BREAKTHROUGH STORY 5.18.2012: Brigitte Sanou

Aired as part of Nora Simpson’s Creation Nation LiveStream May 18, 2012 at 12 noon Eastern

Podcast available for free download on May 19, 2012 on www.simpsonstrategic.com  

Brigitte Sanou was born in Burkina Faso in the village of Borodougou in 1976.  She never attended school, never learned to read or use numbers, and struggled to survive in the most destitute of conditions.  Until The Hunger Project arrived in the nearby village of Yéguéresso, Brigitte and her three children survived on less than $5 per day. 

Thanks to The Hunger Project’s Africa Epicenter Methodology that begins with the Vision, Commitment, Action Workshop, and continues with leadership coaching, literacy training, financial education, business training, and a microcredit program, Brigitte learned to read, write, and use basic accounting skills at the same time that she and her fellow villagers were being trained to take over the coaching, training and financial management programs until the epicenter was fully independent of THP’s staff and funds.

In 2005, when Brigitte was 29, she obtained an agricultural business loan of $34 from the Yéguéresso microcredit cooperative.  In order to receive the loan, she had to participate in specific financial and business management classes and put certain minimum deposits into a savings account. 

She used her first loan to make and sell peanut butter at market.  She repaid the loan immediately, then continued to grow her business by taking out a series of loans through the program for $78, $111, $160, and $222, all of which she paid back in full as she diversified her peanut butter business to include commercial cooking oil, wheat dough and even plastic containers.

She has now earned enough money to feed her three children consistently, pay their school fees, build up her savings account and even purchase a bicycle for herself—a vital mode of transportation in an area of dirt roads and very few motorized vehicles.

But Brigitte has done more than achieve success for herself and her family.  She is now a member of the Committee that runs the Microcredit Cooperative within the Yéguéresso epicenter.  She helps train other women and men in how to grow their businesses and makes decisions about how to allocate the cooperative’s growing resources.

Support Brigitte and more than 20 million women and men just like her through the remarkably impactful work of The Hunger Project at www.thp.org

You may not feel normal but...

A friend of mine in a lot of pain came to me recently to talk about what she was going through.  After telling me her story, she asked me: 

Do you think I'm totally crazy?

And I replied:

No, I don't think you're totally crazy. I think you're having totally healthy, normal, appropriate pain in response to really terrible stuff that happened to you when you were too young for it to be safe for you to feel these healthy, normal, appropriate reactions and still survive into adulthood. So now you're having healthy normal appropriate feelings that feel utterly awful in the present moment. But if you're willing to live through these feelings, learn new healing tools and connect with kind people, your healthy, normal reactions to your history will give way to healthy, normal engagement with life in the present. And it may even feel good if you're not too careful.

I love this notion! People are healthy and normal when they feel terrible in response to trauma. We're supposed to feel grief and pain as part of a healing process. But when traumas happen to children, their nervous systems literally don't have the developmental maturity to handle the trauma experience.  Instead, the most resourceful children (aka the survivors), create physical blocks to the emotions coursing through their bodies through addictions and other compulsive behaviors. As these behaviors get peeled away in adulthood, it becomes our task to re-connect our own physical capacity to feel these feelings, allow ourselves to express the full emotional weight of the old traumas and begin to release these stuck emotions, memories and self-sabotaging behaviors.