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Forty–year–old Bintou Coulibaly remains seated on a small wooden stool
after the end of her weekly Credit Association group meeting in Louta
Goura village, in the farm country north of Ségou. She twines her arms
around her 3–year–old daughter and wrings her hands while snuggling
the child. She says she worries a lot. “I am always thinking about the
future. If you are in trouble yourself, it often means that your children
are in trouble, too.”
Five years ago, tired of the old financial system of bartering bags of rice
and onions, “which you then have to pay back before feeding your own
family,” Bintou joined a women’s Credit Association, based on Freedom
from Hunger’s Credit with Education program. “Before, there were very
hard times,“ she recalls, but now, “things have improved a lot. We can help
our husbands and work together as a team.”
Using her loans to grow onions, Bintou sells them on her own terms
and now saves 250 CFA (US$.50) a week. Because she had to quit
school after the fifth grade to work, she never had the chance to pursue
her dream of becoming a medical doctor. Instead, she married a man
chosen by her parents and has devoted the last 20 years to him and their
children, ages 3 to 20.
Bintou invests proceeds from her savings in
school fees so that her children will have more
choices than she did. “School fees are the most
important issue,” she asserts. Her eldest child,
a striking young woman named Assiatou, just
completed high school, where she concentrated
in biological science. Assiatou has taken her
entrance exams for college and feels pretty
certain she passed. She speaks shyly but surely of
her clear intentions to become a midwife. And
while Assiatou hopes to marry and have a family
someday, that will come “much later,” after school.
“My father used to work in the office of the state,” she says, “but now he
plows the field. . . . It is very hard work. My mother works very hard, too,
and I worry about her. But she will not allow me to help her with the
chores–she would like me only to study a lot.”
How does her mother manage to care for her large family, cultivate and
harvest vegetables by hand, and make the long walk to market each
week to sell her produce? “I just don’t sleep,” Bintou jokes, because that
is what it takes.
Her mother would have made a good doctor, Assiatou believes. The
nearest maternal health center is in Kolono, too far away to walk and, too
often, impossible to reach in time when emergencies arise. When she
completes medical training in the city, Assiatou would like to return to
open a maternal health clinic in her family’s village. Maybe then, she can
hire her mother to manage the place.
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