The science of reading

A great introduction in a short review article by Caleb Crain, also just appeared also is The Science of Reading published by Blackwell.

Meshack Asare, children's author from Ghana

Two very nice books (Meliga's Day and Kwajo and the Brassman's Secret) from the prolific Ghanaian children's author... excellent illustrations and stories guaranteed to appeal to a village reader. The problem? Go to amazon.com to ask how much these cost? Here is what you get:

Meliga's Day (Opon Ifa Series, 2) by Meshack Asare (Paperback - April 2000) 2 Used & new from $88.12 Books: See all 30 items

Yes, most of his books- ordinary children's paperbacks- are selling in the used market for $20, 30, 40, 50, even $88.12 dollars! Incredible. The books can, though, be ordered from Michigan University Press and the African Books Collective.

Quietly saddening evening reading

Of course I mean William Trevor. His 2002 novel, which I just finished, would make a perfect gift for a serious reader. Here's the review from Powell's.

Kunka community library in Ghana progressing

Thanks to a generous donor, FAVL is proceeding with refurbishment of a building in Kunka, Upper East region, Ghana. The library should be open sometime in January, is the plan. Our coordinator in Sumbrungu, Lucas Aligire, is doing a great job of working with the village community to make it happen. We will keep you posted.

I read children's books too...

But I realize I never write about them here, so I should start. Tonite I read The Blue Marble, a wonderfully illustrated book for 10-14 year olds by Jackee Budesta Batanda, an up and coming Ugandan writer. The right mix of realism and happy ending. Published by Sub-Saharan Publishers and UNESCO.

My own reading, continued....

I started, one evening, and then simply could not stop, R.K. Narayan's The Financial Expert.... the ending was predictable and disappointing, but the first 100 pages were enthralling, and nice crisp writing of course, what else from Narayan?

Read something different for the holidays? Novels from West Africa

I spent a few minutes putting together a short list of novels from West Africa on amazon.com. These are what our readers in the libraries in Burkina Faso really enjoy reading. A more comprehensive list of the 100 Best from Africa is at the Africa Book Center.

Tina Brown on Christmas in America

For the New Yorkers especially, a nice piece in London's The Spectator on why we're different... And Bruce and Rosemary Harris's work to establish the Chalula Community Library in Tanzania is featured! Hats off to all the Chalula donors, and especially the village leadership in Mvumi, including the indefatigable Joseph Biseko. Here's one more picture from Chalula, at the opening last week. Enjoy the holiday season.

Photos from Bereba, first FAVL library in Burkina, featured

Santa Clara University photographer David Pace had some portraits included in a recent cover photo essay... click on the image for the link.

Why the insistence on program evaluation and measuring impact should be taken with salt

In the annals of the "flip-charts have no effects" department...
Adult Literacy Programs in Ghana: An Evaluation
2004
Niels-Hugo Blunch
Department of Economics
George Washington University
Claus C Portner
Department of Economics
University of Washington
Abstract
This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. We find that in most cases there is no significant effect on consumption from participation after allowing for self-selection into the program. For households where no adults have completed any formal education there is, however, a substantial positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption, pointing towards the potential importance of adult literacy programs for the parts of the population which have not participated in the formal education system. Possible explanations for why adult literacy program participation does not seem to significantly affect households where some formal education has been attained are explored, as well.

Ben Okri on his new novel

A favorite author of mine (whose short stories are excellent for teaching about Africa) has just released a new book... can't wait to read it.

Reynolds Price and Walter Mosley

They don't have much in common, but I read Fear Itself (a mystery) and Noble Norfleet (pretty incomprehensible)... I'm not a big mystery reader, but Fear Itself is an interesting portrait of Los Angeles in the 1950s (from an African American perspective), and since it is where I went to visit my grandmother on vacation in summers, I get an appropriate feeling of nostalgia when Doheney is named in a book... Noble Norfleet... the writing careens about, and the story never really gels... interesting but hard to recommend.

Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture

Steve Cisler sent me the link to the speech... rambling (calculatedly so?) but full of the power and importance of books and writing in Africa:

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

Chalula library project in Tanzania: Open for readers...

Bruce and Rosemary Harris just got back from Tanzania, where they helped put finishing touches on the new library in Mvumi village. The beautiful building is one of the nicest among the various FAVL managed libraries. Kudos to Bruce and Rosemary, who led the effort. The project was conceptualized by a group of Habitat for Humanity volunteers who had been in the area building houses, and decided to strike out into library support. They all tapped into a deep network of generous friends and family... it goes without saying that the library is going to make a huge difference, especially for the village students. We are hoping that people will want to visit and volunteer in the library when they are in the area, near Dodoma ... just a long 8 hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam! Drop us a line if you want to get added to the mailing list.

Governments vs. NGOs to deliver literacy/education

The New York times had a nice story on the slow pace of aid delivery by the Millenium Challenge Corporation focusing on Burkina Faso.

The agency, a rare Bush administration proposal to be enacted with bipartisan support, has spent only $155 million of the $4.8 billion it has approved for ambitious projects in 15 countries in Africa, Central America and other regions.

FAVL co-director Kate Parry's recent paper - Languages, Literacies, and Libraries: A View from Africa

Kate presented this at the recent IFLA conference in Durban, South Africa. the full paper is available here.
Abstract
Africa is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world. This paper, based on experience in Nigeria and Uganda, explores the implications of that fact for the development of literacies and the role of libraries. Many people in these two countries speak at least three languages: their mother tongue, an African lingua franca, and English, the former colonial language. The three (or more) languages are used for different purposes and are associated with different social groups and ways of life. Accordingly, literacy cannot be seen as a single skill that applies to all of them. Rather, each language has its own literacy, and the problems of developing a reading culture are different in each case. Mother-tongue literacy is limited by the fact that most African languages have only a limited range of written material, while some have none at all. Lingua franca literacy has more scope, and therefore more potential for giving access to information to large numbers of people; but it is seen in some areas as a threat to the mother tongues, while it is itself often overshadowed by literacy in English. English literacy has greater social prestige as well as more written material to sustain it, but it suffers from the fact that English is an alien and often resented language, and the majority of African people have little chance of learning it well. The paper argues that libraries, especially ones targeted at rural communities, are particularly well suited to addressing these problems. They can cater to the demand to learn English by providing access to English materials that are linguistically appropriate and culturally accessible. They can likewise provide materials in the local lingua franca so that people who speak it can learn its written form. As for mother-tongue literacy, they can not only collect and provide access to whatever written material is available but also organise educative bilingual activities and encourage more mother-tongue writing. In these ways community libraries can complement formal education systems and can enable their members to move beyond the restrictions imposed by schools to become independent multilingual readers.

More on the XO

In response to a friend, I wrote: The XO wouldn't be my preferred way to donate to improve education (that would be FAVL). There is a high risk that an enormous amount of energy has been put into this effort, and then large sums of public money spent, and that three years from now there will be dusty warehouses full of these machines sitting around. Ask yourself: would it be better to buy one laptop or 10 Leapfrogs.... The concept of the whole project is: if we do it big enough it will change the world. But like many "big ideas" conceived in university settings, it is vulnerable to the critique that, "big ideas don't succeed in the large because they were never tested in the small".

Future technology for libraries

Take Amazon's Kindle reader, or the XO (One laptop per child), and add the International Children's Digital Library and you would have a very low variable cost library for children. But the fixed cost is enormous... At $400 per electronic reader (maybe $200 if you got a bulk discount) and 20 readers per library, the "book collection" would have a fixed cost of $8000-$4000... this is well more than our present cost for providing traditional paper books. The electronics have the disadvantage of requiring electricity to recharge, personnel to manage, internet connections to download more books (the nearest connection for most FAVL libraries is several hours and $20 roundtrip away). The readers also may be tempting to thieves. So far we have found that children's books are pretty immune to theft. But someday the cost will be low enough, and the collections big enough, that electronic readers will be the books of village libraries in rural Africa.

Addition to post: My colleague at SCU Center for Science Technology and Society visited Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive for a demo of XO.... it looks amazing but my early position still stands!

A library friend has opened a library in Jordan Nu, Ghana

Marilyn Deer writes...
Jordan Nu is about a three hour tro-tro ride from Accra.... The commissioning ceremony was wonderful with all of the community in attendance. The entire primary and junior secondary marched in singing at the tops of their lungs accompanied by drumming. The paramount chief of the region was in attendance as well as library board executives and district assembly executives. I gave a speech, calmly, thinking not too many would understand my English, but then was told by many of the community over several days that they heard my message repeatedly and translated by the secretary of the community. Had I known that the media vehicle was in fact recording I might have been speechless. The community insisted on naming the library after me, I tried to convince them to call it the Jordan Nu library or community library but they felt the sponsor's name would benefit them later and they wanted to honor my commitment to them....what an honor! The first day the library was open there was no room to walk because the floor was lined solid with children reading. Now that made the whole four years of work worth every minute of effort! Of course, now the work and commitment really begins and we hope for a sustaining asset. Jordan Nu is paying the two librarian's salaries as well as the building maintenance and they formed the library committee independent of me. I have committed to supplying books until they can carry that responsibility alone. I am so thrilled to have been a part of this project. I don't know when I'll return, soon I hope. I'd like to be a fly on the wall to see how thing progress in the next few months. I am collecting books appropriate for them and believe that "if you collect them, a donor shipper will come." One of the library board execs was very impressed that the books I had stocked the library with were almost entirely written by African for Africans and I tried to use the national publishers. He said they are quite weary of well-meaning donors sending inappropriate literature which is not useful or meaningful to them.

National Endowment for the Arts report "To Read or Not To Read"

The report describes a decline in reading by Americans...

All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals— whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. se cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact—books change lives for the better.

Amazingly there is no mention of libraries, except to mention they will not be mentioned...

Also absent is a discussion of U.S. public libraries and their part in promoting reading of all kinds. A lack of reliable national data on library circulation rates for reading materials—as separate from CDs and videotapes, for example—has informed this decision.

Literary reading on Nov. 7 in New York to support Kitengesa Library and FAVL

The Canadian organization YouLead has raised CAN$10,000 towards a computer center for the Kitengesa library. Before we can buy computers, however, we must purchase land and put up a new building, for the present building is not appropriate for expansion, nor can we stay on the school’s land for ever. The new building will include a community hall that can be rented out to generate an income. All this cannot, however, be covered by $10,000 (even Canadian ones); so we are now engaged in a drive to raise a further $10,000. We would like to invite you all to a special benefit reading on behalf of the library on Wednesday, November 7 at 7:30 p.m., in the Hunter College Archives, Room 222A, Hunter East (i.e. in the college library); the building is on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 68th Street. The readers will be Donna Masini, Jan Heller Levi, Tom Sleigh, and Michael Thomas, all of whom teach in Hunter’s acclaimed MFA in Creative Writing Program. The suggested donation is $25 or $5 for students; or you may choose to sponsor a Library Scholar for $100.

Jacb Lawrence's Library - 1969

For more on Jacob Lawrence, see the great website created by the Phillips Collection.

What Books to Read After the Kung-Fu Movie? Digital Book Reviews to Inspire African Village Readers

We've made an application to the Knight News Challenge for a new program in Burkina Faso... you can read it there and comment (search for Africa, and you will see the handful of proposals, including ours).

Young village readers are often reluctant to experiment with new books, worrying that the grammar, style and vocabulary (books are in French) might be too difficult. These same young readers are avid viewers of local evening video sessions where an entrepreneur shows kung-fu and Bollywood movies for a small fee on a television powered by a generator (the villages have no electricity). There is no feasible way for them to get written book reviews of new and notable books, a traditional function of print newspapers. FAVL would create a regular bi-monthly stream of short (15 minute) video book reviews featuring local readers speaking in local languages, giving short plot summaries of readable new books available in the local libraries. These reviews would range from novels to memoirs by famous politicians. A FAVL staff member would be trained to shoot, edit and transfer to DVD short videos. The DVD's would be shown on video movie nights and other occasions when televisions are used in the villages.

Introduction to Sumbrungu Library and FAVL

Click on the "Start" arrow below

The library club....

FAVL volunteer Tanya Driechel sent in the picture and caption- she just returned from a couple months in Sumbrungu: "Myself & the Library Club I established while I was there. The Library Club is comprised of ten - twelve junior high girls who are planning on volunteering on a weekly basis (each girl committed one hour every two weeks, in pairs, doing storytelling, cleaning, organization, coloring, crafts, origami, reading....)."

What happens when a village library hosts "African movie night"?

Apparently, from these pictures just arrived- with apologies for low quality- the village goes bonkers, with hundreds of people coming out to watch the film on the TV set that we acquired along with a DVD player to show the films by Souleyman Cisse (well-known West African filmmaker). Showing the films costs about $20 per session (to rent generator, get benches, etc.) and our budget is really limited for this. Can you help!?

Sherigu library in Ghana... a bit off the beaten track

FAVL director Leslie Gray and volunteer Tanya Driechel (pictured) met with Ghana librarians Lucas Amikiya, Darius Asanga and Bernard Akulga at the Sherigu library. Nice pictures, Leslie!

Floods in ghana, Uganda and Burkina Faso have not affected libraries... yet

United Nations agencies on Tuesday warned that the worst floods seen in Ghana and other parts of Africa for decades could intensify in the coming days and appealed for international aid to avert the threat of disease.

About a million people have been affected by torrential rains stretching between West and East Africa since July, with Ghana and Uganda accounting for more than half the tally alone, the UN's humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) said.

Cases of cholera, dysentery and diarrhoea have been reported in northern Ghana, where 260,000 people were affected by floods and the death toll has risen to 32, OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told journalists.

Authorities there have declared a state of emergency and appealed for international help after bridges, homes and crops were destroyed, she added.

Kitengesa Community library, Uganda

Pictures are worth ... that's why the Kitengesa library organizes Saturday morning drawing, painting and coloring sessions for kids. Your donations to FAVL help these programs keep on going!

[in French] Librarian Koura Ivette reading a book