The Many Labors of Yahya

I started a business class for the local women this month. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but haven’t had the social capital in village to pull it off. But after I managed to get my neighbor kicked out (his bosses finally transferred him once I got the alkalo to make a call), my street rep improved to the point where people would actually show up to something if they said they were going to.

So a few weeks ago twelve local women and I gathered in a sweltering little room in the back of a local shop to discuss profit margins and budgeting. We immediately hit a few road blocks. Only three of the women could read, and only six could do basic math. My Mandinka was good enough get across the basic ideas I wanted to teach, but not to understand and answer all the questions they had. After about an hour of stammering, misunderstanding, and scribbling on pieces of paper, I realized I’d fallen into the same stupid paradigm as every damn aid agency on this continent.

Before even meeting with these women, I’d decided what was wrong, what they needed, and how to give it to them. I planned out a lesson, gathered them together, and lectured them on how to do the jobs they’d been doing their whole lives. All I knew about their businesses was what I’d seen from the outside and what I assumed to be true.

So I started over. I threw away the papers, grabbed a friend from the compound next door to translate, and sat down so we were all at eye level. Then I asked each one to tell me about her business, what the challenges were, and what she’d like to learn. Turns out the biggest problem most of them face is that profit margins are razor thin, and the slightest hiccup can send them into the red. They can’t raise their prices or become more competitive because the laws the market follows are social, not economic. Since they’re all competing for the same small customer base, in their eyes it’s a zero-sum game: make more money and the person next to you makes less. By the same token, the culture of charity means that any revenue – not even profit, jut revenue – is eaten up by family and friends who sponge off anyone with a job. It’s impossible to build up capital, so tiny businesses stay tiny forever.

It’s not all grim. The women have a collective that works sort of like a combination group savings account and microfinance loan agency. Each woman contributes a certain amount each month, and then at given intervals they give the whole fund to one woman, decided by vote. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but the main idea is excellent, and I arranged to talk to the whole group at one of their meetings and see how I can lend a hand.

For the purpose of the classes, right now the women and I are trying to do some basic bookkeeping. Almost all of them sell foods and perishables, so a lot of it gets wasted when people don’t buy it. If they can figure out exactly how much is going in and out, it will do a hell of a lot to improve their profits without biting into their friends’ businesses. The problem, of course, is that they’re illiterate. So I’m putting together a system with pictures and colors that might work. They’re all pretty excited about it, at least. So we’ll see. Whether it works or not, it’ll be on their terms.

It’s nice to have some work that’s actually solid. Ramadan started this month, which has been a whole lot of fun, let me tell you. Now, before any of my vast Muslim reading audience gets offended, I have every respect for the fasting tradition. It’s a way for Muslims to bond with their families and communities through shared privation. It gives them a clear way to prove their faith through sacrifice and suffering, things that are highly underrated in our culture. It puts everything you do in a more religious context, so good deeds during Ramadan count more, and sins are doubled. I’ve tried it, and it really does clear your mind and make you more aware of yourself, your place in the world.

It also makes you grumpy and hungry. Not eating or drinking for fourteen hours during the most humid part of the year will put a damper on anyone’s mood, no matter how pious you are. Trying to get anyone to do anything requiring effort is an exercise in futility. Work more or less grinds to a halt.

The funny thing is that I’m still busy, just not with anything cool. Construction projects have mostly been put on hold because of the rains – we’d like the buildings to last at least a year before they melt. Once Ramadan ends and things dry out I’ll have a dozen projects to deal with at once, so while things are slow I’m doing a lot of paperwork and preparation. More thrilling adventures in the Peace Corps.

The puppies started walking this month, which added a whole new level of psychosis to my life. I was really hoping that once Chulo was potty-trained it would be a while until I had to deal with dog poop as a daily aspect of my existence. This month my house was a mine field. Every step had to be examined first, every trip across my living room to be weighed for its potential gain and risk. Going to the bathroom at night was sheerest folly.

The puppies themselves were fun, when they weren’t irritating the hell out of me. I’ll spare you the details – just read the entry nine months ago from when I first got Chulo, then multiply by five. They were certainly active, with sharp little teeth and a taste for toes and socks. Chulo is terrified of them, which is hilarious. He refuses to go near them and sleeps on chairs so they can’t get him. They love him, though, and like to chase him around the house. Watching my badass gangster dog flee in panic from a few tiny puppies has been the best entertainment I’ve had in a while.

After a few days I noticed one of the girls couldn’t walk. Her back legs stuck out rigidly from her body and she had to drag herself around by her front paws. For a while I thought that it was just a muscle problem, that she’d get over it. I spent hours manually moving her legs and trying to teach her to walk. But sometimes her front paws would be paralyzed, too, or her head. Her crying would wake me up at night and I’d find her lying in a puddle of her own urine. There were signs of mental problems – she didn’t respond when I picked her up or one of the other puppies tried to play. I had to clear a space for her to feed, or else the others would shove her out of the way, but even when I did she often couldn’t manage to get her mouth around the nipple. She was in a lot of pain.

When it was over, I carried her body out into the bush late at night. By the light of my head lamp I dug a pit in the mud near a rice field. It needed to be deep so that the hyenas that roved near town couldn’t get to it. It seemed very strange to me that she and I should be there, at that moment, together. If each of lives only once, how does it make sense that this dog’s only chance was a few miserable weeks of pain and fear? In some literature the significance of a character lies far beyond his life; he’s a symbol, written out as part of a word he’ll never read, that has no relevance to him or to his pain. If he ever found out, how furious would he be with his author? Would he even care what the word said?

Anyway. Something happier. I got to die again, which is always fun. This time I was stabbed through the stomach with a tree branch. The experience was only marred a little by the fact that the guy who did it was wearing a giant purple dress. I made sure to scream and flop around a lot; everyone liked that.

Remember that Regional Strategy Plan I talked about a while back? Probably not. It’s just a group of volunteers trying to combine efforts. For months it’s been a lot of empty talk and frustration. That all changed when we decided at the last meeting to quit messing around and do a damn project. We were going on tour!

Some background: a few years back a PCV in Mali invented a topical medicine called neem cream that makes a better mosquito repellant than anything you’ll find on the shelves. It’s cheap as hell and easy to make – all you need is soap, cooking oil, and the leaves of the neem tree, common in Africa. Volunteers in the Health Sector are required to do a certain number of neem cream demos a year, getting a group of villagers together and showing them how to make it. As a sustainable project it doesn’t usually work that well - people are happy to get have the toubab make it for them, but won’t pay a lot of attention or make it themselves afterward.

So we did the mother of all neem cream demos. We wrote a skit, translated it into Wollof (a tribal language I don’t know), and took it on the road. I got to stretch my theatrical muscles as the evil villain who wanted everyone to die of malaria. At one point my opening monologue scared away the entire audience. We didn’t have enough women (which was weird), so one guy had to play the wife. I choreographed a quarterstaff fight that ended, like I said, with him stabbing me through the stomach. (I had to drop my script for the fight, so to my meager Wollof vocabulary was added my last line – “You’ll never stop me. You’ll have to kill me.” You’d be surprised how useful that’s been.) We made several huge batches of neem cream and sold them at a nice little profit, donated of course to the needy volunteer beer fund.

The audiences were insane. We performed at the luumos, which weekly markets held at different vilalges across the region, to absolutely packed crowds. Even though we were speaking their language, I was the only one who projected enough to be heard over the constantly chatting crowd, so most of the plot was lost. They liked my death scene, though, as well as the chase scene and some other physical comedy. And they paid attention to the part where we actually made the stuff. A week later, I got reports that people were making and selling neem cream at the luumos.

So bam. A win for the good guys. Not to overload you simple folks with too much introspection in one entry, but it occurred to me as I took a bow after the last performance that I am really, really lucky. To be doing this, working my ass off in the heat and the dirt, with good people, at something I’m good at, doing something that really might save people’s lives – it’s not too bad at all.