FAVL Blog

There have been several blog posts about "Aya" graphic novels throughout the history of the FAVL blog. The fictional girl from Côte d'Ivoire has taken Burkina, and more specifically, community libraries in western Africa by storm. Kids love the novels in the series because they can relate to the culture and enjoy looking at the drawings. Both of these things are very important for encouraging them to read and maintain their literacy skills outside of the classroom.

We'd like to provide each FAVL village library in Burkina Faso and Ghana with a set of 5 "Aya" books for patrons of all ages to enjoy. But we need your help to do that! A complete set costs around $100 ($20/book), and a small donation can go a long way to helping us achieve that goal. If you'd like to donate, visit the project link on the GlobalGiving website.

Step 1: Meet with representatives of organizations and businesses to briefly brag about FAVL and what we do here in Burkina. We bring along a copy of our freshly updated pamphlet and sample of our RWA photo books.
Step 2: Follow up with a little information care package while FAVL is still fresh in their minds. It includes our new pamphlet with details and pictures about the community libraries in Burkina Faso, information about the annual reading camps and a copy of our annual report.

Our idea is to introduce a friendly face with the information so that the organizations will be more likely to read it, pay attention and follow up. Thus far we have met with representatives from la Francophonie, Unilever (a big soap company) and the Millenium Challenge Account. The guy from Francophonie gave us helpful suggestions on how to proceed with the mayors of the communes with community libraries. Next we're planning future meetings with Coris Bank and WaterAid. Everyone has been incredibly receptive to FAVL's mission, and we're looking forward to future collaborations with these organizations.

Here are the pamphlets we have created to accompany us on our PR missions:

It's 2003. The Kenyan government has just promised free education for all. Kimani Maruge is thrilled, because now he can finally learn how to read and write. Kimani Maruge limps to the school gates and asks to be admitted to the school. The teachers laugh, and send him away. Why?
Because Maruge is 84 years old.

"The First Grader" is the true story of an old man who wants nothing more than to learn to read and write after never being able to afford school. Despite his being turned away, Maruge continues to show up to the school everyday, finally winning over headmaster Jane Obinchu.

In between his present battle of fighting for his right to an education against the parents and administrators determined to kick Maruge out of the school, we learn about Maruge's horrific past as a Mau Mau veteran, a man who fiercely battled for the independence of his country. He witnessed his entire family murdered before his eyes. He was held in detention camps for years and brutally tortured (beat, whipped, toes chopped off, sharp pencils jammed inside his ears).

So very true...

FAVL volunteer and Santa Clara Univesity graduate ('10) Brianna Osetinsky on her second day in Sumbrungu...

The other day, shortly after my arrival to Sumbrungu, I was invited by Lucas, the library coordinator, to a funeral in his family's home.

After greeting many of Lucas's family members, we settled onto a large tire under some much appreciated shade, and Lucas explained some of the funeral traditions. Gesturing to the goat tied up next to him, Lucas explained that people bring offerings of money or animals. The animals are slaughtered over the course of the funeral celebration, often playing the dual role of sacrifice and food for the numerous guests. I had to chuckle to myself at the parallels to the overwhelming amounts of cold cut and cheese platters that people had brought to funerals I had attended in the US. It really only takes about two meals of baloney before you start to wonder where you can get a little goat.

This particular funeral was on its fourth day, and we were going to see a "sending off" ceremony of sorts, where friends and family give things to the deceased to tell her "we will not forget about you" because the final funeral closing rights were not going to be for another year.

As Lucas was explaining the finer points of the traditions, a large group of women came around the outside of the house chanting a song and moving and clapping in time while a shaker drove the beat. We followed them into the courtyard, where they began to dance and sing. The women were of all ages, and many were very old. However, they were some of the most exuberant dancers, leading the songs and jumping into the middle of the group to jump and stamp their feet when the tempo of the clapping rose to a frenzied pitch.

After a while, the group began to gather close around a wall, still singing and dancing, but now with a definite focus. Lucas and I climbed onto one of the flat roofs to get a better view. The group was gathered around a large clay pot, and the women who were closest with the deceased were kneeling around it holding onto the brim with both hands. The women around the pot would get up and sing in intervals, sometimes with the others, sometimes an individual dance, often ending with a long high yell that they directed right into the mouth of the pot. One of the women began quietly crying, reminding me that this celebration was for a funeral, but she was led away because this was not a time for crying. After all the women who wanted to dedicated something to the pot, the women carried it as a group into a small opening in one of the buildings, where it will be saved until the final funeral rites. Then more general singing and dancing resumed, including an appearance by two men complete with bows and a huge quiver of arrows, the traditional wear for the war dance.

We were there for most of the afternoon, and as dusk set in and bugs started to bite, Lucas suggested we head home. We climbed down, but before we could leave, I got pulled into dancing. Full disclosure, it takes almost nothing to pull me into dancing, I will dance at any opportunity, and with the beat that had been going on all afternoon, it had been more a matter of self control, and not wanting to overstep boundaries that had kept me from jumping in long before. That being said, I still don't have a ton what could rightly be termed "rhythm" when I dance, but it didn't seem to matter much. Pretty soon I was jumping and stamping my feet with an old woman as the others clapped a beat for us. After laughing a while with everyone, I thanked them for having me and we headed back to the Women's Center in Sumbrungu, with a grin glued to my face after such a pleasant day.

One of these days my sister Bridget Kevane is going to read and write about African literature (si, tu) but until then, I really enjoyed this latest by her... the whole piece is here in Tablet Magazine:

"Another jewy piece by that jewish girl/ in the poetry scene who keeps/ being all jewy, talking about being jewish, writing/ about being jewish .../ jew, jew, jew, jew, jew," is the battle cry of Vanessa Hidary, the Hebrew mamita. She is a slam poet known for her curves and for dressing like a Puerto Rican; big hoop earrings, tight jeans, hair pulled tightly back in a glistening high ponytail, great red lipstick, high heels. When I met her in New York at her favorite haunt, Starbucks, I admired her playful nom de plume, Hebrew mamita, for its mix of high-brow and low-brow culture, the former being the ancient language of Israel, the latter being the catcall that most self-respecting Puerto Rican girls cannot live without. (I am from Puerto Rico and know the catcall well: Though we hate being harassed, we also hate not being whistled at. And Jewish men do not whistle at women with curves or at all, for that matter.) Alas, Hidary has not one ounce of Puerto Rican blood in her. Does it matter?

One of the books that most profoundly influenced me in college was something I read, as a junior I think, on my own, a copy of a book I found in a thrift shop: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.  The idea of really taking your life into your hands and literally saying goodbye to all that was something that never really had occurred to me as a possibility.  I think I ruminated on that for years, and still find it a tremendous inspiration (whatever the actual details of his life etc.)

I was reminded of this because my kids and I are watching I, Claudius.  Terrible over-acting, but the stories of intrigue are incredibly compelling to the 9-13 year old set. 

And then, I was reading a few comments on Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy" in a recent The New Yorker, and one commenter used the "sad sack" phrase... suddenly I remembered Sad Sack, which I read voraciously as a kid.  My brain made all kids of connections.... stunning!

I know I've posted about the site Letters of Note before. Each day they post a new letter, and reading it has quickly become my favorite part of the day. Today's letter came courtesy of a Scottish poet, Robert Burns, in response to a critical review of one of his poems. It really just made me laugh, and I had to share with you. The site is definitely something that everyone needs to check out.

Ellisland, 1791

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.

My colleague Bill Sundstrom had a great post about the U.S. economy that I missed at the end of December...

Like Paul Krugman, I find myself in deep disagreement with this pessimistic column by David Brooks. Brooks compares our own time unfavorably with the era of the Great Depression, when, he alleges, the economy was in its "adolescence" and its underlying potential to create mass prosperity was far greater than it is today. Krugman makes the simple but important observation that a similar attitude of defeatism was widespread during the 1930s, only to be rapidly turned around with the wartime recovery and subsequent postwar expansion. In Krugman's view, a substantial boost to aggregate demand is all the anti-depressant our depressed economy needs (presumably something other than World War III would be the best prescription).

He crossposts a great graph about income inequality in the U.S.  Read the full post here... And I learned that I should start all my blog posts with something like... "Like J.D. Salinger, I...." or "Like Andrew Carnegie, I..."  Yes I am just like them!  (Remember snark? It's a Scandinavian origin word, natch.)

More seriously, do take a look at Alex Field's (another  colleague) recent book, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth: .

Some of my favorite times in Burkina are during major soccer tournaments. My first experience with this was during the Africa Cup of Nations in 2010. I've never seen a group of people get so excited about any sporting event, and this includes each of the four consecutive years that the Buffalo Bills went to the Super Bowl in the glory days of Jim Kelly (I'm from upstate New York, where you love the Bills through the good times and the bad). My colleagues spent entire days glued in front of the television, watching match after match, like the fate of the world depended on them watching each match.

Well, the Africa Cup of Nations is back! (See my previous blog about President Blaise Compaoré's words of encouragement before the Etalons left for the tournament.) Sunday evening, the night of Burkina's first match, my neighborhood transformed. Up and down the street, giant flags of Burkina were blowing in the wind. Televisions suddenly appeared at every restaurant, food kiosk and street corner, with people crowded around. People were on a high because Côte d'Ivoire had just defeated Sudan.

Then the game started! Burkina was up against Angola. Throughout out the game, you could hear cheers and geers everywhere. When Burkina scored it's first goal early in the second half, I swear you could hear the whole city cheering. Unfortunately, it was downhill from there. Admittedly, the Burkinabè played quite badly. And in the last ten minutes or so, the Angolans did not want to take any chances giving up their one-point lead, and a few players tried to run out the clock by faking fatigue and injuries. At one point, I swear the Angolan goalie literally just laid down on the field. The Etalons did end up losing. It was a very disappointing game.

On the bright side, the first round is not over yet, so we still have a chance to make a comeback! We play again on Thursday against Côte d'Ivoire. And tonight, in a match I'm excited to watch, Mali is up against Guinea. I'm rooting for our neighbors to the north!


  

We definitely are at a point where long term highly-qualified volunteers who want to "take charge" of certain things would be really useful:

1.  Coordinating/managing the growing FAVL portfolio of librarian activity guide, summer reading camp guide, and reading materials for literacy classes (workbooks, health literacy, etc.).  This would involve curating, managing a resource webpage, creating new material, printing and distributing.  Could be remote if have strong Internet ad web design skills.

2.  Coordinating/managing/creating photo books.  We just printed 120 copies of Mon Livre Prefere for a group of libraries in Europe (Amy Reggio, you are famous!). We need someone who really enjoys design for a purpose... even if it means a lot of grunt work (layout, uploading, printing, proofing, shipping). Could be remote if have the appropriate software (Adobe Indesign).

3.  Bookkeeping.  One person for Ghana, the other for Burkina Faso.  This is about 10 hours a month if done well, and that is frequent enough that person can start working with the local team (via email) and make an impact. Has to be in San Jose unless have Quickbooks for non-profits.

Over the weekend, I watched Redemption: The Stan Tookie Story.
The movie starred Jamie Foxx, who played Stan Tookie Williams, one of the founding members of the Crips gang. The movie takes place after he has been imprisoned and is waiting on Death Row for crimes he committed as a gang member. Throughout the film, there are flashbacks to Williams' life of crime. While waiting to be executed, Williams claims to be a changed man, renounces his gang membership and even starts writing books (including children's books) warning against the dangers of gang life. He co-writes the books with a friend, Barbara Becnel, who also advocates for clemency from the state of California on Williams' behalf. Although there were many people who did not by into William's claims of reform, many people supported him. There is a seen in the film where Winnie Mandela comes to visit him in prison. In fact, Williams was even suggested as a Nobel Peace Prize winner several times for his anti-gang stance and work. At the time the film was made, Williams was still in prison, working on appeals and clemency pleas. They were never granted, however, and in 2005, he was executed by lethal injection. (The conclusion of this story is brought to you thanks to Wikipedia.)

It's a very interesting movie that brings up a lot of questions about whether someone can really reform after a life of crime and  whether the death penalty is just. Even though they are not really related, the whole idea of Williams reaching out to children through books to help them make better of their lives reminded me of FAVL and our mission here. I would definitely recommend the movie to anyone.

I'm currently training for a half marathon at the end of March. In the single year before I joined Peace Corps, I ran three half marathons, a 199 mile relay race, and several 10K races. I thought that training for this measly half would be a breeze.

What a difference 4 years makes!

I am slow. I am struggling. I am winded. I have no endurance. I am freezing cold. And on more than one occasion I have actually driven all the way to where I'm supposed to jog, dressed and ready for my run, sat in the car for two minutes before shrugging "ehhh" and driving back home. In other words...my motivation is lost and buried.

Luckily, I came across this Nike commercial. If this isn't motivation, I don't know what is!

A cute little video for your viewing pleasure.

A very nice list from a must-read blog... see here for the other categories and be sure to check the comments section.

More contemporary (part of Ghanaian diaspora)

• Benjamin Kwakye: The clothes of nakedness, The sun by night, The other crucifix
• Nii Ayikwei Parkes: Tail of the blue bird, The makings of you
• Mohammed Naseehu Ali : Prophet of Zongo Street and other stories
• Kwei J Quartey: Wife of the gods, Children of the street 
• Yaba Badoe :  True murder
• Marilyn Heward Mills: Cloth girl, The association of foreign spouses
• Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond: Powder necklace
• Akosua Busia:  Seasons of beento blackbird
• Lesley Lokko: Sundowners, Bitter chocolate, One secret summer, A private affair, Rich girl, poor girl.  Architect, who also writes chick lit
• Selasi Taiye : Ghana must go (To be published in 2012) + well acclaimed short stories
• Esi Edugyan:  Half-blood blues, The second life of Samuel Tyne.  Canadian, born of Ghanaian immigrants
• Glover, Boakyewaa:  Circles
• Kuukua Dzigbordi Yomekpe:  Writing memoir; creative non-fiction mostly

More contemporary (living in Ghana)

• Amma Darko:  The housemaid, Faceless, Beyond the horizon, Not without flowers
• Camynta Baezie:  The African agenda 
• G A Agambila:  Journey
• Ayesha Harruna Attah:  Harmattan rain
• Meri Nana-Ama Danquah: The black body, Willow weep for me, Shaking the tree, Becoming American.  Writes mostly non-fiction
• Farida Bedwei: Definition of a miracle
• Mamle Kabu:   writes short stories
• Franka Andoh:  writes short stories
• Alba Konadu Sumprim :  The imported Ghanaian, A place of beautiful nonsense.  Both are satirical
• Kofi Akpabli: A sense of savannah, Tickling the Ghanaian.  Writes creative non-fiction
• Nana Awere Damoah:  Tales from different tails, Excursions in my mind, Through the gates of thought

From an op-ed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Nigerians, particularly in the heavily Muslim north, live in fear of violence from the Islamist group Boko Haram. More than a hundred people have been shot to death or killed in bombings in recent weeks. My uncle, who lived most of his adult life in the northern town of Maiduguri, recently moved back east after a Boko Haram bomb exploded mere feet from his bookshop. Now he is struggling to start over, a man past middle age, grasping for hope. I saw him on New Year's Day. He said he had only barely been able to afford the rent for a new shop in Awka, our state capital, and now he had to deal with the new price of petrol -- he will have to spend much more on transportation and, since there is hardly ever any electricity, on the generator to power his shop. "How will I cope?" he asked.

I'm no economist, but this seems like a poor implementation of policy.  Wait, I am an economist!  Hmmm... gotta say something intelligent I guess.  So while economists in general are against subsidizing polluting consumer items, Africa-specialists realize that public transparent subsidies like a gasoline subsidy are the only way the public can keep a small "rein" on corruption by public officials... they have to give something back to the public.  They cannot steal everything from the public coffers.  So the anger at the removal is palpable... the reaction is not, "Good, now the fiscal house will be in order" but rather an incredulous, "You want to steal even more from us?"  So the right policy was to have pulled a switch, and announced that fule subsidies would be removed and solar panel subsidies would be implemented.  Free solar panel and storage battery and wiring kit for $10.  Or solar lanterns for $1 from d.light.  Jeesh, why aren't I running Nigeria?  Would be so easy.

Kyle Baker's graphic novel Nat Turner, tells the very powerful story of slavery and rebellion with "pull no punches" images, and few words (except a lot of extracts from the Confessions of Nat Turner).  The graphic novel is bracketed by two images of readers in the dark, literally and figuratively, that summarize the whole tragedy and crime of slavery.  This really should be required reading in high school. I have a feeling most school principals would be terrified, however, of the imagery.... axing a baby to death in the rebellion, a mother throwing her child overboard as the slave ship disembarks in America... Nat Turner swaying as he is hanged.

A commentator on Amazon gives the book a 1, with the following comment (among others): "Some things shouldn't be remembered at all because they just bring back bad blood. Nat Turner should not be remembered. If you want to know more about him, read one of the many scholarly histories on university websites. This book is nothing but gore porn."  I think this is indeed a complex point, and was raised in discussions of Spielberg's Schindlers List.  If you already know your answer to this kind of question, you know whether you ought to read Nat Turner.  If not, think about the question before reading.

I recently acquired a television here in Ouaga. Besides catching up with my favorite game show, "Des Mots et Des Maths", and the fantastically horrible Latin American soap operas that are translated into French, I've been enjoying regular installments in a series of short films by ONASER (l'Office National de la Securité Routière). The series is being aired in installments each evening on RTB (Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina). Each of the specials (that you always get tricked into watching because you think it's a movie - very clever, ONASER!) features someone going normally about their daily routine, leaving their house either by moto or car. Unbeknownst to them, there is a menace on the road, vehemently breaking one of the well-established rules of the road (so far I've seen chatting while you're motoing alongside someone, talking on a cell phone, smoking and speeding). Eventually, a collision happens, and either one or both of the parties is gravely injured. Some of them are a bit gruesome, but I think it helps the message really hit home.

What I really like about this series is that all of the situations are incredibly realistic. Most educational videos make you feel like the situations are purposefully exaggerated to prove their point, and therefore, the consequences could never actually happen to someone in real life. However, this is not the case with the ONASER videos. Because people are just that ridiculous on the roads, and accidents like the ones dramatized happen everyday in Ouagadougou (as well as other urban centers). I personally feel like I'm playing a game of Russian Roulette with my life everytime I move outside of a half-a-block radius from my house. It's every man for himself out there and can be quite terrifying! And not only does everyone "roulent mal" as we say here in Burkina (a phrase that roughly translates to "drive badly"), very few people where helmets, so even minor accidents often become more serious. 

In an article on allAfrica.com in December, the Director of Road Safety, Hubert Poda, explained why he thought the short film series is important:

L'année 2011 est en passe de devenir l'année la plus meurtrière du fait de la fréquence des accidents graves que l'on enregistre chaque mois. Pour réduire le nombre des victimes de ces accidents, il nous a paru indispensable de changer les mentalités des usagers de la route, voire de la population entière à travers ces actions de sensibilisation de masse et de contrôle afin d'adopter des comportements responsables.

(The year 2011 has become the deadliest year [in Burkina Faso] due to the frequency of serious accidents that we've seen each month. To reduce the number of victims of these accidents, it has become necessary for us to change the mentality of the people who use the road, to reach the entire population as a whole through these informational videos and to encourage them to behave responsibly.)

Shorts on RTB seem like the perfect medium to reach the population. RTB is a station that you get on your television even without an antenna. It is watched on a regular basis by a large portion of the urban population, where most of these deadly accidents occur. Even when people don't have personal access to televisions, they watch at neighbor's houses, restaurants and bars. Not to mention, the Burkinabè love a good drama. If it encourages just a few more people out there to actually look at the road and pay attention while they are zooming down the road, it will have served its purpose. I may even have to be totally Peace Corps about this and invite the people of my neighborhood over to watch it one evening, so I can stop biking in fear for my life!

You know I'm a pretty voracious reader, but someone, let's just call him "Uncle Kevin," has been taking advantage of my regular need for reading "fixes" and pushing me to the limit, with a steady supply of top-notch award winning fantasy novels.  Really, I've never read this genre before "Uncle Kevin" came on the scene.

I've read two decent ones over the last couple weeks.  The better was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a world-weary, Unforgiven-style meditation on the difficulties of being a "hero"... pretty nice actually. 

OK... but really just OK... was The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch.  Both will be Hollywood movies soon I am sure... apparently they already have been optioned and have screenwriters and producers and all that stuff. 

The genre, if these two novels are evidence, should last a long time.  I'm a fan of donuts, as are hundreds of billions of my fellow humans, and these are the donuts of fiction.  At first I scoffed my way through the often quite bad writing, even wondering whether practitioners of the genre deliberately make their writing bad, with anachronisms and pop-culture allusions that are wildly out of place.  Then I realized that the writing is so bad because so much of the author's energy is focused on how to keep the story moving forward.  Game of Thrones and all that (ah yes, suddenly I remember I did read the first volume of that series... far better than these, by the way).

Even if the writing were equally bad, I'd love to read an Africa-focused style fantasy novel, and have it be really successful amongst teens (OK, we really mean boys, this literature just rubs girls the wrong way, apparently... maybe because there are really no women characters? Maybe? Could be?).  It'd be great to have characters who were plainly African, and let the European types be the exotic ones.  It would be fun to see a whole generation of African kids reading stuff like this... 600 pages of deep-fried dough topped with sugar.