Call Me the Magic Bullet; I’m Turning Lemons into Lemonade

A few months back, during an email exchange, a former colleague noted that it was interesting that I was teaching my women’s group to read and write in their own language, especially in light of my being less than fully conversant in this language. I’ll admit that when I originally envisioned joining the Peace Corps, I thought that my work would be more aligned with my finance background, which I felt made me relatively unique among prospective volunteers. In fact, my nontraditional profile was a major factor in applying to the Peace Corps; I reasoned that there are millions of kids like me with the same aptitude and training all vying for the financial brass ring (cushy VP job on the MD/partner track, stock options, 5 week vacation), so wouldn’t it be good for me to join the Peace Corps and diversify their volunteer pool, where I would be a little more distinctive than I was in finance and consequently add more value? I fantasized about taking a fledgling micro-enterprise by storm and building it up into a sophisticated multinational concern through collaborative work with my eager host organization, facilitated by my high level of fluency in French and 7 years of experience in the private sector. (Yes, unfortunately that is a representative sample of my fantasies; I’m boringly tame.)

The first nomination I received from the Peace Corps was to be a high school English teacher in West Africa, which I rejected. I felt that my unique skills would not be optimized by being a teacher, especially when there were business-related volunteer positions available, at least in theory. I reasoned that while I could certainly teach English, there were probably scores of other applicants who could also teach English, so I should focus my efforts on getting an assignment that took advantage of my particular background and training. Maybe I was being too obstinate, but I thought that if I was going to devote 2+ years of my life to living in the developing world while concurrently getting off the finance track, that I should at least be doing work about which I could be passionate. I was ecstatic when I got a second nomination to be a Small Enterprise Development volunteer and happily accepted.

Now, 6+ months into my service, I find myself working with a cashew processing organization where my main contribution is teaching the members, all female and adhering to conservative Muslim lifestyles, how to read and write in Jula, (a local language). At the outset it looked promising; they had requested a volunteer who could help with accounting and the President, my counterpart, was very dynamic. However, as I got to know my group better, I realized that truly getting to know them would be difficult- meetings were overly formal and less than informative. I had to balance unfaltering persistence with sensitivity so as to not annoy the group members in my quest to get them to open up. Little by little, I learned about the group; that they engaged in international trade and had respectable annual gross revenues; the cashew processing procedure; the interpersonal dynamics between the bureau (President, VP, Secretary, Treasurer) and the rest of the group members. I also learned that only two members of the group spoke French; the rest only spoke Jula, except for 2 members who attended a madrassa and could thus also speak and write in Arabic. Having been one of 3 volunteers in my 32 person stage whose incoming French skills were deemed “advanced,” it was a little heartbreaking to accept the fact that my French abilities really couldn’t help me in achieving success with my group.

I think with every venture I’ve undertaken, be it a new job or class or extracurricular activity, the excitement and rose-colored preconceptions that precede the new experience inevitably dissipate and take shape into something unexpected. I think this is also true for many people. Once we realize that what a venture truly is, rather than what we hoped it would be, we make decisions on how to cope with the reality as presented, and these decisions are an integral part of how we experience these new ventures. With my cashew processing group, it would have been natural for me to be disappointed with my inability to use my finance background and French skills, and when I first came to terms with this, truthfully I was a bit disappointed. However, I also decided that I could still add value, just not in the ways I had expected. While I am helping a little with their business issues, my primary activity with them is teaching them to read and write. Maybe this activity is something that I’m not unique in being able to do, but the point is that there’s a job to be done and I’m the person who will do it. Besides, at this point, whenever I try to work on business-related coaching, I can really only work with the President given her skills in French and leadership. Hopefully by teaching the other members to read and write in Jula, and later French, I will be able to instill confidence in them which will make them more active in managing the organization. I also feel the rapport with the group members growing with each class and I feel they trust me and open up a little more each day (we meet for 2 hours a day, 4 times a week). They don’t call me Madame anymore; they call me Tènè (my local name, which means Monday). My women are much more relaxed around me and even try to joke with me in Jula, even though I don’t understand most of what they’re saying. Maybe next year we’ll be at the point when I can infuse our lessons with basic economics and supply chain theory, but we’re not there yet, and I’m glad to have something to which I can look forward.

My other pitcher of lemonade is my summer enterprise club with high school students. At first there were 90 students interested in joining the two clubs that Dave and I were each going to manage. Eventually this whittled down to 50, then 30, and now Dave has 8 students who devotedly attend his classes and I have 6. The point of the summer enterprise club was to teach the kids about money management and entrepreneurship with the goal of them raising enough money to pay for their school fees in October. We’re lucky in that we live in a city; in the villages, the kids would be out cultivating from sun up to 9 PM and thus precluded from joining any club. The first couple times, I met with my group 1 hour per week and talked about marketing and income generating activities they could undertake. Then my students asked if we could increase to 3 meetings per week since they’re not doing anything else this summer, which I happily accepted. At the end of June, Dave and I combined our classes and taught them how to make liquid soap. (Soap is a very popular commodity in BF.) We finished the soap on a Friday; by Saturday, all of my students had already sold their entire stock. Liquid soap also has some of the fattest margins of all the proposed income generating activities (50%) so we’re really happy our students have taken to it. The kids are also interested in learning how to make hard soap, so we invited an expert from Banfora (fellow PCV Kat) to come down and show the kids. She has a hard soap recipe that garners a 33% profit margin, but I think the kids could make up for the smaller margin with bigger volumes (again, people really go crazy for soap here).

I am also working with a small group of neighborhood kids on an English club, which is still more of a lemon than lemonade for me. The kids wanted to stay active during the summer so I couldn’t refuse their ambition. We also meet about 4 – 5 times per week for hour-long sessions. It keeps me busy and the kids appreciate it.

Those are my regular activities. We also pursue some one-off activities, like helping out with girls camps put on by some other PCVs in the region, working on community infrastructure grant applications and the planning of our own girls camp. Additionally we have some projects on the back burner that we want to pursue in the next couple months. My Peace Corps service so far is nothing like I expected it would be, but it’s certainly shaping out to be a satisfying, thirst quenching experience.