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Agape - We are Together

A couple of years ago we watched a film called We Are Together. If you have not seen it, it is worth getting the DVD and the CD of the music.  The film is deeply affecting and the music is just beautiful - it is sung by the choir of children at the orphanage. The orphanage is in Kwa Zulu Natal in the Valley of a Thousand Hills - emKhambathini in Zulu which means the Place of the Giraffe Acacia Trees.  

From their website 'Agape was founded by a lady called Gogo "Grandma" Zodwa. She was working as an HIV counselor and found that many of the people she was counseling expressed deep concern about what would happen to their children when they were no longer around. So Zodwa established Agape to look after these children.'

Something I did not know was that Agape is a Greek word meaning 'unconditional love.'

Anyway, watch the film, buy the CD! You won't regret it. And listen out (in the film) for a song called Pigogo (Peacock) - absolutely exquisite.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IYAXl6Csvc]

 

Niamh Sharkey new Children's Laureate

Congratulations to Niamh Sharkey appointed as the second Laureate na nÓg. Niamh is only the second Laureate to be appointed and follows in the footsteps of Siobhán Parkinson who has done an incredible job during her tenure as an ambassador for children's books in Ireland. So, a big bualadh bos to Siobhán and a big welcome to Niamh.

Maurice Sendak

Sad news today that Maurice Sendak has died. Good article in the New York Times here . A brilliant man.

In his most recent interview with NPR he said the following : I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

You can listen to the  interview with Maurice Sendak NPR here

Poetry in schools (again!)

I know I have posted on this issue before, but it arose again for me last week. I was in a lovely Primary School last week, Scoil Mhuire Tullow, a girl's school with about two hundred pupils in it. I was there to talk to the Fifth and Sixth classes about The Butterfly Heart and to sit in on sessions that Lucinda Jacob was doing as part of their poetry week. This had been organised by the Writers in Schools programme which is run by Poetry Ireland.

What Lucinda did in her classes was interesting to me. She read out a few of her own poems, she encouraged children to read out poems they had written and she distributed a whole pile of poetry books for them to look through. The object of this was for them to choose a poem they liked and then take part in a mini Poetry Reading and come up and share this poem with the class. It was amazing to see the pupils diving into these books, sharing poems with one another, chatting and laughing about the poems and then proudly reading out the ones they had chosen. It was brilliant - and the poems they chose were wonderful; funny, happy, a little bit rude, sad and rhyming. One duo from one of the classes got up and performed a Rap poem they had written!

Surely surely that is what it should be about? I look at the agonies my own children go through in Secondary School as they are forced to read particular poets and then study them to death. I watch as what could be a natural love of poetry gets quickly stifled and smothered by what often appears to be poetry irrelevant to their own lives. I read their essays which examine, to a formula, what the poet was trying to say. I look on all this with despair.

One of the aims of an English syllabus has to be to generate a love of reading in all its form: poetry, prose, fiction, non fiction. Why, instead, does this torture have to be repeated year after year after year?

When my own children were at Primary School they had this wonderful thing called DEAR time - Drop Everything And Read. Reading as a treat, not reading as a chore. As a start why couldn't this simple thing be introduced at Secondary School level?

Child Marriage Free since March 2011

As a short follow on the the previous post I came across this article by Kiran Flynn in The Guardian . What caught my attention this: A large colourful sign outside the Bashbari village in Sreepur, Bangladesh, declares it "Child Marriage Free", and its Village Development Committee proudly states that "since March 2011, we have had no child marriages"

The committee in Bashbari village, took part in community education programmes organised by Plan International. "We have been spreading the message to our community" says 25-year-old Rani from the committee. "Everybody discussed and then took an oath not to give children in marriage before 18." 

Great initiative!

Illegal Child Marriage in Bangladesh Continues To Rise

Very interesting radio broadcast by Angus Crawford on BBC 4 last week on his programme Crossing Continents. You can listen online, download the podcast and browse the archive.

It dealt with the issue of child marriage in Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh 20 percent of girls under the age of fifteen are forced into  marriage illegally. The legal minimum age is 18. Child brides are often forced to leave school, are rarely allowed to work and many become victims of domestic violence.

These young girls lose their freedom and childhood completely. And with their bodies too young for child bearing, pregnancy results in serous health risks for both mother and child.

One of the issues that Angus Crawford highlighted was the work being done by Plan in Bangladesh. I was in touch with people  who have been helping Plan to raise awareness on this issue internationally.  What follows will tell you a little about the work they are doing and the children affected by this.

Meet Oli – The 12 year old working to inspire others

Oli is just 12 years old and a sponsored child with Plan International. He is an inspirational member of one of their children’s groups in northern Dhaka who work to raise awareness of the impact of early and forced marriage on children. Oli is helping to make a huge difference to poverty stricken families in Bangladesh.

“Behind our parents’ decisions to marry girls young is poverty – extreme poverty. If our parents get a good offer, sometimes it is very difficult to change their minds,” explains Oli

There are 25 children in Oli’s organisation and Plan has 60 similar clubs across the country.

Plan has reached around one million people with its anti-child marriage work while Oli himself has reached about 50,000.

Here is Oli, only twelve years old, speaking about the issue and what they are trying to do.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yvMQ90sCOGg#at=64]

This is Nargis’ story – she was forced into marriage at just 12 years old

“My name is Nargis and I’m 19. I was 12 when child marriage shattered all my dreams. My family arranged for me to be married: my father decided for me, and my husband’s father decided for him. There was no scope for me to say no.

“On the day itself I was frightened: again and again I felt fear, fear, fear. I didn’t know what to do, or what was going to happen next. Once my grandmother and sister had gone, I had to go and live with my husband. I didn’t know him. That night I felt strange, and very scared.

“When I lived with my parents I had freedom. After I was married I lost this, and I can’t live the same way now. I feel very bad, because instead of going to school I live at my father-in-law's house and do all the household work.

“When I was at home I could share my feelings and emotions. Now that I’m married I don’t have any say and I have to abide by what my husband and my father and mother-in-law decide.

“Two years after my marriage, when I was 14, I gave birth to a baby boy, but there were complications after the birth. He survived for 16 days but then he died.

“When I was getting married, I had five close friends. Two are still in school, but three are married. I never see them now. When I was in school and with my friends, I was very happy: I really want to go back to school.

“I don’t think girls should marry before they’re 18. If they do, they face problems like I did with my baby. I want to tell other girls that the age I got married was not good for health, for family, for education - for anything.”

How is Plan helping in Bangladesh? To help prevent forced child marriage Plan has been working hard to issue birth certificates to girls across Bangladesh. Having a birth certificate helps girls to prove they’re not old enough to marry.

Plan is also working with state organisations and authorities to raise public awareness of early marriage by holding open events, theatre shows and workshops. These events help to educate communities and explain why it is important that girls wait until they are over 18 to be married.

Seomra Ranga - Classroom

I was searching on the web the other day for sites that offer support and resources to Primary School teachers. I was doing this as I wanted to find a suitable home for the brilliant teaching guide that Orla Mackey of St. John's School, Kilkenny had developed with her Fifth Class when they were reading The Butterfly Heart.

One of the first sites I came across was Seomra Ranga which means classroom in Irish. It is a site set up by Damien Quinn, a Primary School teacher in a rural school in Sligo and he set it up, as he says himself, 'to share practical resources for the primary school classroom on the web.'  These are mainly resources he has developed and used in the classroom himself, with the addition of resources submitted by other Primary School teachers. It is a fantastic site and when I emailed Damien to ask whether he would be interested in seeing this Teaching Guide he came back immediately and said he would. The upshot of all of this is that the Teaching Guide is now available for download on Seomra Ranga here and this week they are also running a competition with five of the books to give away.

Seomra Ranga for me illustrates the positive power of the web - here is one individual, a committed teacher, who has set up a website, a twitter and a facebook page and through this other teachers are able to share resources in a way that can only enhance the experience of the children in the schools. Just brilliant.

Brain Pickings and Kurt Vonnegut

Today I was sent a link to this site Brain Pickings the brainchild of Maria Popova, who describes it in this way: 'Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.' One of the things it is focussing on this year is Reading More and Writing Better and I was browsing through the various posts on this (each one of them worth a look). Then I came across one of the pieces of writing advice offered by Kurt Vonnegut and it is so simple but so true that I thought I would reproduce it here.

I have just finished reading a book which has been written to wide acclaim and I was puzzled by my reaction to it. The writing was word perfect, unusual even, the phrasing beautiful and the storyline held my attention. But, at the end of it I felt nothing. I did not feel, as I often would, saddened on reaching the end of the book; I do not imagine I will read another by this particular author. The sole reason for this is that I did not like any of the characters. Those that I assume I was meant to feel some measure of empathy with I did not. None of them took me with them; I was not, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, rooting for them. Quite frankly I was left feeling I did not give a damn about what happened to any of them. If the book had ended in a nuclear holocaust or with a catastrophic invasion of flesh eating zombies I would have closed it without a moment's regret.

I can only hope that nothing I write ever leaves a reader feeling that. If it does I will feel that I have failed.

Here are the rest of his tips, courtesy Huffington Post

Craft and Ingenuity in Zambia

I am lucky enough to be on an email forum of Zambians in California. I found my way onto it through Vukani Nyirenda. Last week someone on the forum emailed out this brilliant picture. This generated a lot of discussion. One of the responses that came in was from Victor Mwaba who describes himself as a thirty something father of two young girls, husband of one wife, who was born and completed high school in Zambia, but went to college and now works as an engineer in the US.

I am reproducing his response with his permission below.

Victor said … “I must say I find this picture quite mesmerizing because it brings a profound sense of nostalgia with it. I can relate to the subject because I used to be quite a craftsman when I was little.

A cousin of mine from the village taught me how to knit fishing nets. This process first involves reinforcing/twisting (ukupila) the polythene mealie-meal sack fibres with which you make the net. I would put a few strands of this fibre between my shin and my hand, row it down my shin, and let the fibres twist on themselves upon release, making a very very strong cord. Then I would also make big strong nets to put on soccer goal posts and bar made out of bamboos. This prevented a lot of arguments as to whether someone scored, or not.

I went onto making badminton racquets with the same ‘reinforced’ fibre. Get some strong thick wires and pieces of wood and the fibre; I have a raquet! For the badminton shuttle, I would get the stem of a cob of maize (umuseba) and shape it smooth appropriately on one end. Then get chicken or duck feathers and glue them to the maize cob stem; you have a perfectly flying shuttle. Of course the badminton net would be made with two bamboo sticks on two sides and the reinforced fibre net in the middle.

With this much fun, lets just say mom used to force us to go and eat nshima (The Zambian corn meal staple), else we would play all day long. Nintendo what? Wii? Video games were for the top 1%. 99% of us just figured out how to have fun blissfully with whatever material we could lay our hands on.The good ol' days.”

Thanks Victor (pictured below) for letting me post that - it is no wonder you became an engineer it was in you from a very young age.

Play Pump in Katapazi, Zambia

How's this for a simple but brilliant idea?

I came across this on The Butterfly Tree website. An organisation that unusually does not apportion funds it receives to large overhead costs and salaries. All the money raised goes straight to benefit those who need it, and the project is involved in very practical work that is not imposed - they work with rather than for the communities they work in.

This Play Pump is located in the Katapazi Basic School which is in the Mukuni Chiefdom not far from Mosi oa Tunya , and enables the children, through play, to pump up clean safe water from the underground borehole into a 2,500 litre tank.

Water is life, and in the West it is taken for granted. I know in Ireland it is, we have so much of it I sometimes wonder whether the island might just float away! Elsewhere it cannot be taken for granted.

Here are the facts (republished from Just a Drop ) Kid carrying bucket

A child dies around every 20 seconds as a result of water-borne diseases. 

Over 1.1 billion people in the world – roughly one eighth of its total population – do not have access to clean, safe water.

Around 2.5 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation – almost two-fifths of the world’s population.

Over 2.75 million people die from diseases every year because of unsafe water. 

1.4 million children die each year from diarrhoea alone caused by unsafe water. 

Over 40 billion working hours are spent carrying water each year in Africa.

In parts of Africa women and Asia women often carry water weighing as much as 20kgs (the same as the average UK airport luggage allowance) on their heads.

Source: World Health Organisation, UNICEF, Cosgrove & Rijserman

Room to Read

I recently came across an organisation called Room to Read which is working in Zambia, South Africa, Tanzania, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Their aim is a simple one: We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education, reach their full potential and contribute to their community and the world. To this end they have focussed on literacy and gender equality in education.

What has impressed me in reading about them is that they employ local teams to implement the programs - 'local teams who are personally invested in their nation’s educational progress, and familiar with the challenges ahead. They speak the language, know the customs, and understand what it takes to implement each program successfully.' Once this happens the success of programmes such as these is a whole lot more likely.

To date, according to their website, they have achieved the following:

Schools 1,556
Libraries 13,152
Books Published 707
Books Distributed 11 3 million
Girls' Education Participants 15,388
Children Benefited 6 million

Pretty impressive.

Below are some pictures from their website as well as from the website Passports with Purpose  who last year worked with Room to Read Zambia and are now busy building libraries with monies raised.

Human Rights Day

21st March is now a public holiday in South Africa in memory of the 69 people who were massacred on this day in 1960 by police who opened fire on protesters in Sharpeville. Most of the people killed were shot as they were running away. It was a brutal scene.

It happened 52 years ago but memories are long, as anyone who lives in Ireland knows only too well. There are many people alive today in South Africa who lived through Sharpeville and its aftermath, who lived through the darkest days of Apartheid and are now among those who have lived to tell of those times.

Today some people would rather forget. The system of Apartheid, they say, is dead and gone, over, kaput. It is no coincidence that the people who say this are those who manned the system, who worked it, who benefited from it and in increasing numbers voted for it until its eventual demise. It should not be forgotten because it's effects run deep; they are with us today and will be for many generations. It was a system that reached deep into the lives of every South African and to forget it would be like pretending it never happened.

That is not how it should be. And in saying this I am not suggesting that as a country South Africa should live in the past and not move forward - it should and it is. But with memory.

Confucius has often been quoted as saying 'Study the past if you would define the future.' I do not know if that is an accurate translation of what he actually said, but it's good enough for me!

And, just because I feel like posting this song somewhere, here is the song called Johannesburg by Gill Scott Heron who died last May. This seems as good a place as any to post it. This was him performing at a London Artists Against Apartheid concert in 1988 - but he wrote this song in 1974.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SPj8PRf9Zw]

Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year Awards Shortlist

I was delighted to learn today that my book The Butterfly Heart is one of nine books on the CBI Book of the Year Award Shortlist! Very exciting.

I am in illustrious company - Siobhán Parkinson, Roddy Doyle, Mark O'Sullivan, Celine Kiernan, Catríona Hastings, Andrew Whitson, Oliver Jeffers and Derek Keilty.

The Judges comment on my own book was :

Told from the perspective of an adult and a child, this work of magical-realism sensitively incorporates folktales and legends from Zambia into its treatment of dark and difficult issues from Africa’s past and present.

Thanks to the Judges for considering me for the shortlist, I feel honoured to be on it.

You can see the article from CBI here

Habitat for Humanity and Zambian Skies

I came across a blog yesterday that linked Ireland and Zambia (here it is). Ciaran Kelly who writes the blog is going to Chipulukusu in Ndola. There he and other members of Habitat for Humanity will build five houses. The project operates similarly to the Niall Mellon Trust in that the volunteers have to raise the money themselves, so Ciaran's aim is €3000. He has almost reached his goal. As he says himself  about Habitat for Humanity: 'They have been building worldwide since 1976, and their motto is to ‘Give a hand up – not a hand out’.

They have built more than 500,000 houses in almost 100 countries, housing more than 2 million people. In 2011 Habitat for Humanity Ireland sent 251 volunteers overseas, on various projects in different communities.'

That's great to read about, 251 people from Ireland, in the middle of a deepening recession, taking time out to help others in a very real and practical way.

So, Good Luck Ciaran and all the other volunteers! You are going to a great country; enjoy the work, the people and your beautiful surroundings.

I found this picture below taken by a student from Ohio who was visiting Zambia. He could not get over the Zambian skies. Zambian Tourism describes the skies quite rightly as 'big, big skies.' And it is true. Nothing quite like it.

Kanga Writings - Jina

Anyone from Africa, or who has travelled in Africa, will have come into contact with the exquisite fabrics that have emerged from this continent. East to West, North to South, the colours and patterns on the cloth reflect the warmth of the sun and the richness of the earth. In Zambia these cloths are called Chitenge and I feel privileged enough to have some (courtesy of Mwanabibi Sikamo who is the Founder of Bibusa - which produces quality handmade goods from Africa.  She also writes the blog Uprooting the Pumpkin.)

Below is a picture of one of my chitenge which currently brightens up my filing cabinet!

In Kenya, where I was born, the cloths which are worn by women in  a variety of ways are called Kanga. Kanga in Swahili means Guinea Fowl and the story goes that in Zanzibar, where these cloths first emerged, they were named for the guinea fowl because of their bright speckled patterns.

For me the most fascinating thing about the kangas is that each one bears a message; sometimes a  Swahili proverb, sometimes a political slogan, sometimes a very personal message from the giver to the receiver. These messages are known as Jina and they are many and varied. Short and to the point, they carry a whole lot of meaning.  They are given by mothers to daughters, friends to one another, children to mothers, husbands to wives etc. And the meaning matters. For me it is such a wonderful tradition, a beautiful gift with a message on it that you have to puzzle out.

If you want to read more, this site has a very good list of just a few of the jina found on kangas.

While I was reading up about them I came across an interesting tale (recounted by Wener Graebner) which demonstrates so clearly how these jina can be used. A young Tanzanian girl recounted how she became engaged to a German man and that in her area this caused much talk. She bought herself two kangas: on the one was the message - Wasemao na waseme - Let them talk who want to talk; on the other was written, Moyo ndiye muamuzi - Only the heart decides. She reported that the talk soon stopped once she appeared wearing these.

Here is a photo of some of my own kanga. They would look better under the African sun!

Weaver Birds

An abiding memory for me from childhood is the sight of branches weighed down by the nests of the Weaver birds. These birds are found all over Sub Saharan Africa and there are many varieties of them.  The ones in Zambia would build nests like these ones below, and as children we always loved finding a nest that had been discarded. Perhaps it had not met the standards of a fussy female and she had rejected it in favour of another. A colony of these weavers is a noisy affair, the males, who build these very complex structures, make their presence felt. They sound almost as if they're squabbling!

A Masked Weaver

You can see from the pictures above that the birds build their nests close to one another, but in Namibia they go a step further. The Sociable Weavers who live in Namibia build entire structures. A little like the termites who build huge mounds together, these birds build huge apartment blocks in the trees.

Here is a short clip with David Attenborough about this phenomenon (excuse the ad, nothing I can do about it!)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jPibkNv7lM]

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