The Fortune Teller...and some project info

Now that I am back at Post things are back to normal. Now that the first three months are over, I will be able to do more traveling around Benin, during which we are required to stay at post in order to facilitate community integration.

It wasn’t the easiest to come back here, I will admit. When I was in Kenya I had an extended ‘taste’ of all of the things I am missing back home, partially because Kenya is much more developed than Benin. If colonization is a skill, the French suck at it. But, now that I am back I am moving on many of my projects.

I have started a Women’s group in village to make bread. Well, that is actually giving me more credit than I deserve. My neighbor and two other women, who are probably around 50 years old but look 200, approached me because they want to make and sell bread in village but were denied by the microloan company in our area. It seems the microloan companies in developing Benin can spot a bad investment better than all large financial institutions in the US.

Anyways, they were denied for lack of a business plan and lack of potential ability to repay the loan on time. So, this is where I come in. PC-Benin has given us tons of info on starting small enterprises here to use in circumstances like this and I have solicited the help of another Small Enterprise Development PCV for this project. Since this is a women’s group and it is relatively cheap, PC-Benin gives out small grants for projects exactly like this. All I am doing is coming in to facilitate a feasibility study of the village, the creation of a legit business plan, and a comprehensive budget. I also asked them to bring some new blood in and so they found two young women around 20-years old, which brings the group to five. I did that because younger women here tend to have a bit more free time (might have only one kid as opposed to 5), have more of an education, can speak French, and can help increase the potential longevity of the enterprise. The deal is that they go through the steps to set up a small business as well as invest some of their own money, no matter how little that may be, and I will find the funding, which does not have to be repaid. I think this will be successful because no one here makes bread and the only way to buy it in village is on the back of some motorcycle, who comes in from a bigger town and is as dependable as the weather in Wisconsin. But everyone already eats bread and from my informal conversations with villagers, there is a desire for a dependable provider. There is already a market and the demand is higher than the supply, which is what you want to see.

What else am I doing? The community environmental club, which has a motivated group of six young adults and one village elder, the German volunteer in Camate, and I are planning a village cleanup with the goal to do it monthly. We are starting small but this initiative will hopefully grow into the development of a trash collection infrastructure since none exists right now, which means people burn or just throw their trash outside.

I have also found the funding to fix the broken pumps in my village. There are four pumps and only one works, which means at busy times, people will wait upwards of 1 ½ hours for drinkable water. With this and a later cistern project, I hope to greatly reduce the immense problem of water availability in Camate.

Enough with the boring stuff. I visited a Beninese fortuneteller the other day, who told me how to get everything that I want, kind of. I went with some tourists and the guy leading the tour of the hills to the ‘seer’s’ hut. To make a long story short, I whispered a question (it has to remain a secret or it wont be answered) into my hands holding a large seed and the money I was paying him. He then quietly chanted and played with a metal chain that had bones, seeds, and small shells interspersed between the metal links. At the end of each end of the chain were two spark plugs, yes, spark plugs, like for a car. Even though this ‘skill’ of fortunetelling has probably been passed down for hundreds of years in his family, he has discovered and released the future seeing power of…the spark plug. Basically what he told me is that I will receive what I am looking for in my question if I am patient. I don’t think one could give a more bland, ‘can apply to everything,’ answer. He even compared me to throwing gasoline on a fire. He also said that there were exams (not the metaphorical kind) in my future, meaning that I am not done with school yet. So, that’s it. Now I know my future I can try to be patient, which sucks, because I don’t like being patient. Regardless, it is good advice, despite the fact that it could be applied to any problem.