FAVL Blog

The surprise ending was that Christoph Schlingensief (who I had never heard of, myself being neither German nor avant-garde) was the Fitzcarraldo of Burkina Faso, but didn't get too far... or was the whole thing an elaborate joke?  Read article here- plus illustration of the design of the savannah opera house...

In the African savannah, a good half-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, Christoph Schlingensief felt at home. It is a place surrounded by green fields, granite cliffs and gnarly baobab trees.

"When I was doing so badly, I told my wife, when things get really tough, we can come here with a suitcase full of pain pills," Schlingensief said in February of his African paradise. "I have the feeling that here I can give myself over to nature, to the motion of this world, without the pressure of the life I led in Berlin."
 
This was the place Schlingensief had chosen to build what he called an opera village. The village was to include an opera house, but also a school for theater and music, performance spaces and a clinic.

Now, after his death on August 21, Schlingensief's family is doing everything to make sure his vision becomes a reality. In his obituary, they requested that donations be made toward the opera village, instead of flowers or wreaths. 

Part of the deal for allowing him to play World of Warcraft and Starcraft was he had to read some Africa-related stuff... this wasn;t the best thing to start with, but it was OK.

Read the full entry here- worth it!

August 28, 2010
Today started early as I promised my kids during the second week I would go to the forest with them on Saturday. Looking back these past two weeks went by faster than I can remember. It also means I have only one more camp to run, as the second camp finished yesterday. In the second camp, I decided to focus on doing sound workshops and completing the research component, as the basics in terms of the schedule and division of labour where already laid upon from the first two weeks. This camp I had 19 kids, 9 girls and 10 boys, although one of them wasn't there for most of the time. This student was unable to fully attend because the salary of one of the fathers got stolen. I have found that each household can contain as many as 50 people as the family extends as to how many wives the father has or sometimes many families come together to from a household. Interesting story from Bernard was that the father gathered the entire household and 'laid' a curse of sickness on the one who stole the money. The meaning of this curse is that the first person to get sick was the one who stole the money. When one child got sick, the father and everyone in that household looked down upon this boy, but the mother blamed Safia, one of the girls attending the camp. Then Safia and the boy had to come by and meet with the father every day to talk things over. I haven't gotten this part straight though and don't know how the problem is going to be resolved but I thought the whole witchery was interesting. I have heard many stories having to do with witches and spells, giving way to a country where 'free will' isn't the norm.

Oddly, while I this trip to Chile I read for the The New Yorker's 20 under 40, and the three I read last night were all about children.  ZZ Packer's story Dayward is a chilling chronicle of slave escape.  Much more gruesome than Harriette Robinet.  But still capable of evoking the sentiment of "the best in us".  The reassurance of the children as they reach their aunt's house.  More ambiguous is Twins, by C.E. Morgan.  Great little vignette of the bittersweet world of the child, and the growing realizations and disappointments that the child mind starts to apprehend.  The moments where the early brain clamors for identity and belonging.  And finally The Kid by Salvatore Scibona, a story that felt forced and topical.  A boy is left behind in the airport, deliberately, by his army father, after already having been abandoned by his mother.  A metaphor for whole world regions abandoned as the United States throws its power here and there, willy nilly, with no real accounting of the enormous toll of the dislocations caused?  Not for us to tally, but just to witness? 

I hadn't seen this article from USF's student newspaper:

The opportunity to travel in Africa and publish a children's book for a small village does not come by very often. For junior Elizabeth Guerra, accomplishing just that was an experience of a lifetime. Guerra traveled to Burkina Faso, a small country in the heart of West Africa that is known to be one of the poorest countries in the world, "with about 80% of its population living in rural villages and earning their livings by working as subsistence farmers," Guerra said. For four months, Guerra traveled with a group of eight other students from September to December 2009 through the Santa Clara University Reading West Africa program.

For the beginning part of her stay, Guerra took classes in the capital city of Ouagadougou, studying economic development, community development, French literature and photography. The official language is actually French, since France colonized the country until Burkina Faso gained its independence in 1960 .

During the other half of her time in Africa, Guerra stayed in the rural village, Sara, in Burkina Faso for a total of 6 weeks. There, she shared a village house with one other student, and together they worked as librarian assistants in the village's library, which was established by Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL) and the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO).

Read all....

From Lucas Amikiya's report on the reading camps..."Also John Brown absence for the seconded week affected the Gowrie Kids in their studies that is the first Group. The Kids missed him and wanted him back. They said, they like his teaching and jokes then any of the staff in the Gowrie camp."

A wonderful review by Anna Clark of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's "The Erlking" is available here, in blog Isak.  I read the story on the plane down to Santiago.  Very, very good.  I read also two other New Yorker stories dealing with children, in their own way: Roddy Doyle's Ash (a perfect lesson in metaphor, I mean, just a wonderful short story where the metaphor is revealed in the last paragraph), and La Vita Nuova, by Allegra Goodman (a perfect lesson of taking an emotion- love so fierce it hurts- and transmuting it to a different setting).

Our tour guide Hugo... giving a not-so straightforward accounting of what happened in 1973.  Almost as if Chileans are retelling, for themselves? a 50:50 version of events.  For those of my generation, hard to forget the televised image of bombers dropping bombs on Salvador Allende in Pinochet's coup d'etat... I don't really see how to "spin" that!

I am looking forward (with some dread hesitation) to seeing the museum on the early Pinochet era.  I am in Chile for the week with a great group of Santa Clara University MBA students.  I'll try to see some libraries while I am here, too!