Bio-Benin Newsletter August 2023

August 2023 Newsletter

Bio-Benin just took a giant step forward! The phone rang at 10 p.m. and several more times during the night, as WhatsApp faded in and out. Guillaume was excited to share the good news.

After a long, free meal at his restaurant, officials from the mayor's office told him they had decided to approve the purchase of our land as a training center for organic farming, restaurant cooking and beer making. They will sign the papers to let us establish Bio-Benin in Benin, with legal status in Canada and the U.S. We've almost reached the summit of a long, arduous mountain of setbacks, persuasions, and payments along the way. Hurrah!

Now Bio-Benin will issue the certification documents for graduates, and we must reach out more widely to other entrepreneurs to certify their knowledge of organic farming. We will operate on a much larger scale, reaching way beyond Guillaume to help others become successful entrepreneurs. It's a daunting challenge and a promising legacy.

Brewery intern supervising bottling of La Natayaise beer

In other good news, the final batch of our beer, required to certify its purity and alcohol content, is being bottled by several young interns eager to learn the process. This represents another summit of an equally long, hard struggle. An aspiring brewer from Martinique contacted Guillaume to learn how to brew beer from sorghum. Our reputation is growing.

Meanwhile, the restaurant hums along, with nine new interns learning how to cook delicious meals and clients frequently giving us five-star reviews.

Nine new cooking interns at work. Notice we are big on helping women earn a living

We're still hoping to receive up to $50,000 from the Canadian Fund for Local Initiatives. This will help rebuild our fishpond to raise tilapia and construct a large solar-powered cool room to store fish and beer.

Once in place, we can brew and store 600,000 bottles of beer each year, ten times the 60,000 we currently produce. Without it, we're struggling, so please make a donation, large or small, to help us reach our goals and make this small, impoverished corner of the world more economically stable and food secure.

On the farm, peanuts to nourish the soil and give us a sellable crop, plus corn for the poultry, interplanted with beans and ignames (yams), are the current crops. A Beninese man with a Ph.D in genetic agriculture contacted us to propose working together. He also runs an organic farm and trains students. We're hoping to learn from each other and possibly develop a student exchange program.

All this waiting and worrying is hard and we hope you will respond generously to help us stay the course as we struggle to achieve great things with very limited resources. Please visit www.bio-benin.org and press the donate button with a gift from your heart. We thank you for your generosity and your encouragement to help us and many others around us achieve their dreams.

With love from

Julie and Guillaume

Bio-Benin.org

Bio-Benin: 1897 Sherbrooke East, Montreal, QC H2K 1B6, Canada 438-233-6059

7483 Pinebrook Road, Park City, UT 84098, U.S.A.