End Blog

I’m back in Portland. The Mali trip was great, but it’s over, and so is this blog.

Here are a number of pictures and some short films. Captions and descriptions underneath the pictures this time.

Thanks very much for visiting! Thanks, Piers, for showing me how to post videos. I still would love to get comments.

Another of Bamako's traffic circle works of art. I love 'em!

Visitors usually end up in this restaurant in Hippodrome Quarter. Good food, draft beer...

Bla bla has the same sense of “idle chatter” in French as in English…

The lady who owns the nicest restaurant in Bougouni Mali.

Everyone - like, 100% of everybody - loves solar lamps!

These are just some shots out of the vehicle window as we drove South from Bamako. The landscape gets greener rapidly as you go south, and dryer equally rapidly when you go North. This is the breadbasket of Mali.

A village – this village would have much more modern things than one that is farther from the highway. It probably is within the cellphone catchment area, so people can chat with their relatives in Bamako. It has a school that by its size probably goes up to third or fourth grade. Beyond that, though, probably means either going off for school, or, more probably, no more school.

A little town – I don’t know its name. Very very typical.

ACCESS, our partner, got a contract with the World Bank/Ministry of Energy rural electrification project to put in a biofuels plant. Very neat deal: they are working with local farmers to encourage them to grow jatropha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha) that will be pressed, and then the oil used to generate electricity. It's solar power, only it uses jatropha plants instead of panels to capture the sun. The challenge is affordability: the electricity is still way to expensive for many people, despite a heavy subsidy. This fellow is the head of the jatropha growers cooperative.

Here are some of the staff of Bougouni branch of Nyetaa Finance. They are man and wife, very articulate neat young folks.

Okay, dear reader, with that, this blog is done! Good-bye.

Last day in Mali

Wow. So, here I am about to leave. I have a less-than-ideal flight that leaves at 3:30 in the morning for Casablanca, but when I get there, I’ve set up a time to call my old and dear friend Fouad Abdelmoumni. Then on to Geneva, where I’ll see another old friend, Joanna Ledgerwood, and play the bizarre but addictive French card game Tarot, shop in a little French Sunday market, see lots of other old friends, and so on.

So, things went very well here, and we ended up getting everything we wanted, which was to have all our Malian partners be enthusiastic about the solar lamp project. There’s a lot of work still to be done, but I am strongly optimistic that things will work well. Here we all are, after this morning’s meeting where everyone came together to agree on the way forward.

Yesterday we drove down to the town of Bougouni, where we plan to start selling lamps – all of our partners happen to have offices there. One of our partners, MFC-Nyetaa, has started a rural electricity project designed to be run eventually on bio-fuel. They have three 100 kw generators, which can run on either bio-fuel or diesel. For the moment, they are burning diesel, and encouraging local farmers to grow jatropha, which is an easy to grow plant, that can be used for intercropping, and will grow on abandoned fields. Jatropha seeds, big hard brown and about the size of a marble, can be crushed and give off a substance that burns about like diesel fuel. It’s going to be years before they get enough jatropha production to drive the generators, and also probably years before they get enough people hooked up and able to pay the monthly electric bill, which has a minimum monthly payment of about $5.30, which is a lot for a poor family. For a lot of these people, the inexpensive solar lamp will be a better deal, starting at about $15, but requiring no monthly payments for a long time, since sunlight is free and there’s plenty of it here!

Anyway, here are my colleague and I at the generator, pretending to understand what the various gauges mean.

Something completely different were these three kids + two donkeys, delivering – well, I’m sure they would deliver just about anything!

Well, got more pix, but I’m falling asleep after too many long days and I’ve got a taxi coming in 21 minutes, which is about the time to upload another picture! Thanks, all, for your comments. I’ll do one more posting from Geneva, and at least get the other pictures up. Bye for now. Oh, one more thing. Piers Rippey, who some of you know, is on his way to go sailing in Alaska with our friends Jack and Carol McCreary. Piers has started a blog called the Grand Maritime Adventure. http://grandmaritimeadventure.wordpress.com/ Visit him if you like!

Paul

What happened on Monday

Today we hoped to have two meetings – but for various reasons we hadn’t been able to nail either one down. We didn’t have either meeting, but we managed to schedule them for tomorrow morning, so that was good. So, I spent a lot of time at my computer catching up on other things.

Bamako, for some reason, has many many delightful statues and monuments in its traffic circles. They are just a little bit of totally non productive pleasure for passersby. I love them. Here’s one. I’ll take some more pictures.

By happy coincidence, an old friend, Jeff Ashe, of Oxfam USA is in town at the same time, so we were able to go out to dinner and talk about savings groups, solar lamps, and this and that. Jeff has been one of the real leaders in microfinance for a lot of years, and is also one of the visionaries in the micro-savings movement. Tomorrow, more meetings, and therefore few pictures. Ah, but later on this week David and I will go down to Bougouni, and then, dear readers, you will see some pix!

Oh – before you go – would you take a second and say hello? Just click on “Leave a comment” or “comments” and the rest is easy. I LOVE to get comments. When I do, WordPress sends me an urgent email telling me I need to approve them before they can be posted! It’s seductive…

More pix

I was told there is a big Hommage à Michael event tonight. It took me a second to realize which Michael: Jackson, of course.

These are:

• Some girls on the street when our taxi broke down (a second time). It was kind of hot in the taxi so I jumped out for a photo op.

• The Niger River, seen from a taxi as we were coming back from a meeting. The town of Bamako spans the river, which is beautiful…

• He is the Eggman.

Saturday

I’ve had a couple of good meetings in the last two days, including a very satisfying exchange just now with the outfit that I think will be our principal partner here. Went really well.

But I am going to concentrate in this blog on Mali, not my work. So, here are some pictures I took yesterday:  here’s our taxi broken down – it was just out of gas.

Then, a couple of cute kids pictures, including some boys playing babyfoot, the ubiquitous game that I think is foosball in English, while the girls look on.

And, lunchtime.

First day in Mali

I met my colleague David Levai in the Paris airport and we flew down to Bamako together, and got in late last night. Today, we set up some meetings for the days to come, but had only one meeting, with USAID.

I realize most people reading this blog have no idea why I’m here. So, here’s why: I’m working with an American non-profit organization called ACCION, which among its many activities wants to promote clean energy products in the developing world, in part linking to financial institutions. I head that project, which is called Energy Links. One of the things we’re working on is getting together the finance, supply, and marketing chains that will allow a local firm to import and sell low-cost solar lamps to people using kerosene. More on that later.

Here are a couple of photos from our last trip to Mali back in January.

That’s David interviewing a woman about her solar lamp…

And, here is a lady with her solar lamp. The lamp stays inside the house, and the one-watt panel, on a three meter  cord, goes outside in the sun during the day.

Much more to say, but I’m going to bed now. I’d love to hear from you! Just click on “comment”…

In Paris

Nice flight. My seat mate, Larry, is an Austrian psychotherapist who works with two doctors from Bangladesh, in Seattle. That, of course, is why he was flying to Paris. When I got to the Air France business lounge here at Charles DeGaulle airport, the lovely lady at the reception steered me to the massage sign-up sheet, “a present from Air France”. And a nice present it was: a long 15 minutes of Shiatsu by Yvon, who is quite good. Now I am very relaxed, and very sleepy.

In our happiness seminar, we are working on simply creating our experience out of nothing. But I wasn’t thinking of that when I was scolded by an airport employee who was spending her day sending passengers into one of two lines, depending on their gate number. My flight to Bamako didn’t have a gate number yet, but I wasn’t going to the gate, I told her, I was going to the lounge. For some reason, she got very crabby – perhaps it was the knowledge that her job would be redundant if there were better signage in the airport. I got crabby back. Now, what I could have done is smiled, and said, “You’re doing a great job! Thanks!” Next time….

In Seattle

Waiting at the airport in Seattle. I just learned that I can’t post movies to the free wordpress site – I’d need to put this on a different site somewhere. I’ll do that next time.

NO, I’ll do it this time, thanks to Piers telling me how!

Okay, that’s an uninteresting video. But now that I know how, this opens up all sorts of possibilities.

Testing, un deux trois

This is my first blog post, and it may have a picture also.