Paleng, 25-28 February 2015

Khothatso Ranoosi and Marion Drew together run Paleng, the place of stories in the Malealea Valley in Lesotho. At the end of February Sheila Drew, one of the South African in-country co-ordinators for the African Storybook Project, visited Paleng and was impressed with the work that Khothatso and Marion are doing. This is how Sheila recorded parts of her visit.

Day One - Telling stories at Paleng
It is library day, so Marion and Khothatso begin to prepare for the afternoon when the children will arrive. They decide what story they will read or tell, and an activity to go with the story. Marion explains that there is a mixed group of children, boys and girls, ranging in age from 4 to 15.

The children each have a plastic book bag with their name on, and they are keen to exchange their books when they arrive.

Marion explained what normally happens during story telling in the afternoon.

“We start the story when there is a core group of about 10 children. By the end there are up to 20. We don’t stop the story and start again. Sometimes when we get to the end we will recap to the latecomers, or the children will retell it to the others. Sometimes we have to explain the story first to the smaller ones, as we go along, but the repetition also helps the others.”

Paleng has similar challenges to other pilot sites when projecting from the website on to a screen, because it is difficult to darken the hall where they often tell stories.

Some of the children speak a little bit of English. The older ones are keen to read English books because they have to learn English at school. The stories are told in English and Sesotho.

“Normally we start in English, and Khothatso translates, almost simultaneously, as the story is told. We sometimes use props to support the story, such as felt figures, puppets, plastic animals. Sometimes we act out the story as we tell it. We always ask the children if they like the story. It is difficult for them to say why. Sometimes we ask questions to see if they were listening, and followed, and understood.”

Stories are used in many different ways in Paleng. With Lion’s Fire Sticks, on a previous library day for example, after the story telling Marion and Khothatso wrote the title on a blank piece of paper. They asked the children “Who was the story about?” Then children did their own drawings. There was not enough time for all the children to finish, so the following week they remembered the story and completed their pictures. “As a result we developed an adapted translation of the original story, with children’s own pictures. We will now try and publish the story on the website,” said Marion.

One of the things we experimented with during my visit was taking photographs on a cell phone and uploading them as illustrations. We hope that we can make this work as a way of using children’s illustrations in our stories.

Marion and Khothatso had held a story development workshop with two teachers, the local chief, and a worker working with HIV/AIDS orphans(these people were chosen and invited because of their work with children). In the workshop they wrote three or four stories. One of them is called ‘Khomo e lenaka le leleng’. That story is now published on the African Storybook website after our story editor commissioned pictures for it.

After the workshop Marion and Khothatso used that story with children:

“We wrote the story up on a flip chart. It was left up for the children to read. The following week we read the story in English and Sesotho. We asked the children the question in the story “What would you do if you met such a cow?” Children wrote down the answer to the question. Those that couldn’t write, asked other children to write. We typed up the responses and translated them for example: I would run away – Ke ne ketla balea. This became a document called ‘endings’. We are not yet sure how we will use that. One little boy said he wanted to draw the cow and he drew pictures on a flip chart. That could become part of a new version.”

We look forward to seeing how different adaptations of that story will land up on the African Storybook website!

With another story from that workshop they wrote it up flip chart and stuck it on the wall. “We left pens and pencils on the floor and the children drew pictures at the bottom. The children are most interested in reading this story.” It is still up on the wall for children to read. You can see it here on the wall on the left of the children.

Click here to read about Day Two and Day Three of my visit to Paleng.