Bettering Lives by Making Butter

One of my primary projects here, commissioned by a local NGO L’Enfant Epanoui Bénin and by project financers, will be delivering assistance to three local women’s groupements in the income-generating production of Shea Butter.

In Bénin and across West Africa, a groupement is a group of women (in this case about 30-40) who form some economic collaborative such as the cultivation, preparation, and selling of vegetables, yams, soybean products, cheese, etc. Our groupements are in the business of Shea Butter.

Shea Butter is more recently known to the States as an ingredient to certain beauty products or as an item in the natural products niche market, given Shea Butter’s veritable uses and its supposed homeopathic qualities. But in West Africa, the only region where the Shea Nut (coming from the Karité tree) naturally grows, Shea Butter has been used for centuries for a plethora of household ends, most notably as a moisturizer, healing product, and for cooking.

Although Shea Butter has been produced across this sub-Saharan strip of Africa for generations, most groupements (being the most common producing agent of Shea Butter) employ the same tools and methods always used. Basically, the women will de-husk the nuts with a mortar and pestle; further remove moisture from the already dried nuts by grilling them over a fire; run this through a mill; enliven and “refine” the butter through a lengthy and technical process of kneading, cooling, then boiling the paste; then leave the refined oil to dry into butter in calabash bowls. The end product, as you will see it in a local marché, is a spherical greenish/crème-colored solid with a earthy/nutty taste and odor.

According to my own observations, transforming a 25kg of dried Shea Nuts takes: about three days, the manual labor of several women (at least), and about 4300 CFA (about $8.70) in direct costs. Yet, in the local market such a transformation will yield only about 5,000 CFA (about $10.00) in sales for the women to divide up or reinvest in the next production cycle.

Our project hopes to cut the direct and indirect costs of the production cycle by purchasing for each groupement a machine that effectively subverts the time spent de-hulling, and the money spent running the nuts through the mill. We also hope to regularize the quality and quantity of production enough such that we are able to export raw Shea Butter to a buyer in the States (where demand for raw Shea Butter is catching on fast) or Europe. According to my preliminary research, in these markets one can generate revenues of more than four times that in the local Béninese marchées. If such a point could be reached (indeed, many groupements across West Africa are already selling directly to buyers), our groupement women and their families could benefit greatly from the sustainable supplemental income that is generated.

Supplementary and complementary activities will include the replantation of Karité trees in the our locality; community sensibilization concerning the problem of desertification; and the technical training of the women’s groupements concerning topics such as accounting, shea butter production techniques, and others directed towards the better well-being of their households.

Photos:

Top Left: A woman from a local groupement sells Shea in the Nikki Marche.

Bottom Left: A drawing depicting the kind of Machine Production of Shea Butter that is replacing more traditional methods. Acquiring such technology will greatly economize our groupements Shea transformations.

La Cuisine a Beninoise

Several travel books make the claim that Beninese food is some of the best in West Africa. While I can't comment on the comparative element of this assertion, I think that this culinary judgment should probably be made with some qualifications, or at least some divulsion regarding what exactly composes Beninese cuisines.

Beninese food for the most part consists of 2 parts:

A) Starch. You have your starch, sometimes rice or cous-cous. But most of the time it is "Pâte," a lump of paste made out of either corn mill or garri. Here in the North "Ignam Pilé" is in my opinion a more palatable alternative to Pâte. It is basically boiled yam (not the yam found in the states…these are huge…starches on steroids) pounded (w/ gigantic mortars and pestols) into a thick disk-shape perhaps very roughly resembling the closest thing they get to mashed potatoes here.

B) Sauce. The sauce is usually composed of some variety of the following ingredients, all easily found in your local village market: tomatoes and/or T paste; Maggi cubes (think bullion cube); onions, piemont (peppers), garlic, oil, and often some meat (beef and chicken are best, but goat and fish are the other more lowly of God's creatures who frequent these sauces more often). Sauce "legume" will have a greenish vegetable in the ensemble, and sometimes "Wasagi" cheese. And "gumbo" is a slimy concoction made using okra…perhaps the Beninese salute to Southern cuisine?

And that's about it as far as variety goes. On the streets one might also find "boie" (think oatmeal, but made with corn meal instead of oats); fried yams, or fried balls of dough (sometimes made w. bean-curd) and surved w/ a hot sauce. Outdoor "cafeterias" will offer you one of the above staple/sauce combinations, perhaps also with additional options of spaghetti noodles, beans, and cheese (rice, beans, cheese are my own daily staple here). Often you can also find an omelet stand, a "salad lady," someone selling bread, and in most towns you can find some guys grilling meat in the open market.

C'est vrais, J'existe...

With the close of Pre-Service Training's sunrise-to-sunset schedule regiment, and as I further settle into my new post, I'm finally finding myself in a position where I can begin posting more faithfully on my blog….depending on how often I get to an internet connection. If for the past 3 months you've been regularly checking for updates, only to be consistently disappointed, hang in there.

Following is a shot-gun blast of posts that have actually been in the works for a while, whether in my head or on my laptop.

A First in Football History

 

Last week the groups for the African Cup of Nations were chosen by lottery. The African Cup of Nations is to be played out in Ghana and Egypt this January and for the first time in its humble history Benin qualified for this 16-team event by beating Sierra Leone 3-0 a couple weeks ago.  

 

Unfortunately, as this week's draw revealed, bottom-seeded Benin will be playing Nigeria (the recent victor of the Under-20 World Cup) in the first round. Most Nigerians appear pretty confident of the estimated results of this match-up, probably w/ good reason. Mali and Cote D'Ivoire are the other teams in Group B, which is to play in Ghana.

 

While Benin's lot admittedly doesn't leave much opportunity for success in its group, I admit that watching a Benin-Nigeria match in Nikki will be a blast b/c Nikki, being situated on the eastern border has many Nigerian residents. If I can't be in Accra in late Jan to watch this match in person, a generator-powered tin shack packed with a good mix of Beninese and Nigerians is not a bad consolation.

French in French Africa

 

Here's a brief digestif after having spent three months as a French student in French Africa.

 

First, some thoughts about the French language. Proper French is kind of like playing bagpipes. When the pipes are played well, they produce one of the most beautiful sounds heard. Yet anything less than well-played produces the cacophony of a goose giving birth. And getting to the point of playing the pipes well is really, really hard, as I've had chance to observe.    

 

French, when spoken well, is a beautiful language. But it's really hard to speak [and understand] it well. There are a number of technical reasons for this I'm sure, perhaps purposefully conceived of by the aristocratic classes of Old that made French the exclusive language that it is.

 

In some sense, to speak French well you have to be in a special club, a country club if you will. Club membership entails understanding all the secret rules of grammar and pronunciation, many of which are based not on any kind of linguistic logic that I can conceive of, but on an aesthetic of what sounds nice. One must gain an intuitive discernment to know which of the consonants and vowels one is actually supposed to pronounce in any word, and equally to know which letters hang onto words for no apparent reason other than to trick novice speakers (especially English speakers, as it is, since so many French words look deceptively identical to their English counterparts).

 

Club membership also entails that you have the time and training [and trainer, perhaps] to learn to speak the words properly. Speaking French not only requires amazing agility of the mouth muscles, but a considerable amount of mouth muscle memory, as well. How else is one to pronounce their R's.         

 

Having said all that, learning and speaking French in French Africa has its advantages. To begin with, most Africans speak French more slowly, rhythmically, and with "courser" pronunciations than Frenchy-French. For example, Beninese tend to roll their R's versus the French slurring. Grammatical rules and constructions are also more simply employed, if not often ignored and violated. Fewer verb tenses are used. For example, in Benin the subjunctive virtually doesn't even exist (only in the linguistic-grammatical sense, of course).

 

Bien sure, learning French in Benin also brings unique challenges, especially for one wanting to acquire a fairly proper comprehension of the language. As with any language that is spoke in different countries and regions, in Benin also certain French words are wielded and employed differently. "Deucement," for example, is an exclamatory word on a number of meanings: slowly (as adj.); slow down!; be careful!, I'm sorry! "Petites choses" (little things) is underwear; pate ("paste") is a staple food here made from corn flour and water. Another common difficulty, especially in more rural parts of Benin, is speaking and understanding folks who speak a French that is heavily accented by a tongue more accustomed to speaking a local languages than French.

 

All things considered, though, learning decent French is indeed probable and possible here. The Beninese especially tend to be patient and amiable (if not sometimes too forgiving) with an American struggling to learning French. When I've finally reached the point fluency, I may not be a card-carrying member of the high-French country club, and I might indeed speak with a tell-tale West-African accent. But I don't really see any loss in either of these prospects.      

Recently Read: Pathways to Power, by Paul Farmer

 

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." – Wendell Berry

 

I recently read Pathways to Power by Paul Farmer. It qualifies for the well-populated category of "development/poverty/human rights book," but stands out in a couple ways.

 

Paul Farmer, a doctor who's been practicing for over 20 years in Haiti, writes about poverty and human rights, but does so non-abstractly (bringing lots of personal experience into his thesis); with the insight of being both a "practitioner" (doctor) and academic (anthropologist); and with the objective passion of a social prophet of sorts (it quickly becomes clear in his book that Farmer has a high and studied regard for Liberation Theology, its followers, its social grievances, and its methods)  

 

Farmer's main thrust is that the conception of human rights needs to be expanded beyond mere political and legal terms, and expanded to include and address injustices caused by "structural violence." These are more difficult and costly to address because they are social, cultural and economic in character, and naturally run counter to market-driven capitalist ideology and systems that runs the world today.

 

For example, you have a Haitian girl dying most immediately from AIDS. While the standard legal-political categories of human rights has no classification for such an abuse, a deeper analysis made according to Farmer's proffered stipulation of human rights would identify the many facets of structural violence that led to this girl's death—i.e. the material poverty and social casting that led to her contraction of HIV; her lack of economic resources that mitigated her ability to fight AIDS (with drugs and overall health). Because the girl's contraction of HIV involves Haiti's history of violence, national poverty, general prevalence/vulnerability to disease, a deeper analysis would also include Haitian history, U.S. policy towards the same, problems with the way that international Aid operates today.

--
Ryan Vroegindewey

PCV Benin 2007-2009

http://vroeginbenin.blogspot.com/

Concession Culture

 

My place of residence here in Nikki is a cement "house" adjacent to others in a duplex-style of construction. This "concession" also features a small front courtyard/outdoor space in front of our residences, where most Beninese do there cooking. The concession is enclosed by cement walls and a metal gate.

 

Concession-living caries with it its own flavor of culture—nothing like I've ever know, in fact, despite my two years of service as the RA of a college dorm. If I had to encapsulate the culture of concessional living, I would have to proffer that "Concession" is African for "sharing"… of everything.

 

For example, in a concession everyone shares his or her noise with everyone else. What follows is a typical schedule of what one might commonly here in a typical day:

 

8:00 – Neighbor girl sweeping the entire courtyard.

 

10:00-22:00 – Radios and Televisions, played at various times, from various directions, and at various volumes, but as a rule of thumb more loudly as the evening ensues and the temperature cools.

 

20:00-23:00 – Neighbors yell-talking in Barriba (a local language). Kids

playing/fighting…sometimes not sure which.

 

4:30 - (yes, that's four-thirty a.m.) – Neighbor girls making "Ignam Pile" (which is French for "mashed yams") to be eaten before sunrise, when the daily fasting of Ramadan begins. The important part is that ignam pile is made by 2-3 girls pounding with a HUGE wooden mortar and pestols, right outside my bedroom window.

 

4:5:00-6:30 – Various roosters intermittently crowing. Other animals (goats, dogs, etc.) progressively join in morning chorus. Barriba-talking neighbors join in later.    

 

5:00 and 7:00 – Calls to worship from the nearby Synagogue.

 

8:00 – Begin again with sweeping, and we have a fully 24-hour day.

 

Fortunately, I like all my neighbors, and I happen to even like ignam pile. I guess it's just a matter of adjusting….and cranking my radio.