Seydou Coulibaly in the Picture is the Program Director for the Peace Corps Mali's Small Enterprise Development sector which is the one I am working with.
We attended a panel with four businesses a Veterinary Supply Store, a Cosmetic boutique, an electric supply retailer and a street fruit vender. These bussiness people were from the community where my home stary is. On the way home we ran into the girl who runs the Cosmetic boutique.
The questions asked inquired on how they funded setting up their business, whether they were licensed, paid taxes and it they had an accounting system, and how they maintained their inventory..
Here in Mali most people set up businesses with money borrowed from there families. There are in formal lending groups called Tantes where people from a village get together and give the tante some monty every month and a member gets to borrow on that monthy. There are also microfinance institutions. Two of these are in my community but not many people seem to know of them. There is not a major bank in my community.
We also visited a business called Mali Chic that exports crafts they have even gotten several orders from Hallmark. The business was started by an ex-PCV and currently is a partnership of Malian artisans. A current Peace Corps volunteer is working with them and trying to help them get some accounting in place.
Tomorrow I go out to my site that will be my home for two years. My home will be in the city of Koutiala is 400 km from Bamako the capital of Mali. Here is the capital of Mali's white gold, cotton. People call it a truck stop which means it will have a high percentage of peopleinfected with AIDS/HIV. Population 110,00; there is an array of Mali minority groups; it is the home of Mali's biggest cotton factory; the people are 90% muslim; there is a x-pat community; the market is on Thursday.
My appartment has all the amenity, running water, flush toilet, and is located near the bus station.
Here are all the SED volunteers and their Malian counterparts they are going to be working with at a session on expectations.
My work will be with Union Association of Artisan's of Koutiala and Chamber of Professionals. They are asking me to go to the office six days a week and both the Peace Corps and the groups I will be working with are excited about my bookeeping skills.
So even though I joined the Peace Corps to get out of the office and do something besides bookkeeping and didn't want to live in an apartment here I am going to work six days a week with a good possibility of training people in bookkeeping. Actually I have enjoyed meeting the small business owners and the idea of learning how to train illiterates to do bookkeeping intrigues me and living in an apartment right near the bus station in the third largest city in Mali.
Koutiala is the town I have been assigned to and where I will be living for the next two years. My work will be with the Union Association of Artisans of Koutiala. This is an umbrella organization for all associations of entrepreneurs and their associations.
On Friday they found me a homologue. Three metal workers from the Metal Workers Association came to meet me and gave me a tour of their shops. This is my homologue Tiemoko Diarra demonstrating a water pump that pumps water out of a well and connects to a hose to water gardens. The shop here builds them and school desks. Tiemoko builds metal shutters for windows and metal doors. All homes in Mali have metal window shutters and metal doors partly for security and partly to keep water out when the storms come suddenly with the hardest rain I have ever seen which comes after thunder and lighting followed by strong winds then the hard rain falls. 
