By Charlotte Vallaeys works on development project in Burkina Faso

Town Crier Staff Report

A couple of weeks after graduating summa cum laude from Santa Clara University in June, Los Altos resident Charlotte Vallaeys boarded a plane for Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Vallaeys lived and worked in the remote village of Bereba, located in the southwest of this landlocked west African country, one of the poorest in the world. For five weeks, she helped evaluate and provided assistance to a village library.

Vallaeys went to Burkina Faso to assist the San Jose-based non-profit organization Friends of African Village Libraries. Along with two other Santa Clara University students, Vallaeys accompanied Michael Kevane, a professor in economics at SCU who is also the president of this organization. Vallaeys’ job was to oversee the installation of solar panels to provide electricity in the library. However, she spent most of her time talking to the villagers about their opinions, perceptions and criticisms of their village’s library.

“We can’t just go to their village and tell them how they need to run things. I believe that we must listen to the people themselves and really respect what they have to say and if and how they want to develop their community,” Vallaeys said.

In Burkina Faso, almost 90 percent of the people rely on subsistence farming and 60 percent live on less than $1 a day. Eighty-five percent of women are illiterate. Only Niger, Burkina’s neighbor to the east, has a higher illiteracy rate for women. Increasing literacy and promoting education for girls is believed to be crucial for the development of the country and for the equality and rights of women.

Overall, Vallaeys found that the library is a success in the village. “People just love their library. Most like to read African novels and books about African history and politics. Even those who can’t read still learn things from their children, who read books and then tell their parents what they just read about,” she said.

Before, people had virtually no access to books. Children who attend school are too poor to buy schoolbooks, so they could not refer to their books when doing homework or practicing their reading skills. Literate adults who are curious about world politics, history or, more commonly, livestock raising and farming, had no way to get their hands on books on these subjects.

“Everybody talks about literacy being a basic human right. Literacy empowers people and communities, but in order for your literacy to be of any use, you need access to the knowledge that is contained in books. Like all African cultures, the people of Bereba have an extraordinary oral tradition and a wealth of traditional knowledge. Now, with the library in the village, they also have access to books, meaning that they can access information and knowledge that they didn’t have before,” Vallaeys said.

While living in the village, Vallaeys had an opportunity to talk to traditional priests and healers. She is interested in how Western-style development affects their unique practices and culture. “I went to Burkina with a lot of questions about development, but instead of coming back with answers I am just so much more confused right now,” she said.

There are only 10 village libraries in the whole of Burkina Faso. Recently, Friends of African Village Libraries received a request to build another library in a nearby village. In a country where about 80 percent of the inhabitants live in rural areas, this means that a staggeringly low number of Burkina Faso’s people have access to books. The village libraries are small, consisting of two rooms and carrying only about 1,000 volumes. However, they are a luxury for the villagers, who would otherwise have no access to books to expand their knowledge.

Vallaeys graduated from Pinewood High School in Los Altos Hills four years ago. This year she graduated from Santa Clara University, where she won the Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J. Award for being “a whole person of solidarity in the real world and having the courage and faith to build a more just and humane world.”

Last summer Vallaeys did research in a town in Ghana, also in west Africa, exploring traditional religious beliefs as well as local beliefs about HIV and AIDS.

For this project and her paper, titled “Awareness is Not Enough: Gender in the AIDS Pandemic in Africa,” she won Santa Clara University’s Markkula Prize for outstanding work in applied ethics.

Vallaeys continues to live in Los Altos and works as a research assistant for the Institute on Globalization at Santa Clara University.