Recently in Africa Category

  There are perks that come with certain jobs and I have to admit, this last perk that I benefitted from was pretty amazing:

I've just returned from a Peace Corps conference, Best Practices from the Field, that took place in Senegal. In short, it's a conference where all Senegal volunteers get together and learn about what other PCVs are doing. It is a huge conference and PC Senegal invited me and other volunteers from across West Africa including Mali, Togo, Gambia, and Cape Verde to present projects.

 
The conference was very well organized, interesting and informative. I gave several presentations on promoting literacy and talked about FAVL as a resource. I met a volunteer from Mali who was giving talks on adult literacy so we worked together to combine our presentations. We got a lot of positive feedback from the other volunteers. They loved the children's books made by last year's RWA group and many asked where they could buy them.
When I wasn't presenting I was attending other presentations including Best Practices for Working with Youth and Conducting NGO Workshops.

A volunteer demonstrating how to make fuel briquettes (what the girl in purple is holding)

Senegal, to put it mildly, was INCREDIBLE! I knew Dakar (the capital) was much more developed than Ouaga but I never imagined to what extreme. The city was absolutely beautiful, the main city road passing right along the ocean water; high-rises were everywhere, the city bustling with things to do. The food, especially compared to Burkina, was delicious. Fresh fish, tasty rice dishes, and vegetables galore....I was in heaven! The art work being sold was so beautiful, diverse and colorful. As another volunteer put it, "If we were volunteers in Senegal we would be broke and 50 lbs heavier!"

The conference was great, the beaches beautiful, the food delicous...and all expenses paid? You wont be hearing any job complaints from me.

Em

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's that time of year...Tabaski! Celebration of the sheep; a Muslim holiday. A day of going door to door visiting family and friends and feasting on, you guessed it,  sheep. Coming from Pobe-Mengao, a predominately Muslim village, I wasn't expecting much from Ouaga.

I should have known better!

 By 1p.m. the top button of my pants had to come undone. It was like the food and drink would never end.  I haven't eaten so much since....well since last year's Tabaski!

Amina!

The Kitengesa Community Library in Uganda has a new redesigned website, at www.kitengesalibrary.org. It has also published a recent newsletter that can be accessed from the website. And for anyone who is in the New York area, there will be a benefit for the library at Hunter College on November 15, 2010, at 7 p.m. The event will feature readings by Meena Alexander, a well known poet who has written extensively about the postcolonial condition. For more details, write to kateparry@earthlink.net.

Yesterday evening Emilie and I went to a meet and greet with the new U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso at the United States Embassy here in Ouagadougou.  Nothing terribly exciting, but it was nice to get a guided tour of the new compound, which is way out in Ouaga 2000 due to new embassy security protocol after the embassy bombings in East Africa a few years ago.  The highlight for us, it should go without saying, was the library.  Well, at least it was the highlight for me.

 

Charley: "We should definitely get a membership."

Emilie: "Why?"

Charley: "So that we can come and check out books?"

Emilie: "But all of their books are so... American."

Apparently the African book selection didn't quite meet Emilie's standards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Emilie and I (Charley, who needs to set up his own account so his posts don't keep coming up as Emilie's) just got back from Ghana last night, where we were helping Nico and Francesca with their research from the Summer Reading Camps.  We spent the week helping them administer oral reading tests to primary school students from several different schools, some of whom participated in the summer reading camps a couple of months ago.  It was great to see a couple of the libraries there, as we both are familiar only with the FAVL libraries here in Burkina.  Beyond interacting with kids in village, which is always (usually?) a blast, we also enjoyed practicing our English after being in a Francophone country for so long and being referred to as "white man" instead of "les blancs" or "nasara" for a few days.  My camera unfortunately ran out of battery power before I could snap a photo of "King Jesus Chemicals" or "God's Will Beauty Salon," but I managed to get a few shots out at the schools. 

 

  The comedic film « Taafe Fanga  (Skirt Power) » is centered around cosmogony and mythology in 18th century Dogon, Mali. The women, tired of the men's arrogance, capture the powerful Albarga mask and threaten the men into taking over traditional women's roles.

 

RWA assistant Monique reviews the film:

 

" TAAFE FANGA is a very interesting film that I just watched. It talks about a problem that concerns me, the roles of women. While watching it I thought that this film allowed men to better understand the behaviors toward women that they wouldn't want to be subjected to themselves. And the film is very funny!"

 

 

La comédie « Taafe Fanga » est structurée autour de la cosmogonie et mythologie au Dogon, Mali, pendant le 18eme siècle. Les femmes, fatiguées de l'arrogance des hommes, capturent le masque puissant 'Albarga', et forcent les homme a prendre la relève des travails traditionnels de la femme.

 

Monique, l'assistante avec RWA, fait une critique du film :

 

« TAAFE FANGA est un film qui est très intéressant et que j'ai vu. Il parle d'un problème qui me concerne ; celui de la condition des femmes. En le regardant je me suis dit qu'il permettra aux hommes de comprendre qu'ils ont des comportements envers les femmes qu'ils n'aimeront pas subir eux-mêmes. Et, c'est un film vraiment très drôle ! »

 

 

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.

URLCODA is the acronym for Uganda Rural Literacy and Community Development Association. It is centered in the West Nile region, which is in the extreme northwest of Uganda, in the corner between the borders with Congo and Sudan. The region is quite remote, and its people are very poor, especially since communication with the rest of Uganda was difficult, and many people were displaced, during the long years when the Lord's Resistance Army was fighting the government.

URLCODA began at Makerere University in the late 1990s when students from the region got together to address the poverty. They were led by Willy Ngaka, who was studying  adult literacy in the Institute for Adult Education. Now it is a fully recognized NGO with an active Positive Group (comprised of people who are HIV positive), many affiliated adult literacy groups, and a fully developed practice of teaching intergenerational literacy (in which unschooled adults and primary school dropouts teach each other); and, since it is a member of UgCLA, it has, of course, a library.

When I first visited this library in January of this year it consisted only of 250 books, which were kept in a storeroom in Willy's house in the village of Lokotoro. The library coordinator, Jasindo Afebua, would take the books out as needed for the intergenerational classes, which were held in the garage; there was no dedicated library building. The books, as well as the plastic chairs that the library had, had been bought in 2008 with a grant of $1000 from the US Embassy, distributed through UgCLA.

This year, I am glad to say, UgCLA has been able to help URLCODA again. Late in 2009, the Hawk Children's Fund asked to identify appropriate sites for a Rural Solar Demonstration Project. The Fund would provide $15,000 in all to provide solar electricity and to do any necessary building work for it to be used. We recommended the URLCODA and Mpolyabigere Community Libraries to divide the grant between them. URLCODA thereupon completed a building that it had already begun in Willy's compound, roofing it with iron sheets that it had already secured for another purpose. The solar electricity was installed last week, and the new building was officially opened on Sunday. Almost immediately it was full of children busily reading.

But that is not all. I was there last week not only to see the new library building but also to deliver more books and another, smaller, sum of money, for URLCODA's Positive Group to use. The books are on health issues, and the group will translate a few of the easier ones into Lugbara and will also write about their own experiences with HIV in the same language. The grant for this work again came from the Hawk Children's Fund, to which we are all very grateful.

In addition, I visited no fewer than nine other libraries in the region, all of which are affiliated to URLCODA. Eight of them are already members of UgCLA, and one other will be joining soon. Most of these "libraries" are actually primary school classrooms where an adult literacy group is allowed to meet, and such books as they have may be used by the primary school children too. One of the most successful is the Queen of Heaven Community Library in Yumbe, near the Sudan border. Here there is an active women's group, which is engaging in a number of income generating activities and which was one of the winners of books in UgCLA's Children's Book Project that was funded by Pockets of Change (see my post of May 5, 2010). The books are now displayed on a bookshelf in the classroom, and there is a regular timetable for children to come in and read them. Others are less well off. One, at a village called Endru, was constrained to leave the primary school where it was started and now meets under a tree in a compound a mile or two down the road. It has virtually no books, but it displays with pride a computer keyboard that the women made out of clay; their leader learned her letters from this sort of keyboard, and she can now write her name on a real computer. Another, the Sida Community Library at Tuku village, used to have books, but they, and the shelf on which they were kept, got eaten by termites. So the women resolved to put up a building for their library. They made the bricks themselves and got the walls up four years ago; but they got stuck at the roof because they had no money for iron sheets. So  the walls still stand, while the women meet under a tree and learn their letters from a blackboard.

The needs in such a region are so great as to be overwhelming. The primary schools, however, are beginning to get books as the government finally gets round to providing them. At one school we saw a lovely set of Primary One readers in Lugbara, though we were distressed that the packets had not yet been opened; and in another the head teacher was actively promoting the use of the school's books and appreciated the adult group's commitment to reading. URLCODA is also producing little readers in Lugbara, and UgCLA has already contributed significantly through its support (thanks to the American Embassy and the Hawk Children's Fund) of the "mother library" at Lokotoro. I believe that we should continue to build up that library so that it can lend books to the other ones and, as Willy suggested, have the primary schools send their children to Lokotoro on a regular basis to spend a night and enjoy the electricity.

The URLCODA library and its affiliates are the kind of institution that UgCLA exists to support--and they, in turn, provide the dynamism that sustains UgCLA. It is a wonderfully productive partnership, so my question now is, are there such partnerships among libraries and library associations elsewhere in Africa? And if not, why not?

For more about URLCODA, click here.

 

UgCLA (the Uganda Community Libraries Association) will be three years old next month, so I'm writing to report on how this toddler is doing.

First, let me clarify UgCLA's relationship to FAVL. I myself am the chief link, being on the Board of both, and FAVL helps UgCLA significantly by acting as a channel for donations from the USA. UgCLA, for its part, promotes FAVL's aims in Uganda. It operates quite differently from FAVL, though, since it does not itself establish libraries. Rather, it seeks out existing ones, helps them to develop, and encourages the foundation of more. It does these things in five main ways:

·         A lot of travelling! I myself am trying to visit each one of UgCLA's member libraries so as to encourage them and give them advice. So far I've covered about three quarters of them.

·         Workshops. Since its foundation, UgCLA has organized two national workshops a year, to which every member library is invited to send a representative. These workshops are invaluable, not only because they provide training in running libraries but also because librarians can meet and share ideas. By now they've developed a strong sense of community and clear leaders have emerged among them. The only trouble is that the libraries are now too many (see below)--so from next year we will be organizing a single national conference instead in combination with regional workshops.

·         Distributions. We try to make partnerships each year that will enable us to distribute goodies among our member libraries, usually on a competitive basis, and to provide training for the competition through our workshops. The first such distribution, funded by the US Embassy in Kampala, was of six grants of $1000 each; the second was of four scholarships to attend the 6^th Pan African Conference on Reading for All in Dar es Salaam (to which we added a small conference on community libraries in Lushoto); the third, this year, was of ten packets of locally purchased children's books. Next year we are working towards a "Libraries for Health" project in which we hope to distribute books about health (especially HIV-AIDS) together with funds for organizing reading camps or workshops on the subject.

·         Links to funders for individual libraries. We are building up relationships with small-scale funders and advising them on which libraries they could work with for particular projects. A recent example is the work we've been doing with Hawk Children's Fund, of the University of Maryland's Eastern Shore Campus (see http://hawkchildrensfund.org/). HCF wanted to support a rural solar electricity project, so we identified two libraries that could make good use of solar electricity, and then administered the grant that the fund gave us. Now children at the URLCODA library in Arua District and the Mpolyabigere library in Namutumba District can read at night (see the posts on each of these two libraries).

·         Volunteers. UgCLA also hosts volunteers: that is, we identify appropriate placements for them, depending on their interests, and arrange with the host library for their accommodation. We have had four volunteers so far and are receiving two more this month.

UgCLA is definitely fulfilling a need, for its growth over three years has been extraordinary. When it was launched, in August 2007, it was joined by 14 libraries. The number rose slowly at first, to 16 by July 2008. But a year later it had reached 41, and now, in June 2010, UgCLA has 64 member libraries. All are local initiatives and most have no foreign support; and it has to be said that some are notional, having no buildings and few books. But there is the seed of a library in every place: a primary school, an adult literacy class, or a local organization devoted to literacy and development.  The idea of a library resonates with Ugandans' enthusiasm for education and their disenchantment with what the schools are offering. It is the kind of modest institution that local people feel they can support--though of course they always appreciate outside help--and if well led it can become a real centre for community development. UgCLA is dedicated to helping them to get the help that they need in order to flourish, but also, and more importantly, to helping them to help themselves.

For more, see UgCLA's own website: www.ugcla.org.