A West African Journal: Back to Ouaga

It was so good seeing old friends again in Bamako like Janet Schuster, Catherine Crawford, Marian Hagg, and Greta Woods, along with meeting a few new ones as well.* I shared an apartment with a charming Burkinabè woman, Fatima Ouedraogo, who worked at an NGO which helped other charitable NGOs (working with mothers and children), stay on their feet. I had never heard of her organization, and have already forgotten the acronym, but I mentioned an organization that I was familiar with some years back when I was in South Africa called Pro-Vision International that seemed to have a similar mission... Kathryn Seay, it turns out, I had met way back in 2014 in Burkina during the Mali crisis then when many had fled the country. For those unfamiliar with some of the problems in Northern Mali, and the Tuareg desire to make the north a separate homeland with more autonomy for the Tuareg people, this Wikipedia article may be of interest.

I was a bit apprehensive about my return to Ouaga given the circumstances, although when our flight touched down everything seemed familiar. In fact, despite changed and changing circumstances, within a 24-hour period I had seen Damien, Zakaria, the Solomiacs, Urs and Idda Niggli, Sharyn Thomson, JeDene, Rosemary, Paule and a number of others, not to mention Fina, who picked us up at the airport.*

Mali has a modern, clean airport where we killed time as our Air-Burkina flight was delayed an hour

Security and future work plans are definitely in the forefront of everyone's mind though. Idda and Urs are thinking of going to Ghana after spending decades in Burkina. Rosemary no longer lives in the village in Obiré, but has those she works with there visit her periodically in Ouaga, an 8-hour bus ride away. Many organizations operate only from Ouaga, and some have left the country completely. Tourism is, of course, a thing of the past...

I spent my first night at the Center, then the weekend with Fina and her 3 dogs.

Fina's guest room

Catherine makes brochettes on Fina's grill

insect zapping machines

Her Saturday Kids' Club is going strong in its new location. The library has its own building, and there is a multipurpose badminton court which becomes a lecture hall, or gets partitioned off for age-defined "classrooms".

Library

The facilities are designed to be something the children are familiar with. In addition to the library, and an office for Fina, there are sanitary facilities, and buildings with metal ventilated, louvered doors and windows, a ceiling fan, etc., which are something they see daily in their schools. She opens the doors around 1 pm on Saturdays and the children are welcome to come inside the compound, play games, do puzzles, use the library, etc., before a formal presentation of some kind begins at 3 pm. Fina's French is less than optimal, and she relies on outside help both for crowd control (there are usually around 115 - 140 children), and to work with the different ages. She keeps track of who comes and each child has a photo name-badge that they wear.

Básile (in red) takes care of the children when they sign-in

The children are allowed to check-out a book or two from the library, but a parent's permission is required, otherwise they need to use the materials there. I noticed that a good percentage of the books I had bought for her in the past were "missing" when I inventoried the shelves, but Fina assured me that most were legitimately "checked-out", even though she admits that most books tend to be borrowed by the same children.

It was interesting to see that Fina has added more bilingual explanation to her programs, especially for the youngest, who may speak only Mooré, the most dominant local language spoken in Ouagadougou. And I noticed that she has a two-day reading camp scheduled for August with the assistance of FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries). My networking activities of past years are paying off !