Recently in Activities Category

I'm in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, for the month of September, with the Reading West Africa program.  Had a nice short meeting today with Amidou Konfe, the new librarian of Pobe library.  He had just spent the week in Sara village, assisting, and learning from, the summer reading camp.  He had been very impressed by the kids showing up Monday morning in their matching camp t-shirts.  The first day, he said, was a little hard, as everyone realized the reading levels of the kids was lower than expected.  But they worked hard all week, he said, and really managed to give lots of kids a huge boost in their reading abilities.  He was very impressed with the books of Fatou Keita, and saw that the kids were too.  He's ready now to implement something similar in Pobe next summer.

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 

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.

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.

Bonjour Michael

Le moral des bibliothécaires était bon.  Elisée a été un peu direct avec eux a propos des problèmes tel que les erreurs sur les comptes, la bonne rédaction des rapports et la conduite des activités. Il a rappelé que de telles erreurs retardent le travail et peuvent avoir une incidence sur tout le système.  Tout le monde a participé au débat, ils ont pris l'engagement de bien faire dorénavant.  Mais la question majeure était la disponibilité de l'argent pour les fonds de roulement des bibliothèques. Les bibliothécaires disent que le manque d'argent dans les caisses fait qu'il est difficile de prendre des initiatives d'animation qui peuvent nécessiter de l'argent.  

Le bureau à Hounde était bien. C'était un peu en désordre parcequ' il avait un gros paquet de  livres en boites qui prenait beaucoup de place et qu'il fallait distribuer aux bibliothécaires. L'accueil était formidable, la famille de Donkoui était très accueillante (j'adore ses enfants) et on a très bien mangée. Moi j'ai découvert un délicieux plat qui s'appelle le nionkon (boules vertes avec feuilles d'haricot, graines de petit mil et de l'arachide).  Mais dans l'ensemble tout s'est bien passé.
                                                                                                                 
Merci

Emilie
 

Kate Parry writes from Uganda, a quick update... she's a whirlwind!

I visited the library [Kitengesa] on June 30 especially in order to meet with the women. They were full of their work for the FLP and had brought their pictures and books to show me. They had two requests for me: would I please look at their notebooks every three months or so to see how they are doing, and would I visit them all in their homes about that often as well? Of course, I can't do it that often, but it's nice to be asked, and I'll definitely try to make the home visits in August before I leave. And now I'm just back from travelling in the Western Region, where I've seen three flourishing rural information centres, learned about two defunct ones, and discovered a priest in a particularly remote parish who wants to set up a community library. We have 64 member libraries in UgCLA, some 60 of which have said they're sending a representative to attend the workshop that begins tomorrow. So it continues ...