June 1

Had another meeting with the shea association on friday, went reasonably well, people showed up on time, except only two of five showed! I'm loving working as a consultant in this environment. I outlined the baseline methodology that we'll be employing for the community survey, proposed a meeting template, and introduced the concept of a communication tree. All in all, I'd say I'd give myself a B, it wasn't everything that I wanted to have done, I'm still waiting to hear back as to how much it will cost to have a sample of shea butter tested for each of the communities, but it was a decent effort. I'm hoping I'll be able to convince Adisa to get on board with the shea butter grading for each of the communities, I know it will cost some extra money but it would give the association at least a rough idea of what is being produced so they can better allocate capacity building resources, order division, as well as generally have a specification sheet to show to potential buyers. Learned at the meeting that Safia is officially getting her visa to immigrate to Canada, don't know how I feel about that one. While I can't begrudge her for going, at the same time I can't get over that she's leveraged her "involvement" in the association into the ticket, along with the fact she's hanging everyone out to dry. But a individualist approach seems to be the norm over here. Which is contrary to the tales you here of the great sense of community, the veil of which I feel has been removed. It is safe to say that, in any society, when people become organized in a community it is at least partially if not wholly self-serving in motive. People are seeking protection, food security, access to increased resources, be it knowledge or material in nature, as well as numerous other factors which they deem would be beneficial to themselves. It's not like this is an epiphany for me, it's just that the communities here are portrayed as struggling against the odds and somehow, better than those back home. I don't think that's the case, if all things were equal, I feel they would manifest themselves in largely the same way as back home, it's just the limitation of individual resources and knowledge that results in the increase of group participation. Great example came from Helen in the last meeting, she was on a rant about how orders should be divided amongst the communities(14) evenly, it was warranted though as she'd just found out about the 600 kilo order that Safia had accepted, given to two communities, and been payed for without telling anyone else in the association. When she snuck in that, if there wasn't enough to go around, at least the executive's communities should get the lion's share of the order. Interesting that the elected executive would see to it that their areas got the most preferential treatment, sound like a familiar political practice to anyone?
I think another one of the JF's, Glyniss, may have put it best when she said "everyone here believes there should be rules, as long as though don't affect them! It's like the roads, everyone drives on them, just not always in the right direction"
Elbows up, and death to the pens...there only prolonging the inevitable