Recently in Volunteers & Partners Category

We are back in Accra! It was a fantastic week, the Jordan Nu community was extremely welcoming and supportive of our work. It was definitely a challenge at times because we seemed to generate a LOT of interest in the library (many many many children!!), but tonight at dinner we said we were all very happy with the impact we were able to make. Both Laura and I are still in very good health, save some dirt and grime from village/trotro travel :-). We hope this continues!

Best,
Lauren and Laura

PS. Wife of the God's references: saw an advert for the "Chances Hotel" in Ho that Darko mentions, and some Ewe words from the book became familiar!

Thanks very much to Ada Giusti (and her students at Montana State University) and Helene LaFrance for developing a French edition of the FAVL website.  It is now "live" at http://www.favl.org/french/

Over the coming days I want to remember a bunch of people who have been helping FAVL here in the U.S.  Our job here is to raise money and awareness; over in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda the job is to make the libraries into models of cost-effective centers for promoting reading. 

So today I want to shout out thanks to our website and graphics contributors- they have over the years been working quietly yet diligently..  So thanks Brian Washburn, Hiller Higman and Chuck Spidel.  The website keeps getting better and better!

(Emilie Crofton writes from Ouagadougou...)

Every few months a local expat/businessman named Omar throws an event called the "Jungle Party", held in the Parc Bangr Weogo, where locals and expats come to meet, greet, drink, dance and have a good time. At each party, Omar chooses one local organization to help support and this month...FAVL was chosen!

How it works is that the organization chosen raises money through a raffle held at the party.

So for two weeks Charley and I ran around town, trying to get local businesses (hotels, grocery stores, restaurants etc.) to offer certificates and prizes. Throughout the night of the party, we sold raffle tickets and 100% of the money (tickets cost 1,000 CFA each, about 2$) went toward FAVL.

Well, the party was a big success! At first, Charley and I were nervous; by 10:30p.m. just a handful of people were there. But of course, in Burkina parties don't start until midnight
or 12:30. Over the course of the night the crowd grew and grew and by 1 a.m. I would say there  were about 150 to 200 people there.

Throughout the night Charley and I meandered through the crowds, trying to sell as many
tickets as possible. It took a while for both of us to get our salespeople skills on, but once we got on a roll (and people got a few drinks in them) it didn't stop.

By the end of the night, the amount we raised for FAVL was...drum roll please...

210,000 CFA (about 450$)!

The Jungle Parties usually last until 5 or 6 in the morning. Charley and I had both been there since 8:30 p.m. to set up, so once the ticket numbers were called out and the prizes claimed, we thanked everyone and headed out, returning home completely exhausted at 3 a.m. (We may be Ouagalais now, but were still on village bed time!)

Overall the night was a great success. We were able to meet a lot of people, introducing and exposing FAVL to a new crowd,  and raised quite a bit of money!

I gave an early morning talk to Rotary Sunrise San Jose this morning... great group, very enjoyable.  And the sunrise special was great, Pat! 

I was presenting on FAVL's work in general, and also a project we are working on with Charlie Wasser of Santa Clara Rotary to develop a multimedia center in Hounde in Burkina Faso that would serve as local "base" for our book production and dissemination efforts.

It was my first time in Bay 101... who would have thought hundred of people playing Texas Hold 'em at 7am?

During their service a lot of PC volunteers do World Wide Schools, a pen pal letter exchange with students in their villages and schools in the United States. I thought this could be a great project to do with FAVL, connecting young students at the FAVL libraries with classes in the U.S.
I did some research and found a list of 50 different Franco-American schools in the States. Typed up a letter of introduction and what we were looking for. In short, said we were interested in creating relationships between the students at the FAVL libraries and the students at their schools. We'd start with a pen pal letter exchange. If the exchange is successful it could lead to other activities like Book-a-Thons of African literature, fundraisings, sponsorships, etc.
After sending a few letters, the very next day I got a response from a French primary school teacher at Austin International School, expressing interest. After a few more detailed email exchanges we decided to give it a try.
I talked to Hamidou, the Pobe librarian and he has already started the letter writing activity at the Pobe library, organizing interested students (around 10-13) and writing the letters. Jen is also working at the Bougounam library writing letters as well. We'll collect the letters at the next meeting on October 25th and send them out by the end of the month. The plan is to do this activity with all the FAVL libraries. 
This is just a starting point, a simple pen pal exchange. But I think if this is successful it can really lead to bigger things, like fundraisings and sponsorships, better connections between FAVL and US schools.  When I did this in Pobe both groups of children absolutely loved it. They had a new friend from the other side of the world and learned about a totally different way of life. (The class also very generously raised money for the Pobe library!) If for whatever reason the pen pal exchange doesn't lead to bigger things, the learning experience and new friendships the students will get out of it seems worth it to me.

Read the full entry here- worth it!

August 28, 2010
Today started early as I promised my kids during the second week I would go to the forest with them on Saturday. Looking back these past two weeks went by faster than I can remember. It also means I have only one more camp to run, as the second camp finished yesterday. In the second camp, I decided to focus on doing sound workshops and completing the research component, as the basics in terms of the schedule and division of labour where already laid upon from the first two weeks. This camp I had 19 kids, 9 girls and 10 boys, although one of them wasn't there for most of the time. This student was unable to fully attend because the salary of one of the fathers got stolen. I have found that each household can contain as many as 50 people as the family extends as to how many wives the father has or sometimes many families come together to from a household. Interesting story from Bernard was that the father gathered the entire household and 'laid' a curse of sickness on the one who stole the money. The meaning of this curse is that the first person to get sick was the one who stole the money. When one child got sick, the father and everyone in that household looked down upon this boy, but the mother blamed Safia, one of the girls attending the camp. Then Safia and the boy had to come by and meet with the father every day to talk things over. I haven't gotten this part straight though and don't know how the problem is going to be resolved but I thought the whole witchery was interesting. I have heard many stories having to do with witches and spells, giving way to a country where 'free will' isn't the norm.

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."

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.