Seeing the Fruits of My Labor

Today the second literacy serious held their graduation ceremony. Thirty five Malians received certificates. They learned adding, subtracting, multiplying, the metric system, reading, writing and some even wrote poetry. The mayor and the prefect (kinda like a county executive) came to the ceremony. I gave a speech in French. In the middle of the ceremony the Mayor presented me with a banner that read in Bambara “Kori de la pe Sababula Kucala boloa baara law ya kalan soro. Which means Peace Corps works with artisans of Koutiala.


This week Koro and I did math together. We were going over the cost of some new products for pricing and sales calculation. There have been many times in the past months that I tried to facilitate tracking expenses, reassessing prices, and just crunching the numbers as a routine business practice.

When I first arrived here in Koutiala I saw so many things the Bogolan Association could do to improve their business. In the last several weeks many of these have been implemented successfully. There were things like pricing, product development which included new motifs, colors, products, and marketing; business practices such as purchase pricing and sales calculations, just to name a few.

Last week Peace Corps held an In-service Training Session (IST). Koro spent several weeks preparing new products with all the skills she has been developing over the last year and a half. This includes new designs, new patterns and new colors. A lot of these skills were acquired during the bogolan training in Segou (which is known as the bogolan capital of Mali). We were going to the IST with this product debut for the Peace Corps volunteers to browse, buy and give feed back to improve. We didn’t sell as much as we wanted to but you never do, do you. Koro did get some good feed back manly on quality control.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is that no one in the Bogolan Association knew much math. As a Small Enterprise Development volunteer I did get some training in Illiterate Bookkeeping which seems like an oxymoron. Now that most of the Bogolan Association has gone through two of three series in the Literacy program they now know what we in the States would call basic math.

At the ceremony for the Literacy II class all of this came together for me so when the mayor presented me the bogolan banner I got so emotional I had to hold back the tears because tears just are not appropriate to cry in public here in Mali. I am going to miss everyone here so much.