by bus and take the least expensive accommodation available. We think we can attract sponsors because we can offer good publicity in return, but of course any contributions from outside Uganda will also be most welcome!

African Library Project

I finally reconnected with Chris Bradshaw, who runs African Library Project, which coordinates book drives in U.S. schools, "aggregates" the books, and gets them to partner organizations in southern Africa to start village libraries. They have shipped books for more than 200 libraries in just a few short years! If you are thinking of a way to help English speaking school kids, consider organizing a book drive- all the information you need is available on their website.

Translating Kathy Knowles new book - Crocodile Bread

FAVL Ouaga rep SARE Elisée has been busy translating into French and Dioula (with Adama Sougoué) a new children's book by Kathy Knowles, director of Osu Children's Library Fund. It is a very cute book, and will also be available in English. Check out the OCLF website for forthcoming details!

Too much on FAVL's plate... calling all volunteers!

We have at several projects that we are working on simultaneously.

1) Supporting Uganda Community Libraries Association. If you have experience with reading education and books in Uganda, consider joining the FAVL East group, led by Kate Parry, working to fundraise and support UgCLA. We especially need to assure the salary of the association coordinator in Kampala, whose work visiting the various community libraries and developing training programs for them is essential . Kate is presently in Uganda. if you are in Uganda, let us know and we'll get you in touch with Kate. if you are in the New York area, the FAVL East group has periodic meetings and we can let you know of the next meeting.

2) Map the community libraries of Africa! This project using Google Earth aims to create a database and wikiable web site for every community library in Africa. Imagine being able to upload pix and commentary on community libraries anywhere in the continent, from anywhere, and have a group of "friends of" that particular library share the connection to readers and librarians in a remote village. Some Santa Clara University students are taking the lead on this, together with former SCU student, and now newly-minted geographer Meredith Albert. if you have software coding expertise in this area, drop us a line.

3) Improving and implementing summer reading programs. I'll be posting the data from the summer reading programs of Burkina Faso last summer, but preliminary analysis suggests that the camps had a decent effect on performance on reading tests, and certainly there was widespread agreement among teachers, student sand camp counselors that this was and could continue to be an amazing experience for fourth graders.

4) Start gearing up programming in Sierra Leone, where we have some seed funding to work with the community library sector. Have you spent time in Sierra Leone, or are you involved in education (especially reading) issues in Sierra Leone? Join our network.

5) Improve financial processes... the back room is an important room. The indefatigable Deb Garvey, FAVL treasurer, could use more help, if you are here in San Jose, California and can commit several hours a week to bookkeeping.

6) Upgrade the FAVL website... yeah, more back room stuff. But the web keeps advancing, and the cutting edge work of needs updating.

7) Improve "record-keeping"... small non-profits face this challenge as they grow: the founding board members don't have enough expertise to bring the organization into bureaucratic best governance practice (i.e. a BLGP expert, aka Breathing and Living Government Paperwork expert). Again, we would sooooo appreciate a local San Jose volunteer who could devote several hours a week to "interfacing" with the soon to be bankrupt State of California, including the franchise tax board, the secretary of state, the attorney general, and every other California entity that wants to "fee" anything that moves, as well as other government and non-profit entities. Good stuff!

8) Adopt a library in Africa and send them an occasional box of appropriate books. Do you read a lot of African fiction (you should) or love multicultural oriented children's books? Then consider spending a few hours each week at garage sales and local library sales and thrift stores, and spend $50 every few months, to send a small box of books to one of the community libraries we support. Librarians and readers are very energized by "new" books to read. And hey, you can throw in some children's stickers for the kids too. Very low key way to feel great about yourself, especially if you read the books too (and if you come across some Patricia Polacco books, be prepared to get weepy.)

For Ghana send to:
Amikiya A. Lucas
Library Projects Coordinator
c/o CESRUD
Box 267
Bolgatanga GHANA

For Burkina Faso (French only, please) send to:
Saré Elisee
Amis des Bibliothèques de Villages Africains
09 BP 938
Ouagadougou 09
BURKINA FASO

Contact FAVL director for West Africa Michael Kevane mkevane@scu.edu for more info.

I love this picture...

Sam Baker and Austan Woody sent me this picture from the library in Dohoun in Burkina Faso. First of all, the intriguing shirt- what is it that is 200 years old? The slate and chalk technology for learning how to read? Second, the boy to the right is wearing a straw hat. What few people realize is that probably he made that hat himself, out of straw grown "locally"... the hats aren't always that comfortable (a little stiff) so there is no export potential there. But how many ten year olds can weave a straw hat in the U.S.? If he is reading more books and learning how to write = less time for straw hats, eventually forgets how to make them, another skill lost. Philosophical musings about our humanness thus inspired by picture. Third, where they are: in the FAVL "hangar" with the cement benches. We built it, and they came to hang out (that's *not* why it is called a "hangar" BTW). Fourth, most of the kids are barefoot. Clothes are dirty and full of holes, Toronto Mapleleafs meaningless, and to cover a wound, the boy on the right has strips of cloth around his shins/calfs. but big smiles all around. No whining here. Again... humans seem to be very adaptable. What is the meaning of life, the picture forces us to ask. And I have't even started on the post-modern deconstruction of the yellow bag in the corner.

Talking up African libraries with strangers in airports...

That's what happened to Marilyn Deer, and the result is a nice article in Scholastic.com about Jordan Nu library in Ghana. You never know what might happen... so give a stranger a warm cup of coffee next time you are traveling, all you favlheads, pull out your latest FAVL newsletter, and ...

A New Library in Ghana
Scholastic.com Sept/Oct 2008
After one of our editors had a chance meeting in an airport (as a silver lining to a long delay), the Instructor staff got some new inspiration from a library in Africa. Marilyn Deer is a retired nurse from Seattle who wanted to share the joy of reading.

As a daughter of missionary parents, she had traveled in Africa and grown up in Nigeria. In 2002, she visited a town in Ghana called Jordan Nu and decided they needed a library—to provide a mosquito-free, well-lit, comfortable and inviting place to read and study. The community provided the difficult manual labor for the building, completed in 2007, after nearly five years construction (with women carrying river water in headpans from half a mile away so the builders could mix cement). Deer provided most of the funding, with some donations from interested friends and family. We will, of course, be sending her books! Below are some photos from the completed project. We hope you find them as inspirational as we do.

To make donations, go to Friends of African Village Libraries, a worthy organization, no matter what, but if you include a note for Jordan Nu, your donation will go there directly.

To a student thinking of volunteering in Tanzania

I wrote the following...

Most of your time in Chalula will be very quiet. At daybreak donkeys bray and roosters ... well, make noise. You and your host family wake, wash up, drink tea, and then you would head off to the library, spending much of the time helping children reading, organizing activities. Life in a village without electricity is very slow. Plenty of time for walks, naps, conversation, and your own reading (preferably novels set in Tanzania or East Africa, or Africa-related non-fiction). The nicest part about an extended stay is to gradually get to know a few people well, and spend time chatting about life in a village.

In Burkina Faso and Ghana we usually arrange for a volunteer to have a young woman (if volunteer is female) live with the volunteer for the stay. She helps with cooking, everyday chores (surprising how many things need to be learned, like how to wash pots and pans when there is no running water), and companionship, and safety. I am sure that could be arranged in Chalula. We pay a modest stipend to the person, so it is a desirable "job" (and the work is usually much less than they do at their own homes, and they get a chance to practice English, etc.).

The danger spot in a village stay, is precisely illness. When you arrive, we strongly encourage you to take the time to figure out and visit various local health clinics. You should definitely bring a mosquito net. A cell phone is an inexpensive help, because you can quickly call the librarians, or your family, and get advice and comfort. After receiving a call at 2am several summers ago from two volunteers in the Ghana libraries, one with a bad fever, I also encourage you to make sure you have a couple thermometers and aspirin. "My fever feels very hot," was not a helpful medical symptom in the Ghana case. ;-)

Another Peace Corps volunteer in Niankorodougou

And his parents are running a blog, that has some great pictures of elephants, and a nice shot of PCV Brian in front of the village library.

From Peace Corps volunteer Meghan Coughlin

Just received the library report for Niankorodougou for the month of October. The number of library visits and books borrowed has continued to go up with the opening of the school year. In the report, Moussa wrote that he is "tormented" every day by the need for more reading space for library visitors. I am currently working on getting an outside covered area built for this purpose. This past week we held an official library opening with community leaders/officials. More information about the opening ceremony and library activities will be updated on the blog shortly.

More details at her blog, all4nianko.

Getting American schoolchildren involved to help reading in Africa

FAVL friend Lola Galla writes:

I had a pretty successful visit to St. John's School in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, this past Monday. I was invited by the prinicpal to be a guest speaker to meet with students K through 8th grades about my visit to Chalula because the school is planning on having a fundraiser for Chalula in the coming year. The students were well prepared and greeted me with maps of land forms and interesting facts about Tanzania which they displayed in the classrooms. One door even had written "KARIBU", meaning "Welcome" in Swahili. I brought some items from out trip like kangas, jewelry, coffee, etc. and shared some of my Photographs. I taught some Swahili greetings and animals names.

You can buy some of Lola's photos with proceeds going to FAVL at her store: www.lolaoppd.etsy.com

AdVenture Capitalists

Santa Clara University grads Austin Woody and Sam Baker have been traveling the world looking at development projects and issues. They recently spent time in Ghana and are currently in Burkina Faso, visiting and volunteering in the FAVL libraries there. They've been keeping a blog, and raised some interesting questions about "development tourism" that are pertinent (and have been discussed in Chris Blattman's excellent development blog). Here's an extract from Sam and Woody's blog, read the full blog here...

Walking in the breathtaking landscape in the remote Nepali village of Lamatar we proudly returned warm smiles of welcome with our newly learned greeting “Namaste.” Upon which, and without fail, the local children would gladly respond to our traditional gesture, with not-so-traditional demand in English “Chocolate, Please!”
Fast forward thousands of miles to Paga Northern Ghana and as we stand frozen with cash in hand to pay a taxi driver for a trip to the Burkina border he looks at us longingly, wondering why we would cheat him out of the “bag fee”