Recently in Reading West Africa program Category

Great blog, not focused on Africa, but on librarians generally; I stumbled across this entry from last year with very nice mention of FAVL!  Would be great to have some library science students interested in development studies and library issues in Africa come on our study abroad program... one of the best summer volunteers we ever had was a Canadian library science student....(hey Tanya hope you are well!)

Santa Clara University is working with the Friends of African Village Libraries, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to reading material and other information in rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa. FAVL refurbishes community-donated buildings, buys books by local authors, sending donated books, and pays librarian salaries. SCU is offering a Semester Abroad Program called "Burkina Faso: Reading West Africa Program". Program Director is Michael Kevane. Here is the Semester Abroad description: "The Santa Clara University Fall Semester Study Abroad/Immersion in Burkina Faso is a study abroad program for students with at least one year of university-level French or equivalent interested in combining academic work on the literature and development challenges of West Africa with immersion and community-based learning experiences in public libraries in small towns and villages in rural areas. Students spend the first six weeks of the program in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the second six weeks in a rural village in southwestern Burkina Faso, a week in Dogon country, on the Burkina-Mali border, and a final two weeks back in Ouagadougou." A portion of the CSU student learning experience includes living in a village for six weeks and working with FAVL to create two books for village libraries. Students will learn photography in order to capture local images, publishing software, and preparing books for printing a small print run.

Footnote 1: E-Book readers such as Amazon.com's Kindle and the One-Laptop-Per-Child computer can provide thousands of books to each library. The Internet Archive is a powerful source of free, open content.
Footnote 2: The FAVL effort reminds me of several books: Masha Hamiltons' "The Camel Bookmobile" (Kenya) and Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time." (Pakistan and Afganistan)
Footnote 3: See also July 18, 2007 San Jose Mercury News article on SCU and FAVL.

HT: Stephanie Wessels

We've been revising the photography books produced in Burkina Faso through our Reading West Africa study abroad program, organized through Santa Clara University.  The books made by the students, in the course of a class with photography professor David Pace, are now online.  To see previews of all the books click link right here.

Here's Meredith, one of the students in the Reading West Africa, writing in her now-finished Blogadougou, which I just found and very much enjoyed...

My last days in Bereba were not all puking and death, I also celebrated my 21st birthday and I must say it was a very eventful day. I spent the night before in Lizzie and Louise's village half an hour down the road where we spent most of our time at the one bar with electricity. We had just finished our beers and I was the perfect amount of tipsy for the day before my 21st birthday. Then the police chief decided to buy us another round of beers. I should mention that a beer in Burkina Faso is always 30oz, none of those little pansy beers we drink in the US. Basically I hated myself the next day riding the rickety little bus down the dirt road back to Bereba. But my deadly hangover was appeased a few miles down the road, when we saw an elephant in the forest between the two villages! Wild elephants! It was the best birthday present ever. The rest of my birthday was eventful but I'm too tired to write details. Here are the facts. Market day, birthday crown, little man dancing on his hands, burkinabé circus, yummy spicy chicken dinner, kangaroo rat. Imagine what you may.

Excellent article by RFI on Françafrique (the formal and informal ties that bind France to her former colonies in Africa)... I was on the plane back from Burkina Faso, sitting next to a Frechman, who told me, "You know, I just realized, that every single ministerial office I have been to in French West Africa, there is a French conseiller who "advises" the office... It is bizarre."

50 ans après, la Françafrique bouge encore Poignée de main entre Ali Bongo Ondimba et Nicolas Sarkozy à Paris, le 20 novembre 2009. Reuters / Charles Platiau Par Christophe Boisbouvier « On ne vas pas se brouiller avec ceux qui nous rendent de grands services » . C'est ainsi que le secrétaire général de l'Élysée, Claude Guéant, justifie la politique du président français, Nicolas Sarkozy, à l'égard de l'Afrique. Celui-ci avait promis de rompre avec les réseaux de la Françafrique de ses prédécesseurs. Pas facile de se débarrasser d'un système. La Françafrique ? Elle est déjà morte au moins quatre fois.

With a slightly forlorn air of resignation that all good things come to an end, our first cohort of nine students (from Santa Clara University, University of San Francisco, and U.C. San Diego) bid au revoir to Burkina Faso, and their séjour in the village libraries.  The faculty involved (myself, Leslie Gray, David Pace) and many SCU and FAVL staff members felt like the program was a great success, though there is always room for improvement and we look forward to Fall 2010 for another super immersion experience.  Best of all, the first cohort of students produced a set of photo books that we will be printing to stock in all of the libraries in Burkina (the books, for now, are only in French).  You can see the books here, on the Blurb site.  Click on "view all" to see the 23 books now available. (Note: some of them need a little tweaking for French typos, so don't order just yet!)

More on the books later... here's a great photo of the students on top of the bus, in the town of Houndé...