Ramadan

It’s nearing the end of Ramadan. Villages are over flowing with goats, encouraged to grow fat for a few days more. Women sit under trees elaborately braiding their hair. Tailors bend over piles of colourfully died clothes, sewing dresses to compliment the new hair styles.  The roads have been turned into long strings of mud puddles by a persistent rainy season. I am travelling back and forth over them conducting a social impact assessment of the community credit unions and supervising the beginnings of a microfinance program.

At the credit unions I hear the members explain how loans have helped them pay school fees for their children, buy tools for their farms, and buy land to build on. They explain that people in the community are not used to savings but are learning slowly. One woman says there is now peace in her family because she deposits the money she earns from making soap in the credit union; when her husband wants to go use it to buy palm wine he can’t get at it and so they never fight about it.

The women come to the first microfinance sensitization meeting in colourful traditional dresses, bright cloths wrapped around their heads and strings of beads around their necks. They laugh and tease each other, and yell and argue with each other all at once. There is nothing quiet and meek about Sierra Leonean women. I take their energy to mean engagement and therefore a good sign.

By the time I reach home in the evening,  the rain is falling in hard drops making a racket on my zinc roof. I fry some plantains and stand in the doorway eating them and watching the rain splash off the banana leaves.