October 2009 Archives

Marilyn Deer has been the key supporter of this beautiful community library in eastern Ghana.  Here is her report from a recent visit.  She truly exemplifies the spirit of international giving and concern to enable everyone to have the opportunity to read quality books.  (Also, this is a great example of a well-written trip report- a model for anyone visiting a library!)

August/September 2009 Jordan Nu Community Library Visit by Marilyn Deer

After collecting for two years, 120 boxes of books, games and puzzles for the library and ocean-shipping them to Ghana, I arrived in the capitol two days after the shipment was delivered to Jordan Nu.  The books were purchased by me from various thrift stores and library sales, and I spent two years weekly sorting through boxes of books at Half Price Books, Lynnwood, for appropriate reading and reference material for the community.  The books from Half Price were donated.  I received assistance from the Bainbridge Island Rotary Club for some of the shipping expenses.

En-route to Jordan Nu I visited and thanked Joanna Felih of the Osu Children's Library for her training of the current Jordan Nu librarian, Elizabeth Dzansi.  From OCLF I purchased some more wooden puzzles and Kathy Knowles' newest book publications for children.  

Over eleven days with the librarian and other volunteers, we accessed and stamped 5544 books bringing the library collection to 6544 books.  During the hot and tedious task of accessing the books, I hired a carpenter, Yolson, to build shelving for them, removing two of the four existing display-like pyramid shelves from the reading room and donating them to the new primary school in Jordan Nu.  The carpenter also built two reading/study tables and four benches and two shelves in the hallway for the storage of posters and newspapers, and a shelf for puzzles and games.

Once the varnish on the shelves dried, we were able to place the books on them and also to organize the books by fiction and non-fiction categories.  There is a large African writer's collection and several books about and by Barack Obama.  I believe there is a book of interest to everyone in the community available.  The children's collection is large, and the pleasure and excitement of the choices of books was palpable as the children began to investigate them. I purchased cloth for each shelf to prevent dust/dirt soiling of the books and those were hung. The three pallets on which the boxes of books were shipped were given to the primary school for use in prevention of water damage to any stored materials in that building.

Before building shelves for books and one for games and puzzles in what was the storeroom, a painter was hired to paint those walls white which made reading in that room easier since there are no windows with natural light.  John also touched up the main reading room walls and removed the traces of the blue gum adhesive used previously to hold posters on the walls. The carpenter also put battens on the storeroom ceiling and sealed them which will now prevent any further bat guano leaking down the walls. The committee will obtain a bid for the cost of mesh and installation to seal the external roof access spaces so that ongoing extermination of the bats by chemicals will be unnecessary.  John also painted the entire exterior body and trim of the building which freshened and improved its appearance.

Shelving was built in the office which now holds religious books and Bibles and school teaching materials and resources for teachers.  The desk and chairs in that room make a quiet place of study and reading for the use of those materials.  I also brought from the USA dome magnifying lenses and bookmark and full-page magnifying sheets for those who do not have reading glasses and need visual aids to assist their reading capability.
In addition to the ongoing activities of board games, story-telling and reading, Friday skip-rope time, letter writing and drawing, we hosted an enthusiastic spelling bee of students from Primary 1 through Junior and Senior High.  The words were given and each participant wrote the word on a slate and held it up.  Prizes were awarded, toffees and small books for the primary children and reference books for the JSS and SS winners.  They are hoping to have more bees in the future.

 I am paying the travel expenses from Peki of a choirmaster, Maxwell Adzadi, to have a weekly choir instruction/practice and they plan to perform in the weekly Sunday services of the White Cross Mission Church, and for the high priest and local events. Hopefully, some drama can be incorporated into those performances.  The choirmaster is responsible to Mr. Kwami for his time and a report of choir pieces and performance will be included in Elizabeth's monthly report.  

The new school term began on September 15th and teachers were encouraged to utilize the resources of the library. All library children will need frequent reminders by the librarian and teachers of library rules and how to turn the pages of the books without tearing or bending them. The library committee secretary, Mr. Kwami, will speak to the district education superintendant regarding a half hour weekly library period for each class.  Mr. Kaka, the Vakpo officer, was in attendance at the school opening ceremonies and we hope he can continue to try to see that Elizabeth can be hired by the Youth Employment program.  Youth Employment pays 70 GHc monthly and I have increased the allowance of the librarian from 30GHc to 70GHc. She will increase her hours from 12am-6pm to 10am-6pm.  Elizabeth was pleased with the allowance increase, and if Youth Employment pays her allowance, that will permit the 70GHc to be used for other library needs, one of which is a second librarian to assist her.  With the increase in the collection volume there is more library upkeep necessary and vital.  The committee has said they will continue to assist her until a second librarian is found.   

I left funds for two uniforms for Elizabeth, choice of cloth and design will be her choice and the dresses will be sewn by her sister, God's Way.  I have given to Joanna Felih contact phone numbers for Elizabeth so that when workshops occur through OCLF in Accra, she can attend.  

The price of the Daily Graphic and Junior Graphic has increased but I will continue to subscribe to them.  I also subscribe to the BBC Africa Now magazine. 

A review of the library accounts was done and there continues to be three accounts, the Ghana Commercial bank account, the treasurer's account and the librarian's petty cash account.  The treasurer is responsible for the bank and treasurer's records and Elizabeth will do the bookkeeping for the petty cash record. 2000Ghc was added to the existing 325GHc of the Ghana Commercial account and 400GHc to the treasurer's account.  50GHc was given to the librarian's petty cash account.  Jonas Dumelor, vice-chairman, will assist with the banking and record keeping, and Jonas will continue to train and assist Elizabeth as she learns to use the computer to email the monthly reports from the internet café in Kpando.  She has no keyboarding skills currently.

The high priest has removed Senyo Dzansi from the library committee for exclusive use in the community management capacity..  We will miss his knowledge and wisdom and organizational abilities on the committee.

Jonas mentioned to me that the electrical wiring from the guest house to the library may need work and/or replacement due to, in his opinion, poor workmanship of the existing cables/poles and connections.  He will continue to observe for any problems due to the necessity of fans for the dry conditions needed for keeping the books from being spoiled.  I had thought it might be useful to have a 2-seater KVIP for the library but decided to wait on building it until further evaluation of the need.  No other library in Ghana in which I have been has this facility available.

An excess of dictionaries, thesauruses, and Bibles were offered first to the committee members and then the rest will be donated to the church or used for prizes for reading competitions or spelling bees or rewards for assistance in the library by students or community members.    There are several boxes of duplicates of books which will, for now, be stored in sealed boxes in the library storeroom. The key to the trunk of office supplies was given to Elizabeth. I suggested a notice be posted that there be no cell phones in the library due to their disturbance of concentration of readers.  I also suggested that if the library will be closed for any reason that a notice be posted at least a week in advance.  The librarian will take two weeks annual holiday and that absence from the library should also be posted for the community.  If another librarian is found there will be no need to close at all.

The month in Jordan Nu was busy and I believe a lot was accomplished. Both the community and I are pleased with the library and its current offerings.   I hope the use of it will increase and that the community will see the benefits.

Jen Lazuta, a Peace Corps volunteer in a village just outside of Ouahigouya, in the north of the country, is working hard to get a library started in the village.  She sounds like she has really been doing some "deep immersion" in the village, really getting to know people.... it is a nice feeling after a long time in a place to feel like you know it and the people there (and she's a marathon runner apparently... in the Sahel?!?!).

Anyway, we wish Jen much success, and FAVL will be doing what it can to make sure the library gets off the ground and, more importantly, continues serving as a place for reading and cultural activities, for years to come. 

I am getting busy now that university is in full session, so only have time to read short novels... fun to go to the library and just look for thin books.   I can't say that this was a memorable book... Written during the 1960s.  Presumably at the time these and other books of Gordimer's caused a stir by the very unlikelihood of the subject matter: white South Africans going over to the ANC side.  The beauty is in the thickly layered psychology of the central character and her ex-husband, who commits suicide after a botched bombing etc.

I've blogged before about Where There Is No Doctor, but here again, thanks to the good people at Hesperian Publishers,. is Lucas Amikiya at the Sumbrungu Community Library, after having spent a couple of days non-stop (it's addictive!) reading the book...

In the social science lately there is a movement to say that most everything that is worth knowing is the result of a randomized experiment where the effects of the treatment on a treated group of people, compared with the control group, can be valued and compared to the cost of the treatment.   (Snarky junior economists always point out that there is no randomized experiment demonstrating that societies with randomized experiments do better than ones where academics do deeply flawed research but that doesn't matter because policy decisions are informed by policy advisors and if effective policy advisors- who not surprisingly often turn out to be mediocre academics- couldn't ever get degrees they would never have the academic prestige credentials to become policy advisors... sometimes this is called the Joe Stiglitz theory... you have to be an economist to know the deep ironic twists going on there...)

Anyway.... where were we?  Oh yes, justifying libraries in Africa by impact evaluation studies.  Honest, I've got no problem with that... but I'd rather not spend a lot of time figuring out the value of a 50 year old policeman reading Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé...

Here's the post that prompted this tiny diatribe:

Those of you working in higher education in the UK already know about the barbarous proposal to make future support for research depend on a government assessment of its "impact" - in other worlds whether there's a tangible payoff in terms of economic growth or social policy. Whilst some people--"Wordsworth Country!"--will no doubt be able to spin the positive effects of their works for tourism, and those designing surface-to-air missiles systems will be about to cite the probable benefits to UK exports, others are not so lucky. Medieval French poetry, the metaphysics of holes, set theory ... forget it, basically.

I said to myself tonight, "I'm going to go over to Science Daily Digest and see if there is anything new on reading and the brain..." (that's the kind of life I lead, sigh) and guess what?  There was.  An amazing research project.  But... it makes me wonder... all this stuff is tremendously valuable down the road for drug manufacturers and their consumers, but does it really matter for educators to learn more about this? 

Particularly important were the connections to and from an area of the brain known as the angular gyrus. Scientists have known for over 150 years that this brain region is important for reading, but the new research has shown that its role had been misunderstood. Previously, it was thought that the angular gyrus recognised the shapes of words prior to finding their sounds and meanings. In fact, the researchers showed that the angular gyrus is not directly involved in translating visual words into their sounds and meanings. Instead, it supports this process by providing predictions of what the brain is expecting to see. "The traditional view has been that the angular gyrus acts as a 'dictionary' that translates the letters of a word into a meaning." explains Professor Price. "In fact, we have shown that its role is more in anticipating what our eye will see - more akin to the predictive texting function on a mobile phone." The findings are likely to prove useful for researchers trying to understand the causes of the reading disorder dyslexia. Studies of dyslexics have shown regions of reduced grey and white matter in regions that grow after learning to read. The new study suggests that some of the differences seen in dyslexia may be a consequence of reading difficulties rather than a cause.

E-books versus paper books.  Normally I try not to link to NYT since most blog readers are probably reading it already, but this was an extremely pertinent debate.  Wish they had included a voice about never giving 250 million African children a chance to read books if governments and donors are encouraged to jump straight to electronics.  The e-book lobbyists no doubt are working hard on that, and the African publishing industry has no one to represent them at all.  Guess what the outcome is likely to be? 

PS. I love the computer scientist guy who writes "technology is neutral (as usual)" with no attempt even to explain what a statement like that could possibly mean.  Yes, the tornado destroyed your home, but it was a neutral tornado.  He then chides students about writing badly because they are used to texting, but himself uses the "(as usual)" construction twice... Snark is free here, btw.

An extract from the contribution of Maryanne Wolf author of Proust and the Squid:The Story and Science of the Reading Brain:

I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically. For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

We spent the next two days in Dodoma meeting new friends from the PEN Trust, handling library business, and buying water and provisions for our stay. Then we were ready for the last leg of the journey, a one hour drive on a dirt road to Mvumi Makula. This time we were joined by Ricky, another vol who was just finishing up a month in the village but welcomed the opportunity to go back for one last goodbye. The Chalula Community library has been open for close to two years now. There have been ups and downs -including our librarian's serious bout with malaria, and sand-encrusted solar panels - but for the most part things are going well. The collection is growing, albeit slowly, and every day that we were in the village, dozens of children came to read and be read to by the older children and the volunteers. Housing for us and the vols is a small mud brick building with three bedrooms and a common room for eating or socializing. The rooms are furnished with foam mattresses, mosquito nets and whatever the volunteers bring. For my husband that was a flashlight and a stack of New Yorkers. For me it was a canister of Moist Wipes. Don't leave home without them. The two suitcases of books and school supplies we brought were soon catalogued and added to the small collection as were two big boxes brought by our new friends Mungwe and Andrea, the founders of PEN Trust, The Poverty Eradication Network. www.pentrust.org Their help was invaluable on this trip and I am optimistic that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship! I spent half a day using clear plastic packing tape to rebind the ones that we'd left the last time we were there and I don't doubt that we will need to rebind them again the next time we visit!

Read the full post here.

Great discussion by Alain Mabanckou, in an interview with Nouvel Observateur... Tintin au Congo by Hergé is very controversial, and Mabanckou hits the right tone... you can't "ban" it, because its is a "trace" of a certain way of thinking... a way of thinking that has to be recovered, deconstructed, and changed.

Entre 1927 et 1929, par exemple, des livres majeurs plaidaient pour la revalorisation de la condition de l'homme noir, et ces ouvrages étaient donc des plaidoyers contre le colonialisme. Je pense aux deux livres publiés par André Gide (Voyage au Congo et Retour du Tchad) ou encore à Terre d'Ebène d'Albert Londres. Par ailleurs, quoique l'on puisse reprocher au siècle des Lumières, il reste que cette époque a été celle de l'humanisme et donc de recherche d'un certain équilibre entre les hommes. Hergé ne pouvait pas ignorer cela. Il avait donc fait un choix capital: légitimer la colonisation de la Belgique au Congo par son œuvre. En effet les Belges étaient nombreux à ne pas vouloir se rendre dans cette terre lointaine. Il fallait bien une propagande. Dans ce sens, Hergé a donné un grand coup de main au système colonial belge, et «Tintin au Congo» - toutes proportions gardées - a été aussi «stratégique» que ces propagandes que diffusait l'armée française pour inciter le gens à aller se battre en Algérie.

I just finished the English translation of this war novel love story... A Very Long Engagement, from 1991, by Sebastien Japrisot.  Apparently it was made into a movie with Audrey Tautou... I realize I was in Burkina in 2007 when it came out, so no wonder I never hread of it. 

A bit maudlin and precious towards the beginning, and over the top in its anti-war sentiment (I still recommend Goodby to All That by Robert Graves as the best WWI book), but last night I started reading towards the middle and just stayed up until I finished... very nice.  I think I shall have to read the original in French though.  Occasional references to African tirailleurs, which is interesting... they were a commonplace.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.""

From EverythinLiterature: An interview with Maryam Ali Ali, writer and lecturer with Sa'adatu Rimi College of Education, Kumbotso, Kano.

When and how did you start writing?
I started writing very early in life. Maybe because I grew up with the quest to read, I read anything readable, even the newspaper used to wrap akara. From there I started writing. But I once wrote an assignment that so much impressed my teacher then that he gave me a very good mark, that was my motivation, that very big right mark across the page of my exercise book and the comment that followed it, saying excellent; that was what started it all.
What's your novel, The Faces of Naira all about?
It's about being steadfast in doing good, and not hankering madly after material wealth through any dubious means. The novel was originally written in Hausa and published in 1997, then I translated it into the English language and was published in 2006, with the same title in English.

The New York Times adds fuel to the fire of the disingenuous voices that accost me after every FAVL talk, "Why establish libraries when they can just read books on their cell phones?"  Honestly, this latest version of NYT boosterism almost reads like a paid placement by the cell phone industry.  I'm waiting for the academic to come along with the nice randomized evidence that cell phones in Africa are just like fried dough and sugar- impossible to resist for poor people. 

Mr. Bangirana, 60, a former teacher and village chief, wears a bright yellow T-shirt with the words "Ask Me" across the chest. His community now comes to him with questions about farming practices and health issues, and he can quickly find most answers using Google text messaging and an operator service. He said he sometimes took his phone to village primary schools to show the children the limitlessness of the information available to them.

It is limitless, do you hear!  After so much crankiness on my part, I need a nice soothing picture of children with books... how about this one, courtesy of Amy Reggio?

This book is getting a lot of buzz... The young man featured in the book grew up in Malawi and built a windmill, on his own... after reading about windmills in a library?  Sounds a little contrived.  maybe it was his secondary school library cupboard?  But I'll have to read it.  I saw the video from his TED talk several years ago, and indeed quite inspiring. 

Ashley and Yuki, two university students on the Reading West Africa program in Burkina Faso, take some time to read one of the books created by FAVL volunteer Chelsea Rangel.  Later in the quarter Ashley and Yuki will themselves be taking photos and working with FAVL librarians to create more books for the libraries.