I have a few things to do here in the Côte d'Ivoire before I leave. Like I mentioned at the end of last week, since Clément works part-time in the SIL library, and is asked for help by students, I worked with him a little on "the reference interview" as we librarians call it. Often the question asked isn't what the person asking really needs or wants in terms of information, and it sometimes takes a bit of clarification to get to that real question. And, as mentioned earlier, I've also created a list of open-source and other useful free resources that I've added to the desktop that he can suggest to users when the library's collection proves inadequate.
I had a small computer issue that Emily helped fix, so I shared with her my list of mostly open-source and free resources, most of them search engines for journal articles; she was impressed and took a photo. Emily is an extremely young, bright linguist, barely out of college, and currently examining the Abé language, an Ivorian language of the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo language family. I think what she found most impressive were some of the search results, for which I had created PDFs in case I wanted to add a copy of each article to our "Vertical File" of articles on Ivorian languages.
Many people are familiar with Google Scholar, a staple in Africa, which indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. It's been around since 2004.
Well there is also the Internet Archive Scholar, currently in beta mode. Its data comes from public web content as preserved in The Wayback Machine and Archive-It partner collections, as well as digitized print materials from paper and microform collections, and general materials from archive.org collections, including some collaborative partners. Their metadata comes from fatcat.wiki, an open user-editable catalog of scholarly work. I have found these sources particularly useful.
I also had frantic calls/messages/emails from Damien Kaboré [computer person] and Ezéchiel Lopemba [librarian] in Ouagadougou regarding the library computers, just as I expected. The ResourceMate people are working with them remotely, but, of course, they haven't backed up the data externally like they should, so this may cost another $150 from the library budget to use the web online catalog data to fix the problem... Thank goodness that the catalog is online and they can do that, though!
Meanwhile, it looks like I am going to be fairly alone this upcoming weekend, as a goodly number of SIL members and their families are planning to attend the Godié New Testament dedication ceremony in the southwest of the . I am a little disappointed that I didn't sign-up, and wasn't even aware that there was such a thing for lodging and transportation. Most will be staying overnight in Sago in the Bas-Sassandra district, and a few visiting the beach resort town of Sassandra itself, on the Gulf of Guinea. Some of you may recall Sassandra was where JeDene Reeder conducted a Literacy workshop for literacy workers last year... I was hyper-envious... Clément will be here though, so for practice I gave him a list of French periodical articles on Ivorian languages to locate in full-text using the list of search engines I've provided. He's working on that right now...
Almost every day when I do my after-work walk around the neighborhood, I pass the Lycée Maurice Delafosse, a private combination middle school/ high school in this relatively affluent area of Cocody, Riveria Golf. The road by the school is in somewhat ill-repair, and I carefully make my way around the potholes and grass growing through the patches of asphalt as I walk. At 4:30pm or so in the afternoon, as I pass by, the surrounding area is jammed with cars of parents/drivers picking up their teenagers, older student drivers waiting for friends [they can drive at age 18], school buses, and scores of young people milling around in groups large and small.
A little background information--who on earth was Maurice Delafosse and why is this school named in his honor? Maurice Delafosse, a 19th century French colonial administrator in Africa, married a woman from the Côte d'Ivoire, and was also an ethnologist, linguist, teacher and prolific essayist. According to the school's website "his publications on African cultures serve today as a basis and reference for research by African historians and anthropologists on our languages and civilizations. Thus, he is one of our great ancestors, even though he was French."
The school bearing his name has some 850 students paying the equivalent of some EUR 4000[middle school] to EUR 4500 [high school]/year for the privilege of attending. If you click on the link above for the school, you will see the bright colors and busyness that seems to characterize many African websites. What is also interesting is the prominence of the registration information and fees on the site. Buried in the site is the success rate for passing the baccalauréat, which in 2016 was 87% or 97 of the 111 candidates...
The students are polite and well mannered... they always let me slip through the tight space of semi-parked cars and ambling bodies, some moving aside to give me berth. A handful may greet me with a "bonjour madame" and I respond with a simple "bonjour," although I did say "bonjour les enfants" once to bemused giggles.
the Lycée Maurice Delafosse
the social sciences building of the Lycée Delafosse
Instruction at the school follows the French model, and the acronym, AEFE, Agence pour l'enseignement français à l'étranger [The Agency for French Education Abroad] says it all. If students complete their studies through the baccalauréat level they will have the equivalent of 1-2 years of a US university-level education. A good education is possible in the Côte d'Ivoire, and not just at the elite schools, but understand that the country is still dealing with the aftershocks of being war-torn several times, which has interrupted the education sector severely. And while the Côte d'Ivoire has one of the highest literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa, the statistics vary incredibly. Rates seems to vary from 50% to 89% depending on the source. According to UNESCO, the literacy rate was around 80% in 2019 for those under 65, dropping off a bit for the younger ages of 15-24 possibly due to disruptions during the second civil war in 2011, whose repercussions are still felt today. When I visited the Félix Houphouët-Boigny University library in the spring of 2020 with Ezéchiel, the damage done there during somber time period was still very evident.
Most instruction follows the French model which encourages mental discipline over analytical
thinking or creativity, and there is a huge emphasis on rote memorization and oral
recitation. The number of students in a single classroom can be enormous, children in rural areas, particularly girls, may need to drop out of school to support the family, and a child can read words on a blackboard, but have little comprehension of what the text actually says. So literacy verses functional literacy may account for some of the discrepancy in statistics. At the same time, the concept of life-long learning [adult education] is a relatively unknown idea, as is that of recreational reading. Public libraries in this country are virtually non-existent, and librarians really have their work cut out for them...
It occurred to me that I should probably visit the Médiathèque of the l'Institut français in Côte d'Ivoire [French Cultural Center Library] and talk to them about librarianship in this country, but since they're across town, given my time restraints, it may have to wait for another time...
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