The Library Has Finally Opened!

We've finally opened the library! With surprisingly little fanfare, we officially opened the doors last Tuesday to a school of overly-excited children. (I say "surprisingly little fanfare" because typically Son Excellence, Amadou Toumani Touré, President de la Republique et Chef de l'etat, is present at such events to cut ribbons and shake hands and give away presents to small children as he cures a new batch of lepers and turns water into wine for the reception afterwards. Or at least that's our impression from the state-run ORTM television station.)

If you're just looking for pictures of cute African children reading books, skip to the bottom ;)

Each class in our partner school, which runs from kindergarten to 9th grade, has a scheduled time to come to the library (or in the case of the larger classes, several different times for disjoint subsets of students). This first week Sarah and Robert introduced the library and talked about a few rules for its use (no running, no yelling, no fires taller than the bookshelves... your average common-sense library rules). Then, depending on the age of the students, they either had time to read and/or look at picture books, or Sarah read them some stories with Robert translating into Bambara.

If I've learned one thing about the education system here, it's that my expectations always turn out to be wrong. Of course it's hard to really form any "generalizations" after only being here for a few months and interacting with a rather limited subset of students, but I had expected hardly any of the children to know how to read. But once again, as we had our first students on Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised as one of the girls at the table next to me was sounding out words quite well.

Talking with Sarah later, it seems there are a few things going on. First, while many of the students may be able to "read", many of them don't actually understand what they are reading. How can this be? I'm sure there are tomes written on this subject, but here are a few of our observations:

• French is not spoken at home, and French instruction in schools is decoupled from any sort of context. For example, our nephew Papa was practicing a dialogue the other night for his "Education Civique et Morale" class, which involved such lines as "I do not play on bridges" and "I obey my parents". It was clear, though, that he had no clue what he was saying. Sitting out in the courtyard at school, you can hear the little first graders repeating sentences to their Maîtresse, who stands at the front of the class holding nothing but a whip in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. The walls are blank cinderblock, and students rarely have books.
• By 4th or 5th grade, students start speaking enough French to get by conversationally (this is the age of our niece Djamelou, for example). However, because (almost all) students in this neighborhood have no access to books, their French vocabulary is limited to the types of words that come up in a very narrow set of conversational circumstances. Thus, they don't know most of the words that appear on the pages they are reading.

That all said, the students' excitement to finally have access to books is incredible. They are particularly enthusiastic about the comic books and this set of "ImageDoc" magazines, which have articles about animals, nature, space, foreign countries, etc. and LOTS of pictures. The younger ones are content to thumb through the picture books (after all, we were told that "learning the alphabet" was a second-grade activity, so at this point individual reading isn't an option. We hope to change that.). The middle-school aged students, however, are pretty serious about trying to read. They'll sit in (almost) complete silence, and bring their book up to Robert to ask what words mean when they get stuck. One student was very intent on reading Harry Potter, although it took him almost a full 40 minutes to get through the first paragraph. Both Sarah and I really hope he sticks with it...

The moral of the story is, there is a lot of work to do. Even the students that can read are doing so far, far below what one would consider "grade level". But, with actual access to books and other literacy resources, hopefully these students will catch the bug and get hooked on reading. Already we're seeing a lot of kids come in during their free time, so things are looking promising. Now, to just keep up that momentum.