Today is a Good Day

Lest you think that life in the Peace Corps is one big frustrating, hot, bug-filled waste of two years (in dark moments, I sometimes think this), I share with you today’s (well, Friday's)awesome story of success.

The local artists (think hand carved wooden statues, beaded necklaces, and batiks) are in the process of forming an association. They were struggling a bit with getting started, so I offered to step in to facilitate meetings. Last week, we talked about what a good association looked like and what the qualities and responsibilities of the association’s leaders should be. I was pretty pleased with how it went, especially when they asked me afterwards to continue in my role as facilitator for the next meeting, where they would elect their officers.

The Ministry of Artisanal Crafts, Tourism, and Culture has a complicated, decentralized structure with representatives at the village, commune, department, and national level, covering all the different métiers covered under “artisinat.” I’m not entirely sure how to translate “artisinat” but really, it just means anything made by hand – from cheese to furniture to clothing to salt. Each métier has an association and then each association sends representatives to the commune level, which sends reps to the department, etc. I don’t quite get all the different pieces of it, so I invited a very cool old lady to come in and break it down for us. She is a couturier by profession, is the former president of the artisans collective at the commune level, and was just elected as an advisor at the department level.

I was nervous – I invited her this morning, without consulting the guys in the group. I wasn’t even sure she was going to show up. She’s a talker, and can be hard to reign in once she gets going. And, I didn’t entirely know what she was going to say. Once she had the floor though, she was incredible. She had such as command of the room and an incredible gift for storytelling. She ended up talking for over an hour (which I hadn’t quite predicted) but in the end it was clearly worth it. The newly elected officers took the membership (there were a grand total of 7 people at the meeting, including the officers) to a back room and conferred. A few minutes later, they came back and bashfully offered up a 2000 CFA bill, to cover “transport and to buy a soda.” We promptly donated it back to the association. But it was so cool that they felt like they got that much out of the meeting that they wanted to pay us back some how.

As if that weren’t crowning achievement enough, Madame then gave a little closing statement, entirely in local language. She turned to me and said, in Mina, “And now we should also thank Big Sister Elizabeth for getting us together.” And I understood! Not just the gist of what she was saying, but actually the entire sentence – the vocabulary, sentence structure, everything. When I responded, “You’re welcome” in Mina, they burst into applause. Not to toot my own horn or anything (my Mina is pretty awful usually) but I was really freaking proud of myself at that moment.

There’s still a long way to go before I can say that the Association is a success – for all I know, people lose interest next week and the whole thing folds. But, in any case, I did a good thing at this meeting and I’m pretty jazzed about it. So jazzed in fact, that I baked a chocolate banana cake, which I am now going to eat. (And I wonder why I’m gaining weight here…). So, TTFN in the words of Tigger (or Pooh? Ugh, can’t keep my Milne characters straight).