Kunkua library in northern Ghana is now open

I'll write a little later about the generous donation that made this possible, but for now here are a few pictures (taken in northern Ghana by Lucas, FAVL/CESRUD library coordinator, so not great quality). This is the third library in the Bolgatanga area. Great job Lucas!

Photography exhibit coming up... MLK Library, San Jose

Please join us May 11 for a reception if you are in the Bay Area!

The Person in Front of You: Photographs from West Africa
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library 150 E. San Fernando St. - 2nd Floor, Exhibit Area	Sat, May 3 - Fri, Jun 20 All Library Open Hours
"The Person in Front of You: Photographs from West Africa," features photos by Los Altos-based photographer David Pace and Kathy Knowles of Osu Children's Library Fund in Canada. David Pace is a lecturer in art and art history at Santa Clara University. Pace's photos, taken during his 2007 stay in Bereba, a small isolated village in the West African country of Burkina Faso, capture aspects of daily life. They feature women as they go about making pottery, weaving cotton cloth in traditional patterns, and caring for children; children joyfully surround the village librarian during a weekly storytime or are profiled in thoughtful moments in front of their thatch homes; and men are observed fingering prayer beads, talking in the shade of a rare tree, or gathering for a community event. Kathy Knowles founded Osu Children's Library Fund (OCLF) over fifteen years ago to give young African children the joy of reading by providing access to storybooks. Knowle's photographs grew out of a desire to provide children with colorful books that reflect their own cultures and physical environments. Her beautiful color photos of children and adults in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Tanzania give Westerners a flavor of the experiences and daily lives of a region far different in appearance, yet similar in the essentials, to their own. There will be a special opening reception on Sunday, May 11, 2008 from 4:00 - 6:00 PM on the 2nd Floor, Rooms 225/229 of the King library. For more information contact: Deborah L. Garvey at dlgarvey@gmail.com.

Summer reading "experiment"

I've mentioned before that we've got modest funding to "treat" 4th and 5th graders (the equivalent) with some summer reading programs in the libraries in Burkina Faso. We're thinking of doing a simple randomized block design. The blocks are the five villages- can't do anything about that. Each village will then have 30 kids or so receiving reading encouragement and a couple free books and some activities in the summer, 30 kids would be invited to an intensive two-week summer reading camp run out of the library, and 30 kids would participate in a summer 8-week book discussion group, reading a book a week and discussing it. The idea is to see how big the effect is from the more costly and challenging programs (in terms of management). We'd give pre and post reading tests and some socio-economic background diagnostics. Anyone out there done something like this? Any suggestions?

Top five do's in helping community libraries in Africa, IMHO

This is my wisdom so far, not based on any scientific Evaluation 2.0 techniques...

1. Do include a decent selection of books authored by local or regional authors. In all areas we are experienced with, readers are far more likely to pick up a book by an African author, with a cover illustrating an African situation. This applies especially to secondary school material. This means some of your budget should be allocated for that- a hard choice when some organizations are able to ship U.S. or European books with a net cost of $.50 a book, and the African book costs $3.00. But a book read 6 times is better than 6 books never read, right?

2. Do have a credible plan for paying the salary of the librarian and for supervising the librarian. We fix salaries according to the salary (plus benefits) for local primary school teachers. (Many FAVL librarians work half-time so they get half the primary school teacher salary.) The librarian should have the right incentives. If the librarian is a volunteer helping his or her community, that is a fine ideal, but the reality is that after the initial enthusiasm the librarian will likely only open the library when people come to his or her house asking for a particular book. The librarian needs to know that there will be frequent "inspections" and that the library must be kept in good working order, else the salary will be terminated and someone else hired.

3. Do buy furniture that is tailored for children. Very often the initial impulse of the local committee is to buy furniture and shelving for adults, since that is who they think will be using the library. But small chairs and tables, low bookshelves that face outwards (like sandwich boards) are very important for changing the look of the library.

4. Invest some time and money into wall decorations that reflect and promote local culture: masks, woven material, wall carvings. In some of our libraries we have small wall "shelves" with local statuettes that are sold in the capital city to tourists as souvenirs- people in villages often have never seen things like that!

5. Plan for the long-term. Ask yourself what this library can and should look like ten years from now. Are you going to be helping it ten years from now? If you are going to be a friend of the library, then your commitment is in good times (ribbon cutting ceremony and opening day dancing) and bad times (the tedium of the days when nobody comes to the library- hey, it happens!) and your responsibility as a friend is to make sure the librarian and library management committee get more involved, more trained, more capable, year on year.

Note the discrepancy between point 5 and point 2. For the library to be long-run successful, you need to be a long-term volunteer, a friend. The librarian needs to be a long-term employee. That's very deliberate. In the long term you will be earning as a resident of the U.S. $40K+ per year. You can afford to be hard-working and unpaid.

More Ian McEwan

Over the last couple days I read On Chesil Beach, a remarkable exploration of a wedding night gone horribly awry. This one should not be made into a movie, please don't do it. Don't sell the rights. Don't even think about it. It's all the interior monologue of the two protagonists. While somewhat lacking in verisimilitude (could they really have talked so little both being so intelligent?) I found however that it easily reverberated with my own experiences (nothing like the novel, but analogous). And in Burkina and Ghana, even simple interactions are so ripe for mutual misunderstanding.... not just with "westerners", but amongst people living in the same village for years. I love it when we're in the middle of a FAVL discussion and one of the librarians gives a quizzical look to one of the others, like, "I can't figure you out..."

Two resources on children's literature in English-speaking African countries

Lillian Temu Osaki has a website on children's literature and Africa Access has an online database of 1000s of children's book titles.

Publishing in Uganda

James Tumusiime of Fountain Publisher in Uganda was profiled a year ago in the Monitor, of Kampala.

But while his journalism days did eventually end, it is likely he will not be quitting publishing. "It [Fountain] has kept us going...the industry is now serious," he said. As we spoke that Wednesday, it was clear that although the figures still bother him--Germany has 4,500 booksellers and Uganda only 150, he said he finds comfort in the modest accomplishments of the past few years, developments that came from almost nothing, achievements he continues to seek. He considers Animal Farm his favourite book "because it brings out humanity the way we know it".

Literature of West Africa

A review by Alioune Sow of a recent book by Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 288 pp. appeared in the online journal African Studies Quarterly. Here's an extract:

Its strength lies in its important insights into existing interpretations and readings of canonical texts, or debates, as well as in its innovative and persuasive arguments. Newell’s careful discussion of “Popular literatures” gives a much-needed illustration of how the literary dynamism is ensured by local productions that “generate new types of selfhood” and activate new modes of reception. In the same vein, her chapter on the new feminism, which focuses on Werewere Liking, Calixthe Beyala, and Véronique Tadjo, explores the rejection by the three writers of outdated linguistic and normative codes to open to new expressions of “the new subjectivities of African women.” Furthermore, Newell’s discussion includes neglected problematics in the commentary of African letters, such as translation (chap. 5). She also revisits and rejects old paradigms, such as the exclusionary relationship between “written and oral genres,” which has been contradicted, as Newell demonstrates, by the works of the vibrant Nigerian “AlterNative poets” (chap. 8). Her chapter on “Marxism and literature” opens a crucial domain in the study of the history of African literatures by focusing on the dynamic debates about the affinities and divergences that make the ideologies of African literatures (chap. 10).

My fervent hope is that someday the village readers supported by FAVL are engaged themselves in the scholarly interpretations and debates captured in Newell's book.

Kathy Knowles' book in Dioula

FAVL worked with Kathy Knowles of Osu Children's Library Fund to translate into Dioula and print copies of her beautiful Red, Blue, Green and Yellow "I like..." books. Prof. Ada Giusti from Montana State University writes:

I just returned from a trip to Mali with my students. While we were in a village called Sanambele, I shared your beautiful books with the children and teachers. They were so appreciated! Children of all ages kept on asking me to see the books over and over again. They could read the words because they spoke Bambara. If you get on this link, you will see many pictures of Malian children reading the books (which I donated to the school of course).

Name that quote...

Finally, I can elicit some replies in the comments section... I know you're out there! What movie is this from?

The Grandfather: When I was your age, television was called "books."

Girl students become teachers... true in Africa?

An interesting finds from research in Pakistan (see below) is that private schools locate in areas where there are large number of girl secondary school graduates- who can be teachers for the private schools! I wonder whether anyone has done this kind of research in rural Africa? In Burkina Faso private schooling is primarily an urban phenomenon. But the rapidly growing town of Houndé near where FAVL libraries in Burkina are located now has a private school- started by the previous mayor. And certainly our librarians are often young women educated in secondary schools who then for one reason or another stay in their villages- perfectly according with the Pakistan finding.

Students Today, Teachers Tomorrow? The Rise of Affordable Private Schools
Tahir Andrabi, J. Das, and A. Khwaja, 2006
Private Schools are typically thought of as an “up-market” phenomenon. Pakistan 's experience during the last decade is the opposite, with a mushrooming of for-profit private schools and a 300 percent increase in private sector enrollments. This paper links the growth of private schools to the presence of schools in the public sector. We show that private schools are set up in villages where there are pre-existing girls' secondary schools. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that the presence of a private school increases the probability of a private school by 35 percentage points. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between private school existence and pre-existing girls' primary or boys' primary and high schools. Our results support a “women as teachers” channel: pre-existing high schools increase the supply of local skilled women and, in an environment with low female mobility, this lowers wages for women and lowers teaching costs for private schools in these localized labor markets. These findings highlight an important constraint to schooling–the supply of teachers–and suggest that one cannot ignore the role of higher education in achieving universal primary education.

Everyday Literacy in Africa

Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy And Making the Self, edited by Karin Barber, Indiana University Press, 2006.

Came across this interesting title. While mostly focused on the colonial era, the profiles of first-generation literates (who actively participated in the new "technology" of reading and writing in the colonial languages) remain very relevant today. There are plenty of patrons of FAVL-supported libraries who are the same sort of auto-didacts described in the various chapters.

Raises again a recurring theme on the blog: the impact of accessibility to reading materials may be enormous, but just for a handful of people. 100 users of a library may exhibit no discernible impact from the community libraries (except how many books they have read and their reading capability, but with no spillover into other aspects of life). But one person... deep literacy changes their life. How should we evaluate the worth of the library?

Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price

Now more than 30 years old, The Bride Price is a well-told if somewhat formulaic novel of tradition-modernity, choice-custom, men-women set in Nigeria, and a pleasure to read, especially for someone who wants to get an idea of how people might have been interacting as the city and countryside more and more encroached on each other in daily life. Coming back to my earlier postings about novels that try to get into the "minds" of the characters, Emecheta is really all story here and little "mind" - the complex thoughts of her characters are summarized in a few sentences, rather than a half-dozen pages. The most interesting thing in the novel to me is the tantalizing descriptions of people's somewhat ambivalent attitudes towards Chike and his "slave" family. If the focus had been on them and their interior thoughts, rather than on the conventional heroine Aku-nna, it might have been a superb book. By the way, no bookstore in Bolgatanga carries this novel. We'd love to have 4-5 in each library in northern Ghana, so if you are an American university student reading this for a class, and you have finished with the novel, send FAVL the copy and we'll forward to Ghana- PO Box 90533, San Jose, CA 95109.

Home literacy environment

One of the most interesting things to observe in the coming decades in Burkina Faso is how a home literacy environment might emerge. Burkina Faso currently has very low levels of adult literacy (less than 25% in rural villages) and so most children in villages grow up with limited literacy environments in the home. But with African countries moving like jackrabbits chased by hunting dogs towards Universal Primary Education, in a generation the literacy (nominal literacy, let's be honest) of parents will start approaching 100%. Will these parents create rich literacy environments for their children? Or will they encourage them to play digital games on their soon-to-be ubiquitous cell phones?

The research on the importance of home literacy environment is very interesting- Young-Suk Kim a researchers at Florida State University & Florida Center for Reading Research who was at the CIES conference has an interesting paper on South Korean home literacy practices and their effects on subsequent literacy skills. She concludes:

The study revealed two dimensions of home literacy practices, home reading and parent teaching. Frequent reading at home was positively associated with children’s emergent literacy skills as well as conventional literacy skills in Korean. However, children whose parents reported more frequent teaching tended to have low scores in their phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading and pseudoword reading after accounting for home reading. These results suggest a bidirectional relationship between home literacy practices, parent teaching in particular, and children’s literacy skills such that parents adjust their teaching in response to their child’s literacy acquisition.

My reading of the literature is that this kind of finding is typical. How children learn to read is very complex, and it is difficult to disentangle all the casual factors because so much is happening in the interactions among learners, peers, educators, and parents. I've never seen a study like this done in African villages. One of the immediate problems, though, is that in villages like those of Burkina Faso children grow up learning a local language, and then in school transition to French, which they may have never spoken at home, and will not know many of the phonemes, and certainly none of the vocabulary. So what kind of home literacy environment is possible right now? Do we have to wait a generation?

One last quick reflection: the home literacy environment might indeed displace a home tam-tam environment.... one of Burkina Faso's foremost thinkers, Maitre Pacere Titinga, is the founder of a concept he calls bendrologie, the study of the sounds and meaning of the tam-tam the small hand drums used by the griots in Burkina Faso. Will children in rich home literacy environments not learn to hear the tam-tam? Or, something that wouldn't surprise me, would they turn out to be just like Maitre Pacere, masters of both!?

Summer reading in rural Africa

Thanks to some small grant support from Santa Clara University and Osu Children's Library Fund, this summer FAVL will run a few more pilot small-scale summer reading programs. Nowhere near the scale of the UK's national Summer Reading Challenge but enough to have some measurable effects at the village level. Osu Children's Library Fund will help fund a small reading camp in one of the libraries. We're thinking of running it for three weeks, five days a week. Participants (aged 10-13) will do a lot of reading (in groups, with partners, alone, aloud, silent) and a lot of playing (crafts, games, puzzles). The Santa Clara University research grant is to run some less intensive summer reading programs (once a week book discussion groups).

Maybe by the end too we'll have a little Youtube video advertising the programs... turns out there are dozens that have been posted to Youtube- librarians with a little too much time on their hands????

Two high-minded novels and a question....

This was a bad reading week... I did not enjoy at all two high-minded novels- Ben Okri's In Arcadia and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Foe is apparently taught in a number of high-minded literary theory courses. I'm not averse in principle to hard to read novels that are making a point about me as a reader and the author as a writer and all of us using langugae and so on. It's just that I wonder while I am reading these two particular books why exactly is it that I find them hard to read, and the only conclusion I can draw is that they're boring. I'm reading with a feeling of tedium, turning page after page and not really caring much what the characters are doing (perhaps because they aren't doing much). And I don't find myself puzzled and interested in my reactions to the text (I'm bored). So, not every book from Africa is a gem, some are just bad. These are two I don't recommend, and they are from excellent authors, at that!

The question... I was giving a presentation about FAVL to a group of returned Peace Corps volunteers, and towards the end the question was raised whether this whole endeavour, with its focus on the technology of books, wasn't simply missing the point, the point being that electronic reading material was rapidly eclipsing books. FAVL may as well be setting up darkrooms and teaching people how to develop negatives using chemical photoprocessing techniques. What do I have to say about that? It is a good question. People are indeed writing and reading text messages on their cell phones, even in remote villages in Burkina Faso. And undoubtedly someday people will be reading Ben Okri on their cell phone, the way people read novels on cell phones in Japan. But my son, who is 9, and an avid reader, and who lives in Silicon Valley, has yet to read anything on any electronic medium. And most likely he'll never read fiction in an electronic medium, unless the technology improves really really fast. So kids in African villages are unlikely to lose much from the investments FAVL donors make in community libraries. Besides, I believe the most important investment we are making is in the institution of the community library, rather than the books per se. This is the mission that drives FAVL every day, and makes FAVL so different from the book-oriented NGO.... our focus is on building the community library as a long-lasting community institution. So we are technology neutral. Not Luddites, and not bookworms. FAVL doesn't exist to give people warm and fuzzy feelings of reading printed letters on pages bound into books (covered in calfskin?). FAVL exists to help people read.

Ian McEwan's Atonement

Read in in a five hour sitting on the flight from New York to San Jose last week. Curious that no airlines advertise on-board libraries. Jetblue makes a big deal out of their 64 channels. But practically any book is more entertaining and customer-satisfying than the pabulum available. There can be no greater demonstration of what the Jesuits mean when they aspire to the "highest humanism" than to be reading Atonement, take a break, accidentally flip to Fox News, and watch "not highest humanism".

That said, there is something a bit too precious about the book. I enjoyed the self-conscious asides about crafting a novel, a somewhat welcome contrast to the over-serious Crow Lake. But at the same time, important elements of that self-consciousness are left out. Why are the characters in Atonement impossibly rich? Important for the story? Can only rich people be "minds" that need to be understood? Or does McEwan understand the market for fiction, where rich people are going to sell more movie rights than poor people? But a wonderful book, I thought.

Learning to read in a classroom in Ouagadougou

The text that accompanies the video is as follows:

A second grade class at Naab Abga School in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, taught by Juliette Guere, was videotaped as part of a World Bank effort at developing teacher training materials on how to improve instructional time use and learning efficiency managed by the Human Development Network and Independent Evaluation Group, task manager Helen Abadzi. The teacher takes time to write brief texts on the blackboard. The students take turns reading this brief text at the board, write it on their slates and finally reorder the words using the slates. The brevity of the text limits reading practice in class and delays the acquisition of automaticity. As a result, the students may remain functionally illiterate for years.

Les petits acrobates du fleuve, (The Little River Acrobats)

FAVL board member Deb Garvey points us to some wonderful children's books about Africa from the publisher L'ecole des loisirs including this one, Les petits acrobates du fleuve, (The Little River Acrobats), illustrated and written by Dominique Mwankumi, L'ecole des loisirs, 2000. Deb has translated and expanded the publisher's blurb below:

This charming African-village themed book for children ages 7 to 9 is a great introduction to village life in west-central Africa. The story is set in the remote village of Sakata, Democratic Republic of Congo, along the Congo River. The great river churns dangerously whenever a mailboat packed with merchandise arrives at Sakata's tiny one-wharf port. Despite the dangers, the mailboats are tempting targets for the children of the village. Children (aka "little acrobats") scramble into their fragile small pirogues and row out into the turbulent water in order to touch the hull of the mysterious boat. One day, a little boy named Kembo decides it is his turn to have a go at the mailboat. He is even determined to board the mailboat once he reaches it. However, reaching the larger boat requires skill in handling the pirogue in the dangerously choppy waters and a great deal of courage, neither of which Kembo lacks. Accompanied by his friends, Kembo will attempt this very dangerous act of acrobacy....will he succeed?

Mary Lawson - Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge

These meticulous character studies of children growing up to be adults in a tiny farm community in Canada are gripping and Zola-esque (but much shorter) tableau's where destiny and choice come to a head in the second to last chapter. So they are deeply satisfying reads... until the second to last chapter, because when destiny and chance come to a head, well, the experienced reader always sees an author making choices, so suddenly the "transporting away" evaporates which is a little disappointing. But 200 pages of fantastic prose for $19.95 (or free at your local library) is a bargain, natch. Thanks to Sheila Conway at SCU's Orradre Library for reading at the coffeehouse one day and prompting me to ask what the book was.

Malaria is horrible for schooling even when kids not sick

A nice presentation by Matthew Jukes at the Comparative and International Education Society meeting this morning, about a randomized trial in Kenya where older kids who are relatively immune to the fever symptoms of malaria, but nevertheless are infected and full of the parasites, improved school performance significantly with a once-every-three-months anti-malarial pill. Seems that the parasites make you anemic, even if not feverish. Books are important for reading, but not having malaria is pretty darn important too. So what if kids had a book where they read about all the awful effects that malaria was having on them, and showing how to use a mosquito bednet? That would be a good book for FAVL volunteers to start working on.

"We have a million books in boxes in Liberia..."

Comment of the day at the Comparative and International Education Studies conference at Teachers College in New York after our session on village libraries. Seems to be more on the way, too:

Bush declares Liberia safe, gives more books - Feb 22, 2008
United States President Bush, has pledged one-million text-books to the Liberian school system to provide learning opportunities for some ten-thousand children for the next few years.

Problem is, apparently there is no plan or budget for how all these books will be funneled into institutions that will make use of them. I think there is one simple question to ask in these cases: In ten years time, who will be paying the salary of the librarian responsible for the books? If the answer is "I have no idea" then the project is in trouble!

Subject: petit rapport sur notre voyage de niankorodougou

From: dounko sanou
To: mkevane@scu.edu
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008
Subject: petit rapport sur notre voyage de niankorodougou

Bonjour Michael a bereba tout va bien nous sommes de retour de niankorodougou ou Chelsea et moi nous sommes allés depuis lundi matin Meghann qui se trouvait a bobo se jour nous ai atendu et nous sommes parti ensemble . Nous avons pu rencontrer le Comité et les Candidats le mardi et le mercredi soir nous avons fais le test du choix d'un bibliothècaire tout c'est bien passé . Le Maire qui est le president du comité ,les membres du comité tous etaient content par ce qu'ils ont bien compri leur role et devoir ensuite ce que le Gerant doit faire . Le choix du Gerant s'est deroulé en presence du Maire, Meghann, Chelsea et moi très correcte selon tout le monde. Egalement le Maire m'a remercié par ce que explique tout en dioula plus de detail dans mon rapport du mois de mars 2008 merci . Sinon le cyber a houndé est ouvert selon les info depuis bereba bye salu tout le monde.

Blattman's cheap shot.... ;-)

Chris Blattman takes a cheap shot at.... well.... us? Surely not me? And not Kate! But others, definitely. The development tourist. It's food for thought. What are you (the short timer volunteer) actually doing? Is your short trip a morally and practically desirable thing? Do you consume more resources by your trip than services provided? Chris seems to have in mind that instead of paying $3,000 for your round-trip plane ticket, visa, hotel, taxi, food at the airport, you simply make a donation to... well, he doesn't say to whom. For the record, I totally disagree with Chris. For a whole set of reasons, but mostly because I don't think the short-term development tourist does any harm, and because I think it is morally dubious to condemn someone who heads down the right path for not doing enough! It's like condemning a person who has decided to eat less meat out of ecological and moral concerns for animals, saying they are a hypocrite for still eating some meat. There is little virtue in pointing out the failings of people who are trying to be righteous, but aren't completely righteous. This kind of moral reasoning (if you can't do it completely right, then you are an awful person) is terrible for the book trade, because buying a book to read yourself is always the wrong thing to do... to be above reproach you have to borrow it from your local public library. (You knew I had to get libraries in there somewhere.)

Ironically, on TV here at the Grand Hotel in Khartoum is Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz as development tourists in Tanzania....

Some news from Uganda

The Uganda Community Library Association (UgCLA) now has a coordinator -- Grace Musoke. She is organizing the small grants competition as well as taking minutes of meetings, writing reports of workshops, and looking into possible sources of funding in Uganda.

The Kitengesa building project is proceeding apace. The library's eGranary is also up and running now, though not many people can access it since we have only one computer for it. When we have our new building we should be able to network more computers to it.

Books in Khartoum

I am in Khartoum for four days doing a training for an evaluation of fuel-efficient stoves. When the training ended, I went walking around town, looking for bookstores. Found one. Thrilling to see that they had the Arabic version of my book, Kordofan Invaded. Or more properly, the dusty bookshop's manager was thrilled to see me, because I bought all four copies! Then I browsed around for children's book. I didn't see any. When I asked, the manager shook his head. Children's books from Sudan? Are there any? Ah yes, there is one, he remembered! In the back. A small book printed in 1994. 50 cents. Lovely illustrations, but not a very good story (though my Arabic is somewhat rusty, it's been 15 years since I lived in Sudan). I'll scan the cover when I get back. So, elation (my book) to depression (practically no children's books) in 5 minutes.

First reports in from Chalula library, Tanzania

Everything seems to be going very smoothly after the opening to regular hours in mid-January. The librarian did his training at the regional library. The library has over 3300 books and solar panels have been installed. The library had over 950 visits in January and over 2,000 visits in Feb. An MLS student from Pratt University will be making a site visit in July and will stay at Chalula for two weeks to help implement "best practices" and think about reading programs.

Thanks to ....

St. Jude's Episcopal Church, Cupertino CA, outreach group, just decided to generously fund some of FAVL's activities as a way of contributing to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals of achieving universal literacy, halving of poverty, improvements in maternal mortality and gender equality! Libraries, we think, are important actors in this global effort. Villagers in Burkina need to read, and need to read well.

Santa Clara Rotary Club also decided to fund a small pilot by our current university student volunteer in Burkina Faso, who is creating four picture (photo) books on local themes. One is on how to make coura-coura, a delicious fried groundnut pastry). Children love seeing pictures of their own familiar lives, and then deciphering the words in the accompanying text, which will be in French and Dioula, the major local language of southwestern Burkina Faso. The books should be ready in May, and we'll keep you posted.

A book about chickens and microcredit

You probably heard the story on NPR if you are in the U.S., but what a great book. A Ghanaian chicken entreprenuer started small, many years ago. A small donation by you can make sure that hundreds of kids in Ghana will get to read this book! Just write "One Chicken" on your donation, and we'll get copies of the book for our three libraries in northern Ghana.

Is "I just don't care" good enough, or will it get me into trouble?

People who don't run small non-profits aren't aware of the seismic transformation of the field by the so-called social entrepreneurs, who promise measurable impact and sustainable growth through serving the marketplace of the bottom billion. Venture capitalists feel good about changing the world with their smart investments that yield high returns. Microcredit is the darling of this movement, since you get transformation for nothing. But frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. I play the game as best I can, but small community libraries are a different kind of passion. It is a cliché, but most of the people motivated to donate time and money to community libraries are the same people who donate time and money, and who benefit from, their local libraries. They are avid readers, people who are profoundly affected by the reading experience. When I read Chinua Achebe or Amadou Kourouma, or Jane Austen, the experiences in my brain are worthy of study, they're so interesting! So what a library is about, is giving people opportunities to become passionate, avid readers. Is there a study that says that this is a good thing by some other measure? I'm not sure we need that study- isn't becoming an avid reader a good thing in and of itself? Does it have to have some other effect?