It's September; which means it's Autumn; which means that as the season changes, the foliage transforms from verdant softness to technicolor crunch whose dry and crisp flavor matches the air, which chills the body, raising the goosebumps on flesh and the zippers on jackets.
Unless you're in Guyana, less than 500 miles from the Equator, where the only change in season is that it goes from hot to less hot (and a bit cool between 3 and 5 am), buggy to less buggy, and rainy to just humid. But if there's one September constant between my native homeland of the U.S.A. and my current equatorial residence, it's that September is when all the little kiddies go back to school.
With school back in session, it's time to kick my work here at the Imam Bacchus Library into overdrive, and start doing some heavy-duty outreach work, convince students that reading will make you cool, and parents that reading will keep your kids smart and out of trouble. Since my last posting here, I've begun the arduous task of learning how to become a movie director, and then teaching the head librarian here everything I've learned in the last month. Taking a page from PBS's classic show "Reading Rainbow," we're basically recording our weekly Story Hour, where the library's director, Imam, picks a theme for the week, and then reads a few books, tells a few stories, and organizes some fun artistic activity for the Nursery-Primary School-age children who come in. Meanwhile, the librarian and I film the stories, make cute little music videos out of the activities, and then try to wrangle the bucking bronco of video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, to make a short movie out of it.
Premiere Pro is a dense, hard to wield, and unfriendly program, and figuring out how to use it is the PC equivalent to navigating the great Labyrinth and battling the Minotaur, armed with nothing but some dental floss and a q-tip. But once we've managed to wrestle some good production value out of it, the two-phase plan is to a) upload the videos to Youtube for the world to see what amazing stuff we're doing, and b) to start broadcasting them on the local television station, to help advertise the library, while sending out our message of the value of literacy.
Now that school is back in session, the summer regulars no longer have time to show up to the library anymore, so we're also going to start bringing the library to them. On Monday and Tuesday, for example, we'll pack a truck full of books, head out to the primary school down the road a couple miles, and set up a sort of display fair, where we can show students firsthand what we have to offer, when many of them might not have come out on their own. We have a whole list of other projects which we will try to begin to implement over the next few months before my contract here expires, but I'll save talking about those until we've started getting to work on them.
In the meantime, I'm going to take some time now to tell you about some interesting things going on in one of my other homes-away-from-home, Mali. The news there is remaining steadily ominous. We've got a fog ('cause it's the rainy season there now, get it?) of political uncertainty in the south involving interim governments and conditionally-rejected offers of international military support, profoundly disturbing reports of Islamist extremists sending the northern part of the country on a fast-track to becoming "the next Afghanistan," as the media is often fond of putting it, and no end in sight to a long-standing drought and regional food crisis. While I've been reading the headlines often enough, and I'm probably equally informed about current events in Mali as I am about those in American, which is actually saying fairly little, I've definitely lost my inside grasp on what's been going on there since the Coup.
So I'm not interested now in rehashing what a 5-minute Google News search could tell you. No, I'd rather let you know about some of the positive influences that are continuing over in Mali, despite these times of uncertainty which try even the noblest hearts. There are dozens of great organizations, and I'm sure most of them deserve at least your awareness, if not your support, but today, I'm picking just one particularly cool project for this post because, well I have friends who work there.
The organization is called myAgro, and while it's only just a baby, at 8 months old, they've been making some really great headway, and influencing a lot of small-scale Malian farmers. They do this through giving loans and establishing savings programs with local farmer who sign up for the program. According to one of their recent performance reports, they have already signed up hundreds of farmers for their program, earned thousands of dollars in savings for farmers in their program (in a country where, for millions of people, earning just one dollar in a day can make the difference between eating today or not), and continue to run a weekly program to publicize the programs and educate and interview farmers and program members around the country. As those of you who know me might imagine, this some-time farmer, radio DJ, and cheapskate finds a lot to like about myAgro! And of course, the founder, Anushka Ratnayake, is an awesome person who I met a few times during my last stint in Mali. And to quote my good friend and fellow Mali RPCV, Audra, who currently volunteers for myAgro while living in Chicago, "What is really interesting with myAgro is that in the midst of all of the Malian politically instability, their programs are offering solutions for farmers to create sustainable food security for themselves." See, we're not talking about a charity here, we're talking about a capacity-building venture, a program that doesn't give away fish, but creates fishermen.
If you want to learn more about myAgro, peruse their website at www.myagro.org, or alternatively, you could just take my word for it and head straight to their Donate Now page. Trust me, a few bucks on your end can go a long way towards some relief in a country that needs it, and setting good examples for sustainable agricultural methods which, if spread widely enough, will encourage positive and lasting change where it's needed. That's right, for the price of one trenta-sized double-macchiato triple-mochaccino latte caffeine jug, you could help improve farming capabilities in the most fantastic country most of you have never been to!
Well, that's it for now, folks, but keep your eyes on the blog for the continuing adventures of Lower Merion, PA's favorite globetrotting blogger...
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