Reading material that kids in Burkina Faso love

Some photos from coordinator Viviane Nabie's visit to the libraries last week, where copies are now available of the Africa-oriented children's magazine Planete Jeune (thanks to Emily H-W in Wisconsin!) and a color series of books (I like Red, I like Yellow, with text in Dioula, the lingua franca of southwestern Burkina Faso). The color books feature photographs by Kathy Knowles of Osu Children's Library Fund. They really are spectacular! Osu also generously helped FAVL with a lot of the publication cost; Osu has translated the series into other languages also. Some of you, like San Jose resident Laura Wolford, are helping with shipping costs- thanks!

Music to FAVL's ears...

I am not a cynic (can you co-direct a non-profit that helps establish libraries and be a cynic?) but I was browsing Jeffrey Sachs's Millennium Village website, and noted that Millennium Villages ($100,000 per village per year, whew!) are building training centers and grain banks. This is great news. Ten years from now, when FAVL (thanks to your support!) is ready to expand to those communities, there will be nice empty buildings ready to be converted into libraries.

Let me tell you my story about grain banks. In 1989 when I lived for a year in a small village in eastern Sudan, a project had come in and built a grain bank so the farmers wouldn't be ripped off by the grain merchants because they had to sell their crops early at the low price, and buy grain back at the high price. Never mind that the "exploitative merchants" lived in the village too. They were richer- ten sheep instead of five- but they rode the same donkeys and prayed together at the mosque in the evening. And never mind that the farmers had a traditional system for storing grain - the matmura. Never mind all that. The project built a building. The committee in charge (that included one of the grain "merchants") complained (oh, they were delightfully clever!) that without an initial "start-up capital" the villagers would not contribute to the "bank". So the project gave the bank 50 sacks of grain. There was a stern admonishment: "Sell the grain at a low price when the grain price is high later in the year, and then after the harvest use the money to replenish the bank by buying grain at the low post-harvest price." So they did. And then after the harvest, everyone came and sold the grain from two years earlier (that they had stored and was now starting to spoil) to the grain bank. So now the bank had a lot of low quality grain. As one farmer told me: "If everyone else is going to sell their bad grain to the bank, then I should too, because when they go to sell it later it is all mixed up, and why should I sell my good new grain and buy back their bad old grain?" That year the harvest was pretty good, so the price of grain didn't rise. Guess what? They decided that since the grain was going to spoil, they should just give it out for free among the grain bank members. So now the bank had no money and no grain. So the next year they went back to the project: "Excuse us, but the grain bank isn't really working that well, we're not sure why, but could we maybe get another initial fund of 50 sacks so that this time, we'll really get it right!" The following year the grain bank was closed. QED?

Training centers? Behind our house in the village of Béréba in Burkina Faso (site of our first library) sits the "Women's Center". A nice straightforward village building with tin roof. Very nice. Weeds are encroaching though. In April I wandered over with a friend from the village- we noticed cracks, no maintenance. "Well, it is only used once or twice a year. If the women need to meet the would rather meet in the village than out here at the edge of the village."

Oh, there's a grain bank in Béréba too. It has been empty for years.

So what am I saying? I'm not being sarcastic for the fun of it, and the Millennium Village project, God I hope they are wildly successful. But projects, like gardens, have to be watered and nurtured every day. At FAVL our approach is that constant involvement by coordinators and supervisors- building of teams through workshops and meetings among librarians, occasional librarian field trips to visit sites of interest... these hands-on people centered human development activities are what counts. Not the building! The building is the easy part. Turning a young woman or young man in an African village into someone who is desperately proud of the library he or she manages, who is learning every day, who is visiting other libraries so that he or she knows what better futures lie ahead, and what failures to avoid.... that is the hard part.

Photos from Sumbrungu library

Volunteers Annie and Christi spent a month in the Sumbrungu library. They had a great time (you can read about it on their blog, including the latest entry on a scary encounter with malaria) and just sent me some photos. The school girls taught them how to dance (to see women from a neighboring village dancing go to this blog entry).

Links, by Nuruddin Farah

If you've ever wanted to gaze into what has happened to Somalia over the last 15 or so years since the disastrous invasion and withdrawal by American forces, try this 2004 novel. Although I found the prose somewhat stilted for my taste, the novel contains loads of powerful imagery and insights, and a pretty decent (though somewhat contrived) story that keeps you reading.

[in French] report from Koura Donkoui

Donkoui is a school teacher in the small town of Houndé, and has been FAVL troubleshooter since the beginning, even during his long years as school director of a small three-room school in Liki in the Sahel (way northern Burkina near Djibo, in the desert... but even there, a Dutch man named Fritz has married a local woman and settled down...).

Bonjour MICHAEL,
Je suis de passage à BOBO et je profite de l'occasion pour te donner quelques informations eclaires en attendant de finaliser certains de mes rapports. Aujourd'hui 9aout a été la fin du stage des 2 belges à KARABA donc DOUNKO et moi sommes allés les souhaiter aurevoir en organisant une petite reception avec le bureau de l'ADSK et le comité. Elles ont remis un important lot de petit materiel de dessin à la bibliotheque et sont tres contentes de leur sejour à Karaba. Elles remercient FAVL qui a faciliter leur conditions de travail et en les soutenant.Le matin vers 10h nous avons assisté à la derniere seance avant de faire la reception à 14h30.C'est vers 15h que nous sommes rentré à HOUNDE. Nous sommes venus à BOBO pour voir la situation de la plaque solaire. Demain tu auras des informations. Je te signale au passage que HAKAHOUN [Karaba librarian] prendra son congé à compter du 11aout compte tenu du travail qu elle a effectué avc les belges pendant le conge normal. Illusion est devenu realité car HAKAHOUN etait si pessimiste quant aux travaux que les stageres voulaient faire mais je lui ai toujours dit que c'est bien possible car son role c'est d informer et sensibiliser.

Nous avons fait la distribution des habits des etudiants de ILLINOIS et j ai fais les photos que je vais joindre aux rapport de ce mois que tu pourras mettre sur internet pour les faire voire; ça a été une maniere de faire connaitre la biblotheque. Lors de son discours à Karaba le maire a dit que ses portes restent ouvertes pour ecouter toutes les questions relatives àux bibliotheques de sa commune et qu'il sera le porte parole pour les autres maires. Voila un passage qui m a marqué.Avant de parler en français il a tout d abord sensibiliser en m bwamu en tant que educateur d'abord.

Introduction to Sumbrungu community library

I posted this to Youtube before I started this blog and never linked it. One of my first efforts at creating a video.

What if he had no library?

Something on Ethan Zuckerman's blog entry about the TED talks in Tanzania caught my eye....

But I strongly recommend wrapping up an hour’s explorations with William Kamkwamba’s talk. William, you may remember, is a remarkable Malawian inventor, who built his first windmill at age 14, working from a diagram in a library book, and provided light to his family’s home. With the help of a number of TED attendees, he’s now attending school again and has started blogging.

Here below is the talk:

How do children in Burkina Faso learn to read?

A video from Spectaclemedia

Sustainability...

Reading about blueEnergy.org, an outfit that builds wind and solar arrays to bring power to low-income communities, I noticed that they are going through the same growing pains as FAVL in terms of the "business model" and careful attention to the long-term. My colleague Alex Field has (coined?) a wonderful phrase for what you want to avoid: "the install and go syndrome." At FAVL we tell people we are in the 50 year game... that our measure of success is when our first generation of readers comes back to their village and their children and grandchildren read the same books they enjoyed now.

Blogging from Sumbrungu

Anne and Christi are two students volunteering in Sumbrungu, Ghana. They are helping to set up some reading programs in the libraries, and have started a blog... they only have about 10 days left though... so much to see and do though!

A cautionary tale....

A library supporter involved with a stand-alone project in Kenya writes:

The library is stagnating a bit because the mother of the woman who runs it has fallen ill and she has returned to her home village for a while-- it's amazing that it really can be something as simple as that that can affect a whole project like this. I can't even get in touch with the woman...

Building the institutional counterpart to the physical building, so that there is a whole mesh/web/network of people involved in assuring/securing a local community library is way more difficult than starting up a library with four walls and 2,000 books... As FAVL gets more experience I realize this more and more every day- that our mission isn't really about "building libraries" but rather about setting up the "servicing company" that will endure for decades as a friend to these small libraries, ensuring that they survive the thousand and one obstacles to small-scale projects in rural villages. African villages have so much risk and change- completely different from the image most people in developed countries have of an unchanging village...

[in French] Opening of "mask exhibit" in Karaba

This report is from our Burkina coordinator Viviane Nabie:
Exposition de masques a Karaba. La deuxième exposition des masques qui entre dans le cadre de la promotion des bibliothèques de villages, a eut lieu ce Dimanche 22 Juillet 2007 à Karaba. Etaient présents a cette cérémonie la population de Karaba, les chefs de services, Monsieur le Maire de la commune de Houndé, Monsieur Maurice DOMBOUE et son épouse, ainsi que deux étudiantes Belges, Ann et Helen. Le discours des Belges s’est accompagné d’un don d’une dizaine de livres à la bibliothèque (confer rapport a venir de la gérante). A l’issu des discours, se fut la visite de l’exposition des masques. Cette visite fut d’une importance capitale pour la population et les invites de part les multiples questions qu’ils posaient aux gérants. Les questions n’étaient pas seulement posées sur les masques, mais aussi sur le fonctionnement de la bibliothèque. Au regard de certaines questions posées et de l’attention que la population accordait aux explications, on pouvait aisément deviner que certains n’avaient jamais mis le pied dans la bibliothèque. Par exemple, quand on expliquait les conditions d’abonnement à la bibliothèque, un vieil homme répétait exactement ce qu’on disait en secouant la tête pour dire qu’il a compris maintenant. Il a été demande aux vieux de souvent s’asseoir avec les enfants sous le hangar et raconter de histoires, ou simplement causer avec eux car les portes de la cour leurs sont également ouvertes. Les jeunes quant à eux se regroupaient au tour des jeux de puzzle pour essayer de jouer. Nous pouvons dire donc par toutes ces réactions que les objectifs de FAVL ont été atteints, a savoir, faire comprendre a la population que l’accès de la bibliothèque leur est donné et qu’il peuvent chacun selon son age trouver son intérêt en fréquentant la bibliothèque.

What books by African authors can FAVL use?

Turns out the readers of Amazon.com have many many lists of fine novels by African authors... here is a sampling
African novels list 1
African novels list 2
African novels list 3
African novels list 4
African novels list 5

How to participate in development?

A friend writes (paraphrasing and some editing)...
Michael, it is the old retail vs wholesale question. If you are Bill Gates, you think big picture. If you have $1000 to give, you take on a precise project. I took a generator to Rwanda in 1994 for an orphanage; very fulfilling project. Big help to them...If my friend and I have say, $25,000 to spend on Darfur, how should we spend it? Give to Oxfam for village aid on the Chad border, give to African Union for troops, give to Save Darfur divestiture campaign, give to lobbying to pressure US to aid a military intervention, enforce a no military-fly zone over Darfur. (It is funny that we are appealing to the US govt. like it is so limited a power, like France, not the world's superpower. Nick K's reports from Rwanda are most informing to me.) The world, UN does not want to take over running Darfur like it has in Kosovo.

I think there are limits to the big change model: you get a model project funded, then if successful, you apply it to the big picture. When you know the big picture problems are so overwhelming, is it good faith to embark on a Sach's-like project, which by the way a Harper's article a few months ago (for subscribers only; a free description is here) was very critical of in Kenya, knowing that you cannot get funding for big picture. Is it then enough to say, "Oh, we tried." I don't have the answer here, just concerns.

Reading is related to drawing

Kids reading illustrated books have an irresistible urge to draw the illustrations themselves, if they have paper and pencil, and especially if they have crayons and markers. Guess what? Almost no kids in African villages have crayons and markers, let alone a clean sheet of paper. In a world where used newspaper and cement bags are recycled as wrapping for street food, it is almost too frivolous to buy a clean sheet of paper just for a child to scribble on. Or is it? Perhaps early exposure to scribbling, drawing, coloring, tracing... helps you succeed in school so you won't have to earn your living selling roadside food wrapped in a piece of old cement bag... We'd like to run some programs, if we had funding, to see whether there are some significant longer-term impacts. The academic literature seems sparse on this question.

Reading a book in Sumbrungu Community Library

Would Jean Hegland let her children sit on a crocodile?

This is the obligatory picture from a mare sacrée (crocodile lake)... they are all over Burkina and northern Ghana, and the crocs eat a lot of chickens... Elliot has watched a lot of the late (and missed) Steve Irwin, so he was psyched... Now, I am reading Jean Hegland's Windfalls. The first five pages I started thinking uh oh... but about page twenty I got that sinking feeling that if I exercised no willpower I would stay up all night. So I put it down, reluctantly, and am very ready to start reading in a few minutes (it is late here in California).

Just where on earth is the Sumbrungu library?

You can find it as the east wing of the Sumbrungu Community Women's Center on Google earth by putting in the latitude and longitude in the photo at right... can you find it? The Women;s Center is not yet marked in the community layers... apparently they update only once a month.

The day the roof blew off...

Violent storms are a commonplace in Sahelian Africa, and a particularly nasty gust of wind took off the rook of the Bereba library last week. The "A Team" leapt into action and contracted the local masons to repair the roof with new "tin sheets"... and the mayor of Bereba mobilized resources to provide a temporary home for the books while the repairs were underway. Back in the reading business, are we... (Yodaspeak?).

How much has Africa changed in 30 years?

Somehow I find myself simultaneously reading J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K published in 1983 and Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des Independances published in 1970. Both are uncompromising and beautifully written bleak portraits of the human condition (what do you make of being, essentially, alone) in a particular context (Africa spiraling out of control). They both make me think back to Cormack McCarthy's The Road which I read earlier in the year. The sheer physical toll on the bodies of the characters is what is so true, commonplace and yet so absent from the life of the person/reader in a wealthy society. It is interesting how many people try nevertheless to recreate that human body experience with excruciating endurance feats... climbing mountains, etc.
Kourouma's writing is so assured... he's just totally in command of what he wants to say, you feel his prowess rippling through the pages. He can transition from sentence to sentence in a way that makes you realize, "He wrote that deliberately, that way, and he thought about it a lot, and it works beautifully."

Pan-African generosity!

Sikahatele and Lomian Djimtoloum are the parents of Sukie's best friend in Burkina, little Leontine... they were transferred out to Congo-Brazzaville (he works for WHO), but before they left they donated a bookshelf to one of the FAVL libraries. Thanks and good luck in your new home!

Reading and drawing in Ouagadougou

FAVL's Viviane Nabie participates in a small reading promotion event in OUagadougou, organized by Flavien Mare and called Dictee Vivante.

Chinua Achebe wins Booker Prize

FAVL offers congratualtions to a great writer from Africa- if you have not already, pick up Things Fall Apart for a nuanced and compelling short novel.

Who will be the next Burkinabe idol... er librarian

Yes we are hiring another librarian for the Koumbia library. Here are the eight candidates taking a little entrance exam we cooked up. They are now doing oral interviews... well, some of them, and we look forward to another "animateur" of reading!

Flashlights solar powered in Sumbrungu, Ghana

Work beginning in Tanzania, Chalula library

Rosemary and Bruce Harris are flying over to Dodoma this week to continue the work of establishing the Chalula library.

Nyariga... a next in library in Ghana? We hope so.

What every library in Francophone Africa should have

Planete jeune is wonderful children's magazine, very appropriate for an international audience and children in villages... but oh so expensive.... Five subscriptions, anyone?

It is hot in the libraries

German library science student Claudia Entrup did survey work in our Ghana libraries last spring. Here is a little of what she wrote:
In connection with the survey users were asked about their satisfaction with the library services in Sumbrungu and Sherigu. Results were predominantly positive and thus confirmed the libraries to be on the right track. There are some aspects though that were criticized and therefore demand attention. General conditions in the library such as opening hours, furniture, lighting and air were rated by the users and have clearly been found satisfactory (with over 80% in each of the conditions to be evaluated) – with the exception of the air in the libraries. 44.7% of Sumbrungu and 54.1% of Sherigu primary and junior secondary school students stated to be dissatisfied or even very dissatisfied with the air conditions. Even though both libraries have a solar panel that energizes the lights, the panels are not strong enough to provide electricity for fans. However, the Sumbrungu library features fans in each of its three study rooms which could be used, an appropriate electricity source provided. While during the day the library buildings protect users from the torrid sun, they are extremely hot in the night as the heat has been stored within the walls of the building. Concentration becomes very difficult and users frequently have to interrupt their work to get fresh air outside.
I know just what she means… we need electricity and some fans. Help support our move to the “electrified” Sumbrungu Women’s Center!

Sumbrungu Women's Center