NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
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tter to Traore in New York. It took two months. No<br />
w communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Trao<br />
re sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works<br />
in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail a<br />
t the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter<br />
and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry<br />
people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He<br />
asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Tra<br />
ore’s family’s house.<br />
For Traore and others, the most pressing reason fo<br />
r making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that<br />
only a small percentage of Guineans can read and w<br />
rite. The United Nations puts the rate of adult li<br />
teracy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostl<br />
y those who live in major cities — in rural areas,<br />
it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is of<br />
ten conducted in the open air, with no chairs, per<br />
haps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discou<br />
raging to students, it takes place in French, a la<br />
nguage they don’t speak at home.<br />
“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko lite<br />
racy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N<br />
’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fello<br />
w N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of inform<br />
al schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden<br />
languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time,<br />
N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in a<br />
n official school — the pilot program will be in K<br />
iniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.<br />
People had been working on breathing life into N’K<br />
o for years, but they found out about one another<br />
only when they began to put up N’Ko Web sites. The<br />
re is Traore’s site, kouroussaba.com, Diane’s kanj<br />
amadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Do<br />
umbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engine<br />
er in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement<br />
to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called<br />
the N’Ko Institute of America. Diane’s students in<br />
Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko