Maria's Libraries

Kids!

2012-01-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

Since the beginning of this project, we’ve said that the one of the benefits of the library would be to provide a safe space for kids to spend time when school is not in session. In fact, we argued, it would be the only public space in Busia for kids—how could they not flock to it? Well, flock they have.

The good news is, the library is packed with kids every minute that school is not in session. I mean, the place is busting at the seams. And they are reading-- they are reading Harry Potter, they are reading astronomy, they are reading children’s books. Yesterday I saw two 14 year-old girls examining a kids biology books, discussing in hushed tones the development phases of the human fetus.

The bad news is—well, I’ll just repeat: the place is busting at the seams. The space is simply too small. Oh, how Busia needs a new library!

The Inequality Predicament

2012-01-19T02:54:00.001-08:00

I arrived in Busia last night after being in Nairobi for a week. Maria and Mwaeka, who is the Busia Community Library’s primary liaison to the education community, were waiting in town when we arrived. As any proper catch-up should, we started with drinks. Tusker baridi at the end of a long, hot, dusty day, mmm. . . .

Maria had so many things to tell me. I’ll go into it a lot more in the coming few weeks. Something that stuck out, though, was the one book that Maria was asking for. The library used to have it but it was too damaged to save in the flood that the library had last year. The book was actually a report by the UN under Kofi Annan: “World Social Situation: the Inequality Predicament.”

“That book is a must for the library,” Maria insisted. “It is everything that we are built on.”

I will shamefully admit I haven’t read it. Adding it to my reading list!

Celebration!!!

2011-12-06T20:17:00.001-08:00

November 28^th marked the endof the Microsoft Word Training Workshop at the Busia CommunityLibrary. After Mama Mtoto (Mother and Child reading program) ended,the ladies wanted to continue to gather together on a weekly basis. They informed us that they wanted to learn how to use computers.

So, with three laptops shared between14 Mamas, one chalkboard and a few instructors, we taught them thebasics! They learned how to turn on the computer, open a file, clickand drag, change font, use punctuation, save a file…and all thoseother things that those of us who are computer literate take forgranted.

They were a bit timid at first, butafter a few weeks they dove right in. We kept practicing andpracticing and learning and learning. They were such eager students,it knocked my socks off! I am used to teaching 2^nd and3^rd graders, who, let’s just say are not alwayscompletely interested in what they are learning

We finished the class by typing up CV’s(resumes) for all the Mamas. Now they each have two copies of theirwork and learning experience to present to potential employers. Wealso presented them with certificates to show they completed ourtraining.

The Mamas each took turns speakingabout the class. They said how much they loved coming together eachweek and bonding as a group.

Scholastica shared that her neighborsused to think she was illiterate-- when she told them that she wasgoing to get a certificate for a computer class, they could notbelieve it! Now her neighbors want to come to a computer class atthe library themselves! She said that she can even tell that her husbandrespects her more now for her achievement.

Rose told us that she used to thinkthat computer skills were only for the learned, but now she hascomputer skills, and is planning to continue developing these skills.

They all echoed the sentiment that theywant to continue to grow as learners and are confident that thisclass will help them with their employment goals.

We had a celebration on Monday completewith speeches, pictures, music, mandazi and the presentation ofcertificates which all took place in the newly repainted adult section of the library.

Enjoy the photos from the class,celebration, and library make-over!

-Katie

P.S. This is my last week at BCL. Sad. I'm going to the states for Christmas and then my husband and Iwill be moving to Kakamega (Kenya) when we return. I am sure that Iwill be back to Busia to check on the library and visit!

Scholastica gives her remarks on the class

Presenting Gladys with her certificate

Gladys #2 dances while she receives her certificate

Computer class (minus Esther) with certificates

(with Esther)

Gladys enjoying some reading time before the celebration

Preparing to paint the adult side

Extreme painting skills for hard-to-reach spots

Gladys, Katie and Everlyn give a thumbs up after the painting job is done

BCLS readers in action

The new view from the librarian's desk at BCLS

Vincent Ouma: Strangle

2011-11-25T12:48:00.001-08:00

The last in the exhibition, Strangle is one that also comes off much better in reality than in this photo. When we were going over the paintings to bring back to the US, Vincent, Seth-o and I stood over Vincent's paintings and I pointed to this one, saying I liked it because it was a bit ugly. Seth-o said he agreed, and that he had gotten caught in the rain the day before and he had felt exactly like the central figure in this painting. There's so many ways to look at this painting.

If you'd like more information about this painting, or Vincent Ouma, please contact eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Baby feeding

2011-11-25T12:41:00.001-08:00

This is such a tender painting of mother and child, it is gentle and personal.

If you would like more information on this painting, or on Erick Ayoti, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Vincent Ouma: Dunga Beach

2011-11-25T12:37:00.001-08:00

Another Lake Victoria scene fishing scene, this time it's the fishermen bringing in their haul from the Lake.

If you'd like more information on this painting, or the Vincent Ouma, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Seth-o Omollo: Small and big fish

2011-11-25T12:32:00.001-08:00

Another painting from Seth-o of market women bringing fish to market. Lake Victoria is the mainstay of much of the economy in Kisumu.

If you would like more information on this paintings or on Seth-o Omollo, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Shanti Town

2011-11-25T12:26:00.001-08:00

Again, I must admit that I have utterly failed to capture the power of this painting in this photograph. This depicts slum life, in all its dynamic, layered complexity. This is the final one of Erick's very large pieces in this exhibition, and is, again, about six feet by two and a half feet.

For more information on this painting, or on Erick Ayoti, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org

Vincent Ouma: Crazy Society

2011-11-25T12:20:00.001-08:00

Vincent pointed to this painting when I asked him which his favorite of his paintings was. It depicts an old man sitting under a tree. On the ground next to where he is sitting is a "weaver bird" coming out of his nest. Weaver birds build amazing nest. As can be surmised from the bird's name, they are intricately woven, like a basket. When one typically thinks of nests, one thinks of something like an indented pillow made of sticks and other natural substances. However, what weaver birds build is much more spherical, with a small opening at the front. They typically hang from trees, and some trees have 15-20 of these nests. In this painting, in the place of the weaver bird nests are typical Kenyan huts. Crazy society, the world turned upside down.

For more information on this painting or on Vincent Ouma, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Seth-o Omollo: Fishing Downstream

2011-11-25T12:16:00.001-08:00

This painting is small but to me is one of the most moving paintings in the bunch. It speaks to me of calm, and somehow both peace and melancholy at the same time.

For more information on this painting or on Seth-o Omollo, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Vincent Ouma: Elnino at Manyatta Slum

2011-11-25T12:10:00.001-08:00

Here again is a slum scene by Vincent Ouma. This one is a more intimate household scene, the backyard of what is probably a shared compound.

For more information on this painting or Vincent Ouma, email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Church Ladies

2011-11-25T12:06:00.001-08:00

This is another of Erick's very large paintings, about 6 feet by 2 and a half feet. Church in Kenya is in many ways the center of the community. Here are the women of that community, making their way to church on what I imagine to be a Sunday morning. . .

For more information about this painting, or Erick Ayoti, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Seth-o Omollo: We Are Off to Market

2011-11-25T11:52:00.001-08:00

This is another style of painting from Seth-o, a group of market women bringing their fish to market.

If you have any questions about this painting, or about Seth-o Omollo, please contact eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Modern Maasai

2011-11-25T11:43:00.001-08:00

This painting is taller than I am. This painting depicts a member of the Maasai tribe, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania. The Maasai are known for being a very proud people, warriers. They wear the very popular Maasai blankets, as you can see in this painting.

If you would like more information about this painting, or about the artist Erick Ayoti, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org

Vincent Ouma: Saving the Boat

2011-11-25T11:30:00.001-08:00

Oh, the blue! Again, Vincent Ouma paints the long view over Lake Victoria, from boats and fishermen to the weather on the other side of the inlet.

If you have any questions about this painting, or about Vincent Ouma, please contact eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Boda Boda

2011-11-25T11:21:00.001-08:00

OK, I have to give a mea culpa here-- I failed to take a picture that can adequately capture how amazing this painting is. Boda boda, or bicycle taxi drivers, are carrying about their daily activities in chaos, which could be a famous sudden rainstorm (which sometimes results in fist-size hail), or perhaps it's less literal, something to do with order and chaos, daily routines and the swirling madness around them. In any case, this painting is a jaw-dropper. A detail below.

If you would like more information on this painting, or on Erick Ayoti, please contact eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Setho Omollo: The Hunters

2011-11-24T09:37:00.000-08:00

The Hunters by Seth-o Omollo reminds me of rock paintings. About 4 years ago, I went to see some rock paintings in Kenya on Mfangano Island, which is near where many of the famous Kenyan archeological sites are. It's not too far from Kisumu, where these artists are based and the population is from the same tribe, the Luo. This thus speaks to a very different type of cultural heritage to some of the other pieces in this lot. This painting has been the favorite of many who peruse these paintings.

For more information about Seth-o or this painting, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Vincent Ouma: Nyanlanda Boda boda

2011-11-23T22:10:00.000-08:00

Boda boda in Western Kenya refers to bicycle taxi drivers. Nyanlanda is a slum neighborhood in Kisumu, Kenya, and this photo captures the scene perfectly-- both the stillness of a hot afternoon and the bustling happenings of the town. The way the boda boda is sitting in the foreground and the matatu (bus) is whizzing past will resonate with anyone who has spent time in a small African town.

If you would like more information about this painting, or Vincent Ouma, please email eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Seth-o Omollo: Casting a Net

2011-11-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

The photo of this one came out a bit too turquoise, but I think it's still gorgeous. This painting is about 3 1/2 feet by 3 1/2 feet. This painting brings me right back to Lake Victoria, it brings out the stillness, the activity and the serene beauty. I think it even brings out the hot day. Seth-o really captures a day in the life, as it were.

If you want more information on this painting or the artist, please contact eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Fisherman at Sunset by Vincent Ouma

2011-10-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

I love this painting by Vincent Ouma, it's about three and a half feet wide and a foot and a half feet tall. This brings me right back to Lake Victoria and the shores in Kisumu. I'm putting one of my photographs of Lake Victoria as well.

If you'd like more information about this piece or artist, let me know! eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Erick Ayoti: Tunnel Music

2011-10-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

"Tunnel Music" is Erick's representation of his grandfather playing traditional Luo music. This painting was Erick's first painting using acrylic on canvas. Although he has been showing and selling his paintings in Kisumu, Kenya for many years, this exhibition marks the first time this work has been viewed by the public. It is a great honor that Erick allowed me to take this work to America to be included in this exhibition.

If you would like more information about the artist or this piece, please email me at eva@mariaslibraries.org.

Introducing. . . Life on the Shores of Lake Victoria

2011-10-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

Those of you on our newsletter will have seen that Maria's Libraries organized a gallery exhibition featuring paintings from Kisumu, Kenya at the Museum of African Culture in Portland, Maine. More details about the overall show will be forthcoming. This blog, however, is to introduce the series of blogs that will showcase this work. I will be posting paintings from the show twice a week for the duration of the show. Enjoy!

2011-10-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

Hi there Library Friends-

It's Katie here, the new library volunteer most recently from Madison, WI. I'm actually in Busia because my husband Miles is working for IPA. While I'm here I have the freedom to spend part of my time manning the desk at the library, teaching the computer class to the Mamas, and scheming up other things to do in the library. I'm also working part-time for IPA.

Last week Esther and I painted the children's side yellow! We tore down the posters, scrubbed down the walls (Esther) and then I used my summer-in-college-spent-painting skills to rejuvinate the walls on that side. It turned out beautifully, and then we hired an artistic fundi (handyman) to come in and paint images of animals on the wall as well. We are thrilled with the results. Now, of course, Esther and I have our sights set on doing something to the adult side as well, we shall see!

Tomorrow will be another computer class with the Mamas. They are such eager learners, even coming in extra mornings just to practice typing skills. We're trying to determine which computer skills are most useful and practical for them to aim to acquire. This is a work in progress.

I hope you enjoy the pictures of the Library Makeover and the computer class!

-Katie

Rose and Scholastica diligently practice typing

Maria and the rabbit consult about his choice in books

Esther having a teaching moment with the rabbit

Standing in front of their favorite animals

Fish and Lizard!

Esther and me with the kids: "Welcome children! Karibu Watoto!"

Bye Bye Busia

2011-10-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

Heyeveryone!

Today is mylast day working at the library here in Busia, so I thought I'd sharesome of my final observations and reflections with you.

I hope youhave enjoyed the Daily Visitors posts, I had a lot of fun makingthem. The readers were excited to tell me more about what theythought about the library and had no problem being photographed! Thispast Monday, Katie and I conducted the last computer class I attended, which Katie will continue with after I leave. The mothershave been making great progress, all arriving on time and being verydedicated students. The mamas have also become much more engagedduring our meetings, being more open about what they know and whatthey still want to learn. I remember most of the mamas did not speakthe first time I met them back in July, and now they cannot stopasking me questions and laughing at some of my weird “Dutch”ways.

During ourtransition meeting this past Tuesday, Maria and Esther expressedtheir excitement about the computer classes and they hope this willlink the mamas to the library even more. They both appreciated myefforts here over the past 3 months and insisted I come back soon!Yesterday, Maria, Esther, Jimmy, Mary and I took a trip to Kisumu andenjoyed some beers and fish by Lake Victoria, as a final kwaheri(goodbye) to me.

It has beengreat interning for Maria's Libraries, and I really appreciate theopportunity Ariel and Eva have given me. It has been a great learningexperience both professionally and personally and I would recommend itto every newly graduated BA student out there! I definitely intend oncoming back when the new library is constructed :).

I hope youhave enjoyed reading my blogpost, and that you will keep supportingMaria's Libraries in the future!

Cheers,

Harmke

Daily Visitors

2011-10-13T04:51:00.000-07:00

Ruth Musavi

"The library has improved a lot, people know the library now and they come here to get books. It's good!"

Daily Visitors

2011-10-13T04:41:00.001-07:00

Innocent

Sneaked into the adult reading section to read one of the textbooks.

Daily Visitors

2011-10-13T02:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Okumu Echakara

"This is one of the most vital libraries in Busia district, I want to say that it is a learning tool that encourages learning spirit to small pupils at the primary level and it has also helped students who are doing corresponding studies, to do their research and learning in a condusive environment."

Daily Visitors

2011-10-11T02:34:00.001-07:00

Mohammed, Isaac, Breton and Robert

from Busia Township Primary School

Daily Visitors

2011-10-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

Edwin Balongo

"Knowledge is power, without a place to read people cannot learn.

I think the government should assist the library more, because it is key to our community."

Daily visitors series

2011-10-10T02:12:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

In my last week in Busia I took pictures of regular visitors of the library and asked them to describe what the library means to them in one sentence. You can find the series below! I hope it will give everyone a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the library :)

Cheers,
Harmke

Daily visitors

2011-10-10T02:10:00.000-07:00

Marcos Evua

"The library is a place that's quiet enough to study,

nothing distracts you from what you need to be doing!"

Daily visitors

2011-10-10T02:07:00.000-07:00

Sacha, Desteri, Meshack and Phillis

With their favorite books

Daily visitors

2011-10-10T02:02:00.001-07:00

Hillary Omwando

"The library is such a nice place, it has helped me so much,

not me alone, but the people around here."

Daily visitors

2011-10-10T01:53:00.000-07:00

Peter Midega

"We've been yearning to have something like this for a long time, since we haven't developed a culture of reading in Kenya, this library will encourage that!"

Daily visitors

2011-10-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

Willibrod and Bachi

Come in every day to read and write every day.

Lunch at Maria's Farm

2011-10-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone!

This past weekend Maria invited all the mama's, Esther and myself over to her banana farm for a celebratory lunch. I expected to be over at her farm for maybe 2 hours, I guess I still haven't learned after 4 months in Kenya, that lunch, it's a whole day affair.

Before heading over to Maria's for lunch, Esther and I visited one of the mama's at her home. She lives close to Maria's, in a typical Kenyan housing project: one long building with 5 doors, each door accessing a one room home. Inside the home, a curtain divides the sleeping area from the living area. Scholastica, the mother we were visiting, lives in one of these homes with her husband and their two children. Scholastica is one of the most dedicated mama's of the project and was excited to find out that her husband was very supportive! He is a picki-picki driver in Busia, and he thinks it is very important that his two daughters, and his wife, get more opportunities in education than he did.

Scholastica, Esther and I headed over to Maria's farm after a little photo shoot at her home and some chai. Of course we were the first ones to arrive, and Maria informed us we would all be going to her church that Saturday, after which we would have a grand lunch. The mothers slowing started trickling in and around 12:30 PM we headed over the Maria's community church. The priest blessed our program and my journey home, and we listened to his sermon which was mostly in Swahili with the occasional English word.

On our way back to the farm the mama asked me lots of questions about my life at home, my work and when I was planning on coming back. I think they finally felt at ease to ask me more personal questions and it was nice to share and have good conversation with the women I have been working with for 3 months.

The lunch was amazing, Maria and her family prepared all the traditional Kenyan dishes I had had over the couple of months: brown and white ugali, pumpkin, chapati, beans, lentils, fish and beef stew, rice, cabbage, sukumawiki, matoke and lots of sodas and beers. It was delicious! Mze, Maria's husband, met all the mama's and spoke to them on the importance of moving forward with their education, to help themselves and their children. I handed out the certificates, now signed by the district commissioner, and a picture of the mama's graduation on Wednesday. Maria brought out the stereo set and we danced to Ugandan and Kenyan music for the rest of the late, hot afternoon.

Celebrating Mama-Mtoto!

2011-10-06T01:49:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

I just finished cleaning up the library after yesterday's celebration meeting, so I wanted to update you on the great day we had yesterday!

After a lot of preperation from Esther, Maria and I, the big celebration day was finally here! The certificates were printed and signed (just not by the district commissioner, more on that later), the snacks and drinks had arrived, the tent and sign-in booth were set up and the mama's were preparing a dance for the celebration, as we were putting the final touches to the Mama-Mtoto banner. One of the mamas, Lennah, had suggested early on that we all buy T-shirts for the function, to promote the project. The mothers were really enthusiastic, and Maria ended up sponsoring all the mamas for half of the costs, the mamas contributing the other half themselves. Susy and I also bought a T-shirt, and Maria bought a couple of extras for other "friends" of the project.

In the morning, I once again went to the District Commissioner's office, to confirm his presence at our celebration and to have him sign the certificates for the mamas. I had been to his office a couple of times already, but he hadn't been around. This particular morning I had a classic run-in with bureaucracy, waiting for hours for one commissioner, finally meeting his deputy, who sent me to another officer, who eventually confirmed what I had seen coming already: the DC was not in today and would not be coming to our function. Therefore, the mamas received their certificates yesterday, symbolically graduating from the program, but handed them in at the end so I could have them signed today. This morning, the DC apologized for not being able to come to the celebration and signed all the certificates, which reaffirms an old Dutch saying: de aanhouder wint (the one who perseveres wins)!

The celebration got started an hour and a half after the scheduled time, but Maria insisted we were on Kenyan time, and the guests who arrived on time wouldn't mind. Geoffrey Mbweke, a teacher from Busia and the artist who created the cover of the Busia “Wonder of Friendship” book, was the host for our event and he kept everyone entertained throughout the day. Maria spoke of the success of the program and the future library to be built in cooperation with KNLS and Maria's Libraries. Just that morning she received the model of the library and she showed it with great pride to the guests and the press. I gave a small speech on the achievement of the project and the mamas, and my experiences with the Busia Community Library. The mamas read the story from Busia in the 4 languages it was published in and the children from Busia Township, the neigboring school, reflected on some of the classes they had attended at the library.

We finished the meeting with a small speech from the Probation Officer of the District Commissioner's office, the official they had sent after my regular visits to other offices. It was pretty hilarious to see how he tried to connect his line of work to the library, but in the end he concluded that illiteracy and crime go hand in hand, and therefore, the library was a great help to his efforts to rehabilitate people into the community. He handed out the certificates to the mama's and we were invited by Geoffrey to enjoy the pillaw and soda's Maria had provided for everyone!

I think we all had a great day and the mama's were all very proud and excited that they were the ones being celebrated. They loved being graduates and they wore their t-shirts with pride. But, this wasn't the last time we all saw each other! We have a visit planned to Maria's farm this coming Saturday and most of the mamas will come to the computer class on Monday! So thankfully, we didn't have to say goodbye just yet :).

I will update you on both events in the coming days, writing some of my last blog posts before I finish my work for Maria's Libraries and trade Busia in for Rotterdam in just two short weeks!

Cheers,
Harmke

Another computer lesson and home visit

2011-10-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update from Busia: today Katie and I taught another computer class and I went on a home visit across from the library, one of the mama's literally lives 20 meters from the library. Coming Wednesday is the celebration meeting, so more updates then. Here are some pictures of today, enjoy :)

The Last Mama-Mtoto meeting

2011-09-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

Today was the day: the final Mama-Mtoto meeting! After 4 months of meeting, writing and sharing, the mamas came in one final time to talk about the final storybook, their experiences and the responses of their children to the Hyena and the Fox!

The mamas were surprisingly on time, and we started with sharing some general thoughts on Mama-Mtoto and what it had brought the mamas. Maria shared her experience of the Mama-Mtoto program, which I thought I would share with you!

“But going through this program, it has been a warm-up, it has awoken some spirit inside. Most of you had given up, you were doing your business, getting money, but now you know about the books, and empowering your children through books. Even such a small program involves so many people, Jennie from Canada, Susan and Harmke from Holland and Ariel from America. And now if you go to Lamu right now, it is like they knew you long ago isn't it? A library it is more than books, it brings people together, I don't know how to talk about it, I am very happy. The way we advertised this program, there was an application, which is not easy for you and most of the people here want money for the program. But you can't buy this knowledge! Here we have benefitted from the good works of so many people. And I hope you will bring your friends, and once in a while you will come to the library and bring your friends. […] I want to thank you very much for contributing your time and your money, may God bless you!”

As usual, the mothers shared their experiences with the storybook of the week, The Hyena and the Fox. The children really enjoyed the wordsearch we included in the book and the “connecting-the-dots” assignment, Susy created for the book! The kids commented on the dress of people in Garissa, some noticing that the women are completely covered and one of the children asked his mother, “aren't they hot, because it covers everything? Why do they wear that?”

To finish my report and get some reflective comments from the mothers, I conducted the last focus group, focussing on sustainability, cultural exchange and evaluation. The mothers were very positive about the program and some thought I would share some of their comments with you.

“My kids learned something that they had not been exposed to, they learned new stories.”

“The acting assignment really build their confidence, they would not just act in front of their parents and peers like that but now they feel like they can.”

“The books have enriched my children and I would never have had these books if I hadn't participated. I feel like it has stimulated my educational path and I realize I am still learning something new. My husband asks me, are you going to class? He sees that I am using my time usefully and properly. He knows I have to do something to advance myself.

“My children wonder, did our mother really go to school? They would look at me like I a illiterate and like I had never been to school. But now my children respect me and see that I am literate. Moreover, the MM program gave me the opportunity to sit down with my children and read a storybook to them, […] there is more of a reading culture. At school they spend all the time on the curriculum so they have no time to read, but now we do it at home. I had never imagined I would touch a computer, I thought I would spoil it when i touched it, but now I am on track, now I can learn.”

We finished the meeting with an update on the celebration meeting next week and decided that we will all go to Maria's farm for a small lunch next week Saturday to celebrate the accomplishments of the mamas!

Have a great weekend,

Harmke

Computer classes

2011-09-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

Ariel suggested I write a blog about the computer lessons I've started giving to the mama's of the Mama-Mtoto project, so I'll give you all a little update!

From the first moment Susy and I met the mama's and asked them if they had any suggestions for extra meetings we could have, or projects we could work on, they suggested computer lessons. We were immediatly enthusiastic, but couldn't find the time when Susy was still here, we were simply to busy with the Mama-Mtoto project and our BA thesis. So during Susy's last week I promised the mothers I would set up the computer lessons when I got back from Nairobi.

Setting up computer lessons wasn't without any bumps in the road; the projector I had ordered fell through in the hour before the lesson (the guy suddenly wanted to charge me 3000 KsH instead of 500 KsH we had agreed on!), leaving me with one netbook to teach 10-15 mothers Word and e-mail on. Moreover, the power supply had been especially shaky the past couple of days and I was hoping my netbook would make it through the whole lesson. And finally, how was I going to teach these mothers how to use a computer? Computers are definitely something I take for granted - growing up with a dad who works for IBM who let me use his laptop and PC's from a very young age - but most of these mothers had never used a computer before. I prepared a powerpoint presentation (when I still thought I had a projector at my disposal) and decided to go with the flow, and see how the mothers would interact with the computer as we went along.

We definitely had to start from square one: using a mouse was a huge struggle, but once the mothers got a bit more used to the mouse, we started using some basic Word features, such as changing font and font size, saving a document and underlining a sentence. Esther brought the netbook she had been given by Smallbean for the Citizen Archivist project, so we ended up splitting the group into two smaller groups, with 5 mamas sharing a netbook (and at the end of the meeting 6). We spent a great deal of the meeting just practicing, because, as I noticed early on, practice definitely makes perfect when it comes to computers, and the mamas were quick to catch on, eager to take notes, try new features and patiently waiting their turn to highlight a word and make it bold.

We immediately scheduled a second meeting, which was yesterday, and it was another great meeting, with a recap of the lessons learned last week Thursday and a bit of new information on how to print a document, how to align left/centre and right and how to change the font color. We did a short introduction on how to use the internet, which we will further expand on during the next meeting (next week Monday). I am super happy to tell you that Katy Kirby, who moved here last week with her husband Miles who works for IPA, will be taking over the computer lessons and is planning to volunteer at the library when I leave!

Cheers,
Harmke

2011-09-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone!

It's already been a week since the last mama-mtoto meeting, sorry for the late update! However, in the mean time, a lot of other exciting stuff has happened here, so I will update you on that as well!

Honestly, I was a bit skeptical about having a Mama-Mtoto meeting with the children of the mamas present, since the mamas could not just bring their 4-6 year olds, they would bring all their kids. Which would mean a minimum of 60 people (15 mamas with a minimum of 3 kids, but most of them have more!). However, Esther and Maria were really enthusiastic, so we decided to go ahead with planning this special meeting. Instead of our normal MM day, the meeting was on a Saturday, so that the children would be free from school and Maria arranged a couple of women to come and cook rice and beans for all mamas and their children. Esther picked up a big party tent from Maria's farm and about 30 chairs, and we were ready for Saturday morning!

When the mamas and their children arrived, it was great to finally meet the children the mamas have been telling us so much about over these past few months. Around 11:00 we decided to start and more children and mamas came in as we were going through the assignments. After a round of introductions and the usual opening prayer, Esther asked the children if they could perform the plays they prepared (which was the assignment for the Elangata Wuas book). The result was amazing, some of the children had worked together during lunch hour at school and had come up with new endings and extra characters for the stories. Three children even prepared their very own story, which they recited in front of the whole group! The mamas looked on proudly, clapping and laughing at every play and story.

After the plays and storytelling, we went over the assignments for the new book, “The Hyena and the Fox”, from Garissa. This book tells the story of a hungry fox, who eats all the sheep in the area where nomads live. The community decides to set a trap to catch the fox, to punish him for stealing their sheep. When the fox is caught, the people tie him to a tree, dig a big hole and fill it with firewood to burn the fox. The fox cries loudly and a hungry hyena passes by to find the fox still tied to the tree, as the people have left to let the fire get hot. The fox explains to the hyena that his uncle tied him to the tree because he is too thin and wouldn't eat the sheep his uncle had caught for him. The hyena decides to untie the fox and promises to eat the sheep. The fox quickly flees the scene, as the people return and ask the hyena what he is doing. When he explains, they decide he is too foolish and greedy and burn him instead of the fox!

The Garissa book was illustrated by Sammy Wafula, and printed in 3 languages: Kisomali, Kiswahili and English. The kids and mothers really liked the story, but they were getting hungry, so we decided it was time for lunch! As the children ate their rice, beans and greens, Esther and the mamas discussed the coming computer lesson meeting (on the 22^nd). The meeting was this past Thursday and it was very exciting to see the mothers working on the computers, for some of them it was their first time. We dealt with some of the basics – what is hardward/software?, how do you use the mouse – and I taught them a little bit about how to use Microsoft Word. You realize how difficult seemingly easy things can be, such as making the text bold or underlined. However, I do know the first time I started using a computer, it was all very alien to me as well, so practice makes perfect!

Before the computer meeting, this past Wednesday, Esther and I visited 5 of the mothers at their homes in Mayenge. These mothers live the furthest away from the library, a 2 hour walk, but Esther and I took a piki, which took about half an hour. The mothers were very hospitable, and I drank enough coca-cola for a whole week! At every mama's house we talked about when the mother reads to her kids, which is their favorite book, how the program has impacted their day-to-day routine and what they would add to the program if they were the directors! Overall, their answers were very helpful for the report I'm writing and it was also just great to meet the husbands and other family members of the women that I feel I'm getting to know a bit better every day.

Finally, Esther and I have been working on the celebration meeting (October 5^th) already, deciding on the guest list, meeting with the district commissioner, who has promised to be our guest of honor, and creating certificates for the mamas, besides other logistical issues that need to be figured out for the big celebration!

I will keep you updated on all our progress, but for now: Kwaheri and have a good weekend!

The Elangata Wuas Book

2011-09-05T03:28:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

After a week and a half of travelling, and of course, coordinating the printing of the Mama-Mtoto books from a different location, I have been back in Busia for a couple of days! Susan flew back to Holland last Thursday, and she will be starting the introducation to her masters program tomorrow.

This past Thursday we had our seventh Mama-Mtoto meeting, with the newest storybook created by the mamas in Elangata Wuas. But before we discussed the new book, the mamas were excited to share their experiences with the Lamu book, the White Spot. Most of the children drew one of the scenes depicted in the book, and all the children were curious about the snake going into the stomach of the lead character. Maria was afraid that this part of the story would be too scary for the children, but none of the mothers mentioned their kids being afraid. However, the children did ask why the stars were red and green, “they are supposed to be white!”, as one of the mothers remembered her children saying.

Related to the cultural exchange aspect of the project, the kids did indeed ask their mothers why the people in Lamu dressed so differently and lived in different houses. “So why are the mothers covered in veils”, asked one of the children, pointing at the picture in the Lamu book of the participating mothers. “Why does Busia have so many languages?”, asked another child when she noticed that the Lamu book was translated into 2 (compared to Busia's 4). Since none of the mothers had ever been to Lamu, it was an exciting experience for them and their kids to get a small look into the differences and similarities between Busia and Lamu. Some of the mamas mentioned that they didn't imagine this was also in Kenya, it was so different!

After discussing the Lamu book, we moved on to the Elangata Wuas book: “Entito oo Ntoyie and Children in a Bush”. In the book, a young Maasai mother gives birth to a son and daughter one day, while she was walking through the forest. The mother would collect milk for the family with a white calabash, and sing to her children when it was safe for them to come out and drink the milk. When ogres visiting the villages heard the mother sing to her children, they planned to sing as well, to be able to eat the children. However, their voices were too deep and the children didn't fall for the singing. To be able to sing like the mother, the ogres visited a diviner, who adviced them not to eat insects for two weeks. In the end the children come out of the boma, get attacked by the ogres but manage to escape. When their mother returns, the children initially do not come out of the boma, but they realize it is their mother singing and they tell her everything. From that moment on, the children are very careful when leaving the boma.

The mothers really liked the Elangata Wuas story, but they did think it was a bit too short. Therefore, the mothers and their children will create a different ending to the story, as next meeting's activity! What will be even more fun, is that the mothers are bringing their children to the next meeting, so we can see the interaction between the mothers and their kids. Moreover, we asked the mothers to have their children prepare a short play relating to the Elangata Wuas story, so I'm very curious to see what the kids come up with!

In the meantime I will be working on promotional material for the Mama-Mtoto project and finalizing the results of the research Susan and I conducted on the recruitment, effectiveness and sustainability of the program. Moreover, Maria has expressed great interest in further fundraising for the new library, so I will assist her in her pursuits as much as possible!

Cheers,

Harmke

Mama-Mtoto Meeting: The Lamu Book

2011-08-21T03:07:00.000-07:00

Hi all!

During the last week of our official UCU internship, we visited the home of one of the mamas who lives in Bulanda, near Busia town. We interacted with her kids, asked her more about her experiences with the program, and watched her read the Busia book with her children. It was such a great experience to see the children's reactions during the storybook reading (they love the Kiluhya version!) and we saw a new side of the project. We have only been meeting with the mamas so it was great to see how the children get involved and how they enjoy the benefits of Mama-Mtoto. Though we only managed to visit one mama during the internship (they are all very busy!), I know that Harmke will try to visit as many as she can before she leaves in October. We learnt a great deal more about the impact that Mama-Mtoto is having at these homes, so it was extremely valuable.

This past Thursday (18/08) we had another Mama-Mtoto meeting in Busia and it went great, despite that only eight mamas came. First, we discussed the experiences with the Busia book. As one of the assigned activities, we asked that the children create an ending for the story, as it ends at a climactic point. The stories that the children told were extremely creative! There were also many drawings of the various characters of the story and it was clear that the children thoroughly enjoyed the Busia book! One mother said: “My kids liked the story in this book, they do not like the hare though, because he was so cunning and clever so he spoiled everything!” The children also recognized that their mothers had recorded the story, seeing their pictures and names in the beginning, which they really liked.

After we finished discussing the Busia book, we distributed the Lamu book, which arrived just that morning! The mamas were very excited to see what story the mothers from another community had recorded. The Lamu book – The White Spot – is about a couple who are unable to have a child. They go to see a traditional healer, who offers them a red rose (for a girl) or a purple rose (for a boy). After choosing the red rose, the healer warns them that the girl should not be rained on, and soon after they get a beautiful baby girl who they call Doajeupe – The White Spot. Doajeupe goes to school and one day walks home in the rain when her parents do not pick her up on time. A snake enters her body from the rain and consumes her until she cannot walk. The parents search for the healer, who turns out to be dead, and they go across the sea to find a queen to heal their daughter. When she does, Doajeupe marries the prince and everyone lives happily ever after.

After reading the story, the mothers discussed whether Doajeupe had gone back to school or if she entered into early marriage and left school. It was so interesting to see them discuss that it would be bad if she had not finished school! In the end they decided that it had taken so long to heal her that by the time she married she was too old to be in school anyway. After reading the Lamu description, we discussed how 90% of the people in Lamu are Muslim, and how they are currently taking a break from the program for Ramadan.

The mothers asked us during the meeting whether it would be possible to sell the Busia book in the community, as their friends are asking to buy a copy. The mamas argued that everyone would want a locally published story – this might be a great idea for the library to raise funds!

We asked the mamas whether their perception of the library had changed through the Mama-Mtoto program and one mama answered: “I have seen the library many times, but that is a place for kids and teachers, now I realize that it is a place for me as well.” It is so interesting to see how they are growing to love reading and the mamas said they would take their children to the library after the project was finished. Many mamas said that they only ever read the Bible, but now they actually want to read other books!

One mama said: “In my house, I would only think of reading a Bible. But now I find it interesting to read other books, it has definitely changed the attitude, there is a lot of sharing and happiness. I would never imagine I could enjoy anything else but now I can enjoy these things with my children.”

Another added: “My brain had gone to sleep completely, I would have never thought of picking up a book. But now I am awake, I want to read and my kids are also very excited they want to read more storybooks. They know now that there is a library and they will read more. The future is bright and I see reading in their future!”

It is clear that the Mama-Mtoto project has created a reading culture among the participants, which is extremely motivating to see!

After the focus group we conducted, we celebrated Harmke's 22^nd birthday with all the participants in the library! They sang for her, we ate cake, and we took a group photo. It was great to socialize with everyone for a while because this was my last Mama-Mtoto meeting!

On Friday we presented our research project to Maria and Esther at Maria's farm. We have almost finished the internship report which presents all of our results! It has been great to evaluate Mama-Mtoto and research how it could be improved next time.

It has been amazing to work with this project and I will definitely be keeping myself up to date with the progress that is made. I want to take this opportunity to thank Maria's Libraries for allowing me to work with the program and providing such a great learning opportunity! From now on, it will be Harmke keeping you all updated as she is staying in Busia for another two months.

Cheers,

Susan and Harmke

Mama-Mtoto Meeting: The Busia Book Arrives!

2011-08-09T06:28:00.000-07:00

Dear all,

Another two weeks have passed and last Thursday we held the fifth Mama-Mtoto meeting (the second meeting Harmke and I attended). It was a nerve-wrecking few days before the meeting as we were trying to get the Busia book printed in time! After several samples with pages missing, crooked, and cut roughly we were anxious to see the state of the 18 books that were supposed to have arrived much earlier than they did – the morning of the meeting. Fortunately, they looked great! Super relieved and excited to show the mamas the story they had recorded in print form, we headed to the meeting. The mamas that came were much more timely this week, giving everyone more time to reflect on their experiences and also more time to admire the final product of the Busia story, The Wonders of Friendship. For those who are curious, the story is about three friends: a hare, a hyena, and a tortoise. The friends decide to plant and harvest groundnuts, but the hare keeps avoiding the workload. After the hyena and tortoise do all the work, the hare tries to get his hands on the final result: the groundnuts. Having anticipated this, the two friends had covered the granary containing the nuts with glue. The hare therefore got stuck as he attempted to break in, and that's where the story ends. The story is fully illustrated and written in four languages: English, Kiswahili, Kiteso, and Kisamia.

Before presenting the mamas with the book, we discussed the extra two weeks they spent with the Mcheshi Goes to School book. None of the mothers tried the clapping game (where the children have to clap when a certain word is read), and most did not do the color game (where the children have to point to a certain color on every page), although some did their own version of this game and others colored. The mothers said that the children loved the wordsearches! They wanted more of them, and also more difficult ones as some of the children said it was too easy.

Finally it was time to present the mamas with The Wonders of Friendship. They were all extremely happy to see them and clapped for us (a clap that should resonate to all those who contributed to the project in one way or another, well done!). For some minutes we just sat and looked at the book – the mamas happily seeing their picture and names on the second page (although only the names and pictures of those mamas who were present at the second meeting in June were in there, which is a bit of a shame. We will change this for the e-book). The plastic covers we had brought from Nairobi were, unfortunately, a bit too big for the books but we might be able to fix it with some tape. Esther read the book in Kisamia to everyone, and the Busia description at the end, only in English. The mamas were smiling throughout. After, all the mamas read the book together in Kiswahili.

The next assignment Esther gave was for the mamas to write a summary of the story in their notebooks. She gave them 10 minutes and the mamas nervously grabbed their pens. Many sneaked a peek into the book for help when Esther was out of the room – we told them that it wasn't a test and everyone laughed. Afterwards, one summary in each language was read out loud (only one mother wrote in English, most wrote in Kiswahili, and a couple in Kisamia). Since none of the mamas wrote in Kiteso, two mamas read part of the Kiteso text from the book.

Next Esther introduced the new activities for the Busia book: retrying the color pointing and clapping games, drawing “what happens next” (or a character from the book if the child is too young to understand), and a new wordsearch. Then Harmke and I had prepared another focus group for our own research project concerning the husband's response to, and interaction with, the Mama-Mtoto project. Finally, the meeting closed with refreshments and socializing.

As for the printing of the storybooks, the status is as follows: the Busia book has already been sent to Elangata Wuas and is currently being printed and sent to Garissa and Lamu (these two sites are not meeting in August because of Ramadan, so they are not in a rush to receive the books). Next is the Lamu book, which is also finished! We are having a sample sent here as soon as possible and then we can hopefully order the batch of books for Busia this week. The Elangata Wuas book is almost done and will be next in line after Lamu. Garissa will be printed last because it still requires some more editing work and we are missing some information from the site. All things considered the project is coming along well!

That's all the updates we have for now. You'll hear more from us in the coming two weeks!

Cheers,

Susan and Harmke

Video of the Garissa mobile library

2011-08-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

I love this video about the mobile unit affiliated with the Garissa library. The mobile unit is a camel! Head librarian Rashid Farah explains how The camel is loaded with books and walks to area schools to lend books to children.

View the youtube video here.

Maria's Libraries is working with the library in Garissa to implement a literacy program (the Mama Mtoto Story Time Program, developed and implemented as a collaboration between Maria's Libraries and AfricaSOMA, and to which Harmke and Susan refer below). As part of this program we are producing four childrens' books, one from each community participating in the program. The one from Garissa is a traditional story told in Somali, and we will publish it as told in Somali, Swahili, and in English--all in one book!

2011-07-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Dear followers,

Our first two weeks in Busia are almost over, time is moving fast! Last week Thursday we were at the 4^th Mama-Mtoto meeting, and it was great to finally meet all the mothers and see their enthusiasm for the project!

For those of you that don't know what Mama-Mtoto is, I'll just give a short introduction. The Mama-Mtoto project is a parent-child literacy project which aims at teaching mothers how to read storybooks to their children, encourage cultural exchanges between the different sites at which the project is being held and publish a local story from each site as told by the mamas. The first phase of the project has already been completed, namely the recruitment of the mamas and the story telling. We are currently still in the printing phase of the Busia book and the editing phase of the Lamu, Garissa and Elangata Wuas book.

Our first Mama-Mtoto meeting (and the mamas' 4^th) was dedicated to the second in the series of books the mamas will be reading, Mcheshi Goes To School. Starting an hour and a half later than planned, the mothers were super enthusiastic once they we're all present in the library! We went around the group and each individual mama told us the experiences she had reading the book to her children and which activities she managed to do. The children loved drawing and some did a word game in which they had to match the letters of the alphabet to words in the book. Most of the kids liked the previous book, The Matatu Song, better than the Mcheshi book, but they still loved being read to nonetheless. All the mothers agreed that they couldn't read the book to their kids often enough, and they wish they had more time in a day to be able to teach their kids more through the books.

After discussing the mamas' experiences with Mcheshi Goes To School, Esther explained the new activities that were planned for the reading for the next meeting. Since the Busia book is not printed yet, we had to move up some of the activities. Susan created a Wordsearch for the children and we came up with some other games the mothers could play with their kids, relating to the Mcheshi book. The mothers were a bit dissapointed that the Busia book wasn't ready, but they were happy with the new activities.

We both really enjoyed the meeting, since the mothers were so eager to learn and full of pride because of the progress their children had made. One mother told us that her daughter's teacher had noticed the girl was more active in class and seemed to have progressed in 4 short weeks! However, the mamas also noticed that their neighbors and other mothers in their social circle wanted to join in on the project, and they were dissapointed to tell them the program was full. However, they told their friends that hopefully the project will run again next year and then more mamas and their watoto could enjoy the benefits of Mama-Mtoto!

After all the Mama-Mtoto excitement, Susan and I have been spending most of our time on cataloging all the books in the library. Esther previously had a file with all the books, but it was accidentally deleted and she hasn't had the time to redo it by herself, since Ednah has been on leave. We've finished most of the adult book section, only a small cupboard remains, and then it's on to the children's section! Besides Mama-Mtoto and cataloging, Susan and I want to reinstate the Monday reading tents, during which we will help Esther promote the library on Busia's main road, with a collection of books that people can browse through! We have lots more projects in the making, but so far we've been too busy to operationalize them. Hopefully, we'll have more time once the cataloging is done!

Cheers,

Harmke and Susan

First Impressions

2011-07-20T01:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Maria's Libraries followers!

First, we should introduce ourselves. We are Susan Paardekam and Harmke Kruithof, the two new interns at Maria's Libraries in Busia! We are both from the Netherlands and have just graduated from University College Utrecht. We will be in Busia for 5 weeks (Susan) and 3 months (Harmke) so we will hopefully be able to update you on the blog for a while.

Our first impressions of Busia have been really positive – though we are still getting used to the hectic traffic and the dust (and, of course, people yelling “Mzungu!” at you), we are settling in quite well. We are starting to make our way around and have bargained down from the mzungu-price for the transportation (piki-piki is our favorite). Busia seems to be a vibrant, active border town where there is always something going on. We are excited to learn more about this place – especially since in our research we could barely find any information on this area.

We have visited the library several times now and Maria has also taken us to the new site. The dedication and persistence that the library staff shows is really incredible. Though the library is currently in quite a small space, it is clearly a safe space where the community can come and read. We have already seen a group of children laughing and chatting on the ground with a handful of books – their curiosity is definitely sparked by the environment and all of the colorful books around them (even if they are not always actually reading!).

The Mama-Mtoto project is going well – the only problem has been getting the books (local stories recorded by the mamas at every site) printed. Every site is at a different place in the schedule and Busia is the farthest ahead; they are evaluating Mcheshi Goes to School (the second and last pre-printed book) on Thursday. Since we cannot give them the Busia book yet, we decided in collaboration with Esther that we would give them new activities to do with the Mcheshi book. We came up with two games that can be played (Clapping whenever a certain word is read; Pointing out a certain color or item on every page) and a wordsearch with words from the story in English and Kiswahili to do as a separate activity.

Busia's book (The Wonders of Friendship) is nearly finished – we have our final meeting with Sammy, the illustrator, today and hopefully we can get it printed and shipped to all the sites next week. The books for Elangata Wuas (title unknown), Lamu (The White Spot), and Garissa (The Hyena and the Fox) are in the illustration and editing/formatting phase. From what we have seen so far, they all look amazing! I think the mamas at each site will be really proud of their work and impressed with the other books.

For our own research, Harmke and I are going to try to engage the mamas in a focus group discussion on Thursday, focusing on their experiences with the program so far as well as trying to see how the recruitment process went and what they think could be improved next time. We are also going to try to set up some individual interviews with the mamas outside of the Mama-Mtoto meetings, but since the mamas are very busy we do not yet know if this will be possible. We have not made a concrete research plan as of yet, but part of the research will include evaluating the various components of Mama-Mtoto and therefore participation of the mamas would be really helpful!

That's it for now from us – we have been in Busia for five days now (it seems like much longer because we have been so busy!) and keep being surprised by how much we like it here. A couple of weeks ago, we were reading the “Rough Guide of Kenya”, which only had a sentence or two about Busia: “This growing and increasingly bearable town...” Our expectations were thus a bit low – but they have been shattered and we are growing to love it here!

Cheers,

Susan and Harmke

Books as Objects

2011-05-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

A great article by Alexandra Perloff-Giles about the various lives and uses of books. Thanks to Nivi for sharing!!

Update from the field: “The kids, they will kill me. Their books!”

2011-05-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

Sad news on visiting the Busia library today. I arrived at the library this morning to see water coming out of the door. I pensively sat down outside to do some work while I waited for Esther, the librarian, who opened the door. Water everywhere! This government building, the Cooperative Development House, shut off its water last year, I guess because they didn’t need it anymore, having renovated its bathrooms into offices. Last weekend I supposed the building manager changed his mind—the water was turned on for testing and was never turned off. The resulting flood soaked the bottom shelf of the children’s section, and many of the books on it. We laid out all the books in the sun and separated all the pages, and Esther carried buckets of water out of the library.

What better evidence for the need for a new building!! As if we didn’t know it before, the library should be moved as soon as possible to a stand-alone building in which it has control over its own inventory. We are moving forward on this: after 3 (or 30, depending on how you’re counting) years, the land issues are finally settled. Disputes on the title deed have been settled. As of two weeks ago, the land is clear, peaceably, and Kenya National Library Service is set to build a fence around the library this month. The community has chosen an architect, Architronic, who has come up with a gorgeous concept design for the library. There is a great plan for sustaining the library for the generations it’s supposed to be open: KNLS has agreed to take over management as soon as the library is built. That means they’ll make sure its staffed with paid, trained librarians, that the electric and water bills are paid for, and that the needed changes come when needs change in Busia. One important change is happening right now: there’s a new university campus in Busia that just started holding classes. Students have already come by the library looking for study space and curriculum books.

After the emergency was over, I got from Esther the updated stats on the existing library. An average of 10 adults come each day to borrow books, which, depending on the popularity of the book and the number of copies in the library inventory, they can use at home for 3-14 days. 20-35 children come each weekday to read, but more like 50 on the weekends (the kids aren’t allowed to take books home). Esther and the library’s management committee, Family Support Services, must be credited with holding regular hours and keeping close watch on the existing library and its stock. They are stretching very scarce resources (fewer than 3000 books) and a very small space (~20ft x 20 ft) to serve quite consistently an impressive number. However, there are more than 40,000 people in Busia and 600,000 in the county. With more capacity, the library could offer books, services, programming, and computer access to a huge portion of the Kenyan population that currently has to drive nearly 3 hours to Kisumu for similar service.

So, all we need is a building. A fully-equipped, modern library capable of serving the county would cost about $300,000. Eva and I are writing grants for this but it’s a stretch—there are just so few funders who are interested in building projects. This effort will likely have to be done privately. So, that’s where you come in! Donate to build the new library in Busia. Send checks to

Maria’s Libraries

93 Sterling Street

Brooklyn, NY 11225

Send us a cash-free donation via MPesa on 0704 090 755 until July 8.

There is no overhead taken out on either of the above methods of donation!

Credit card donations may be securely made via Paypal.

Thanks so much. Let's get this thing done!

What is community based development? Part I: Thoughts

2010-06-03T11:38:00.001-07:00

At dinner with friends in Kisumu a few weeks ago, the conversation turned, as it often does, to development. Friend A, currently doing a Masters at University of Nairobi was rolling his eyes about the idea of community based development. Since I couldn’t really see a problem with the idea, I asked what he meant by community based development. Friend B answered that community based development is when an NGO comes in with an idea and then makes the community contribute to the project for free so that they are committed to its success. No, no, no, Friend A said, that’s not what community based development is. He continued, Ok, maybe that is what it is, but that’s not supposed to be what it is. It’s supposed to be when the development community supports things that are going on in the local community.

Well, that sounds great. So why the eye roll? Well, because the reality is closer to what Friend B’s definition than the textbook definition. Why is it so hard to make sure that the priorities of the development community are in line with the priorities of the beneficiaries of the program?

Ok, so in this blog I’m going to think about this abstractly, then in part two I’ll think about it using examples of community based development that I’ve seen in action to illustrate this further—I hope to look at community development gone wrong, and community development gone right (that’s us!).

There’re two ways to look at this abstractly—one is to think about development theory and one about the practical realities of operating an NGO.

Theory: Development had long been understood as economic development, even more specifically as the transition into an industrial economy. The idea that development should be based on something else—maybe on improving people’s lives, maybe on expanding people’s rights or choices—has gained credence in the past few decades, and most NGOs are dedicated to these types of outcomes rather than industrial development.

However, in any of these approaches, development is fundamentally about changing people’s traditional relationships and networks—either their relationship to labor, as in economic development, or to each other and their political system, in a rights- based approach. If this is the case, if development is about promoting widespread transition into a modern economy, political system, or even social relations, then it would seem a community-based development system is actually antithetical to the goal.

Of course, in most communities there will be community leaders who are actively engaged in promoting these same goals. Is community-based development, then, finding those individuals with whom you share ideals to work with? That’s largely how we started in Busia. Neither Ariel nor I were looking for a development project to support, but Maria inspired us, and we love libraries, so we decided to help and it grew from there. But let’s be honest: Had Maria been passionate about, I don’t know, promoting respect of ancestors (providing for ancestors came up a lot in the 1990s Voices of the Poor report, in which the World Bank tried to ascertain the priorities of those they had been trying to help), I doubt we would have been involved.

In one line, the point is this: When international actors are involved, real community based development occurs when there is a convergence of interests between the development practitioner and the local partners.

Practically (but still abstractly!):
Who are the main actors in these international projects? Well, ok, this is extremely simplified, but for most NGOs, it looks something like this:

Funders—International NGO team—Beneficiaries

In community-based development, the international NGO should sort of be considered an intermediary between the beneficiaries and the funders. Not only should the NGO interests and the beneficiaries’ interest align, they have to align with the funders, who are most likely private foundations or wealthy individuals in the Western countries. But how is that practically possible? In Busia, Maria’s Libraries has the advantage that I lived there for over a year before starting this project. If we want to move outside Busia, how can we recreate that?

I’ll revisit that tomorrow, but for now, let’s assume that the International NGO can’t be merely an intermediary between the beneficiaries and the funders—they have to be more proactive than that. They have to introduce themselves into a community and find the community members that they are interested in their idea—be it an income-generating activity, a cultural activity, a health intervention, or something like a library.

They further have to convince the international donors that the project is something they should be interested in. If the NGO is lucky, they’ll have a donor that is open to persuasion. More likely than not, though, they will have to convince the donor that the project is in line with the goals of the funder—for example, the goals have to be something that the Rockefeller family is already interested in, or priorities that Carnegie, long dead, had when he was alive. Not only do they have to convince the donor that it’s within their goals, but with the emphasis on community based development, the NGO has to convince the donor that the beneficiaries are committed to the idea. Thus, in essence, the NGO has to convince the donor that the community’s interests are in line with the donor interests. But, practically speaking, they have to do this in a context where they don’t necessarily know the community that well. If you wish to work in a lot of areas, or at a national level like Maria’s Libraries, you simply can’t know each area that well.

So, with this practical consideration, what is community based development? In a line, it is this: Community based development is getting beneficiaries to be committed to the project, in visible or measurable ways. This is fundamentally different from basing development on ideas that are generated from the community. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but how that measureable commitment is garnered needs to be designed well. More on that tomorrow.

Ode to Nairobi Part II: Development vs. Standard of Living?

2010-04-06T03:02:00.000-07:00

In Nairobi about a week ago, I had wine with a group of professional women, primarily expats. They were wonderful, interesting, dynamic women. There was a rule at the event, no complaining about Kenya. Of course, everyone complained about Kenya anyway.

These ladies all lived in Nairobi, some of them had been here for decades, others were new or had been here in the 70s and recently returned. The complaints about Nairobi echoed my own in an earlier blog—traffic problems, mostly. Crime featured prominently as well. Those who had been living here for long noted that things were relatively safer, while those who were here in the 70s reminisced about days when Nairobi was more like Kampala or Dar in terms of safety. The declining quality of the train service since 1977 was also a recurrent theme.

The real issue, though, was traffic. And these ladies, who had much longer histories with the city than I have, told me something interesting. Namely, that traffic in Nairobi had increased drastically in the past 5 years. This was the crux of the complaint—that the standard of living in Nairobi had decreased alongside the increase in traffic. Everybody in Kenya—expat or citizen, blames everything on corruption. So the poor infrastructure in Nairobi, its inability to handle its traffic, is blamed on corruption, just like everything else is blamed on corruption.

However, I think that’s not quite right. The increase in traffic in Nairobi is not a sign of underdevelopment, actually, it’s a sign of development. And apparently of rapid development. If traffic was not this bad 5 years ago, it’s because fewer people had cars. So I’ll amend my earlier rant a bit with two caveats.

First, in subsequent conversations about the possibility of a subway in Nairobi, I realized that the New York City subway system is older than the city of Nairobi. Ok, so the point there is that Nairobi is a rapidly urbanizing place and keeping up with rapid urbanization is a problem anywhere in the world.

Second, these infrastructure problems should not be blamed on corruption. Sure, corruption doesn’t help, but if we expected countries to develop without corruption, no country anywhere would ever develop. Rather, these infrastructure problems are a problem of transition. The same problem exists in all rapidly developing or urbanizing places—Mexico City, Bangalore, Jakarta, and on and on. Countries with weak institutions always have trouble keeping up with quickly changing scenarios—that Nairobi is no exception should not be surprising.

Now on to crime. Well, crime is so complicated. My leap of faith in doing development has always been that I believe that gross inequality is wrong, so I’m going to point the finger at that—slums in Nairobi are not very far from some of the city’s riches areas (see Raila Odinga’s Langata constituency for one)—however, rising inequality does not necessarily mean that a country is stagnating; in fact it could mean that it is growing—although it may mean that growth is being mismanaged (maybe by government corruption, maybe by a rampant private sector, maybe both).

Ok, so if we posit that these problems are a sign of development rather than of underdevelopment, this leads me to a question that all those in the development world must tackle at some point: Can development be inimical to the quality of people’s lives? Of course, the obvious follow-up question is, whose life are you talking about? Is the headache of increased traffic for those who used to enjoy clear roads offset by the convenience for the new car owners?

At my last job at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, we framed our research around the question that encapsulates many of these paradoxes well: How can we promote the positive aspects of development while minimizing the negative impacts? That, of course, is the right question, but unpacking it may be impossible. Whose negative impacts and whose positive impacts? I certainly don’t know the answer.

In any case, I’m still going to be based in Kisumu and avoid Nairobi. But now I’ll have to give a proper thought for why I like it—personally, do I want it to develop and grow, to take full advantage of the opening up of the East African Community and get some industry and trade going across Lake Victoria with Uganda and Tanzania? Or do I want it to remain as is, so that I can ride my bike across town in 20 minutes, or walk to the shores of the lake to watch the sunset surrounded by greenery and flanked by exotic birds. What if they replace hippo point with a new ferry terminal? Or build a fish processing plant at Dunga Beach? Will that increase people’s standards of living? And whose standard of living will it increase?

What is it about libraries? Part II

2010-03-29T04:33:00.000-07:00

Why are people so generous with their time and resources to help us out? As I mentioned, I’ve never had a response to a project that I’ve been working on like the one we are having with this library. A friend joked that it was because librarians are naturally helpful, and asking them for advice about libraries is something they’ve been waiting for their whole lives. But actually this is something a bit different—it’s not just librarians who are interested in this project, it’s everyone we tell about it.

Ariel and I like to quote Benjamin Franklin in our fundraising spiels. Franklin started the first library in America, saying it was essential for a democracy. We also like to quote Robert Putnam’s work on social capital, and the importance of public spaces. I think all of that is right, but I don’t think that people have primarily reacted to this project on an intellectual level. It’s been personal. So here is my hypothesis about why this project has been so universally appealing (and why so many people are putting themselves out for us!).

I’m going to posit a couple of answers. First, in the States, everyone understands the importance of libraries. We all have used them, and there are famous examples of writers who really developed their literary selves (and escaped poverty!) at public libraries—for me Jack Kerouac and Jack London stand out. We also probably all have some sort of personal connection to someone for whom access to libraries was or is life changing. For me, that person is my mother. She grew up in rural Louisiana and often got in trouble for reading in school during class—a joke among her siblings is to scream at each other “Quit reading!” DeQuincy, Louisiana was, and is, a typical American lower-class town where people were expected to end up not far from where they were. The library for my mother was a haven from her chaotic household, and a window to the outside world. My mother still considers the DeQuincy Public Library a sacred haven, a space that was actually home to her in her childhood. So this theory is safe public space cum gateway to another world.

I think stories like that resonate well with Americans, in a sense we have these stories in our blood. We may not explicitly realize it, but in America libraries are everywhere. I looked up the number of public libraries some time back to see how many libraries we would have to build in Kenya to equal the number per capita in the US. Taking into account the 54 Kenya National Library Services libraries, we would need to build over 2,000 libraries.

Given this dirth, I’m not sure if Kenyans have the same association with libraries that Americans who have universally had experiences with them have. However, the support here has at least matched the support we’ve had back at home. So there’s got to be something there. What is it?

Ok, so partially the public space thing is relevant. When we visit libraries here, they are full of people studying and reading newspapers. When I say full, I mean these libraries are clearly not big enough—they are chock full of people. These people may not be using the library to it’s full potential—I am told users are primarily studying for exams. But it’s a place to sit and read, and people need that.

But I think primarily the button that this pushes in both the US and Kenya is the same, and again it’s something different. This project inspires people’s imaginations—here, I’m not talking about any particular book. I’m talking about the idea of thousands of books, on all different topics, available to people for free. The possibilities are endless and you don’t have to think about any one thing to be inspired. That is the point, you think of millions of things, things you don’t even know to think about.

Whatever the reason that we’ve had so much positive response for this project, I love being a part of it.

What is it about libraries? Part I

2010-03-19T23:58:00.002-07:00

I have worked on a lot of projects that I’ve been extremely enthusiastic about, and that other people have been excited about too. But I’ve never worked on something where the response has been quite so positive and overwhelming as this library project. People get excited about public libraries. In this blog, I’ll do a quick review of that excitement, from the experience that Ariel and I have had since founding Maria’s Libraries. In the next blog I’ll hypothesize about why.

In 2006 when I was living in Busia, I sent a note to some friends that there was a library that I wanted to help get books for. I clearly didn’t anticipate the response I was going to get, because when all the books came in, we had no idea how to get them over. In the end, my mother donated the inheritance money she got from my grandmother to ship them over.

In 2008 Ariel and I “launched” the idea of Maria’s Libraries as an organization at a dinner party at my apartment in Brooklyn. We invited a group of people we knew, socially conscious smart friends mostly, to ask them what, how and if we should start an organization. From that dinner party, we got a name, a website, two pro bono lawyers, two fundraising events, and more advice than I can easily describe.

Second, we solicited advice from other library NGOs working in resource poor settings, funders and US libraries. Everyone was perfectly happy to go over and above what we were requesting to help us—none of that competition that often plagues NGOs. We spent hours on the phone with Africa Soma, Friends of African Village Libraries, librarians from Columbia University, the American Library Association and the public library systems in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Rookaya Bawa from the Carnegie Corporation hosted us for breakfast at Carnegie. A whole team of librarians at Columbia University spent several hours filling my head with information and ideas. Students at Columbia’s Earth Institute talked to us about sustainable building. There was only one disappointing response, from a pretty major player in the world of developing libraries internationally, but we learned from their non- willingness to chat as well.

Through later conversations, a friend designed our logo, another friend re-did our website, a pediatrician is doing book collections at this office, we have books stored at friends’ tiny apartments all over New York City, as well as Texas, Maine and Philadelphia. Publishers have sent us books. The woman who runs the Library of Congress Nairobi office lets us stay with her when we are in Nairobi. An architect came over to coordinate the design process. We did spend a lot of time soliciting advice and assistance among our compatriots, but a great deal of what we’ve gotten has been people approaching us, wanting to offer their skills to their project.

And we have gotten all of this for astonishingly close to free.

So that’s in the US. In Kenya the response has also been overwhelming. We’ve been on the National News and the radio. Local publishers are excited to host us on their website, and community members in Busia are working very hard with no renumeration. When we sent out a notice to architects for tender, one of the responses was simply someone thanking us for the work we are doing—he was not interested in the tender. Perhaps most significantly is the telecommunications engineer has offered to hook up all the libraries that we work with for free, and when I was talking to him about the project, he got so excited that he offered to procure the funds for an entire new library in his home village of Ahero, which we are currently working with the Ahero town council to develop. I approached an organization called Kenya Book Foundation to tell him about the library, and he let me know that they sell books (and they're not that cheap, either), so I walked away disappointed. A few weeks, later, the man I talked to called me back, asking me when the Harambe in Busia was and berating me for not demanding donations (which, I am now led to believe, they will give). So the donation tracked me down. . .

I am forcing myself to stop—the list could go on and on, but I’m sensing it might get boring. All in all, the only real challenge that people throw at us about this project is the refrain that there is not a reading culture in Kenya. That discussion is always circular: why would you supply books when people don't read/ why would people read when there are no books. But even in the context of that discussion, people are enthusiastic about the project.

All that is a long way to lead up to the question: What is it about libraries? Why does it galvanize people in such positive ways? Your thoughts welcome!

Karibu Ellie and The Great Book Migration

2010-03-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

We are very pleased to announce the arrival of Eleanor Kebabian to our lovely Busia-based team. Ellie is a Boston-based architect who has kindly offered to come and help coordinate get the plans drawn for the library in Busia. She will be working with Nairobi-based architects, the community members who have been active in the library project in Busia, and the Busia district and town planners to come up with a design that can be a source of pride for the Busia community (and which follows all Kenyan regulations!).

Ellie also joins the ranks of those who have lugged books half way across the world for us to the library. However, I think she single handedly doubled the contribution we had made to date by convincing Delta to allow her to bring 500 lbs of books on the plane with her for free! There’s a long list of people we have to thank for this, so let’s go in order:

Thanks to the many individuals, churches, and publishers who donated so many books.

Thanks to Ellie’s family for helping her pack the books and get them to the airport.

A HUGE thanks to Delta for agreeing to let her bring 300lbs on the airplane, and then not blinking when she showed up with 500lbs.

Thanks to the dudes at the airports in Boston and Nairobi for helping her lug them to/from baggage.

Thanks to the director of the Library of Congress’s Nairobi office for helping us arrange transport for the books once in Nairobi and for letting us crash at her house with all that luggage!

Thanks to Maria Wafula who used her wile to get them sent to Busia via Akamba bus for a ridiculously low cost.

Thanks to the boda bodas who loaded up their bikes to bring them from the bus station in Busia to the library (see photograph!).

And of course, thanks especially to Ellie for organizing all of this. The books are of unbelievable quality and range, any community anywhere would be lucky to have them.

Let’s review—for the well over 1,000 books (we are still catelogueing/counting them) Ellie brought to the library, we paid 700 Ksh (less than 10$) to ship them from Nairobi to Busia on Akamba bus and about 300 Ksh (less than 5$) to get them to the library once they were in Busia. An international team effort!

I hope Ellie will start to grace this blog with her thoughts, so keep an eye out for that!

Can local philanthropy work?

2010-03-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

Libraries are not income generating. I remember as a child thinking that money generated by late fines were what sustained my local library. The idea amazed me and for good reason—ensuring library use is truly public means that there’s no way that fees from users can sustain the library. Any publicly funded enterprise requires a tricky balance between sustainability and access. This has been something we have come up against time and time again when trying to figure out a sustainability plan. Of course, public funding and attaching something to the library plot like an office complex or a row of shops can go a long way to fund the library’s activities. But for it to truly be able to grow, we suspect that the library services in Kenya can take a page out of the book of library networks in other parts of the world: they need a philanthropic network. Of course, in essence Maria’s Libraries is a philanthropic network, funneling international funding into these projects. But does Kenya really have to rely solely on the notoriously fickle flow of funding from abroad? Is it possible to raise funds locally?

We think that a philanthropic network is possible in Kenya. A sustained effort at funding an ongoing project might be a bit foreign to Kenya outside its churches, but there certainly is a tradition for raising money. Usually, fundraisers are organized in parties called Harambe. People pledge money to help an individual put up a house, help a church buy a motorbike, send a child to school in Kenya or even in America, and quite often to pay for funerals. What we are trying to do is somewhat different—we want funds to build the library, but we also want people to consider contributing every year to help sustain the library. This is not a one-off enterprise, it requires a commitment for as long as the library is in existence.

So we’re going to try it. We have several plans. First, we are having a Harambe on April 3 in Busia. Maria and co are asking Busia-ites to buy bricks (which go for 10 Kenyan shillings, or about 14 cents each) for the building and to bring books to the Harambe to donate to the library. They’re asking individuals but we’re also approaching small self-help and micro finance groups that may have trouble contributing individually but as a group can make a contribution. Second, we’re going to do something similar in Nairobi, organized by the Friends of the Busia Community Library in Nairobi, a group of professionals who live in Nairobi but are from Busia. Finally, we hope to get the Kenyan diaspora involved if we can.

I do sometimes wonder if there are ethical issues involved here. Busia is a poor community—according to government statistics, 65% of the population is in absolute poverty, defined as less than a dollar a day. Do we really need their money? I have trouble with projects that require a certain amount of labor from the local community to “prove” their commitment and create a sense of ownership over the project. I don’t feel the community has anything to prove—the support from Kenyans all over the country has been overwhelming. I know they want libraries, especially in Busia where dozens of people attend our planning meetings, the local politicians make speeches on our behalf, and a team of volunteers had kept the library open with regular hours for 7 months and counting with no renumeration. I do agree that a sense of ownership over the library will make people value it more, and I hope they honestly feel it’s their library (the slogan for our fundraiser in Busia is: It’s your Library!). But actually, we probably could raise the money entirely outside the country with less difficulty than a fundraiser here is causing us. And, although there are relatively wealthy people in Busia, for the most part the donors in America would feel it much less than here.

But we hope that people get used to donating to the library. Of course they understand that funding needs to come from somewhere, but we hope that they connect it to themselves. And who knows, maybe we will raise a truly significant amount of money for the library. Watch this space, will report back!

What should we think of the Kenyan government? Part III

2010-02-24T02:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I went to Busia’s District Development Committee meeting with Maria and a few others from the library. We presented our project to the Committee, which consists of all relevant government and civil society bodies in the region. Maria was nervous for the day, saying that it was the forum for securing local political support for the project.

The District Commissioner opened the meeting with a prayer, saying he hoped that the group could leave Busia better than they found it. In his opening remarks, he noted that an NGO was present. He thanked us for being there, saying that Busia is completely saturated with NGOs but they rarely tell the Committee or even just him, the District Commissioner, what they were doing. It makes it difficult, he said, to manage development in the region, since local government initiatives might be overlapping or even contradicting what the NGOs were doing. What better anecdote to start a consideration of how we should interact with government at all levels that to consider that thought.

The truth is, parts of the government are corrupt and inept, for a variety of reasons, not all of them in the control of any particular individual. But that doesn’t matter. Non governmental organization may exist to supplement what governments are able to do. But they are not supposed to replace or exclude government—by including them, problems and all, NGOs can support the development of political systems in addition to their primary work. For example, governments can consider how their programs can be more effective based on how they can positively interact with NGOs. In my small experience in Busia, they are happy to do so.

At the same time, however, we want our project to run as smoothly as possible, without lengthy delays that might result from relying on government. So how do we marry these two?

First, there are different arms of government. Kenya National Library Services is a parastatal, which has the capacity to manage the library and a proven effectiveness at doing so. We are thrilled to be working with them, and hope that the local communities concerns can be successfully integrated with KNLS guidelines (more on that in future blogs!).

With local government, Maria has faced many disappointments, some of which I’ve outlined in the past few blogs. Promised Community Development Funds have never materialized, land politics have abounded and seemingly arbitrary boundaries have complicated the “public” nature of the library. However, at the same time the mayor, town council members, and other local politicians have all pledged their support and we see no reason to keep them out. How we will integrate them, though, will be critical to our timeline. We’ve decided that we do want community development funds—this type of project is exactly what they were created to fund. However, we’re not going to wait for them to start building. Instead, we’ll ask for something that could greatly enhance the library’s functionality, but won’t hold us back if it doesn’t come through in a timely manner. In particular, we’re asking members of parliament from both sides of Busia’s road for a vehicle for a mobile library. We could run several programs for communities in areas that have trouble travelling to Busia, like computer training classes, writing contests, programs to develop research skills, and book loans. But if it takes 3 years to go through, we can carry on with our other activities without worrying. This way, we both make this a government project and avoid many of the fall-backs that working with government can entail.

I don’t see any reason to try to avoid working with government, though at times it can be frustrating. Over time, we can build successful relationships and hopefully strengthen the capacity of those who are charged with leaving Busia a better place than they found it.

What should we think of Kenyan government part II: Tribalism and politics

2010-02-12T22:27:00.000-08:00

In my last blog, I offered our land dilemma in Busia as an example of the complicated relationship between corruption and good governance. Today’s example is somewhat different. It’s less clearly a case of corruption as in the land example, and more a case of political patronage or tribalism. It’s also probably a story that’s not quite over yet.

Kenya is governed in administrative districts, and there are smaller units within those districts called divisions. There is one Member of Parliament per district, and the number and boundaries of districts are therefore a subject of contentious political debate. The districts were recently redrawn, and may once again be redrawn in the new constitution that is currently being developed in Kenyan parliament.

The town of Busia is somewhat unhelpfully located between two districts. Busia township lies along a road that runs from the coast into Uganda and Congo. That road is the only paved road in Busia, and the town has largely developed on either side of the road. However, the road is also the district boundary. One side of that road is Nambale District (largely inhabited by the Luhya people) and the other side of that road is Teso District (largely inhabited by the Teso people). This means there are two Members of Parliament who represent Busia. One might think that is a good thing, but it introduces a great deal of politics into the way the town develops. Many Busia-ites think of the town as one entity, but since public resources are allocated according to that boundary, for some crucial purposes many think of it according to the political boundary. For example, the Nambale district headquarters are located on the Teso district side of the road—they were built in a time when there were different boundaries. The MP from Teso only half-jokingly told me that the entire Nambale District administration was squatting in his district.

How does this relate to the library? Another piece of Kenya- specific administration is necessary here. Some years back, the national government created a decentralized fund in order to promote local development called the Community Development Funds (CDF funds). These funds are administered at the district level. They have been subject to charges of rampant corruption and all of that—this will be the incorporated into my next blog, so for now I’ll leave a fuller discussion of CDF funds aside. The MP from Teso is very approachable and comes to Busia every weekend to meet with his constituents. The MP from Nambale is less so, and despite our efforts we have not been able to meet with him.

When we talked to the MP from Teso, he was excited about the library. He was full of ideas and was thinking about plots of land in his district that he could set aside for the library. When we told him that we were trying to get the title deed for the KNLS plot of land, which is on the Nambale side of the road, his attitude changed completely. “Oh,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “I can’t help you if you build there.” Maria reminded him that this is a community library, it’s not for any particular group and Teso will benefit just as much as all other parts of the larger Busia community. The MP was apologetic, but, he said, it doesn’t matter. If he allocates one single shilling to that side of the road, his Teso constituency won’t elect him again--why should "they" (the Luhya) benefit? He was quite frank about it and I respected his candid comments. He said he’d help us in other ways, using his political influence to push the land issue (before we had it settled) or think about ways to work with the MP for Nambale. But he could not openly support a community library located 50 meters from the Teso District boundary.

Again, we face a paradox. Clearly the MP's refusal to openly support anything on the wrong side of the street is anti-development. Is this an example of patronage, even a sort of tribalism since the Teso people are technically different than the largely Luhya Nambale? Or is this political reality? The administrative units are poorly drawn, yet this sort of democracy is really set up to be a patronage or tribalist system—and it’s based largely on the US system, with a legal code largely inherited from the UK. I have no reason to doubt that the MP from Teso is committed to the idea of the library. But what can he do to help? His incentive is to be re-elected, and a certain form of tribalism is necessary for that. I guess it’s not so different than Iowa Senators who advocate for agribusiness or Virginia Senators who can’t get over coal.

Can this be related to the 2007 stolen election and resulting violence that exploded largely on tribal lines? Of course there's no easy parallels, but at the same time how can it not be related? If political boundaries are drawn around tribal lines, than the politically disenfranchised will also be drawn around tribal lines.

As I said, the story of the MPs and the library in Busia is probably not over yet. I still hope to meet the MP from the other side of the street, and I still hope that we are able to work with both of them. Watch this space.

What should we think of Kenyan government part I: Land and corruption

2010-02-09T23:49:00.001-08:00

The other day I wrote about how Nairobi’s bad rep. Now on to the Kenyan government’s bad rep.

There is definitely corruption in the Kenyan government. Aside from the very dramatic election scandals in 2007, the corruption here is in many ways out of control. The Anglo Leasing case in the 1990s, in which the government poured millions if not billions of shillings into a company that did not exist, is a particularly key example. John Githongo, the government minister in charge of investigating corruption, was rewarded with exile for his integrity.

However, I would like to submit that all that, true as it may be, does not equate to a government that is not invested in making things better for its people. On paper it may certainly look that way, but through this project I’ve had the opportunity to work with government and quasi-governmental organizations at local and national levels. It’s a hard thing to get one’s head around— that being corrupt and working for the betterment of your people are not mutually exclusive. But the truth is, in my experience, government officials care about improving the lot of their constituencies and of Kenya as a whole and, further, they are interested in doing a good job in their positions.

I could wax on about my experiences with Kenyan government, but I will illustrate with two installments of examples, one now and one in tomorrrow’s blog post.

First, land. Oh, land. Land is contentious in many African countries, and title deeds to the same piece of property are on occasion held by more than one party. When Ariel and I were here in July, almost 7 months ago, we met with the town planner, city council, mayor and all relevant city government officials. We were promised land, a big plot out by the hospital, and we were over the moon. This meant that we had two parcels of land to choose from, the KNLS-owned plot in town, and a bigger plot a bit outside of town. When I arrived in January, I accidentally ran into many of these same politicians when I was visiting the Member of Parliament for one of the Busia Districts. We decided to have lunch together, and when we sat down, I asked them about the land. In the nearly 7 months since we had been gone, nothing had happened to further the process. The town planner, the mayor and their ilk had an almost identical discussion about land that they had had when we were here in July. They were excited about the library, they were excited about it being built while they were in office and sending their children there to read and all of that. But ultimately I didn't know what to think. Were they stringing us along or were they going to commit a piece of land? If they committed a piece of land, how would we know if it had previously been committed to someone else?

Also at lunch, the plot of land that was held by Kenya National Library Services was discussed. Er, the local politicians said, there may be problems with that land as well. The title deed in the Busia files had “disappeared” and another government agency, the Agro-forestry Unit, had paid all fees on the land up to now.

I was furious, I almost got up and left the lunch. They were telling us that they had re-sold KNLS’s land without letting KNLS know. I held it in through lunch, though, and devised a scheme with Maria whereby Maria’s Libraries would play “bad cop” and threaten to build the library in another community if they didn’t get their act together.

I stand by that scheme. However, I began to think about Mushtaq Khan, a British scholar who makes a distinction between good corruption and bad corruption. He attempts to show the function of some type of corruption, so I start to wonder if this form of corruption served any purpose.

Well, in way it does. Kenya National Library Services had owned that land since 1994 and they have never made any indication that they were going to use it. Fifteen years after they acquired it, a foreign donor (us) randomly showed up wanting to build. Unused land in such a prime location is a public bad. In many countries, there are ways of dealing with unused land. In London, squatting is legal, and if the owner of the property doesn’t do anything with it for 7 years, the squatters legally own it. In many countries, there is an unused land tax. Imagine what would happen to an abandoned lot in, for example, Manhattan! It would not last long, but there would be mechanisms in place to legally extract it from the owner. In Kenya those mechanisms don’t exist so the local politicians did the same thing, illegally.

Ok, so I can be sympathetic to what the local politicians have done. But that doesn’t mean we should give up that land. Legally, KNLS owns it. The local town council could make it up to us by giving us another plot of land, but what if that was legally owned by someone else that hadn’t figured out what to do with it? Much as I might think Kenyan laws might want to have a mechanism to deal with unused land, the only way for us to operate that will not ultimately get us into trouble later on is to operate to the letter of the law, inconvenient as it might be. Richard Atuti, the new director of KNLS, told me he would fight for the land. He seemed to have read the skepticism on my face when he unequivocally told me that in Kenya, if you can trace your right to the land, the deed will only go to you.

And he was right. I told him we would of course need copies of all the documentation that KNLS owned the land before we could start to plan building the library. A week later, Richard called me and said he was sending a package for me via Akamba bus to be picked up in Kisumu that included all of the necessary documents. That was yesterday, and I will be bringing it to Busia tomorrow.

Score one for the rule of law.

Ode to Nairobi

2010-02-03T00:25:00.000-08:00

Nairobi largely gets a bad rep. I remember the first time I arrived in Nairobi, my head filled with knowledge of its violent reputation, I was increasingly terrified with every step I took off the plane. A woman who worked in the airport must have seen my fear, because she got me a taxi and actually took it with me into town, pointing out all the hotels and nice, modern things that Nairobi has to offer. She walked me into the hotel, told me not to leave until morning, but then during the day, she added, feel free to walk around the city, and went back to the airport. Now I know that even in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum, it’s ok to walk around during the day. There is considerable risk at night and of course during occasional violent rallies, for both Kenyans and visitors, but during the day you are probably safer in Nairobi than you are in, say, some parts of New Orleans.

So although this is still a dangerous city, the days of “Nairobbery” are largely over. That said, it’s not exactly a pleasant city either. One day it will be—with all those glorious trees and huge forests and parks interspersed throughout the city, it must be one of the greenest cities on earth. If only you could breathe to enjoy it! The pollution, mostly from unregulated exhaust fumes, makes walking around the city literally a sickening affair. Also, in my week here, there's only one day where I've scheduled more than one meeting in a day and I worry I won’t make them both, even though they are pretty close to each other. Traffic. A large part of each day in Nairobi is spent on matatus, 14-seater Nissan vans that constitute the public transportation system. A 7 mile drive takes at least an hour, more likely an hour and a half. Sitting in traffic at the best of times is a pain, but in the midst of the horrible exhaust from Matatus, huge lorries, cars and the occasional tractor, I think it constitutes a public health problem.

One little subway, Nairobi, that’s what you need, one little subway. Kenya could probably find the money in its own government coffers if it wanted. It also would be a great project for a foreign donor, even if the project is rife with potential for corruption. It makes me sympathetic to all those politicians in Western Kenya who think all this funding for human rights is crazy and a little hilarious-- they don't understand what it means to fund human rights, but they understand what it means to have poor road systems and a shortage in medications. C'mon World Bank, or newly arrived masses of Chinese donors, build a subway in Nairobi!

I explained to a taxi driver the subway system in New York and he was very thoughtful about it for a minute and then said slowly, “The problem is, that would require planning.” Well, ok, until then I’ll stay in Kisumu.

The Digital Revolution hits Kenya

2010-01-28T00:10:00.000-08:00

When I first got to Busia in 2006, the only place to get internet was the Post Office. It was painfully slow and didn’t usually work. If I had to send something large, like a database, I would have to haggle my way across the border into Uganda where there was one internet café that was a bit faster and sometimes open. Uganda’s electricity is something like 24 hours on and 24 hours off, so if I went there during an “off” spell, I’d have to either find 4 more people to use other computers to make it worth their while to turn on the generator, or pay for 5 people myself as I sat alone, trying to send one email.

Now, almost exactly four years later, I’m sitting in my room with an internet stick that plugs into my USB port and provides me with internet where-ever there is a phone network. The much anticipated high speed internet from the fiber-optic cable hasn’t reached this part of Kenya quite yet, but it’ll be here soon enough. In any case, the stick is plenty fast. If I was a little less lazy, I could go into town to use one of the many internet cafés, or the hotel which has wireless (that’s right, wireless!).

Internet and cell phones have become efficient and mainstream so much more quickly than things like land lines and even electricity. I don’t think this is part of the public vs. private debate—I think it has to do with how dramatically simpler the required infrastructure is for these goods. There are parts of Kenya that, I predict, will never have land lines. They will only have cell phone towers.

Our library needs to pick up on this. Book are wonderful and irreplaceable, but we have to take advantage of resources that can be digitized a much as possible. It does not make sense for us to drag over reference books, which are large and go out of date quickly, or even textbooks, when we can bring them on CD. If we are able to develop a strong digital library, it can serve the duo purpose of providing information and training people to use computers, which (it almost goes without saying) is an essential skill.

Back in Busia: Progress report

2010-01-24T00:47:00.000-08:00

So much has happened since last we were here!

First, the small library room that Maria has been running has been open with regular hours since we left. The people visiting the library has increased a lot. Jimmy, the man who pretty much runs all internet services in Busia and around, has agreed to set up wireless internet for free in the library—even though it will compete with his business! The constraint now is getting computers that are fast enough for the wireless.

Second, they’ve come extremely far with getting the land issue settled. Maria, who is kind, funny, and not going to take any crap from anybody, has been pushing the planning departments both in Nairobi and in Busia to come up with all the paperwork we need to start building. Land is extremely contentious in a lot of African countries, Kenya included. We are not interested in building a library on land that someone will come up with an excuse to take away from us later on. In the US, we would need to make sure that all our 'i's were dotted and 't's were crossed. Here, they need to be dotted, crossed, bolded, underlined and in italics. Maria has been making sure they are.

Third, Jimmy has gotten in touch with the Member of Parliament for Busia, who is extremely interested in the library. In Kenya, there is a decentralized fund called the Community Development Fund, or CDF. The CDF funds, since they’ve started, have been the source of much controversy, as their allocation is often thought to be rife with corruption. However, committed MPs can do good things with these funds. Busia straddles two constituencies, and we hope that the MPs from each will find some funds for us.

It’s also just nice to be back! Sunny Busia is a great break from the cold of New York, and I’ve compulsively bought enough bright fabrics for 3 people. If anyone wants any, let me know!

What is the role of an international NGO?

2010-01-21T00:59:00.000-08:00

The term non governmental organization (NGO) is meant to describe an organization that provides services normally associated with governments in a context where a government is unable (or unwilling) to step in.

The positive side of NGOs is that they contribute to global resource redistribution and hopefully include the transfer of knowledge or technologies. However, NGOs have potentially negative affects as well. For example, they are often charged with allowing the state to disengage from the public sector with the assurance that the NGO will manage social services. Further, they can actually weaken the state by replacing services that the state provides with their own programs—and in such a way that it may not be sustainable. When the NGO departs, the state, who has not developed the sector because the NGO had taken over, is not prepared to adopt it. Finally, they are charged with addressing needs that are designed by the NGO or funders, often located in rich countries, rather than the needs defined by the people they purport to benefit. NGOs may have incentives to perpetuate themselves as organization, which may not create the right incentives to actually solve problems.

Given this, what is the role of an international NGO? How can an international NGO bring the strengths of the international community to bear while avoiding, or minimizing, the potential negative affects?

It is important to realize that, just as developing countries are not all the same, NGOs are not all the same. In fact, the term describes such a vast array of organization that it is actually not terribly descriptive. When Ariel and I decided to start Maria’s Libraries, we decided we could put these concerns at the core of how we structured the organization. Having both worked in and with NGOs, Ariel and I have seen a lot that we liked and a lot that we didn’t like. We have sought advice from major funders of library projects in the developing countries, leaders of similar organizations, students and professors in information technologies, and smart friends engaged in international development. Librarians in the US have also been amazingly forthcoming, and we have studied how library networks work at home. Librarians in Kenya have been similarly helpful, telling us how they operate and what challenges they have faced.

Taking all this into account, we decided to base what we do on an idea that comes from growth economics—in short, we asked ourselves and our partners in Busia the following questions:

What are the binding constraints that are preventing this library from being built and run in Busia?

What are the binding constraints to the emergence of a library network in Kenya?

Who is best suited to deal with those constraints and how?

Of course, the answers to these questions are specific to Busia. If Maria’s Libraries begins work in a new town or a new country, we will have to think this through again. We are already asking the same questions as we start to create a national library directory in order to network them.

In the case of Busia, the major constraints we have identified are the following: (1) funding and resources like books and computers; (2) organization and networking between and within sites; and (3) capacity to sustain the library. As for who is best suited to deal with these issues, in the case of Kenya we feel that we can have a role to play in procuring funding from international donors. Of course, local and national donors can help, and we feel that we are well suited to assist in local and national fundraising. We have also found that we can help with organizing disparate groups, and networking them. As for sustaining the library, in Kenya we do not feel that we are best suited to do this, either in terms of funding or know-how.

As for funding, we hope that this library will be around for as long as Busia is around. We further hope that Maria’s Libraries will be similarly long lasting, and we will remain committed to the library in Busia. However, for the library to be truly sustainable, it must be able to exist without our support and we can move on, bringing what we feel are our strengths to other communities. Kenya has a national library service that could run the library and, if the community chooses not to work with the national service, there are several ways they could design the library to raise enough funds to sustain itself. Building a local philanthropic community is part of that. Other ideas that our partners in Busia have had is to build an office space on the library compound that would be rented out to benefit the library. They could also run programs through the library, like computer classes, that they would charge for.

As for the technical aspect of running a library, we are not librarians and are clearly not best suited to be involved in this part of things. Similarly, the capacity to run a library does not, at present, exist in Busia. However, it does exist in Kenya, and we feel very strongly that tapping into local expertise will bring us a lot further than importing expertise from abroad. There are librarians and organizations in Kenya who would be willing to work in Busia. Kenya National Library Service has been running over 50 libraries throughout the country for decades. They also run classes where Maria or other people who have been involved in the project could be trained in librarianship.

In our organizing role, we are helping to connect KNLS and other library networks to the local community. We hope that in doing so we are actually strengthening the capacities of both.

In short, our role is organizing, networking and initial funding. We can assist where requested in the sustainability aspects, but we are clearly not the best party suited to this. Of course as funders we need to make sure that the plans for sustainability are well in place before we begin to build.

Not only do we hope that the library we build will be a benefit to the community for decades to come, we hope that our NGO represents a responsible model for promoting development.

Kenya trip, day 7: Kakamega Provincial Library

2009-07-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

We wanted to go to Kakamega to see KNLS’s provincial library. We got there the night before and camped at a sweet little guest house without electricity or running water. The guy who ran it asked us if we wanted to take a “traditional bath.” I thought that was hilarious. “You mean a bucket bath?” I responded.

The day we visited the library, we got up at 5 in the morning to hike in the forest in Kakamega. The forest is supposedly the only piece of jungle in East Africa, a relative of the jungle in Congo. Calling Kakamega forest a jungle is a bit of an overstatement if you ask me, but it’s beautiful and there are tall trees and three kinds of monkeys so it’s fun anyway.

After the hike, the owner of the guest house, Smith, hitched a ride into town with us and neither he nor the taxi driver knew where the library was, despite having grown up in the area. The taxi driver asked someone and we all went. We got to the library at around 11 am. It was a beautiful building. We found out later that it was built by the Finnish in the 70s.

Smith was blown away by the building and was shocked that he hadn’t known of it before. He did recognize the truck parked in the parking lot though. It was the book mobile, and he remembered the books he got from it when he was a kid.

We hadn’t warned the library we were coming, which was in part to see how things work when they’re not expecting “donors” to be there. They had no idea who we were, but they asked someone to take us around. We asked them about their relationship with the main office in Nairobi and they said that over all it was good, although sometimes the bureaucracy was such that things happened very slowly. They were promised renovation and expansion that hadn’t happened yet. Also, the book mobile that was bought by the British in the 60s had finally broken down for good a few years ago and they are still waiting for a new one. However, the library was well staffed and was full of really great books that had been donated by Book Aid through KNLS. It looked like they had more books than they could really accommodate, which is why they are so desperate to expand. These are problems, yes, but they are good problems!

We met a few very friendly librarians who were very informative and candid about the way the library works. One of them had been picked in a leadership initiative and sent by Carnegie council for training in Illinois.

When we asked Robert Cheriot, the provincial librarian, about the library in Busia, he knew exactly what library we were talking about and told us that Maria had been calling him. Maria has felt jerked around by KNLS and this guy seemed aware that he had been jerking her around. He said that he was about to leave his post in a few weeks and wanted to let the next librarian visit Busia and meet with Maria since there seemed little point if he was leaving so soon. It may have been a weak excuse, but at least we knew that Maria was very much on his radar.

Overall, we were thrilled with the library in Kakamega. It was very clear that they have a lot of problems, but the staff knows what those problems are and they are working within the limits of the bureaucracy to work them out. And most of the problems were indicative of how successful the library is, rather than how it’s stalling or mismanaged.

Kenya trip, day 5, Kids reading tent day

2009-07-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

A few days before we got there, Maria and Mwalimu (Mwalimu’s name is Jeffrey, but we call him the Kiswahili word for “teacher”) invited kids from schools around the area to participate in a “reading tent day.” I’m not necessarily very good with children—more precisely, when there are more than 1 or 2 of them I simply don't like them—so I was a bit nervous for today.

When we got to the library, Irene and Ruth, two of the library volunteers, were busily matching up books to the cards that they had spent all night making. These were basically the handmade version of cards and envelopes that you find in the back of books in libraries in the US—at least, before most libraries were digitized. Alice explained to us that they needed to have all of these cards in the books before the kids could look at them. Ariel and I grabbed a stack of cards and started to match them to books. It turned out to be fun, like a game of memory. Once we got through the over 200 books that needed to be catalogued, we started gluing the envelopes in the books. We started with the kids books, since that was what we needed for the day.

When they were ready, we set up a registration table with the stacks of kids books. Alice and Ariel registered the kids as they came and checked out a book for them. This went on for about 5 hours. I sat there for a little while, but Ariel was there pretty much the whole time, until we started “the program.” The table was basically mobbed the whole time, with kids taking book after book and bringing them back. I think they also liked going to the table to get to talk to Ariel.

We bought some watercolor paints as a raffle prize, but there was a surprising demand to use them to paint at the event. So we got some paper out and the kids started drawing and painting pictures from the books. They also painted each others’ faces. Ariel and my’s favorite was a kid who painted a simple half circle around one eye but Maria said such asymmetry was very naughty. Some of the students were stellar artists.

At some point during the day, I stepped through a hollow piece of ground and scraped the back of my ankle. It wasn’t bad at all, but it bled profusely and was a little embarrassing. Maria and some street children helped me clean it up, and I introduced them to the wild world of hand sanitizer. The foot was a little stiff, so now one of my ankles was sprained, the other scraped up, and a porcupine quill injury in the side of my leg. Good stuff.

When we started the program, Mwalimu had all of the kids introduce themselves, say their class and what school they went to. One of the street children who Alice brought along hid during this period, but Alice got him out to introduce himself. He had been diligently getting books all day and looking through them eagerly, but he was clearly not comfortable around the school kids and of course was not able to say what school he went to since he doesn’t go to school. He had a look of quiet intensity the whole day, but he stayed from the very beginning to the very end.

I also made friends with Morris. I’m not sure where Morris came from. I think he saw the event and just came over. Morris was also very shy and didn’t speak any English. I tried to speak Kiswahili to him, but it probably just came out like jibberish and confused the poor thing. He was my buddy, though, and came with me to buy prizes and diligently helped me look for books that people asked for even though he had absolutely no idea what he was looking for. It became my goal to make him smile. This was not easy. I could get him to show me his two missing teeth, which came out as something between a smile and a snarl, but that was sort of cheating anyway. Finally, I showed him one of the pictures I took of him on my digital camera and he screamed with delight. We had to work quick, but we finally got a picture of Morris smiling.

After the introductions, there were speeches about how fabulous libraries are, and a couple of the kids recited poetry. We had a reading contest, where one kid from all the schools would read part of Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me. At the end, the students with the best drawings and the best reading got prizes. Finally, Maria handed out sodas and bananas from her farm.

At around 4pm, Ariel and I, half starved and totally beat from the day, went to Blue York, a hotel with wireless internet, to do some work and eat. Later still, we went with the library ladies, some old friends of mine in Busia, and some people from the hotel we were staying at to see live music at Check Inn, Busia’s hottest club. (There are three in town, and the District Commissioner had recently banned dance clubs, so two of them were all but shut down. The third, it was rumored, was allowed to stay open because they paid off the police. In any case, they seemed to have made an exception for this musician who is high profile in Kenya and had gone to the States to campaign among the diaspora for Obama.) Somehow, Ariel, Caro (a woman I used to work with) and I ended up on stage dancing with the band. But that’s sort of another story I guess.

local v. KNLS management

2009-07-16T04:53:00.000-07:00

In partnership with the Busia Community Library Service, we have been discussing issues of community ownership and the identification of an appropriate plot of land on which to build. These concerns are intertwined, and not because land is a resource that we lack. To the contrary, Busia community has a couple of options open to it. I think that the discussion is interesting, and hope that you will weigh in with your comments.

There are many benefits of working with the Kenya National Library Service, who owns a well-located and nice-sized piece of land in Busia, set aside specifically for the development of a community library. It is up to the community to construct the building. Once the building is complete, KNLS will undertake a competitive national search for the identification and hire of trained librarians, outfit the library with books and other materials, and take responsibility for the maintenance, management, and functioning of the library. The Busia community, at this point, as the capacity to contribute a bit to some of these activities, but lacks the resources to fully manage any of them, so the KNLS involvement would be a boon.

Busia has, however, been operating a small-scale community library in some form since 2001, and local aspirations and local knowledge should not be discounted. The library is the project of the community, intended to serve Busia district and the surrounding region. In an underserved area, it would be nice if the new construction led to long-term positions of employment for locals. True, building the library will create some temporary positions, and maintenance and low-skilled staff positions will likely be created once the library is in operation, but holding a national competition, giving no preference for locals, for the skilled staff positions (save one) leaves it very unlikely that there will be continuity between the old library and the new, or that the community leaders who have been so involved in coordinating the maintenance of the existing library and the development of the new library will have more than nominal involvement in the functioning of the new library.

Acceptance of the KNLS offer of land means that once the library is built, Busia will hand over the keys, literally and figuratively, to KNLS. Identification of a different plot of land on which to build will be expensive for the community but will free it to negotiate, once the library is built, the level of involvement that KNLS will have with the community library moving forward. KNLS provides many services to unaffiliated public libraries, including training, technical assistance, and material support.

These ideas have implications for Maria’s Libraries beyond the Busia initiative. KNLS owns land in 72 communities across Kenya, on all of which they hope libraries will one day be built. Maria’s Libraries is very happy to work with KNLS to help develop these latent projects, but both organizations are very aware of benefits and drawbacks associated with partnering with KNLS.

Kenya trip, Arriving in Busia and book delivery!

2009-07-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Busia at 5:30 in the morning and somehow made it to the hotel that Maria had booked for us, Farmview. It’s a bit out of town and does indeed have a view of farms. It’s also next door to Busia’s sewer treatment plant, which is sometimes called “the beach of Busia” and is a hit for dates on Valentine’s day.

The first thing we did was sleep. The next thing we did was walk through the fields on our way to the one paved road. Within minutes, I took a step off the path and sprained my ankle. Luckily, I have an ace bandage in my pack left over from spraining the same ankle almost exactly a year ago in Ecuador.

In any case, we finally made our way to town and visited with old friends. Maria was anxious to see us, so we got the two suitcases full of books and went to the library. With us, the suitcases, Maria and two of her friends, there was barely any room left. It’s such a small place, the library. There was a student sitting there studying. When we started pulling the books out, he noted the lack of economics books. I immediately pulled out the entire IPD collection and piled them in his arms. If he takes all that in, he’ll be Jose Antonio and Joe’s perfect protégé!

After the merriment surrounding the books, we sat down with Maria and Alice, someone who had been working on the library project for some time. We went over all of our activities since the spring, showed pictures of the fundraiser at Galapagos and the bike ride to Coney Island. They were thrilled that people in the US care about the library in Busia—they really had trouble believing it.

After the fun stuff, we told them all the things we had been worried about. We talked about the benefits and fallbacks of working with KNLS (see Ariel’s blog). We talked about sustainability issues and consistent opening hours. We talked about community ownership and—the biggest issue of all—land.

Maria and Alice told us about the politics of the town, and how building the library would fit in to those politics. Busia is located on the edge of Teso and Busia districts—this is two different tribes, the Teso and the Luhya. The dividing line has never been completely clear to me, but basically the one paved road that runs through town demarcates the lands. The library would of course be open and welcoming to everyone, but which side of the land we ultimately build on will ultimately send a signal about whose library this is, and could determine what kind of political support we get.

We also got to see what work they had been doing at the library. They had put a partition up which made the library look a lot smaller. On the other side of the partition, they were planning to offer computer services. They only thing they lacked was computers. The other innovation was that every book was catalogued in Microsoft Access, with title, ISBN numbers, authors, etc. There were 686 books total. We had just brought over 200 more.

The meeting was long and good. After we left them at the library, we went over to the internet café where we were shocked to find that wireless internet had hit Busia! We were all ready to take out our laptops and plug ourselves in when Jimmy, the owner of the shop, greeted us. We remembered each other from when I lived in Busia, and we told him about the library. He was immediately excited and took us on a walk to visit the areas he thought would be good for land. He’s great, very entrepreneurial, and had been the one to introduce wireless into Busia. We roped him in. He agreed to put some books into both of his shops, not to lend out, but to advertise for the library. He also agreed to come to the stakeholder meeting that we’re having next Tuesday to help generate ideas. If we can get all of Busia’s Jimmy’s on board—the good hearted, smart and driven people in Busia, the project will be all set.

a tour of some KNLS libraries around Nairobi

2009-07-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Nairobi, against all odds (particularly unfriendly weather and cancelled flights) at 6:30am on Wednesday morning. My friendly driver Edward and I quickly realized that he’d also taken Eva from the airport a few days earlier. He knew why my bags were so heavy (they were full of books), and knew that I’d passed through his hometown, Kitale, last year with Eva. Upon arrival at the Upper Hill Campsite and Hotel in Lavington, a nice section of Nairobi, we found Eva in the dining room, working away. She told me to drop my bags at the front desk and keep Edward near—we were to go directly to KNLS for a tour of a few KNLS-run libraries in and around Nairobi.

Our first stop was Thika, a busy suburb roughly 50km from Nairobi proper. A library had been built there in 1981, and the library’s director, Beatrice, answered our incessant questions and showed us around. A clean, well-lighted space, the Thika library consisted of a very large adult reading room, an only slightly smaller children’s space (both including an impressive book collection), a cyber café, a news area (both for adults and children), a large reception area, nice office space, and good public space both indoors and outdoors. KNLS was very proud of this well-functioning branch, with 27 full-time trained librarians and support staff. Beatrice was happy to let us know that its location on the border of Thika and a very large slum allowed for its use of much ground, provision of a quiet public space, and opportunity to serve a vastly underserved population of local children who were used to being shooed away from other public and private buildings in town.

We moved right on to the new library construction in Bura Bura, a middle class area of mostly civil servants just about 2km outside of Nairobi. As modern as they come, the shell of the building complex was complete—in addition to the 5-story main library building, there were shorter wings for a conference center, a business center (already in use by a bank, a print shop, and Safaricom, a Kenyan cell-phone provider), and a residence for a caretaker. Internet ports for more than 50 computers per floor revealed the modern aspirations of the town. After imagining the space filled with books, computers and people, we headed back to Nairobi with Omar, our host from KNLS, to get a look at the Nairobi branch, which was connected to KNLS headquarters.

The main branch had an impressive digital accounting system for tracking both members and books’ movement in and out of the library, as well as specialized resources for special needs groups, including the visually impaired.

After a quick, early dinner, Eva and I rushed back to pick up our things to bring to the bus station. We were soon on an overnight bus to Busia, where we dropped everything at the Farmview Hotel, to start a new day!

How many Libraries are there in Kenya?

2009-07-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

Good question! We don’t know, and neither does anyone else!

Because there are so many NGOs and other groups that run libraries in Kenya, no one really knows how many libraries there are in the country. KNLS has 54 libraries, and we are currently compiling a map to show their distribution around the country. However, there are probably many more libraries outside the KNLS network than inside.

We want to get a comprehensive list. Kenya Library Association is going to help us by sending a letter to everyone in their network asking them to send a list (with contact details!) of all the libraries that each of them knows about. We will put together the spreadsheet, deleting duplications. If we get to a point when we can hire someone in Kenya, one of the tasks will be to get in touch with those libraries and ask them to list all the libraries they know about. We will continue with this until we hit dead ends on all fronts and there are no new libraries to contact. It sounds like a lot of work, but a lot of projects in Kenya work this way—you get to know who is doing what by word of mouth.

In the meantime, if any of you know of any libraries operating in Kenya, let us know!

Kenya trip, Day One, meetings with KNLS, British Council and KLA

2009-07-14T05:41:00.000-07:00

It is usually very difficult to set up meetings in Kenya in advance. After months of trying to get in touch with both Kenya National Library Services and Kenya Library Association, we had managed to set up meetings with both of them. This was probably mostly due to Rookaya at Carnegie Corporation who gave us the contact details for the director of KNLS and Lauren Messner who helped us track down Kenya Library Association.

Ariel’s flight was cancelled twice, so while I was hustling around Nairobi she spent her time looking for mushrooms in the Amsterdam airport (to no avail, but she did find tulip bulbs!).

Meeting one: First, KNLS gave me all kinds of good deets on libraries in Kenya. The truth is, no one really knows how many libraries there are in Kenya (see “How many libraries are there in Kenya?”). However, KNLS has the biggest network of libraries, with 54 spread all over the country. Western Province, where Busia is, has the least number of KNLS libraries in any of the provinces. It is by no means the least populated, though, and even the remote Province like North Eastern have more libraries. This is not to say that KNLS is not interested in working in western Kenya. It seems that land is more contested in western Kenya and it's difficult to get for libraries. KNLS is enthusiastic about putting a library in Busia. Many of them had been through Busia before, and knew it as a bit of a rough place. Irene, the director of KNLS, said that she thought that creating a public library that could serve as a landmark in Busia would change the whole nature of the town. I think this is right and the plans we have for the library immediately upgraded in my mind as she spoke. It would be so easy to change people’s mindsets both in Busia and about Busia if it was known as the town with the great library. So many times I’ve been struck by the grandeur of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library (possibly one of my favorite buildings on earth), not only because of how big and beautiful they are, but because of how amazing it that in the US we have such temples to public knowledge. It shows where our priorities are. KNLS is interested in creating the same. They offered to take me on a tour of several libraries, but we decided to wait until Ariel arrived so that she could join.

I spoke with five people at KNLS: the deputy director, the director, two public relations officers and the resource mobilization officer. They were very aware of the problems that some community libraries had in working with them (see “Local vs. KNLS management”). They were also very candid about talking about why they had those policies.

Meeting two: Next I headed to the British Council, where I was supposed to meet with the Member of Parliament (MP) representing Busia. My friend Tedman from Nyanza Province, works at British Council and had arranged the meeting. I had actually met Tedman in 2006 in Kisumu when I was looking for the library that the British Council ran. He let me know that not only had they shut down the library, the British Council was retrenching and moving all their offices to Nairobi. What a shame! Since then, so many people from all over Western Kenya have told me fond stories of the British Council Library.

A few years ago in Lamu, an island off the coast of Kenya, I discovered that porcupine quills were the best instrument to hold up my hair (for those of you who don’t know: I have a lot of hair. It is big and unmanageable at the best of times, in dusty Kenya it is impossible). There’s a little stall in Nairobi that sells them, and I buy a few every time I come to Nairobi. I had put one in my bag that morning and as I was seated waiting for Tedman it broke through the bag, through my nice linen pants, and continued about an inch into my leg. Porcupine quills are sharp, as it happens. Just as I was pulling it out, Tedman came down. I was thought he might produce the MP right then, so I awkwardly tried to pretend nothing had happened. When I stood up, though, I could feel the blood gushing down my leg so the first thing I did was ask for the bathroom, somewhat tersely. In the bathroom, I tried to tie toilet paper around my leg but that didn’t work. Luckily puncture wounds clot quickly so I was able to make the bleeding stop pretty easily. I then returned to the meeting.

The MP didn’t show up (typical), but Tedman had gotten the entire “western” contingent of the British Council on board, and they got in touch with Busia’s former mayor, now a councilwoman, to tell them we were coming. Tedman’s approach was very interesting. He told her he had a gift for the town and all we asked for in return was land to put it on. He hung up the phone and nodded and said, “They will give you land” and that was that. I was excited to go to Busia.

Meeting Three: I went to the Uthalii House in town to meet with KLA. I couldn’t find the office for a long time and ended up somewhat randomly in the office of the man who I used to apply to for research grants across town. He remembered my face and we talked a little bit. He was doing the same work, he told me, but for a different ministry and was therefore in a different building. So weird.

I finally figured out where I needed to be, and met with three ladies from KLA. KLA is a loose association of professionals who are interested in libraries. They hold two conferences to discuss the state of Kenyan libraries every year. They listed for me a few libraries outside of the KNLS that they thought we should get in touch with. They also agreed to help us figure out how many libraries there are in Kenya (see “How many libraries are there in Kenya?”). These women confirmed what we already knew: People interested in libraries are some of the nicest, most helpful people anywhere!

Is there such a thing as an inappropriate book?

2009-07-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

Ariel and I have talked a lot about this. We want to solicit books that the community wants, and once they have come up with a list of priority areas, we will start to look for them specifically as well as receive donations. But in general, are there books that we should turn away if donated?

Of course all books have value—some of them for valuable information, some of them for a perspective on what was once considered valuable information (my master’s dissertation was, in part, a discourse analysis on science and policies around sexually transmitted diseases in Africa in the 19th century). But we’ve decided that outdated textbooks are not worth sending over. Our resources are too scare to use them sending information that can’t be used here and now!

However, with some books it’s less clear. For example, we received several up to date high quality psychology textbooks. One of them specifically dealt with gender issues. I was fascinated with the book personally, and was leafing through the pages. As I did so, I started to wonder if psychology was completely Western-centric. Of course, Franz Fanon was a psychologist who wrote the book which has been one the most influential books all over Africa, "The Wretched of the Earth." But this book was somewhat different. Do chapters detailing the effects of cafeteria politics on girls have any relevance in rural Kenya? I don’t have the answer to this.

Another book dealt with queer theory and sexuality. All over the world, there are people who are attracted to people of the same sex. But the social constructs of how those relationships manifest are so different across societies. In Iran, the government can state that there is no such thing as homosexuality while sex change operations are perfectly acceptable. In Kenya, homosexuality is not at all accepted but in some Muslim communities on the coast there are men who wear hijab and live as women. When I was living in Busia and reading Middlesex, about a hermaphrodite in the mid West, many people would ask me what the book was about. When I told them, the response invariably was, “Oh, like that woman who works at the Post Office.” How people consider issues of sexuality varies so dramatically across countries that I’m not sure a book made by and for Westerners about sexuality really makes any sense in the Kenyan context. Again, I don't have an answer for this.

The final example was this book:

Ironically, Ariel and I received this book right after having a long conversation about whether we should put restrictions on what books we accept. When we first saw this, our reaction was to laugh and show people in the office. But later we thought about it in a more sober light. To me, the example of deciding not to bring this book to Kenya is poignant. It underlies the bitter irony of the how the world’s inequalities do not serve anyone. It underlies not only the gross imbalance in things like provision of medications but also the uphill battle that we all face to make sure the institutions that surround us serve us all well.

Book donations!

2009-06-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

In the past couple weeks we've gotten some fantastic donations. Check them out:

Anya Schiffrin took us to the Bank Street Bookstore in New York last week, and the above are just a few of the gorgeous books she bought for the Busia Library.

Above, some photos donated by Mark Bresnan

Some of the many, many books donated by Carmen Morillo and family are above

Walker and Bloomsbury Press sent boxes and boxes of books. The above is just a sampling.

Coming soon: photos of a gorgeous donation from Rachel Bernstein and the Brooklyn Public Library

Welcome to Maria's Libraries!

2009-06-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Welcome Friends!