A Literacy
Project in Burkina Faso
Earlier this year, in January,
three Peace Corps volunteers and I found ourselves in Ouagadougou, discussing
small projects that we are doing at our sites. One volunteer brought up how he
wanted to start collecting local stories, while another brought up that the
volunteer that he had replaced had collected a few stories – he was attempting
to put them into book form so he could read them to children in his village. I
mentioned that while working with children in my village, I had come to realize
that few of them had ever even held a book and that even those who attended
school were baffled by the idea that written text could be transformed into
spoken words; I had been sharing American magazines with the children, but as
these were, of course, completely in English. Yet another volunteer had
recently been assigned to work at a community-based preschool, with a class of
one hundred and fifty students; while his preschool was relatively well
supplied with playground equipment, it had almost nothing in terms of print or
reading materials, and the idea of reading aloud to young children was
completely foreign to the local counterparts. Both of these problems were
aggravated by the fact that the resources that were available in Burkina were
all in French – there was extremely minimal resources for children in their
local languages. All of this made us remember the statistic we had heard time
and time again, that Burkina Faso has the lowest literacy rate in the world. We
realized we all wanted to find some way to bring affordable, language and
culturally appropriate resources to schools, and maybe in the process convince
our counterparts that reading aloud was not something only done by priests and
imams. The four of us realized that our needs and wants were surprisingly
synergistic; that we would be much more effective working as a group. This led
inevitably to our creation of the Early Childhood and Community based Education
and Literacy Working Group (ECCEL).
My neighbors, Deborah, Ali and Kabore (the two boys are twins), enjoying the books and drawing
At our first official meeting we
formed a plan to make ten storybooks from local stories in six months. We
decided that, with this initial group of books, we would use primarily local
and traditional stories; we wanted the books to be culturally and
linguistically appropriate. After some work at site, we collected over fifteen
stories and legends from our various communities. We narrowed this down
to a final list of ten stories. For each story that we included in our final
list, we wrote a list of ten post-reading questions, both comprehension
questions as well as questions that hopefully would help the listener think
critically about the story they had just been read. Once we had finalized our
stories, we started searching for illustrators, and found several volunteers
and two Burkinabe who were interested in illustrating. We we gave the
illustrators our finalized stories and they began their incredibly creative and
exhausting work.
An example of some of the wonderful illustrations that people did
We
scheduled a conference for the translation of these stories for the beginning
of May. We had settled on four target languages for the stories: Fulfulde,
Gourmantchema, Jula, and Moore, all of which are spoken in areas of Burkina
with high concentrations of volunteers. We had found four Burkinabe translators
(one each for each of the languages); with them, we sequestered ourselves in a
conference room in the Peace Corps bureau, and, after much trial and
tribulation, we emerged triumphantly four days later with each of the ten
stories in the four local languages, as well as versions in French and English.
The only European story we did: Little Red Riding Hood. This version is in my village's local language: Moore
All
eight of us in ECCEL (as well as many other volunteers) have been using these
storybooks in small groups with children across the country. The reaction from
the children has been incredible: almost without exception, children in Burkina
love to be read to and adults in our communities, once they became comfortable
reading aloud and understood how important it is, love reading to children. The
children (and the adults) all seem to learn from the books – both from the
stories themselves and the post-reading questions. Many volunteers have said
that kids don't just sit and listen but also ask questions. The books have been
so popular with our communities that we've decided to start the process over
again; we're in the initial stages of producing another set of books – this
time focused on preschool aged children.
We all look forward to having these
storybooks available when the elementary schools and preschools start back up
in October. We have found them invaluable in the effort to encourage children
and adults to work to become literate. The importance of literacy in our
communities will have a powerful impact on the development of our communities
and on the future of Burkina Faso.
The Adult Literacy teachers - they teach teenagers and adults how to read and write in Moore (guy on the right is Abel, my counterpart)
