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Vol. III, Issue 2, July 14, 2004

Avuxeni, South Africa: Volunteering with the World Library Partnership

By Eunice Kua, MSI, eskua@umich.edu.

What shall I do this summer? I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Information, and though it was the fall of 2002, the summer internship hunt had begun. Someone sent an email to the school listserv announcing a chance to do library work in Africa. This was not your traditional internship, but I was immediately intrigued. I made up my mind on the spot—here was something I wanted to do, and I was going to do it, no matter what. This turned out to be an excellent decision.

The World Library Partnership (WLP)

The World Library Partnership (WLP) is a non-profit organization based in North Carolina. Its mission is to “build global understanding by promoting literacy, learning and access to information.” It believes in libraries as agents of empowerment, and “advocates for sustainable, community-based libraries in developing areas of the world”(World Library Partnership).

Started by a former Peace Corps volunteer, WLP has been organizing summer volunteer trips to Africa and Central America for the past six years. Last year, their Inform the World Library Skills Exchange Program (ITW) was held in South Africa, Guatemala and Honduras.

Volunteers—professional librarians, library school students, and other professionals with relevant skills—lived in rural communities for a month, staying with host families and working at designated sites in pairs. Most of the volunteers raised their own support, though some scholarship funds were available.

Limpopo, July-August 2003

Our group went to Limpopo ¹, South Africa from July 12 to August 12, 2003. It consisted of school media specialists, academic librarians, public librarians, library school students, a special librarian, a literacy specialist, and an educational consultant. Some in the group were full-time students or working professionals. Some had full-time jobs or were part-time students, and one was a retiree. It was a mixed group, which added to the richness of the experience. We were able to learn from and draw on the different skills sets and personalities during the times we were together. It was also just plain interesting to learn about each person’s background and career path.

The itinerary was as follows: July 12 - arrive in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, where training and orientation was to be held. This included in-country training by WLP, together with the teacher-librarians from the schools we would be visiting (there were seven sites in Limpopo, six of which were schools and one was a community library). It was an important bonding time between volunteers and the teachers. The content of orientation, over three days, was basically a crash course in all aspects of libraries— vision, library policy, collection development, storytelling, and creative use of scarce resources. Some sessions were devoted to specifically cross-cultural issues; a particularly helpful session was community mapping, an exercise in drawing a physical and a human resource map of the village to which we were going, based on the knowledge of the teachers who worked there.

We were shipped out to our sites after this, and stayed there for three and a half weeks. Afterwards, on August 12, we reconvened at the provincial capital Polokwane/Pietersburg for a one-day debriefing and a book fair on the next day. During the interim period, we visited other WLP sites and were able to maintain contact between them and another village with a site (four sites were in one village, and two in another). This exchange proved helpful and educational. ²

Welcome to Makheto

With my two colleagues, I arrived at the Mthombeni Family household in Phalaubeni village on a starry, pleasant winter night after a long, bumpy trip in a large van. One of my colleagues was L.J. Menzel, an independent consultant for a school district who was an elementary school teacher and principal prior to her present position. Jill Craig, my other colleague, also had educational credentials and is a digitization librarian at Western Maryland Public Libraries. She had experience in international development work in Uganda and Lesotho.

After an introduction to the host family and one of the teachers with whom we would be working, we turned in early and were ready to go to Makheto High School the next morning.

Our mission at the school, and what we accomplished, was five-fold:

Create a school library
Draft a school library policy
Formulate a collection development plan
Hold an open house for the parents
Hold workshops for teachers and students

The pattern of work days soon established itself: rise around 6:30 a.m., off to school by 7:00 or 7:15, work until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., walk home and hang out, bathe and have “dinner,” go to sleep around 9:00 p.m. There were three of us at our site, which was unusual because most sites had two volunteers. It worked out really well for us, and as a consequence, we were able to get a lot done.

The school day for the students and teachers went from 7:30 a.m. until 1:30 or 2:30 p.m. However, we were given keys to the library and the school gate and were able to come and go as we pleased.

Abbey Mokgalaka was the young teacher assigned to us in the absence of the regular incumbent who was away on maternity (“accouchement”) leave. He was the biology teacher at the school. Mokgalaka was an articulate, intelligent, and thoughtful person who showed great enthusiasm and fortitude in the face of personal concerns.

We arrived to a lovely space in physical terms. The school, having been recently built, had low brick buildings, a hall, and a dedicated library. The library space was huge, as large as two classrooms—and was bright and airy, with many windows. The library was furnished with tall steel shelves—four vertical rows in the back, with one row placed perpendicular before them, an immense circulation desk, and 16 computer tables without computers. We were able to set up our worktables in the empty space in front of the shelving, between the front shelf and the circulation desk. The space was also housed plastic chairs that were always in high demand; students often sought chairs to use in the hall next door because there never seemed to be enough.

With Mokgalaka and S.J. Mabunda, a geography teacher and school administrator, we planned and executed various schemes of work. Plans did not necessarily guide our work; it was good to have them, but situations and schedules changed daily, and we did not always know when the principal would be in, or when the Grade 10 or 11 students would be available to us, or when lunch would arrive. While we had broad goals and things we wanted to achieve, the day-to-day functioning of our team was really determined day-by-day.

The process

Although the route was circuitous, the work in a broader sense marched on. We began with weeding—clearing shelves of the old textbooks that had been stored there. Teachers for each subject area came in and determined which books were still useful and which could be put in alternative storage (“the store room”).

We reorganized the shelf contents so that the front perpendicular shelf would host the library materials, books that would circulate and could be checked out, as opposed to the regular textbooks that were issued by teachers for specific classes. The four back shelves were left for textbook storage, with the books organized by subject and grade level.

Early on, we started the decorating campaign, setting up a bulletin board display that included a “Welcome” sign and a sheet and pencil for kids to write messages to Madiba (Nelson Mandela) on the occasion of his birthday, which was during our stay there. We put up posters supplied by WLP, and began designing new signage.

Policy work also went on. We met with the teachers to discuss the library policy, wrote a draft, and typed it up for further discussion. My cohorts Menzel and Craig taught English classes, and I later taught a biology class, increasing our interaction with the students. Menzel took a book and sat under a tree and read aloud at some of the break times. We scheduled workshops for teachers and students alike, all of which finally took place during the last week of our stay.

The final week was packed with activity. We decided to incorporate five copies of each literature item from the textbook collection into the fiction section of the library—that included novels, short stories, plays, and poetry in Xitsonga, English, and Afrikaans, so we had to process books. We also held the educator and learner workshops as well as a parents’ open house.

The results

The last week was especially gratifying, since students could begin to visit the library to read the books on the shelves, check out some processed books, and learn to play games that we had brought such as Scrabble, chess, checkers, and dominos. Class sizes were huge with 40 to 60 kids in each class; Grades 8 to 12 had one class to each grade except Grade 10, which had two classes, so we split students into three groups for each library orientation. My cohorts and I simultaneously conducted workshops that consisted of library orientation, showing how to use a dictionary, and how to play a game.

The educator workshop consisted of a library orientation, review, discussion of the library policy, and work on a collection development plan. The collection development policy would eventually serve as a guide for Mokgalaka and Mabunda to select books for the WLP-sponsored school book fair at the program’s end.

Visitors at the parents’ open house included mothers wearing bright headscarves and men well-along in years. It was particularly important to at least once formally invite the community, since they were not only were they playing host to us foreigners, but were including us as part of their commitment to this initiative. Thus, beyond the practical imperative to have all the stakeholders involved in the library, we wanted them to enter and see what we had done. We had worked with selected library monitors the day before teaching them some processing and orienting them to the library, and we enlisted them to be the hosts that day.

There was much speech making, a tour of the shelves, and presentation of local items—contributions to the library from community members (a tribute to local production and knowledge). The library monitors showed their elders around, explained the shelving systems, and helped spell names and words on a Scrabble board. It was unfortunate that we were not able to work more with the library monitors, a bright and enthusiastic group of students, but that was work that would be continued by others after we left. (WLP was planning to initiate networking between schools, primarily through library learner committees.)

Avuxeni!

Tinyeleti ti sasekile -“The stars are beautiful” was one of the first (and only) phrases I learned to formulate on my own. Nyeleti-star, singular; Tinyeleti-star, plural; ti-are; sasekile-beautiful. The local language in Phalaubeni was Xitsonga, also known as Tsonga, Changana, and Shangaan. One of the 11 official languages of South Africa, it is one of the lesser spoken, the language of about 4.4% of South Africans (African Languages.com, 2004).

Life in Phalaubeni village consisted of talking with the older children and adults who spoke English, watching the younger children play, waving to kids and nodding to older women, and trying to communicate through the limited vocabulary on both sides.

We met some remarkable people, adults and children alike, and had some good conversations on culture, gender, beliefs, and aspirations. For the most part, the instructive thing for me was simply observing life as it went on (albeit rearranged by our presence): chores included cooking over the fire with a three-legged pot, fetching heavy barrels of water from the communal water-pipe, washing clothes by hand in the big silver tub.

Electricity is available but not widely used. There are dim light bulbs in houses, and radios always blasting (music is an integral part of the culture, and they love to dance). A relatively wealthy home like that of our hosts had large-screen TV. Favorite television programs included Backstage, a local teen soap opera playing every weeknight at 6:30 p.m., and WWF Smackdown Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday evenings after the soccer telecast.

There was little reading or studying done at home, at least, that we saw. With the dim lighting, this was not surprising (we were not home for many of the daylight hours). There were always chores to do—girls cooking and fetching water with wheelbarrows, boys unloading the truck or chasing goats into their corral. When chores were done, or when it was not time yet to do them, there was much fun, playing, visiting and laughing. Our house was blessed with many children of all ages, and it took us awhile to figure out who actually lived there, since people wandered in and out and came and went at will. We tried dancing, singing and other things. I learned one of the traditional girls’ games and was dismal at it; even though I played 20 rounds, I was soundly beaten in the end.

All of us learned quickly the standard greeting of Avuxeni, to which the appropriate reply was Ahey, and its follow-up question, Minjani (or Kunjani), to which the response was either Mi pfukile, Mi pfukeni, or Inkona ³. Wandering around the village, these phrases were very useful. Whether, watching or walking or taking the bus, when without an interpreter, this was sometimes basically all the language we had, and the rest had to be said in smiles.

Excursions

Weekend trips to surrounding towns were affected by a variety of arrangements and serendipitous information about rides and various forms of transport. Villagers, most of whom do not own vehicles, rely on intermittent local taxi services and a bus that goes from village to the town of Giyani twice a day, leaving 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., and returning in the evening at 4:30 and 8:00 p.m., a four-hour journey each way.

On our first trip, we rented a car in Tzaneen, a town with shops, a grocery, a gas station, and a cybercafé. We marveled at the greenery of the plantations growing tea, bananas, avocados, lychees, and mangos, a far cry from the dry, dusty, brown terrain of the round huts in the village not so far away.

Disparities were present everywhere. In Tzaneen, and later in Phalaborwa, another town, and in Kruger National Park, we saw economic activity, infrastructure, facilities and resources that seemed to belong to a different world. I found the juxtaposition both jarring and instructive.

Perspectives

The importance of flexibility, and a willingness to adapt to the current situation, cannot be overemphasized. While this may be true of any environment, this factor becomes the more significant in a cross-cultural setting and for a relatively short period. It was an interesting challenge learning to negotiate the ins and outs of the Makheto High School environment and rural life in Limpopo.

Professionally, and educationally, it was definitely a valuable experience. Hands-on work building a library from scratch was a great practicum in back-to-the-basics librarianship and the core ideas and services behind a library ⁴. I had to ask myself: “What is the use of a library? How can it help? Is it important enough for these people to be investing in it, as opposed to something else?” These were questions I brought into the experience, and by the end of it, I was converted to the cause of libraries and the belief that it is indeed a great resource and potentially the source of much good in the community.

Our main concern for the library was sustainability—how were children going to have access to the library when there might be no one to staff it? The teachers all had full teaching loads, and in fact, there was a shortage of teachers at the time. Volunteers from within the community were an idea, but that would have to be worked out with the school. The last I heard, from letters from the school and reports from WLP in South Africa, the library was still open through the efforts of dedicated teachers. Students were still going in and checking books out, and teachers were also stopping in to play chess and Scrabble with them, and to take out subject reference books.

Adjusting to the low-tech environment (or no-tech, in terms of computers) was a very different concept of “library” from the current situation in the U.S. Adjusting was not difficult, though it did show all the more clearly the difference in resources. Coming from a large research university, with information at my fingertips, or in many cases a few clicks and keystrokes away, it would have been nice to show my new friends how to email me or where to find good articles on a certain topic on the Internet. Here we were concerned with how they could raise money to buy print resources like books, magazines and newspapers, and obtain enough materials of appropriate content and reading level to accommodate the students.

In terms of cultural differences, there were both joyous similarities and disconcerting differences. Some adjustments, such as the pace of life and the concept of time, were welcomed and are probably more of a rural-urban disparity. Socioeconomic differences were apparent in the hard lives of women and high unemployment that forces many men to be absent, traveling to other villages, other towns, or far off to the city to find work. There were sometimes issues with ideas about gender roles and stereotypes on both sides.

Yet the joy and vibrant life to be found in the village stood out. People were curious and wanted to talk. The children always appeared to be having the time of their lives, even though they did not have much food, or much of anything. There were communal activities and things were surprisingly busy, at least at the household in which we stayed. In school, learning protocols like how to run a meeting was an instructive experience; meetings began with prayers, perhaps a song, and people and the community at-large would be invited to speak—we got to see democracy in progress, serving as observers at the School Governing Body elections. The singing of students at school assembly was an additional treat.

Information gathering was an interesting experience in the village. In the absence of print material to inform us, we had to ask many questions. We often did not know who knew what, and they often did not know what we did not, so it was initially difficult at times to find things out, not knowing the best channels of communication and information. Sources of information included teachers, students, people at home and at school. Keeping eyes and ears open was essential in the absence of other methods. It was almost all by word of mouth, and through television.

Preparation

It may seem rather strange to place this near the end of the article rather than at the beginning, but learning and reading as much as possible before the trip turned out to be very useful. As previously noted, the village did not have the resources for doing background research during the experience. This was an irony in one sense because you could learn more about the country—at least, a bigger picture—outside of it, than within it. To be sure, though, learning only from afar is inadequate, and the point of going to see a place for oneself is because there are many things you will not see or learn without actually being there).

Two general sources that I enjoyed were Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), a hefty volume but an easy read, and the documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (2002), a film about music and freedom songs in the struggle against apartheid.

Two WLP-recommended sources that I found particularly helpful were Libraries for All: How to Start and Run a Basic Library, by WLP founder Laura Wendell (1998), and School Register of Needs Report, issued by the Department of Education of South Africa (2001).

Why volunteer?

Libraries are happening! They are agents of enrichment, education, and community development. However, libraries in developing countries, particularly in rural areas, are in need of support. The WLP is one organization seeking to provide and support these institutions. It has various volunteer programs, a staff person and intern working in the country, and a three-year commitment to each school it selects as a work-site. A similar initiative, focusing on Asian libraries in Cambodia, India, Nepal, and Vietnam is Room to Read, which builds schools and libraries, and provides scholarships to promote literacy in South and Southeast Asia.

Experiencing a different culture, stretching perspectives and broadening horizons, learning about someone else, and discovering creative ways to work—rewards are many. There are challenges, and there may be anxiety, discomfort, and tensions, in the experience. But my fellow volunteers still said, in the end, “I’m glad I did it.”

An interesting question regarding volunteer programs is the question of impact and outcomes. A volunteer initiative brings so many good things—expertise, resources, and cultural exchange— and there are quick, tangible benefits to the community (e.g., there is an active library where there was none before). However, there is room for research, evaluation and documentation that addresses these questions: how exactly do these initiatives help? What are the outcomes? What is the impact on the community? How do community members become engaged? How do they sustain the center? What benefits do volunteers derive? How does the sending organization benefit, and how would they best utilize volunteer resources?

Some libraries begun by development volunteers such as those sent by WorldTeach ⁵ or the Peace Corps flourish or languish in obscurity and are dependent on limited resources and literacy skills of the community once the volunteers have gone. Library-specific initiatives such as WLP or Room to Read focus on sustainability by engaging stakeholders and embracing local knowledge, culture and resources, and are able to follow-up. It would be interesting, given the lack of library-specific programs and organizations, and an overlap in mission in terms of information access and literacy, to look at the interface of libraries with other community development initiatives such as “digital divide” programs, ICT and telecenters, United Nations Literacy Decade and associated programs, as well as literacy programs listed on the International Reading Association site (see Web Resources below for a few examples).

Caveat

It is nearly impossible to generalize the experience of this program, since volunteer teams at different sites often had differing living situations, school/work situations, and geographic locations. Also, different teams brought different skill sets and backgrounds to the table. I hope, however, this report of my experience will encourage librarians to investigate these initiatives, consider supporting them, and perhaps participate in them.

Acknowledgments

This trip was funded by a Moody Fellowship administered by the South Africa Initiatives Office (SAIO) of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies (CAAS) at the University of Michigan; the School of Information Community Information Corps (CIC) Summer Fellows Program at the University of Michigan; and the University of Michigan School of Information (SI).

Sources Cited

African Languages.com (2004). African languages: Xitsonga (Tsonga). Retrieved May 26, 2004 from http://www.africanlanguages.com/tsonga/.

Dean, S. Simpson (Director) (2002). Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony [Film]. Kwela Productions.

Department of Education, South Africa (2001). Brochure for 2000 School Register of Needs Report. Accessed May 28, 2004 at http://education.pwv.gov.za/content/documents/295.pdf

Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Little-Brown.

Room to Read (2003). Room to Read: Learn about us. Retrieved May 28, 2004 at http://www.roomtoread.org/about.html.

Wendell, L. (1998). Libraries for all! How to start and run a basic library. Paris: UNESCO.

World Library Partnership, Inc. (2002). The World Library Partnership: Mission. Retrieved May 12, 2004 from http://www.worldlibraries.org/about.

Web resources

Digital Dividend (World Resource Institute), http://www.digitaldividend.org.

International Reading Association, http://www.ira.org.

Room to Read, http://www.roomtoread.org.

United Nations Literacy Decade, http://portal.unesco.org/education/ev.php?URL_ID=5000&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.

World Library Partnership, http://www.worldlibraries.org.

Notes

¹ Formerly known as Northern Province, South Africa. (return)

² One site was located in a village much further away, and the volunteers there were unfortunately not able to have the same level of interaction with fellow participants during the site work. (return)

³ These orthographies are subjective for the most part. However, some spelling, (Avuxeni and Mi pfukile) I was able to verify in Ouwehand, M. (1964) Everyday Tsonga. Braamfontein: Sasavona Publishers. Other spelling is purely based on my impressions of the sound. Actual phrases and also pronunciation of those phrases varied widely from person to person within the village. (return)

⁴ In some cases at other sites, volunteers literally built shelves, made poster hangers from wire, and converted classrooms into libraries. (return)

⁵ I had the opportunity to speak with a newly-returned WorldTeach volunteer in Namibia, who had been teaching in schools and setting up classroom libraries there. (return)

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