These past weeks have been really crazy with all kinds of happenings but I have been doing well as a whole. I am leaving today on vacation so I am so excited! The rainy season finally started and it is so much cooler, especially at night. I don’t really need a fan anymore to sleep at night because I now get a cool breeze in my room. It is wonderful but when it rains a lot, the roads are almost impassable which is really hard, especially on my bike.
I am a bit frustrated with my work in Bohicon because things are slowing down a lot and I have had a few Peace Corps training formations so I haven’t been able to coordinate times to start projects with my work partners. However, I know that I am moving at the end of August and I will be working 2 weeks of training for the new group of trainees in July. So I really will only have time to finish up some things and prepare to move, which I am so excited for. I haven’t told my work partners that I am leaving (the Director of my sector wants to tell them and hasn’t been able to yet) so I feel really bad because everyone keeps talking about things we can do in the future together and I can’t say that I won’t be able to. However, I should be replaced in September by a new Volunteer so I know they will have lots of opportunities for work.
A couple of weeks ago I went up to a small village where my friend Tony lives. His village is nestled between some hills and it is so beautiful there. Anyway he has a group of women who wanted to start to make bread but needed funds to start up. Tony found the money and they have been successful making bread and selling it (there is no bread in his village until now) but they don’t really use accounting and needed a system to track revenues and expenses so I went up there with my friend and fellow Volunteer Ravi to help Tony and the women. It was definitely interesting because we are so used to tracking everything by the penny but here it is so different; most small businesses are so informal and rarely use any sort of accounting. Tony figured out how much money should have been generated by the sale of bread. We added up all of the money made by the women and of course were short by a few thousand francs. When we asked them why they had no idea but after prying it out of them by asking multiple questions we found out that they bought things like plastic bags but also gave away lots of free bread as “gifts” to friends or family and they sold some bread on credit. After explaining at length that this behavior hurts them they understood and hopefully they can stick to a system. It was definitely a learning experience on both ends as we needed a translator to translate our French into local language because most of the women didn’t speak a lot of French and getting the point across was challenging. But in all I think we all learned something and hopefully these women can start making lots of money!
