Slow week

This is the week of the annual branch conference, so very little is happening from my perspective.  I have yet to make it to the Médiathèque Municipale, although I have emailed Michael Kevane from Friends of African Village Libraries about the lack of enthusiasm for reading I have witnessed, even among those supposedly interested in promoting it.  Reading is just not part of the Burkinabè culture and it shows in stark contrast to other African nations where it is more present.


Michael loved the book suggestions I gave him from ScoLibris, however, and mentioned me in his FAVL blog:

http://www.favl.org/blog/archives/2014/02/amazing-distributor-of-childrens-books-for-franophone-africa.html

If you have the means, consider a small donation to FAVL.  They really are a great organization trying to help from the grass roots up in developing a culture of reading and libraries, something that just doesn't exist in Burkina Faso.  With an appalling adult literacy rate of just over 28%, Burkina competes with several other countries for the lowest literacy rate in the world, so parents are certainly not helping their children with homework.  And since they are not setting that important example of reading, the children don't mimic good reading habits. And, tragically, two thirds of this illiterate population are women!

Bird on a hot corrugated roof

Strange fruit seen outside my window

Bananas growing nearby

The green you see is because there is a gardener where I am staying, determined to see things grow.  He waters early in the morning and in the early evening daily.  Otherwise there is just reddish earth and very little vegetation in Ouaga during the dry season.

Tuesday I spent some time in the urban park of Bangr Weogo, not too far from where I am staying. It was once part of the sacred forest belonging to the local Mossi emperor, filled with sacred animals such as the boa, giant lizards and the crocodile, and was used for animal sacrifices, and other special rites and ceremonies.  Several kingdoms of the Mossi people existed in what is now modern-day Burkina Faso, and flourished from the 12th - late 19th centuries. According to an article in Wikipedia, the French took over the kingdoms in 1896 and created a colony known as French Upper Volta, using the existing Mossi administrative structure to govern it. While I was there I saw mostly squirrels, birds and a variety of small lizards, that were too quick for me and my digital phone-camera.

The nearby Bangr Weogo Park looking somewhat drier than the same time last year

Wednesday and Thursday afternoons I spent in chat sessions with the Jaywil/ResourceMate people, and Skype with a colleague trying to get the network to work between the librarian's computer and the public access catalog. I was having to type on an AZERTY keyboard programmed as a QWERTY one, so had to type blind, so to speak.  A very frustrating experience.  For those of you that don't know the difference, the letters of the AZERTY keyboard, used in France and francophone Belgium, are laid out differently than the familiar QWERTY one we use, making typing--particularly symbols, very difficult.  There are still some networking issues  between the two computers, but progress has been made.

A dusty AZERTY keyboard