August 2010 Archives

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!

Je choisi un livre qui est facile a comprendre et qui va intéressé les enfants le plus.  Premièrement je lis moi-même, après ils relisent. On découpe les mots difficiles pour qu'ils puissent bien les prononcer. A la fin on discute le thème du livre et je les pose des questions pour voire si ils ont bien compris. Livre que j'aime utiliser : « Le pain crocodile » et «Comment fait ont le Koura Koura »
-Ivette, bibliothécaire a Béréba

Je regroupe les enfants par niveau et classe. On utilise les livres d'exercice scolaire. Ils lisent avec moi ou je les fait lire un a un. Après on corrige les fautes. J'encourage tous les élèves avec les bonbons à la fin.
-Jonas, bibliothécaire a Boni

On lis a voix haute. Ceux qui ont des difficultés, je les regroupe ensemble et relis plus avec eux. Je mets beaucoup d'accent sur la prononciation.
-Zomizou, bibliothécaire a Béréba 

The exhibit looks really interesting... if only I were there!

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views brings together three series by South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa (b. 1960). "Interiors" and "Empty Beds" document the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, South Africa, while "Common Ground" focuses on the shared experience of natural disasters in urban areas, featuring houses in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, after wildfires.

Trust is a big word in economic development... African societies are often said to be low in trust, and this explains their slow economic development.  Low trust may have been a consequence of slave raiding.  I'd love to replicate this paper in African village settings.... and I'd love to see whether reading lots of fiction makes you more trusting.

People high in trust were more accurate at detecting the liars -- the more people showed trust in others, the more able they were to distinguish a lie from the truth. The more faith in their fellow humans they had, the more they wanted to hire the honest interviewees and to avoid the lying ones. Contrary to the stereotype, people who were low in trust were more willing to hire liars and they were also less likely to be aware that they were liars. "Although people seem to believe that low trusters are better lie detectors and less gullible than high trusters, these results suggest that the reverse is true," write co-authors Nancy Carter and Mark Weber of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. "High trusters were better lie detectors than were low trusters; they also formed more appropriate impressions and hiring intentions. "People who trust others are not pie-in-the-sky Pollyannas, their interpersonal accuracy may make them particularly good at hiring, recruitment, and identifying good friends and worthy business partners."

N. L. Carter, J. Mark Weber. Not Pollyannas: Higher Generalized Trust Predicts Lie Detection Ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2010; 1 (3): 274 DOI: 10.1177/1948550609360261

From a thesis by Jill Jenkins at George mason University:

This study investigated how the context of a Primary 3 (P3) teacher of Luganda in Uganda influenced the teacher's literacy instructional decision-making, beliefs, pedagogy, and practices before and after she was provided with supplies and literacy instructional procedures that helped produce reading materials for her students. The contextual problems that were addressed were the poverty context that included the lack of opportunities for P3 students to read in their native language due to having few or no books in Luganda (a minor language), and instructional practices that focused on rote learning which put students in a passive learning environment. The study was conducted for eight months in a rural/urban, public primary school P3 classroom with over 100 students. There were few teacher and student resources and 18 different mother tongues represented in the classroom. For six weeks the teacher taught the researcher about her beliefs, pedagogy, and practices through interviews, observations, and writing. The researcher also conducted interviews with selected students and community members. The innovation was based on Ball's teacher change model and involved the researcher modeling Language Experience Approach book writing, sharing information on literacy pedagogy, and collaborating and supporting the teacher's reflection and decision-making to develop literacy activities. A model was developed that included small group book writing that took the local context into account. The teacher experimented with the model and changed it according to her desires. The results included an increase in teacher capacity; changes in her beliefs, pedagogy, and practices; and modifications in the context. Less advanced students received support from more advanced peers, and the teacher had more time to work with groups and individual students. In addition, at minimal cost, students authored books on the curriculum in a minor language and read them.

An interesting library effort in Mozambique:

In July 2010, Books for Kids Africa director Mary Jo Amani traveled to the villages of Vinho, Vunduzi, and Mbulaua in Sofala (Mozambique) for three weeks to distribute 1130 high quality children's books to school and community library programs, funded in part by a $6610 U.S. Embassy small grant. Books for Kids Africa staff trained teachers in each of the three elementary schools on how to read books out loud and to use the books in mobile classroom library programs where students have the chance to select books of interest and read individually several times each week.

A perfect Masters thesis... from Judith Montgomery at Sierra Nevada College, "Effects Of The Accelerated Reader As A Motivational Tool In Promoting Literacy In The Classroom"

This single school, comparative study used a pretest-posttest control group design to examine the efficacy of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program on second grade students‟ motivation to read and their reading achievement. The relatively small sample of thirty-six participants attended an at-risk school, whose student population was deficient in meeting reading standards overall. These students had diverse needs and abilities. After twelve weeks it was determined that Accelerated Reader had no substantive impact on the treatment group‟s attitude toward reading or improvement of their reading abilities. It is suggested that AR may promote enthusiasm, fluency, and comprehension skills for those students who are independent readers but not for students reading below grade level.

Below is the blurb on the amazon.uk site for the book

'His beautifully controlled prose presents a cruelly absurd vision of war punctuated by passages of hyperreal tension...Italo Calvino considered 'A Private Affair' one of the finest novels of his generation, and its author is well regarded in his own country. This new Hesperus edition, with a fluent new translation by Howard Curtis, and an informative introduction by Paul Bailey, will bring Beppe Fenoglio to a wider audience.' --Times Literary Supplement

I have to concur.  A remarkable short novel.  The intensity of the prose and seamless flashback is a pleasure to read.  The ending is something only a master stylist could bring off.

FAVL volunteer Francesca notes how hard it is to run summer camps when everyone keeps getting sick...

Development and progress is so hard to achieve in places like rural Africa for many reasons- one being the incredibly small amount of time that people are physically able to be productive due to external circumstances such as no power, broken transportation and above all personal health. just from what i have seen...the average ghanaian (if he or she is lucky) will be sick/unable to work for at least one day a week due to some kind illness. even if they are able to come to work their productivity significantly decreases. This is not new- it is a very well known fact but it reaches a new level of recognition when you have a staff of 12 in 3 different rural village libraries and each day you expect at least one or two to be sick and even unable to work. This is a way of life for these people and they have designed their culture and economy around adapting to this lifestyle of limited full capacity productivity. here, malaria is more common than the common cold in the US. it is pointless to take a preventative pill everyday if you live here and many do not take the pills to fight the parasite once they have it. It is such a common and frequent disease and few can afford the medication. Even if you can- some would rather live with it than take the pills that would have side effects to stop you from working for 3-4 days. Example- my boss Lucas, who refused to take the pills for malaria because they made him sleep all day. he had had malaria so much that if it is under 3 plus- he would rather just live with it.

Here's the link to the gated article.

Do individuals engage in beneficial activities, like recreational reading, if the necessary materials are easily accessible and relatively inexpensive? I investigate this issue by estimating how much reading time increases as a result of public library use. To address the endogeneity of library use I use an IV approach where the instrument is a household's distance to their closest public library. Using data from the Current Population Survey, American Time Use Survey, and National Household Education Survey, I find that library use increases the amount of time an individual spends reading by approximately 27 min on an average day. Moreover, it increases the amount of time parents spend reading to/with young children by 14 min. This increase in reading is more than offset by a 59 min decrease in time spent watching television, and there is no significant change in time spent on other activities. For children in school, library use positively impacts homework completion rates. A simple cost-benefit exercise highlights the potential application of these results for local governments who fund these libraries.

"Un vieillard qui meurt n'est pas toujours une bibliothèque qui brûle."  Kind of a strange blog, from Benin, but I appreciated the sentiment...

En 1980, nous avons eu une séance de travail Issalè (sud-est de la, République Populaire du Bénin), capitale d'un très ancien royaume yoruba; nous fûmes surpris de constater que le meilleur en tradition orale concernant l'histoire de la région avait a peine la trentaine : en effet, Agbo Ola Ogudele, non seulement connaissait parfaitement tous les récits utiles à une bonne approche de l'histoire d'Issale, mais il demeure actuellement le seul informateur à pouvoir réciter de mémoire la liste complète et dans l'ordre de succession, des 17 souverains qui ont régné à la tête de cette modeste entité politique; au cours de la même séance de collecte de tradition orale, les 5 vieillards que nous croyions être de vraies bibliothèques vivantes, et qui avait chacun au moins le triple de l'âge d'Agbo Ola Ogudele, connaissaient

UgCLA (the Uganda Community Libraries Association) held its sixth workshop from July 11-13 this year (see the pictures below). The workshop was funded largely by Pockets of Change, as part of its support for our Children's Book Project, and  Hawk Children's Fund provided some additional funds to allow our new members to attend and to support a book-making project for a couple of the sessions. The workshop was held, once again, at the Kabubbu Community Library, which is affiliated to a conference centre and resort where we could all be put up.

Every workshop that UgCLA runs seems to be bigger and better than the last. In this case, we had 55 people attending, representing a large majority of our 67 member libraries. The activities were all focused on how we can better help children in our libraries. First, those libraries that had received books under the Children's Book Project reported on what they had done with them, and everybody present had a chance to ask questions and make comments. A packet of 80-odd books has been given to each of ten libraries, and while they all used them in different ways, the impact seems to have been great everywhere, bringing in increasing numbers of children and encouraging adults to read as well. Then we spent an afternoon working on photographs of everyday Ugandan people, things, and activities: participants designated the themes in the new thematic curriculum for lower primary classes that the photographs could be used for and wrote text for each picture appropriate to the designated themes. Our plan is to collate this work to form  a set of picture books that could be used not only in primary schools but in nursery schools and for family literacy projects - for we have found that one of the major deficits in locally produced material is picture books for young children. Next day, the librarians at Kabubbu showed the participants how they could make supplementary material from the books they had in their libraries, material that would be fun for children to work with and that would make the books more accessible - and one of them had a group of eleven volunteers act out a story with an accompanying little song that she had made up. Lastly, we had a session devoted to "fun and games", which, this being Africa, evolved into everyone dancing to the beat of drums played by children from the Kabubbu primary school.

In short, a good time was had by all, but it's important to emphasize that this is not the sole purpose of our workshops. We have found that through them our library managers pick up ideas from their colleagues as well as from us, and that all the libraries are run, in consequence, a little better. The participants get to know one another and have by now built up a strong sense of solidarity, which is expressed in practical offers of help to one another. On this occasion, for example, the library at the Suubi Centre in Masaka District made arrangements for its new librarian to spend some time at Kitengesa and Kabubbu to get some training. Then, of course, the actual workshop sessions will result, we hope, in libraries exploring new activities and developing new materials. We have yet to see what will come up as a result of this last workshop, but we are confident that many libraries will now be using pictures more and many librarians will be making word cards and exercises to go with the children's books that they have.

This unassuming novel is something I just found on the bookshelf of Santa Clara University's library.  A really good read.  Once I got started I just plowed the whole way through to the end. 

It is written in the form of a series of letters from mother to daughter.  While there is much hat-tipping to "Africa" really one has to be extremely clear, the Africa in the book is an extraordinarily well-educated, well-traveled and wealthy African family, albeit with rather normal roots in a village.  The setting, Zimbabwe, is an outlier in terms of colonial history. 

Mariaire is nowhere near the writer that Doris Lessing is (though she could have been- the bio notes indicate, rather, that she is a doctor and neurosurgeon).  While the prose is very good, and the style of letter writing is quite forgiving since meandering is part of the form, the subject matter makes the book complex.  At heart it is a serious attempt to construct an identity.  And this is where the reader (me) gets a little nervous, because I can't figure out whether Mariaire is a novelist, and is trying out what it would be like for someone to construct this particular identity, or whether Mariaire herself is constructing the identity.  The reason for nervousness is that it isn't really a very interesting identity to construct... the reflections of the identity-former and the narrator never really transcend, they stay very simple.  Like a knee-jerk to various stimuli.  It is useful to contrast with Chimananda Ngozi Adichi...

From FAVL Ouaga, Emilie Crofton and Elisee Sare:

Excellent film du célèbre réalisateur Ousmane Sembène, Faat Kine relate la vie d'une mère-célibataire. Dotée d'un fort caractère et d'une indépendance financière, Kine a su élever ses deux enfants grâce à son activité de gérante de station de carburant dans la ville de Dakar. Heureuse de l'obtention du baccalauréat par Aby et Djibril, ses enfants, elle décide de leur offrir une fête à la hauteur de l'événement. C'est alors que se présentent Boubacar et Hamath, respectivement père de Aby et Djibril, ceux-ci voulant se racheter d'avoir abandonné leurs enfants. Il s'ensuit alors un affrontement entre pères et enfants. En somme, Sembène pose dans ce film, les délicates questions du célibat chez la femme et le conflit  degénérations qui caractérisent les sociétés africaines.

An excellent film by the famous director Ousmane Sembène, Faat Kine is about the life of a strong-willed and hardworking single mother who is independent and financially successful as manager of a gas station in Dakar. Thrilled by her two children Aby and Djibril graduating from

high school, she throws them a party. Boubacar and Hamath, the fathers of Faat Kine's two children, show up at the party seeking forgiveness and asking to be apart of the children's lives. This leads to a climatic confrontation between father and child.  In this film Sembene poses delicate questions and portrays the difficulties facing women, especially single mothers, as well as the generational attitudes that constrain them in African society. 

Making picture books: the participants wrote text to use with the photographs supplied.

Volunteers performed a play based on a children's story about a boy who refused to eat his dinner, and a stick who refused to beat the boy, and a fire that refused to burn the stick ... eventually everyone did as they were asked, and the boy ate his dinner.

Over the years since 2001, coming up to our 10th anniversay, FAVL has received gneerous donations:

  97 individuals (and a few excellent foundations) have donated $1000 or more
  53 individuals have donated between $500 and $999
333 individuals have donated between $100 and $499
380 have donated sums under $100
and 37 people have donated stickers!

In total we finally broke the $500,000 mark, for the past nine years. 

That leaves out dozens of volunteers who have contributed the most valuable resource of all- their time.

So thank you all!!!!  We really appreciate it.    We hope you are satisfied with the results: thriving small networks of community libraries in villages where kids and adults rarely had the opportunity to read quality materials.  These libraries for the most part are visited 50-100 times a day.... that's a lot of reading going on...

I am going to be visiting the libraries in Burkina Faso and Ghana in September, and am eager to send back reports of what is new...