Gold Rush!

Last night, we sat down to have our weekly savings and credit club meeting, just like we do every friday night. It usually goes the same every week; the women gather, either in my courtyard or right outside my courtyard under the trees, we all gossip for a while, the women bully me about something or other, (how the food i prepared for dinner tastes terrible, or how all my friends are prettier than me, etc.), they each contribute their 25 cfa for the week, they put in the money they've earned from making liquid soap that week, they discuss whether or not anyone wants to borrow money from the group to start an individual project, they count all the money to verify it's all there, and they do some book keeping to take note of their spendings and earnings. In any case, it's quite a simple and enjoyable procedure, which, like many "meetings" in burkina, is more of a hang out session with a little bit of productivity as a bonus.

Anyway, last night, we got through the first few steps of the meeting just like they always happen; the women made fun of the soup i was eating for a while, gossiped about the kid who fell into a well earlier that day (he's fine by the way, which is a miracle; they pulled him out with a very long rope and a plank of wood), but when we got to the part where we count the money to make sure it's all there, all hell broke loose. 10,725 cfa was missing!! Everyone was shocked. Their lock box looked completely normal, no one had broken it, so it was obvious that the perpetrator must have opened the box with a key and then put it back where it was without anyone noticing. We tried shaking the box vigorously to see if money could come out that way, but it was solid, so it couldn't have fallen out or have been shaken out by someone. It was extremely bizarre, especially because the key is kept with a woman who lives on the opposite side of the courtyard from the woman who keeps the box with the money in it, specifically for the purpose of avoiding situations like this. She keeps the key hidden in her house, and claims that she's the only one who knows where it is. At first, everyone thought that perhaps the money just fell out of the box, so we were all shaking out our clothes and shining our torches all over each other to see if it was anywhere to be seen. We quickly realized that the search was not worth the pain, because the money was likely in someone's pocket far away from us. Aguera, the keeper of the box, starting running all around at this point, in and out of my courtyard, and to be quite honest i'm not exactly sure what she was doing, or who she was looking for, but she clearly felt responsible as the box had been in her house when the theft happened. The rest of the women just kept saying things like "ooh this isnt good" and "see ilana, we told you there were robbers around here" and "it's the kids who did it. the kids are not good". The sum stolen was also very strange. There was a 10 mille bill taken (about 20 american dollars), plus 3 coins amounting to about a dollar and 70 cents. Why the coins, i wonder?? And why only one of the two 10 mille bills that were in there? If there had been a ton of 10 mille bills, then maybe I can understand because the culprit may have thought that the women wouldn't notice just one missing out of many. But there were only 2!! Why wouldn't he or she just take them both? Very strange.

The women have made about 35 mille at this point (about 70 american dollars), so the 10 mille loss is almost a third of their earnings, which really sucks. Now no one wants to take the money box because they're all afraid it will be stolen again, so they left it at my house last night, and there it will likely remain until they find some kind of solution to the problem. Maybe i shouldn't have said that here, in this public forum. I hope the robber can't read English. Perhaps a good combination lock would be better than the simple lock that opens with a key, and is probably very easy to pick open with a stick or pin or pen or something. I also suggested that maybe they have enough at this point to open up an account with the Caisse Populaire, the local bank in Ouahigouya. They said they'd all think about it and talk about it next week. They were too shocked to get any productive talking done last night.

So we dispersed and ended the meeting, and I started to get ready for bed, as it was already passed my normal 9:00 bed time, when I heard some commotion going on outside my courtyard, so I went out to see what was going on. "They found gold!!" was all I heard amidst the chaos. Everyone was running about in every which way, acting all crazy and ridiculous. And then, within 5 minutes, everything was quiet because all the men and school aged kids had raced off to the gold mine, leaving only the women and babies behind. About 10 minutes later, in fact, a lone man wandered through our courtyard, and the women all shouted at him "you're still here!! go! go!" and he said "i'm going, i'm going!". Someone finally found some gold in one of the many mines in the surrounding area of my village. I suppose where there's gold there must be more gold to be found, hence the literal rush out of the village and into the mines. I don't know much about mining gold other than that it's very dangerous the way they do it here, it happens mainly at night because it reflects off the lamps, and it involves using mercury to separate the gold from the rocks and sand and so forth, which is why i didn't go out to the mines myself. You also have to be really lucky to actually find anything, and I've never been one of those people who lucks out with things like that, so eh. Not worth it for me, but good luck to my villagers.

So on the same night that the women found out that their money had been stolen, the opportunity to gain lots and lots of riches through gold (probably not) was revived. Coincidence?