March 2010 Archives

Mason does a lyrical job of conjuring the confusion, glitter, and menace of the city, as seen through a naive country girl's eyes, and he proves equally deft at contrasting the metropolitan chaos with the spartan world Isabel knew in St. Michael.

But while he makes the reader sympathize with Isabel's plight, it is an abstract sort of sympathy - the sort of sympathy people feel for the poor or the homeless, glimpsed on the evening news. Isabel remains more of a symbol than a person, and, in the end, her quest for her missing brother, too, feels less like a real search than a sort of Jungian hunt for a missing part of herself.

Georgiou points out that English is an orthographically inconsistent language; in other words, letters can have more than one sound each. Because of this, he says, children learning English "need someone to show them the letters, teach them the letter sounds, play with letter magnets on the fridge. "We have found that in English, you need a rich home literacy environment. It's absolutely necessary," he says. But that's not the case in other languages. Georgiou notes that students are able to learn to read faster in languages such as Greek and Finnish, because there is one-to-one correspondence between a letter and its sounds. This difference with English, he says, implies that Greek or Finnish parents do not need to read as frequently to their children to give them an edge on learning the language. Simply put, Greek or Finnish children will eventually learn to read regardless of how rich the home literacy environment may be.

Santa Clara University is working with the Friends of African Village Libraries, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to reading material and other information in rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa. FAVL refurbishes community-donated buildings, buys books by local authors, sending donated books, and pays librarian salaries. SCU is offering a Semester Abroad Program called "Burkina Faso: Reading West Africa Program". Program Director is Michael Kevane. Here is the Semester Abroad description: "The Santa Clara University Fall Semester Study Abroad/Immersion in Burkina Faso is a study abroad program for students with at least one year of university-level French or equivalent interested in combining academic work on the literature and development challenges of West Africa with immersion and community-based learning experiences in public libraries in small towns and villages in rural areas. Students spend the first six weeks of the program in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the second six weeks in a rural village in southwestern Burkina Faso, a week in Dogon country, on the Burkina-Mali border, and a final two weeks back in Ouagadougou." A portion of the CSU student learning experience includes living in a village for six weeks and working with FAVL to create two books for village libraries. Students will learn photography in order to capture local images, publishing software, and preparing books for printing a small print run.

Footnote 1: E-Book readers such as Amazon.com's Kindle and the One-Laptop-Per-Child computer can provide thousands of books to each library. The Internet Archive is a powerful source of free, open content.
Footnote 2: The FAVL effort reminds me of several books: Masha Hamiltons' "The Camel Bookmobile" (Kenya) and Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time." (Pakistan and Afganistan)
Footnote 3: See also July 18, 2007 San Jose Mercury News article on SCU and FAVL.

Avec « Le jujubier du patriarche », la Sénégalaise Aminata Saw Fall [sic] signe un roman où les liens de parenté, tel un foisonnement, occupent une place centrale. C'est ainsi que chaque année, tel un pèlerinage, les descendants réels ou opportunistes de Babyselli, leur ancêtre commun, viennent se recueillir sur sa tombe dans un petit village de la brousse. Le lieu funéraire est dominé par un jujubier auquel est accordé des pouvoirs magiques, notamment d'être un lien entre les vivants et l'ancêtre Babyselli. Mais cette année le jujubier a perdu de sa superbe. Pour Tacko, épouse de Yelli, lui-même descendant de Babyselli, les mauvais présages sont déjà à l'ouvrage. C'est ainsi qu'elle n'a de cesse de rappeler à son mari leur déchéance à cause de la naïveté et des largesses de ce dernier ; lui qui autrefois était riche et avait dilapidé sans modération sa fortune dans l'entretien des griots et autres opportunistes. Sitôt les bourses vides, sa petite cour avait disparu. Tacko se doit de supporter les affronts qui en résultent. C'est ainsi qu'elle fut obligée de quitter sa belle villa installée dans le quartier le plus en vue de la ville pour une petite concession dans une rue populeuse. De plus en plus aigrie et jalouse, Tacko ne supporte plus les affronts et cela peu importe leur nature. C'est ainsi qu'elle se met à dos sa « fille », car celle-ci appartiendrait à une lignée d'esclaves qui a le culot d'être plus riche qu'elle. C'en est trop ! En dépit de la dislocation des liens de parenté, Aminata Saw Fall laisse à ses personnages la possibilité de renaître, de vivre ensemble. Une petite ombre au tableau, le nombre important de personnages peut nuire à la compréhension du roman.

Intuition and piecemeal evidence suggest that literacy has positive externalities on earnings of others in the household. That is, a literate person is likely to share some of the benefits of his or her literacy with other members of the household. This means that it is better to be an illiterate in a household where there is someone literate than in a household of only illiterates. We have tested this hypothesis in two ways. Firstly, we have asked whether it can be derived from a consistent set of assumptions about household behavior. Our theoretical analysis of the household, based on the collectivist model of the household, confirms that it can make sense for agents to share their education with others in the household. Secondly, we have tested if the hypothesis stands up to systematic scrutiny in earnings data for Bangladesh. We found that it not only stands up, it does so with a considerable amount of robustness. Controlling for observed personal attributes, an illiterate worker earns appreciably more in the non-farm sector when living in a family with at least one literate member. This finding is robust to the tests we perform for selection bias and marital sorting. The empirical investigation has yielded insights deeper than what we had anticipated on the basis of theory and intuition. It is, for instance, widely noted that a literate mother confers greater benefits on the children than a literate father. But what about differences between male and female recipients? Is there any reason to believe that a female is better able to absorb the benefits of literacy in the household than a male illiterate? While theory suggests that they can have differences, it gives no hint as to which way this may go. Our empirical results suggest that women are more efficient recipients.

Comme prévue, j'ai effectué un déplacement a Pobé le mercredi 23 février pour voir l'état d'avancement de la bibliothèque.   Le bâtiment est totalement refait, il se compose de 4 pièces. La salle de lecture est spacieuse et les étagères y sont déjà disposées ainsi que les premiers livres.  J'ai discuté avec Adama Sawadogo - l' antiquaire et membre du comité de gestion qui a beaucoup soutenu le projet de bibliothèque - il dit qu'avec Emilie et les autres membres du comité ils sont convenus de lancement officielle des activité de la bibliothèque le 3 ou le 4 Avril 2010 en fonction de la disponibilité des uns et des autres. Je note egalement Adama, très enthousiaste, a promis de faire construire un hangar sur la terrasse de la bibliothèque.