Busy as Abeille

So it’s been awhile and I am happy to say that I have not been blogging because I have been busy. If you know me, you know that busy is the way I like to be, so I ended up in a great placement in Guinea. I have been out to a farm / prospective ecotourism site to do a minor strategic plan / business plan and got them up on WWOOF. We have our first WWOOFer coming in November (check us out, we are the only site listed in Guinea wwoofindependents.org)! After months of pulling teeth trying to use a participative method for script writing, we have the outline of a script for “The Adventures of Nga Bountou & Kadi”. The title is still in progress but it follows a women who successfully starts a business transforming manioc into atteike and a women who does not business plan so fails in her fabric dying project. The moral of the story is that a business plan minimizes risk and to be truly successful you need to innovate. Hopefully it will go up on youtube but it will be in local language so most people will not be able to understand. I traveled again to Mamou for a volunteer advisory committee meeting and got to meet the new stage (training class) of education volunteers. They are a great bunch and it is always exciting to get new blood. Ramadan is over. I got my family a live chicken and carried it by its feet for two miles to get it back from the market. We almost killed it for the fete, but it laid an egg so it was spared, but not for long. I saw my brother eating chicken this morning and have not seen my feathered friend pecking around anywhere. In biggest news, I am working with another volunteer to start BiblioTech. BiblioTech is a Kindle library. We had an Open Space conference on entrepreneurship in Kindia and one of the out comes was the vocalization of a need for a library. BiblioTech’s most obvious goal is to provide books. Kindia has 300,000 people and 0 libraries. We are going to stock the Kindle with classics, popular novels, and business, management and entrepreneurship books. On a deeper level, the goal is to provide a concrete example in Kindia on how to leverage technology to create a profitable social enterprise. Membership to the library is going to cost a small amount of money and this will support the buying of new books and the general activities of my partner organization. Another volunteer is starting a BiblioTech in her community, Dalaba, based on a slightly different model (it is not going to generate revenue and will be supported by a library instead of business NGO) and from our success (fingers crossed) we hope that the model can be copied across Guinea. As I have talked about in other posts, Guinea, if it ever wants to catch up with the West needs to leapfrog development steps, so it makes no sense to build a physical library full of paper books because that technology is becoming obsolete. If you are another volunteer or development agent and want to see the full proposal comment with your e-mail and I’ll send it along. All exciting things, so I am thrilled to be so busy.