Service Learning 4

The fourth day of serivce learning started off with a bit of a bump as we arrived to our site an hour and a half late due to a miscommunication with our bus driver. First we were driven to another site, then back to the Songhai center, then to a site around 20 minutes away, and then finally after much debating to the microenterprise. Traveling and communication in developing nations often faces these problems and goes to show that patience is a requirement for traveling in such places, expect the unexpected always.

In terms of our service learning today showed me the way that patronage in this society works. For example, our organization wouldnt exist if it were not started by Toussaints wife, who isnt even a member of the group. Without this link and the approval from the top down of such a group there would be none. Today was a very low activity day as some of the women left to transport peanuts and soy, using the only bowls the compound had, prohibiting work. In this time we walked across the street to examine a machine that we potentially wanted to buy for the women for our capacity building project. The machine is literally across the street, and can process the peanuts and soy that the other women take around 2 hours total to transport to another machine. The man who owns the machine will simply not use the machine for their purposed regardless of their insistence of him to do so, and he only uses it for corn. This tragic circumstance made clear the patronage system and why it is hard for a group of women to make deals for their betterment.