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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (21702)	7/26/2002 4:26:40 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

It is a dark, cold gloomy night here. And I was just reading some really gloomy stuff about gold in various places around the web. Am sitting with my head in my hands trying to figure out where to invest some excess trust cash that has recently accumulated. Put some of it to work today in 3-year and 6-year treasuries, BEGBX, and VIPSX. The only cheery thing I've read all day was this, from an obscure village in Africa... Mali's Makeshift 'Cuisinarts' Create Peanut Butter and New Possibilities online.wsj.com By ROGER THUROW Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL excerpt... "SANANKORONI, Mali -- "Thump-thump-thump" is the trademark sound of the African bush. It is the dreary rhythm of village women pounding grains and nuts into breakfast, lunch and dinner with their heavy wooden pestles. But in this village of simple mud-brick huts, the melody of daily life goes "chug-chug-chug." Isn't it wonderful?" marveled Biutou Doumbia, talking above the din of a diesel engine kicking into high gear. Balancing a baby on her back and cradling a large sack of peanuts in her arms, she approached a contraption that looks to have sprung from a Rube Goldberg blueprint -- a most unlikely weapon in this country's war on poverty. After paying the equivalent of 25 cents for machine time, she emptied her 15 pounds of peanuts into a funnel leading to a grinder and blender connected to another funnel, and an ooze of thick peanut butter emerged from its spout. The job was finished in 10 minutes. All that was left for Mrs. Doumbia was to scoop the peanut butter into a dozen jars and sell it on the market. Then, she said with a laugh, she might take a nap. "Before, it would take a whole day to pound and grind the peanuts by hand, and the butter still wouldn't be as fine as this." Not only is the peanut butter better -- and Mrs. Doumbia's selling easier -- so is the quality of life in the 300 Mali villages that have the machine. Girls who were kept home to help with the domestic work from dawn to dusk are now going to school. Mothers and grandmothers who would have spent a lifetime pounding and grinding now have the free time to take literacy courses and start up small businesses, or to expand family farming plots and nurture a cash crop such as rice."