We are so thankful to everyone who has made a donation to the Dokotoro Project. The donations to date have exceeded our wildest expectations. In the last 3 days, we’ve received gifts from 10 people, for a total of $1,750. Wow! Our heartfelt thanks to all of you for your confidence in us and for backing this important work.

Our fundraising total is now above $6,800, well on our way toward the estimated $25,000 needed to translate, proofread, and edit the entire book. We are relying on volunteers to do many jobs, but we are paying professionals in Bamako for translation and editing.

For those of you thinking of making a donation, now is an excellent time! Having cash on hand means that we’ll be able to continue contracting with our translators. We are especially happy to send them work since they lost their language-teaching jobs with the US Peace Corps when the program closed in April due to the security crisis.

It’s been a busy month, and there’s a lot to report following the Steering Committee’s latest monthly meeting, held on Wednesday October 17 in Oakland.

First off, we’ve added a new member to our steering committee. Zach Matheson is a recently returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Mali’s western region near Kati, is a fluent French speaker, and with an interest and expertise in Public Health. Welcome Zach!

Translation
Our editor, Djibril, has been busy proofreading Chapters 18 and 20. He’s been reviewing the text very carefully, which means the work is moving slowly between his family obligations and full-time teaching job. Overall, he says the translation is very good, but there are a few areas that need some attention, and a few issues to discuss. We could use the services of one or more other editors. Qualifications: must be a native Bambara speaker, and have expertise in the written language.

Our current plan is to create side-by-side versions in Bambara, English, and French (although we’re not planning print runs for the English and French editions, but will publish them as PDF documents). This means that dozens of pages of text need to be translated from English to French and vice-versa. Members of the steering committee are helping with this, but we could use extra help from volunteers.

We’ve signed an agreement with GPHAN, the Global Public Health Action Network, a student organization at NYU. They’ve agreed to help provide research assistance on medical issues where it’s needed. We are delighted to welcome Hawa Nangado to the team. Hawa is from Segou, Mali (!) and is a first-year student in NYU’s public health graduate program.

Layout
We’ve begun laying out the first two chapters in Adobe InDesign. We’ve also figured out a streamlined way to extract the images from the PDF documents (and crop and de-speckle). We could use volunteers to help with this task. We’ve also spent some time debating different fonts, and have tentatively settled on the free font Charis SIL for the body text, which has excellent Unicode support. Ultimately, we may test a few different fonts with our target audience to see if Malian readers have a preference or if any readability issues come up.

Administration and Finance
We’ve signed the grant agreement with our fiscal sponsor African Sky. What this means is that people can make tax-deductible donations to African Sky, and designate them for our use. We’ve also finished opening a business checking account at Mechanics Bank. We’re looking into the cost of wiring money to our translators in Mali via wire transfer, Western Union (or other means?).

Fundraising
We haven’t really launched a fund-raising campaign, but all of the pieces are in place (i.e. paperwork filed, bank account set up, online donation system in place, etc.) Despite this, we’ve received two gifts, totaling $300, both from alumni of Mali Peace Corps. Thank you to both of you! The service that we’re using to take online donations works very well. FirstGiving goes to lengths to protect donors’ privacy. Unfortunately, this means that we don’t always have enough information to send a personalized donor acknowledgement.

We’ve submitted one grant application for $2,000 to a local organization. We’re working on identifying funders to approach for the next stage of the project. We’re also hoping to receive individual donations during and after our launch party in November, which will also mark the formal launch of our fundraising campaign. Through our conversations with others, it’s clear that there is a lot of interest an enthusiasm for this endeavor out there, especially among Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. We are hoping to turn that enthusiasm into the nearly $25,000 we estimate is needed to pay for translation, editing, and field testing.

Website
The Facebook page seems to be where the action is. Not many people have signed up for emails updates via the site. Still, it’s important that it’s there. It will continue to be the official source of information about the project, and we’ll add updated budgets, project updates, etc. here. In the next few months, we’ll try to translate the basic information on the website into French. We’ve also discussed translating into Bambara, but probably won’t proceed with this unless we find a volunteer to do it. It doesn’t seem like a big enough priority to pay to translate the website.

Outreach and Volunteers
We could still use more volunteers to help with a number of tasks, mostly related to managing the text. Also, now that we will be able to share with others what the book will look like, we will begin reaching out to other organizations involved with health and community development in Mali.

Launch Party!
We decided months ago that we wanted to throw some kind of a party. We spent a lot of time searching for the perfect venue in the last month, and settled on the very generous offer by supporters willing to host us in their home in San Francisco on Sunday, November 11. The purpose of the party is twofold. First, we want to show off the progress we’ve made. We are nearly finished translating, proofreading, and laying out the first two chapters—nearly 10% of the book. The second purpose is to launch the fund-raising campaign. Up to this point, we’ve been largely self-funded by contributions from steering committee members and a generous start-up grant from African Sky. However, our cash on hand is running low, and we’ll need more funds to enter into a second contract with our translators in Bamako.

The party should be a lot of fun! We’ll have African food and drinks. Our friend Karamo Susso has agreed to come and play music. He is a master of the kora, the 21-stringed West African harp. We’ve also had donations of wine and beer, which we hope will help put people in a generous mood! We are putting together a host committee for the party and doing everything we can to get the word out, especially to people with an interest in, or connection to Mali and West Africa.

struggle against landgrabbing in mali from La Via Campesina on Vimeo.

Amidst all the bad news emerging from Mali these days, here are some websites where you can listen to great music and look at wonderful photography. Plus: Our favorite Bambara-language blogger!

Listen – Afropop Worldwide rebroadcasts show on the Festival in the Desert.

To pay tribute to the country we love, we’re encoring our Festival in the Desert 2003 special, featuring some down home tent sessions by Ali Farka Toure, Lobi Traore, Tinariwen, Khaira Arby, Afel Bocoum, Habib Koite, as well as largely unknown artists from Mauritania and Niger. See our beautiful photos and blog postings.

Look: Everyday Africa Photoblog on Tumblr.

Photography by Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill. Two journalists who often work in Africa and, for what it’s worth, two former Peace Corps Volunteers who used to live there (Peter in Ghana and Austin in Ivory Coast).

 

Read: Fasokan: Aw ye kunnafoniw sɔrɔ bamanankan na yan.

A blog by Bakary Konate, teacher and rural IT promoter in Mali. All of the articles, on village life, folklore, and culture are posted side by side in both French and Bambara. A great resource for brushing up on your Bambara-language skills!

Since the outbreak of violence in northern Mali in January 2012, thousands of Northern Malians have been forced to flee from their homes. Estimates of the number of refugees vary, but Doctors without Borders estimated that 260,000 had fled their homes as of April 2012. Refugee camps in Niger and Mauritania are crowded, and the living conditions are difficult. Much of the region suffered from drought over the last two years, increasing the difficulty of providing food and water for refugees. 

Marketplace in Mali. Photo by Anh Ly.

We believe our project, to publish Where There Is No Doctor in Bambara, is important and, in the long term, will help contribute to the health and well-being of many Malians. However, it is overshadowed by the acute humanitarian crisis gripping the region. Many friends and colleagues have asked what they can do to help, so here are links to some good organizations.

How You Can Help

There are a number of reputable organizations at work in the region. My wife and I have given to the Red Cross and to Catholic Relief Services. Please consider donating to an organization you believe in. This story from CNN lists several agencies working in the region, and how to contribute. Their list includes Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, the UNHCR, and the World Food Program.

If you’re unsure about a charity,  look them up on Charity Navigator. I always look for an organization that spends most of its revenue on “programs,” or money that is spent to help aid recipients. Here are some organizations working directly to help Malian refugees:

• Catholic Relief Services
• Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières).
• International Committee of the Red Cross (choose Niamey – covers Mali and Niger).
• Relief International

We urgently need volunteers to help translate some English text into French. Proficiency in French is a must, and familiarity with African French is a plus.

Here is a short explanation of the task. We decided to translate the French-language edition of Where There Is No Doctor that is published by ENDA in Senegal. There were two reasons for this: 1) Our translators are more fluent in French, and 2) this edition has already been adapted for a West African context.

The US-based publisher, Hesperian Health Guides does a substantial revision of the English and Spanish versions of the book every year to fix errors and to keep pace with changing medical practices, new medicines, recommended dosages, etc.

Even though the French-language edition is the “5ème réimpression de la 3ème édition augmentée et corrigée,” it has not been updated as thoroughly as the English edition. For example, over the last decade, information about HIV and AIDS has been added to many chapters of the English text.

Example of the marked-up text

Our team of volunteers is carefully reviewing the French text and marking where new text should be inserted. This work is painstaking and slow but extremely important. Several of us read French well enough to mark the changes, but need someone who is more fluent in French to translate.

As of now, we have about 10 pages (approximately 2,000 words) to be translated. We would also love to translate this website into French. (Probably just the main pages, not every blog post…)

If you or someone you know can help us with this, please be in touch! Contact translation coordinator Matthew Heberger.