Recently in Literacy Category

Yesterday I returned from village(s) where we began the LED research study.
As Michael mentioned in a previous entry, we distributed solar-powered lanterns to 4th/5th graders in 9 different villages (5 of which have FAVL libraries) and plan to track their reading habits. During this phase of the project we went down to each school, explained the project to the students and randomly picked 80 per school to participate. After having the parents sign letters of consent, we returned to the villages to conduct a series of tests (written, oral, questionnaires) to evaluate their reading levels and habits. After another random drawing, 40 received the solar lamps and the other 40 got vouchers for new children's book. 

The trip definitely got off to an interesting start. Upon arrival to our home base in Bereba we were warned that it was the "temps des masques," where men wearing African masks sneak up on people, chasing them, throwing stones and heavy sticks, whipping whoever gets in their way. Young children, the elderly and, unfortunately for me, even foreigners who don't know better aren't spared. (It's no joke. Last year an elderly man was chased, pushed to the ground and fractured his wrist. Several years back a PC volunteer in a neighboring village was slashed so bad he needed stitches). The two day event is supposed to be some sort of cultural tradition to call for rain, but if you ask me, it just seems like an excuse for people to hit one another without risk of punishment. Those first two nights I slept with one eye open, wary of flying rocks coming my way. Luckily none of us were hit, though we did have masked men visit us twice in the middle of the night, jolting us awake and leaving me jittery the rest of the night.
 
Luckily the mask situation didn't impede on our work. Leaving Ouaga, I was stressed and worried about the project but was immediately calmed by the amazingness that is Dounko. From the start he took charge and was both efficient and productive out in the field. Initially I had estimated 10 days of testing, if not more. But the team: Dounko, Alidou and myself (along with the teachers at each school and, when they could help, Donkoui and Alison) often worked 12 hour days and were done after one week. Exhausting, yes, but we were all grateful to finish early.
 
The study itself was interesting. I had participated in a similar study that evaluated student's reading levels in Ghana back in October. I was surprised by the drastic difference (in a good way) of the reading levels here in rural Burkina compared to Ghana. In Ghana, most students I encountered couldn't read simple phrases. There were several students here in Burkina that couldn't read the alphabet, numbers, nor simple phrases; but they were few. The vast majority of the children we evaluated could read. The big issue that we encountered, however, was that only a handful of the students could actually understand what they read. In other words, the students could read a paragraph just fine but when you ask them questions, you realize they have no idea what they just read.

Unfortunately we ended on a horrible note: our last school was the most depressing and, quite honestly, left me angry and disgusted. There was not a single positive thing to say about the school environment in the village of Bereba. The students were by far the worst readers; the vast majority couldn't get through the first page of the oral test (focusing on letters/numbers/simple sentences). Not only that but they were rowdy, disobedient and disruptive...though one had only look at the teachers and school director to see why. During our 6 hours at the school the teachers showed up for about 1 ½ hours, choosing to sit and chat outside instead of teach. The director spent his time beating students who weren't in class, even though the teachers were nowhere to be found. From the start the director was angry with us because his son was not one of those randomly chosen to get a lamp. When we explained that we used the system of random drawing so that all students had a fair chance to participate, he responded that he was the director and should therefore be given all favors and free gifts. Dounko refused and from that point on the director did all he could to cause us problems/failures (like telling teachers not to help us, giving students the wrong information so they wouldn't come on the right day, etc). Again, it was not a nice way to end our research.
 
Despite the negativity surrounding Bereba's school, overall I was very pleased with how this phase of the project went.  It was so fun to see the smiles on the children's faces when they received their lamps, though it was hard having to exclude so many others. Depending on their numbers drawn, the sounds of cheers or tears trailed from the rooms. At the schools I witnessed dedicated (and successful) school teachers, blossoming school gardens, hardworking students, and school administrators (minus in Bereba) genuinely happy to see their students given tools to help them succeed. 

The experience was great for me too, as it has given me a lot of ideas and a better understanding on the areas to focus on during FAVL's reading camps this summer.

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.

 

URLCODA (Uganda Rural Literacy and Community Development Association) is one of the most active members of UgCLA (Uganda Community Libraries Association). Its leader Willy Ngaka, has recently written to say that URLCODA has won seventh place in a photo competition organized by eLearning Africa. The photo can be seen on the eLearning Africa website: http://www.elearning-africa.com/picturevoting_home.php and will also be part of the next eLearning Africa Newsletter. Congratulations Willy and URLCODA!