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

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