Ex Libris Salone

Coming back to Africa had me looking forward to having plenty of time to read.  Forty years ago in Zaire, reading was my main form of entertainment. It is much easier to find time to read without the temptation of television, radio, or Netflix. Forced to spend more time than usual with each other, Ann and I tend to run out of things to talk about.  Discussing what is happening in the books we are currently reading provides a constant topic of conversation.  Books are not as important to the younger PCVs these days.  They have their computers on which they can play hundreds of movies and TV shows and listen to podcasts.  Still, they read quite a bit, trading books with each other and the small libraries at the PC resource centers in Freetown and Kenema. 

I have managed to read 20 books in the five months of our adventure here.  That’s pretty good for me.  I am averaging about a book week.  This was a goal set by a colleague in the math department at UWRF upon his retirement.  I always thought that it was a laudable one and hoped to keep that pace up in my own retirement. I’d have a tough time reading a book a week if I included some of the heavyweights found in the PC library here in Kenema: 1001 Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Infinite Jest (two copies!) and a moldy War and Peace.  Here is a short list of the ones from the library that I have enjoyed the most: Freedom (Franzen), River Town (Hassler), Into the Night (Markam), Steppenwolf (Hesse), Stormy Weather (Hiassen), Boone (Morgan), and The History of Mr. Polly (Wells).  This last one came from a class set of 15.  I can’t imagine using it in modern Sierra Leone to teach English literature as the humor is distinctly British, it talks about a foreign culture long since past, and is filled with archaic and made up words.  I guess the English teachers at Bumpe High School couldn’t either and that is how the set found its way to the Peace Corps library. 

Surprise to me, H.G. Wells wrote more than science fiction.

The History of Mr. Polly is published by the Longman Group as part of a Heritage of Literature Fiction series which includes: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Silas Marner, and Hard Times among others. Longman also publishes a mathematics book, Additional Mathematics for West Africa, by Talbert, Godman, and Ocam.  My independent study student, Joseph, is about finished working his way through the four chapters of the Mechanics section of the book.  He is convinced that if he has the solution to all of the problems in his notebook, he will be prepared for any question a student may ask on the subject when he starts teaching high school.  He may be right.  I would be pleased if every one of my first-year math students had mastered all the material in this 600 page book.  I have seen several copies of this paperback and every one of them is literally falling apart.  The books get passed on to family members and resold at book stores until they disintegrate.  One particular “charm” of the book is that there are numerous copy errors.  This is sure to bring students to my door because they can’t figure out why they are not getting the answer in the back of the book.  It’s a learning experience, but one has to wonder if the book would receive a little more care in editing if it were destined for some other continent.  The book was first published in 1984.  The latest edition that I have seen is 2005. 

Feed me!

One of the challenges of teaching at our institution is that there are no textbooks for class. There are textbooks in the old library, but that building has been locked since before Ann and I arrived in September. We are told that the books in the old library are awaiting shelving in the new library. We have been waiting for months for the shelving to arrive.  Ann and I were willing to work on a project to bring more books to Eastern Polytechnic, but first it would be nice to know what our school already has.   Of course, I was interested in the math holdings. I had this idea that some of the old desk copies overflowing a back room of the math department at UWRF could be shipped to my school here. (Recently, I have learned that the math club at UWRF has graciously agreed to help out with this endeavor.)

Can you spot the math book?

My first attempt in the fall at gaining access to the old library was unsuccessful. It seemed that finding the key to the old library was a Herculean task.  We vowed to try again once we got back from vacation.  So, the first week back I marched over to the new library building where the librarians, having nothing to do, hang out on the front porch whiling away the day.  I told them there would be no way we could request books from my old department unless we could see what Eastern Polytechnic had.  To my surprise the key was produced and the library door was opened.  The building was crammed with old desks and tables as well as shelves of books.  I climbed a table and tried as best I could to spot math titles.  After five minutes of searching, one of the librarians remembered that most of the math books were in a second building. 

An old friend.

Off we went. When that door was opened I beheld a small mountain of books five feet high that had to be summited to get to the shelves.  Apparently, lacking any more space in the shelves, all sense of order had collapsed and the mountain of books had been created.  One librarian climbed over the mountain and discovered a cache of calculus texts including the second edition of Stewart, used for 30 years in the math department at UWRF. I took on the mountain to see for myself. The majority of math books were basic algebra texts. However, I was able to grab books on discrete math, linear algebra, probability, and statistics for my personal use.  I was very pleased to find out that the library at least had a start where math was concerned.

Later that week I excitedly told my three calculus students about my finds.  They were indignant.  They said that they deserved calculus texts too.  I couldn’t argue with them, so off we went again to the old library to secure their copies in spite of administrative red tape.  “Do the students have library cards?”  Of course not, they haven’t had access to the library all year long. “Have they paid the additional library user fee?” No.  The problem was solved by checking out all of the books to me.  Now, when the students can’t understand what I am writing on the board in class, they have a second source of information as back up.  Understandably, they find the five-pound books too heavy to bring to class, just as some of my American students did.

Like UWRF, many university libraries in the States have been reducing their stacks for years in favor of more computer space.  Some institutions brag that they are all electronic, no paper allowed. Where do the unwanted books go to spend the last days of their lives?  Africa is the retirement home of choice for many of them.  Books for Africa is an organization that sends shipping containers of books to the continent.  These books are measured in tons rather than volumes.  Unfortunately, more weight does not always translate into more value.  Bill, a fellow PC Response volunteer, reports that his high school has received 100 boxes of books from Books for Africa.  Most of the boxes contained outdated college textbooks unsuitable for his students.  He estimated about two boxes of useful English grammar and math/science texts. 

New library awaiting its books.

Coming to Africa sometimes feels like stepping back in time.  Will the future for books in African colleges follow the current reality of American universities?  My gut tells me yes.  We have seen cell phone technology succeed rather well even in the poorest countries over here.  Dependable and cheap internet access is all that is needed to catapult the educational system in Sierra Leone into the twenty-first century.  Without that, the schools are somewhat stuck in the mid 1950’s at best.  Until that day comes, good books are still one short-term answer to improving education in this country.