Kande's Story on World Aids Day

“I have been attending HIV and AIDS seminars but I had never come to understand well about it. However, I will live to remember this week, for from my own language I have learned more about this epidemic than what was taught to me for the last 20 years.”

Kande’s Story is a true-to-life short story based on a Nigerian pastor’s account of the ravages of AIDS in his community. In the story, Kande is a 12-year-old African girl whose father and mother die of AIDS. She and her five siblings are left as orphans and must fend for themselves.

Simply told and illustrated, readers of all ages are able to follow the storyline in their own language as Kande and her siblings encounter problems and dangers trying to survive. People in their community, especially people from local churches, help them in their time of need.

At last count, Kande’s Story has been translated into 222 languages. That would place it at 4th on the Wikipedia list of the world’s most translated books! (It would also be 4th on this list and 8th on this one.)

Do you want to translate Kande’s Story into your language? You can find it in the Bloom Book Library. Download Bloom software and Kande’s Story and get to work.

Kande’s Story has essential health information concerning HIV and AIDS packaged in a five-chapter story. The story and illustrations are laid out in a template book (or ”shellbook”) ready to translate the content and adapt the book to the language and cultural setting in which it will be used.

Often health workers assume that people will understand material disseminated in world languages like English or French or national languages like Swahili or Bahasa Indonesia. Translating Kande’s Story into local languages has proven more effective in engaging readers, allowing them to more fully understand the story.

Here is a brief video based on the book:

The story also incorporates the role that churches can play in reaching out to those in need, linking it to biblical principles. Church leaders testify that now they have a tool to help address the stigma and break the silence surrounding HIV and AIDS in their congregations.

Providing people with an avenue to talk about and constructively respond to the disease according to their circumstances and in their language has been a significant step towards addressing AIDS at the most local level, where its impact is the most substantial.

“This is my story. I thought I was the only one who had this problem, but I actually see now that there are others.”

• One Kenyan church group made plans to build a shelter and make a garden for a family of orphans after the first lesson of Kande’s Story.

• Another class of 70 participants agreed to go to the local clinic and get tested for HIV together.

Kathie Watters, a Scripture use consultant for the Africa Region of SIL International, developed the Kande’s Story toolkit, which has now been translated and distributed in at least 24 countries and 222 languages.

For more information or a free download of the Kande’s Story toolkit, visit the Bloom Library. The information can be freely distributed; Watters and SIL ask only that the contents of the story be maintained, credit given appropriately, and electronic copies of new translations shared freely with others.

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Additional links related to Kande’s Story:

• A CBN news story from Uganda: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/April/Kandes-Story-Helps-Africans-Fight-HIV-AIDS/

• An MP4 video from Burkina Faso: http://vimeo.com/10686678

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Give to help minority language communities

DONATIONS ARE NO LONGER BEING ACCEPTED FOR THIS PROJECT.

Thank you to those to those who donated in the past.

SIL LEAD is a faith-based nonprofit. Through our network of expert consultants and local partners, SIL LEAD offers extensive capabilities in language, communication and education. You can donate to the SIL LEAD general fund and help to further the work of our staff and consultants.

Invest in a Minority Language Community's Future

Your donations help local community-based organizations around the world pursue their development goals while maintaining and developing their unique language and culture.  SIL LEAD's Community-Based Language Development fund seeks to help fund efforts by these organizations. Click here to donate now and select "Community-Based Language Development" from the drop-down menu.

Literacy and Development through Partnership

Literacy and Development through Partnership (LDP) exists so that children and adults in northern Ghana can learn to read and apply their literacy skills to better their lives. Local trainers from the Dagomba community work together with the public schools in northern Ghana to improve the quality of basic education. LDP works with these Dagomba trainers to provide teacher training in literacy, to develop reading materials, and to advocate for and implement Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education in schools. Currently, 1,500 in-school-children from 47 rural communities in four districts of northern Ghana are benefiting from LDP’s basic education work. Your support for LDP enables children and adults in the Dagomba community to read and to receive basic education, unlocking opportunities to improve the quality of their lives. 

Click here to donate now and select Literacy & Development through Partnership (Ghana) to designate your gift.

Learn about Learning

In belated recognition of International Literacy Day (September 8, 2017), we would like to tell you about SIL LEAD’s involvement in the Ghana Partnership for Education: Learning. Learning is part of the USAID Partnership for Education project. This project supports the early grade reading and literacy improvement activities implemented by the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service. Through this project, the work of SIL LEAD consultants may benefit over one million children and 30,000 teachers in eleven different local languages.

Earlier this year, seven SIL LEAD consultants led a 9-week materials development workshop in Tamale, Ghana. This workshop focused on the development of Kindergarten (KG2) Term 1 and Grade 1 (P1) Term 1 reading instructional materials comparable to materials developed during the Dagbani reading prototype. These materials were developed in 11 official Ghanaian languages and will be used in a national scale-up prototype program. The workshop included 44 mother-tongue authors, eleven illustrators, seven SIL LEAD reading consultants, and five experts from Ghanaian partner organization GILLBT. We are pleased to report that the workshop was very successful and that the materials development goals were accomplished.

Hard at work in Tamale, Ghana

A second 9-week workshop is now underway in Tamale and another will be held in early 2018. During these workshops, SIL LEAD consultants will facilitate the development of the remaining pupil and teacher materials for KG2, P1, and Grade 2 (P2). In addition to scripted lessons, new pupil books (including both decodable and leveled texts and exercises) and supplemental teaching and learning materials will be developed.

In other news related to this project, the first ever Spelling Bee in a local Ghanaian language was held in July. Competitions among 20 schools prior to the Spelling Bee resulted in 77 children qualifying to compete. These top spellers gathered in the town of Yendi and competed in 11 rounds to determine a winner, runner-up, and a third place winner. Prior to the start of this project, Dagbani children could not sound out more than three letters in a minute. During the Spelling Bee they were asked to spell four to eight syllable words. Now that is progress!

To learn more about this project please see:

Dagbani Prototype Brochure
Ghana Learning Brochure

Bloom: Did You Know?

Bloom training workshop in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

SIL International’s innovative Bloom software eases the process of bookmaking so that more people can participate – if you can type on a computer, you can create a book in Bloom.

Bloom users can create an original text or select a template, called a “shell book,” and insert culturally appropriate pictures and local translations of text. The books created can then be saved as a PDF and distributed in printed or electronic form.  It is also possible to use Bloom to create EPUBs and “talking books.”

SIL has been developing and using Bloom since 2011. For the All Children Reading Enabling Writers competition, SIL added features to let Bloom users create decodable texts and leveled readers. Literacy specialists can create “Reader Templates” that help writers create texts for specific languages that are decodable at various stages of learning and conform to leveling guidelines.

SIL International has also created 31 Bloom Training videos.  The videos are narrated in English but subtitles are currently available in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Bangla, English, and Swahili.  For example, Why Bloom is a 10-minute video which explains the role Bloom software can play in aiding literacy development. It also gives an overview of the key features of Bloom.

Click on the screenshot above to watch this video on YouTube. Once the video is playing, click on the gear icon to enable subtitles and/or to change the subtitle language.

Additional videos can be viewed on either Vimeo or YouTube.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/channels/bloomlibrary/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SILLEADInc

• Bloom has been launched on Internet-connected computers more than 100,000 times in 117 countries, with a high of more than 12,000 times in one month alone.

• Of those 117 countries, Bloom was launched more than 1,000 times in 10 different countries (USA, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Cameroon, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Bangladesh, Nigeria) and more than 300 times in an additional 10 countries (India, Kenya, Mexico, Australia, Senegal, Chad, Nepal, China, Burkina Faso, Mali).

• Bloomlibrary.org currently contains 1,211 books (as of August 29, 2017) and new books are being added all the time. The library currently contains books in 86 languages.

• The USAID-funded Enabling Writers Workshop Program with awardees in Bangladesh, Haiti, Indonesia, Nepal, Nigeria, and the Philippines will result in about 3,000 books being added to Bloomlibrary.org in 15 languages.

SIL LEAD conducts Bloom training workshops as one of the services it offers.  A Bloom training workshop can be held on its own or in combination with a SynPhony training workshop.

SIL LEAD also offers a Bloom Trainer Certification program.

Veteran and aspiring Bloom users are invited to join SIL LEAD's Bloom User Group (BUG) on Facebook.

Please contact us for more information.

Enabling Writers Produce 2,000 Books in Nine Months!

Enabling Writers authors in the Philippines.

SIL LEAD has assisted the Enabling Writers Workshop Program through the provision of Bloom training workshops, Bloom Trainer certification and support, and through the localization of Bloom software and training videos.  It is wonderful to see the amazing progress being made by this program! Please read the following article from our friends at the Global Reading Network, reproduced here with their permission.

Succeeding months ahead of schedule, local authors in five countries working with the Enabling Writers Workshop Program (EW) have created nearly 2,000 different books for children in grades 1, 2 and 3. Written in the language the youngsters hear at home and illustrated with culturally sensitive imagery, the titles are being field tested for use in schools and under review for adoption by the Ministries of Education in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Haiti. Negotiations for a sixth project in Kiswahili/Kenya have been put on pause over budgetary limitations.

Funded by All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD)-a partnership of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision and the Australian Government - the Enabling Writers Workshop Program supports the Global Book Alliance's goal to transform book development, procurement and distribution to ensure that no child is without books. The objectives of the program are to develop substantial sets of high-quality decodable and leveled books for adoption by ministries of education and use by schools in developing countries, develop sustainability for local capacity to continue creating quality decodable and leveled books beyond the scope of the funded project, and to produce a large set of quality books, using the Bloom book-writing software, for sharing via the Global Digital Library and other online e-book access points.

Participants in the Enabling Writers workshop in Bangladesh display their creations.