Monthly Archives: December 2015

Health Guides for Africa

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World Reader is a non-profit organization that encourages literacy and reading by distributing e-readers and e-books in developing countries. Here is an excerpt from a recent blog post explaining how they are helping to distribute Where There is No Doctor and other health books in Africa:

Hesperian is a nonprofit that has been putting easy-to-understand health manuals into the hands of people worldwide. In 2013 we joined forces with Hesperian to send their most widely-used health care manual, Where There is No Doctor to our schools and libraries in sub-Saharan Africa. It was a success.

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In an effort to empower more people in Africa with health information, we’ve added two more Hesperian manuals, Sanitation and Cleanliness for Healthy Environment and Pesticides are Poison to Worldreader Mobile, our mobile reading application being used by more than 13 million readers in 47 countries.

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December 2015 Update

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First off, I’d like to say that everyone involved with the Dokotoro Project is deeply saddened by the recent terror attacks in Bamako. We send our condolences to those who died and we are praying for peace in Mali.

Things have been moving behind the scenes here. Admittedly, things move slowly since everyone involved has a day job, and this project takes up a lot of our nights and weekends.

11_31aOur team of translators in Bamako is currently finishing up the very last chapter of the Bambara version of Where There Is No Doctor. The final piece is the Green Pages, a long chapter at the end of the book with a list of all the medicines, along with detailed information about usage, dosing, precautions, and side effects.

It is extremely important we get this done right, so we are being extra-careful and triple-checking every line. In addition to the Bambara edition, so far we have about 90% of the text translated into French as well. Many hundreds volunteer hours have gone into this. We will be pushing to finish this in the coming months.This represents a totally updated and corrected version compared to any existing French-language version in print, all of which are old and out-of-date.

The French version will be useful as the “majority language” source text, and should also be useful throughout francophone Africa.

The next step is to prepare all of the translated material for publication. Our lead design volunteer has recruited and will be mentoring 3 university students who are doing the layout as their “capstone project.” They’ll be starting in early January and need to finish by May in order to graduate!

We are always looking for volunteers willing to help out. Right now, there is a lot of work involving MS Word, getting the documents prepared for the layout team, who will be using Adobe InDesign.

New Chapter Posted: Prevention!

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I’m happy to announce that we’ve posted another chapter. Check out the new version of Chapter 12: Prevention: how to avoid many sicknesses. Or in Bambara, Kɛnɛya sabati fɛɛrɛw.

On our downloads page, you’ll find the new Bambara translation, as well as a bilingual version with French and Bambara on facing pages. Here is an online version hosted on Issuu. Bon lecture! Ka kalan diya!