On my last day of post visit, the directeur told me that we were going to visit the palm nut factory, and I was not excited. Palm oil (l’huil rouge) is thick and red and forms the base of basically every dinner in Benin. It’s absolutely awful for you, and my village produces a lot of it.
Anyway, so we went to visit this factory, and we started at the owner’s huge compound of a house – I don’t know how many wives he has, but there were a bazillion kiddos running around, and I’m betting they’re all his. When we met him, we had to bow as we shook his hand… I couldn’t figure out why, but whatever, I did it anyway.
After seeing this gigantic factory and how many thousands of gallons of oil it can produce in a week, I was pretty impressed with the factory itself. That’s when they told me that the owner built the factory from the ground up, and he’d never stepped foot inside a school.
That’s pretty incredible, I think. They told me I needed to give a speech at the end, so I tried (and failed) to translate the idea of the American dream into French. Unable to think of anything more eloquent, I said “c’est increible” about 15 times and thanked him profusely. Then we were friends: he invited me to a multi-day voodoo fete that he hosts at the factory in February – score!
Moral of the story: with some luck and ingenuity, anything is possible, even in Benin.
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