In love with books: A librarian's story

Fatou, Feb. 2009

When Fatou Darboe finished second grade, her father told her that girls were not meant to be educated and she would have to quit school. Her grandmother agreed, saying Fatou should stay home and take care of her little sister.

That might have determined the course of her life. But Fatou was very bright and inquisitive and, even at that age, ambitious. She taught herself to read and write. Now she's the librarian at the Salikenni village school, and she has won high praise for way she does the job.

Her childhood best friend, Kaddy, stayed in school. Fatou would follow her there and linger in the schoolyard and sometimes chat with teachers. Kaddy wrote out the letters A to Z for her and the numbers up to 100. When Kaddy was in sixth grade she gave Fatou her third grade English textbook, and Fatou devoured it.

A friend gave her a story book about a grumpy lion who lived in a cave. When other animals came to chat with him in front of his cave, the lion would groan and say he didn't feel well. One day a goat and a sheep followed the lion into his cave, and he ate them up. Fatou thought this was very funny, and she has been in love with story books ever since. She borrowed them from people she met. There was no library in the village then. When she came upon a strange word she would write it on her palm with a pen and go and ask a teacher what it meant.

Her grandmother disparaged her effort. "You are always reading and writing," the old woman told her. "You don't do anything. You don't know anything."

When Fatou was a young woman, the non-profit group Save the Children gave her a job teaching adult Salikenni women to read and write in their own language, Mandinka. It was her first salary. She held the job for two years. Then the Salikenni school hired her as an "unqualified teacher."
In those days it was common for schools to hire teachers with no training. She taught first grade for four years, then nursery school for two years.

In January, 2009, the Gambian government decided to dismiss all of its uncertified teachers, unless they could pass an entrance exam and go to Gambia College to become certified. With her two years of formal schooling, no one suggested that Fatou should sit for the exam, so she was about to lose her job.

But just then the Salikenni Scholarship Fund happened to be looking for a new librarian for the library which we sponsor at the Salikenni school. We hired her Feb. 5, 2009. The library is an old storage building, which we renovated by stages over several years. We have supplied most of the books and pay the salary of the librarian.

Fatou (blue and gold dress) in library with students. Nov. 2010

Fatou keeps the place spotless. The books, which kept falling into disarray under previous librarians, are always neatly shelved in their proper categories. When someone borrows a book, Fatou records it in a big red ledger and checks it off when it is returned. If it's not returned she goes into the classrooms to tactfully remind the borrower. Perhaps due to the atmosphere of order in the library, the school children, without being told, always step out of their flip-flops as they enter the building, leaving them clustered on the stone step outside.

When she began the job, Fatou was still a fairly slow reader. But she took advantage of every idle moment to read, especially the African stories. She would suddenly laugh and say to anyone present, "This book is very funny. Listen to this." And she would read the passage aloud. She loved these stories and soon knew many of them by heart. She often tells the stories to the youngest children, in a combination of Mandinka and English, holding up the pictures for them to see.

Her own reading skill has greatly improved, and she is able to help students from the youngest up to the highest level in the school, grade 9, with their reading problems. In recent years, the Gambian schools have begun teaching phonics in the lower grades. But those now in the higher grades got very poor training in reading. We see many ninth grade students who can barely read.

Fatou's biggest achievement, we believe, has been to begin to create in the village a culture of reading for pleasure. She does this by passing on her own love of books. The Salikenni school has long had library periods for each class. But increasingly we now see students drifting into the library at other times, one or two at a time, to browse and borrow books. This is something new in an African village, and it is, of course, the main purpose of the library.

During the summer of 2010, when the school and the library were closed, we enrolled Fatou in a  course for rural librarians at the National Library of The Gambia in Banjul. On her first day, when they learned she had only a second grade education, they sent her away. Our manager intervened, explaining that Fatou was already an experienced librarian and a good reader. They took her back, and she did very well in the training and got a certificate. An official of the library told her, "Oh, Fatou. How wrong we were about you."

Fatou is the only wage earner in her Salikenni family, which also has income through farming. Out of her salary she has put a younger brother through high school. From time to time she gives a little money to the grandmother who helped end her formal education. When she reminded the grandmother that this money really came from all the reading she had done, the old woman looked at her and said, "Fatou, you were right."

We asked Fatou whether there had been someone in her early life who had encouraged her to read and learn. "No one," she replied. "I did it myself." She paused and then added, "God helped me."