Legislation put forth by the family of Kate Puzey and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who survived violent crimes during their Peace Corps service will be put before Congress this Thursday. The proposed act, called the "Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011", is an important step toward improving support for Peace Corps Volunteers. During my Peace Corps service in Benin (2008-2010), I was frequently shocked by failures of the Peace Corps administrations in Cotonou, Benin and in Washington, D.C. to respond effectively to unpredicted situations, to build upon Volunteer suggestions that would improve Volunteer safety (such as frequent demands for respect of Volunteer confidentiality and requests that rather than increasing the number of Volunteers in-country, the administration focus more effort on improving the process of selecting posts for Volunteers), and to provide anything close to adequate mental healthcare for Volunteers who had been through traumatic events. The Peace Corps is a cherished American institution, and it should remain that way. But we cannot simply accept that because of its size (currently supporting around 8,000 volunteers in over 70 countries) that imperfections that leave Volunteers at serious physical and emotional risk be acceptable. That is why I support the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act.

A picture of Kate with her village's midwife and her closest friend in village. She led sessions on reproductive help at the girls' camp I worked at in 2009 and 2010 and also gave me the tattoos on my wrists that remind me of Kate every day.

I knew and lived near Kate Puzey while I was a PCV in Benin. There is no way to coherently describe what it was like to find out about her death, nor to convey how deeply it affected my service, and as I try to write about it now, it comes back to me in flashes—the frantic phone calls from other volunteers and administration; the times I cried alone or in the company of other volunteers—or even choking back tears as I told my boss, Jacques Bio (currently in jail in association with Kate’s murder), that I didn’t think I would be able to stay in Benin; the sense of outrage as Volunteers tried to piece together scraps of gossip to figure out what had happened to Kate and the tragic story of her attempt to protect her students from sexual assault came together; the anger at Peace Corps Benin administrators who would never provide any details, didn’t enact the Emergency Action Plan following her death, and never admitted that she had been murdered; the uncertainty as to whether we were really safe or not; the nights spent wide awake in my house, scared. Kate’s death changed my service in that the second year and a half of my service was a constant fight with these emotions, but it also changed my service by giving me something to work for. Prior to her death, I had already been working with community leaders to address the problem of sexual harassment in secondary schools, and I felt that I should continue to stay in Benin to address this and other problems that faced local girls. I stayed for the girls, and I stayed for Kate. Yet I always felt that one of the greatest injustices of Kate’s death was that the reasons for Kate’s death were swept under the rug; I thought her community should maybe rally around the girls she had tried to protect, and address the pervasive issue of sexual harassment in Beninese schools. This was an injustice that the Peace Corps helped perpetuate, by telling us that any talk or speculation about Kate’s death would jeopardize the trial and hurt her family. It comes as no surprise, then, to find out, as the media have recently reported, that Peace Corps has an astonishing record of covering up cases of sexual assault in its own community (I witnessed this in Benin as well), and I think that it is just that today, Kate’s family is working with Volunteers who were sexually assaulted during their service to gain the justice that they deserve.

A mural at the school where Kate taught, that a group of PCVs, students, and teachers helped complete.

I ask that you support the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011. While an essential reform with noble goals, it risks being blocked in Congress—as previous attempts at Peace Corps reform have been—by those who fear that criticism of the Peace Corps undermines it. I am proud to have served in the Peace Corps; it represents some of the best of the American spirit: idealism, openness, and a spirit of giving. The other Volunteers I served with, Kate included, are some of the best, brightest, and most courageous and intrepid people I have ever met. Furthermore, the Peace Corps is a unique institution; no other government sponsors a program of similar size, scope, ambition, or historical legacy; I am proud to be a citizen of a country that supports such a generous, ambitious program as the Peace Corps. Asking for greater protection of Volunteers in no way undermines the achievements of PCVs, nor Kennedy’s legacy, nor the future work of the Peace Corps.

And so I ask you with my whole heart to please support the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011 by calling or e-mailing your Representatives on (or as soon after as possible) Thursday, June 23 at 2:30 PM EST, when the legislation is announced.

Here’s how you can help, in a few easy steps:

1. Find your representative here: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

2. Fill in your contact details on the next page.

3. The next page gives you space to write a message. You can write a message of your choice, or for your convenience, you can copy the letter I’ve provided below:

I am a (friend/relative/reader of the blog of…) Jessica Bruce, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Colorado who served in Benin from 2008-2010. Jessica served near Kate Puzey, the Peace Corps Volunteer who was murdered in 2009 and for whom the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011 was named. I am convinced that the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011 is an essential act of legislation, and I urge you to support it.

The Peace Corps represents some of the best of the American spirit: idealism, openness, and a spirit of giving. Furthermore, the Peace Corps is a unique institution; no other government sponsors a program of similar size, scope, ambition, or historical legacy; I am proud to be a citizen of a country that supports such a generous, ambitious program as the Peace Corps. Yet, as Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and Kate’s mother Lois Puzey recently testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Peace Corps has far too frequently failed to provide Volunteers with adequate support to promote their safety, security, and emotional well-being, and particularly to protect and support Peace Corps Volunteers who are either whistleblowers or victims of sexual or physical violence.

In order to ensure that the proper protections are implemented to prevent future tragedies for Peace Corps Volunteers and their families, I urge you to support the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Victims and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2011.

Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.

***

Thank you for your help. To read more about Kate, I recommend:

Kate’s Voice: An action network devoted to pursuing justice for Kate Puzey

Kate’s blog

20/20 story on Kate and PCV sexual assault survivors

A recent story on the pursuit of justice for Kate

Blog entries I wrote about Kate/her village: Reaction to Kate's death The Whipping Festival of Badjoude Visiting Badjoude to retrieve Kate's dog, Carl Painting a mural in Badjoude

Thank you. Please pass this message on to others.

Camp Success, Benin's largest girls' empowerment camp, is seeking donations for this year's camp. Here are 5 reasons why this camp is one of the best places your money can go:

1) Local leadership. The camp is co-organized by Peace Corps Volunteers and community leaders, including one male teacher and several female teachers, entrepreneurs, and NGO workers. These leaders work with the girls all week, encouraging them to succeed in their studies and lives.

2) Diversity and unity. The camp brings together 60 of the top female students from around the Donga region of Benin--from the capital city of Djougou to small villages, representing a multitude of cultures and lifestyles. The girls meet together on common ground with a common hope for their futures.

3) Community involvement. Almost half of the camp is funded by community members, demonstrating local commitment to this cause.

4) Sustainability. The girls learn skills and attitudes they can carry with them for the rest of their lives, like goal-setting, healthy communication, and family planning. They will learn how to teach these skills to others and will practice their skills by training orphans during the camp. Additionally, they learn to establish girls' clubs at their secondary schools after the camp. In the past, many campers have put these girls' club plans into action.

5) Transformation of lives. Girls who attend Camp Success are forever changed. In my time in Benin, I met many girls who had participated in Camps Success in previous years who told me how it had changed their lives; one girl had learned to crochet using old plastic bags and was still crocheting and selling her products to pay for her school fees! The girls who I worked with in 2009 went on to be more confident, conscientious students the following school year, and by working with them in camp and throughout the school year, I saw that the camp had truly impacted their lives and their visions for their futures.

Pleae donate now!

It comes as a surprise to most Brits that America is so fascinated by the Royal Wedding. Honestly, I saw more hype about the wedding in the week that I was at home in Colorado for Christmas than I have in the UK until about a week ago. And while I admit university students are perhaps less likely to have royalist affinities than the majority of the population, few of the people I interact with regularly here are really very excited about it. Most of the working population is glad to have a day off, but for students who are studying exams and no longer have lectures to attend, it’s hardly anything to get excited about. But I think the main reasons Americans are so hooked on the royal wedding is that, despite our long cultural and historic ties to England, we never celebrate our Englishness. Everyone loves to claim even a smidgen of Irish ancestry for St. Patrick’s Day, but when do we ever have a chance to proudly show off our Anglo heritage? Enter the Royal Wedding, a temporary fix for the American hunger for all things proper and posh. And so, for my dear American chums sadly sipping away at cups of improperly brewed tea at 4 in the morning tomorrow, I offer you the following ten tips to add a bit of Britain to your daily life.

1. Smarten up your wardrobe. For girls, the general fashion philosophy seems to be: take every advantage to express your femininity. Flouncy skirts, floral prints, lace, ruffles, and anything antique (think cameo brooches) are in (I think they also like this because it harkens back to the height of the Empire.) Get a charm bracelet (preferably gold), and a set of pearl bracelets (better yet: pink pearl bracelets, bound together with a gold clasp). Wear an oversized hairbow or other hair accessory. To make sure no one misinterprets this as prudish, feel free to wear your skirt extra short. If passers-by can see the crotch of your tights, that’s quite alright. For men, think metro-sexual. Get a scarf and a pair of skinny jeans. Wear a sweater. Call it your “cardi.” If any of the above don’t sound like your style, for both sexes, remember nautical is always in fashion on an island nation. Think blue and white horizontal stripes and anchors.

2. Embrace universal healthcare. Every English person I’ve asked about their feelings toward the NHS replies, as if on cue, “Well, the great thing about the NHS is that everyone gets it.” Equality… who would have thought from a nation that maintains a monarch?

3. Complain about the weather. It’s a rainy country, and there’s no way to escape it. In fact, the misery of the winters seems to haunt the English even into the sunnier months. Easter weekend was one of the warmest we’ve had yet, and all anyone could say about the nice weather was, “Better enjoy it while it lasts.” Sunny days are bittersweet when you have precious few each year.

4. Avoid extreme language. In their politeness, the English rather don’t quite seem to particularly enjoy using any sort of, well, a bit extreme, really, language. I recently attended a presentation on writing CVs (the English equivalent of a resume, which, bizarrely, includes one’s secondary school exam scores… no matter how old you are). You would think some of the key points on this topic would be cut-and-dry (and they are). But the English woman presenting avoided insisting on anything. She gave us a sample CV to evaluate, which listed previous work positions but no details about what the job entailed. One keen undergrad excitedly pointed out, “Shouldn’t it have detailed bullet points about what the person did on the job?” To which the presenter replied, “Well, you can do. You might want to think about including details, to really, sort of, bring out your accomplishments.”

5. Drink more tea. I spent the weekend with my lovely Rotary host family, and perhaps the most obvious detail impressed upon me was how essential tea is to the English diet. On Easter Sunday, we went for a 10 mile hike. Before leaving the house, we had breakfast, with a cup of tea. During the hike, I had one bottle of water, and the couple shared a second bottle. We drank tea with our lunch on the hillside. At the end of the hike, we reached the parking lot and a snack stand. I went for more water and an orange popsicle, feeling the need to rehydrate after 10 miles in the sun. Naturally, they went for another cup of tea each. We drove home, and no sooner had we walked in the door than the wife said, “I’ll go put the kettle on!” There was tea after dinner and tea before bed. How anyone sleeps with this much caffeine in their system, I shall never know.

6. Develop a keen regional identity. The UK may be a small country, but it is culturally, and linguistically rich. If the US is to emulate the UK, we must work on narrowing a more nuanced language and cultivating our accents. You’re no longer from America, the West, Colorado, or even “the Denver area.” Tell people you speak Wheat Ridge and make joking banter with the Arvadans about correct pronunciation.

7. Pay attention to “Health and Safety.” I have never heard a Brit refer to any kind of safety precaution or health concern without saying “Health and Safety,” and they take this prudence quite seriously. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the lavatory, where you will never, ever see an electrical socket. Press an Englishperson on why you can’t be trusted to have a small electrical appliance, like say, a hairdryer in a bathroom, and they will turn pale and utter “Health and Safety,” then chastise you on how fundamentally clumsy mankind is and how you are likely to accidentally splash water on an electrical socket and kill yourself.

8. Promote and support charities. Don’t call it a “thrift store,” it’s a “charity shop.” Grow out your mustache and ask your friends for money (it’s for charity!). Wear a red nose on Red Nose Day (it’s for charity!). Donate your change at the cash register to whatever charity’s box is there (and there will be one).

9. Cut your sandwich in half. I’ve never given much thought to my preference for cut vs. uncut sandwiches before, but the English obviously have, so let’s defer to their reason here. Honestly, I’ve tried to feed uncut sandwiches to my boyfriend before, and you can see his face fall. “It’s just so much better if you bite into it and get straight to the good bits,” he’ll say. In fact, all ready-made sandwiches are sold this way: cut in half, and placed in a triangular cardboard box with a plastic window so you can see the good stuff.

10. Travel. Britain’s biggest stereotype of Americans is that we don’t leave the country, ever. Perhaps it’s a bit unfair, since they have Europe right on their doorstep, but our travel experience really looks quite pathetic compared to theirs. I know very few American 18-year-olds who would feel brave enough to take a year off before college to travel the world, but it’s practically blasé in the UK. At the very least, maybe we could get some better international news coverage on TV? (And no, the royal wedding doesn’t count!)

Virgile was my closest friend in Bassila, the village where I lived in Benin for 2 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He’s a man of many occupations; he teaches full-time at the public secondary school and private secondary school, directs the private secondary school, runs an internet café, and participates in various NGO projects—including a recent one in which he studied the causes of school absenteeism. In addition to all that, he is father to an adorable little boy named Bakos and manages to find time to chat online with me about development issues. Oh, and he also has great taste in shoes. While chatting on facebook today, I engaged him in a discussion about the TOMS shoe debate. Here’s a transcript (translated from French; I had to keep the direct translation of pied nu, naked foot!).

Me: I want to ask your honest opinion. There’s an American company that produces and sells shoes. These shoes cost around 27,000f CFA, but when you buy a pair of these shoes, the company also gives a pair of shoes to poor children in countries like Benin. According to the company, children in under-developed countries lack shoes, and because of that, walking many kilometres to school is very difficult, and a lack of shoes causes sicknesses. What do you think of that? Are kids in Africa really lacking shoes, and should companies in the US manufacture and freely give them to children? According to you, a teacher, is the lack of shoes really preventing children from going to school?

Virgile: Frankly, I will tell you yes. Now let me explain. Children in Africa, above all in rural areas, suffer enormously from this state of things. Parents, when they work hard to buy a shoe for 300f CFA for their child, they want the shoe to last a year. If this shoe breaks, the child has to spend the rest of the year with a naked foot. Even in the cities, one easily sees children working in the market all day with a naked foot. If you leave Benin, you notice a bitter situation in countries that are just coming out of conflicts.

Me: But to give a shoe at the price of 27,000f CFA, when shoes are sold in local markets, is that really a reasonable solution?

Virgile: The cost of the shoe is too much. 27,000f CFA could allow you to offer 27 shoes of “good quality” to 27 kids in the local market.

Me: If an American notices this lack of shoes and wants to help these children, is the best solution to do that ? Or could one help these kids better by reducing the cost of tuition, or helping their parents to improve their farmland or their businesses? Also, what will the impact be for shoemakers and shoe-sellers?

Virgile: To support the school fees of children will be the best solution for a Beninese child, for instance. Because sandals cost 300f CFA in the local market. Even if a child has to buy 4 new pairs a year that adds up to 1,200f CFA. If one thus puts this 27,000f CFA toward supporting a child in a year, one could pay his school fees, buy him supplies, and shoes so he wouldn’t have to go to school with a naked foot.

Me: So, it seems to me that according to you, what prevents kids from going to school the most is the problem of school fees. What are other problems that block children? If you could rank the worst problems?

Virgile: Food in the morning and at noon; books; photocopies. [Note: Instead of supplying students with textbooks, teachers in Benin require students to pay to have documents photocopied for their personal study.] Sometimes travel in areas where the school is far from the house. A study that I carried out last year on the cause of the wide-spread problem of dropout of students gave me the results that I have just explained, but put in the first place school fees and then everything else.

Me: The second thing: This company, to promote their shoes, organized a “Day Without Shoes.” They asked Americans to spend a whole day without shoes: to go to school and to work with naked feet. They say that this will really open Americans’ eyes to the conditions of life of poor people. Thousands of people participated in the Day Without Shoes and in the end, they bought the shoes of this company so that poor kids could have some. What do you think of that?

Virgile: If I understand well, if you buy one of this company’s shoes, you have also bought a second shoe that they give you so that the shoe can be sent to a child in Africa. Is that so?

Me: If you buy these shoes, you receive one pair, and the company promises to send another pair to a poor child, maybe in South America, Africa, Asia, etc.

Virgile: The problems of children in Africa are more serious than that. The needs of these children are much more on the order of nutrition and of support than what this company proposes. But it is already very good that those Americans think of the problems of children in Africa.

Me: Even at the level of students’ clothes, I noticed that the bigger problem is the lack of khakis [school uniforms]. Often girls, for instance, have to wear khakis that are torn and too tight, and that causes them to be harassed [as in, sexually harassed, particularly by their teachers.]

Virgile: Yes, it’s true. Khakis would be even more beneficial than shoes.

Me: I’m asking you all of this because this company is becoming a real movement in the US, but I think that giving shoes away isn’t a solution. There are a lot of bloggers (for instance, NGO workers and Africans living in the US) who are writing blog posts to say that this company is in error. There are some that say that gifts of clothes and shoes causes too much competition with local artisans. For instance, in Nigeria, the market for used American and European clothes has caused Nigerian garment factories to be closed now, and this has added to the problem of unemployment in Nigeria. There are others that say that, to give a gift like that adds to much to the problem of dependence, and that someone who is too used to receiving gifts from foreigners will lose the idea of helping himself. There are others that say, as you have said, these shoes are too expensive and with this amount of money one could do better for poor children, like pay their school fees, or build latrines, etc. And there are still others who say that walking a whole day without shoes presents a pathetic image of Africa, and one shouldn’t encourage Americans to think that Africans walk always with a naked foot and can’t improve their own lives. I also wrote a blog post about that. I wanted just to show that one can buy shoes in the local market, and that sending shoes from the US to Africa isn’t necessary, so I put up a picture of shoes in Benin. Also, I wrote about everything one could buy for a student with 27,000f CFA (his school fees, his uniform, his supplies, a lamp, etc… and still a dozen shoes!) and thus those who want to help children should spend this 27,000f CFA some other way. Finally, I write that often children asked me to help pay their school fees, but never for shoes. So I am completely convinced that what this company does is encourage Americans to waste their money on expensive shoes. Even if that opens their eyes to poverty, it isn’t efficient. I hope that my experience in Benin can better open American’s eyes to the problems of poverty and how we can help.

Virgile: Give me your blog address so I can read it when you’re finished.

Me: http://jessunderafricanskies.blogspot.com/2011/04/day-without-shoes.html That’s what I’ve already written. But I’ve been thinking also about sharing our conversation, if that doesn’t bother you.

Virgile: Not at all.

Me: So, what do you think about what I told you about what other bloggers are saying?

Virgile: I didn’t agree with the idea that they say that one shouldn’t help children for some of those reasons. In contrast, I take the position of he who thinks that in Africa, children don’t have a shoe problem. The problem of children in Africa is bigger than that which the company suggests, which in my opinion wants to use the poverty of Africans to push their products (shoes). As regards the concern about competition with artisans or other businesses in Africa, it’s a false problem. Because the gift should go to those who don’t have the means to buy shoes, so that won’t even have an impact on the sales of [local] businesses. The problem is that the idea of helping is good, but the means of support aren’t good. Like you have said, 27,000f CFA could make lots of things for an African child to use other than to offer him a simple shoe. The child is governed by his stomach and so needs to eat when he’s hungry and to not be afraid that one will send him away from school for lack of parental contribution to his school fees, or for a book that he doesn’t have.

Me: I doubt that a business like that really has the knowledge of local communities to be able to distinguish children who really need shoes. Thus, I’m not convinced that there won’t be an impact on local businesses. But even if one could distinguish these children, I think that if one insists on giving shoes, one should at least buy them from local markets in order to also support local businesses.

Virgile: Yes, I agree. In order to minimize the impact on local artisans, for me, the idea of giving shoes to children to fight against poverty is not good.

Me: I was very interested in this problem, so I did a search on the internet and I found some businesses in Africa that produce shoes for American and European markets. For example, there’s a factory in Uganda that manufactures shoes. The company employs girls who want to go to university, and because of their work at the factory, they receive a salary and also a scholarship for university. So I think that this company does more good for Africa. If I have to buy a shoe to help Africa, I’m going to choose those shoes.

April 5th was "celebrated" in many privileged communities around the world as "A Day Without Shoes," organized ostensibly as an event to "raise awareness" of what it feels like to walk for a day without shoes, but ultimately, truly, as an advertisement for the TOMS Shoe company. TOMS is a BOGO (Buy-One-Get-One) business model; you, the consumer whose heartstrings have been tugged by the eye-opening experience of spending a day shoeless, spend £33 (or around $54) for two pairs of canvas shoes--one for you, and one for a "child in need". Aid effectiveness activists, philanthropic consultants, development economists, and travelers alike have responded with arguments that the BOGO model undercuts local enterpreneurs, encourages dependency, disempowers, and misinforms. A donor consultant (and former Peace Corps Volunteer) organized a counter-campaign called "A Day Without Dignity," encouraging bloggers to submit photos of shoes and shoemakers in developing countries, with the aim of raising awareness of the disempowering nature of campaigns like "A Day Without Shoes" and the misguided (and counter-productive) idea of delivering shoes to "children in need". So for my part, I wanted to submit this photo that I took in Djougou, Benin:

I had a lot of great shoes that I bought in Benin from the local markets--flip flops for around the house, leather shoes for work, Obama flip-flops for my own amusement, stilettoes for a Peace Corps function, but I never was able to find another pair quite like this!

Many times, kids I had never met came to my house and asked me to pay for their school fees; because they said "white people" had paid for their school fees before, they assumed I, the new white person, would pay them as well. While I believe investing in education is the single most important long and short-term development priority for Benin, I couldn't help every kid. I did administer a scholarship to one local girl, named A--; I spent the following on her behalf:

School fees for one year: $24

New school uniform: $7

School t-shirt for PE classes: $5

A year's supply of notebooks, pens, etc.: Around $4

Lantern (for reading at night): $3

So for less than two pairs of TOMS (one for me and one for her), I paid for her to go to school for a year; with $54, I could have had enough money to do all of this AND to buy her more than a dozen pairs of shoes from the local market. No kid ever came to my door and asked for shoes. The single highest priority for kids in Benin is education, and the single largest obstacle to that is the prohibitive cost (for many families) of school fees. Thankfully, a scholarship enabled A-- to attend school with the necessary supplies; thankfully, because donors had generously given to the scholarship fund, I was able to support A--'s education.

When studying development economics and considering charitable causes, I try to re-imagine these scenes from Benin and the people I met there to sort of test out the development theories. So when I hear about TOMS, I remember the kids who offered to do household chores for me in exchange for tuition, and I imagine how they would react if I said that, while I couldn't afford their tuition, I had spent $27 on a pair of shoes for one of them and $27 on a pair of shoes for myself. I can only imagine resentment on the receiving end, and that I would similarly feel ashamed at my wastefulness and misguided priorities. The TOMS BOGO plan just doesn't fit in well with my knowledge of real "kids in need."

I encourage you to read this article, which details many strong points about TOMS shoes. (I met the author, Zac (then a PCV in Mali) while in Ouagadougou for the Fespaco film festival.) And if you're interested in using your consumer power to contribute to the good of the world, I recommend you check out Oliberte shoes or Sawa shoes.

I hope that my experiences in Benin shed some light on humanitarianism, as well as the importance of aid effectiveness. One thing that I like about Rotary International is its approach to international aid. Working as partners, Rotary Clubs in our local communities and in needy communities around the world coordinate and sponsor locally-managed projects that address locally-assessed needs. One of Rotary's signature projects which exemplifies this spirit is the ShelterBox, a large plastic container holding a tent, stove, sleeping bags, cookware, and other necessities, which is delivered to families whose lives have been devastated by disasters.

As an example, ShelterBox immediately went into action after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to assess the situation on the ground, identify communities that could best benefit from ShelterBoxes, and began delivering ShelterBoxes. That's why I've decided to participate in the Three Peaks Challenge to raise funds for ShelterBox. The Three Peaks Challenge is a hiking challenge: climb the UK's three highest peaks in 24 hours. I'll be joining other Ambassadorial Scholars (students studying in the UK on Rotary scholarships) in completing this challenge in June, while carrying a ShelterBox on our backs to raise awareness of the cause. With your help, we can deliver one such ShelterBox to a community hit by disaster. To meet this goal, I need your help in raising £590. Please make a secure online donation through my JustGiving page.

Until then, I'll be training! While hiking is one of the activities I most enjoy, I admit to being a bit out of practice. I plan on completing the Three Peaks Challenge a week after I hand in my last paper this term; that means, while simultaneously beefing up my brain for exams, I'll also be training by running, walking, and rambling around Nottingham. Wish me luck!

I used Tagxedo to create a word cloud using the most frequently used words on my blog. Their size indicates their frequency of usage on this blog. Pretty, huh?

More British slang! This comes from a list I kept during my first few weeks in England. I subsequently got quite lazy about updating it, but I'll re-devote myself to carrying around a pad of paper. (Blame this burst of energy on the spring. I'm a new woman! Let a new blogging season begin!)

• brolly: umbrella. I once said "umbrella" and was corrected, "You mean BROLLY?" Even the most macho of English men can't help but use such a cute word.

• nob: a person best illustrated by an example: anything monogrammed could be considered a bit "nobby"

• I think you'll find...: a good way to present your case.

• well: an adverb meaning "very." As in, "that biscuit was well good!" (Can also use "proper" in the same way)

• a quiet beer: a beer you have on your own or with a friend, politely, without getting too rowdy.

• gap year: a year off from studies spent traveling the world. A time for self-discovery, broadening the mind, and well, lots of drinking. For an illustration of the stereotypical well-to-do British lad on his "gap yah," watch this video. It will also illustrate the next two terms.

• chunder: to throw up

• on the lash: binge drinking

• laddy: best American-English translation would be "fratty"

• good effort: well done, good job

• That's OK: You're welcome.

• dear: expensive

• tod: butt

• useless: bad at, as in, "I'm useless at maths."

• knock off: finish up early, clear out

• nip off to the loo: make a toilet break

• nick: steal

• bum: love

• fancy dress: costume, also used to describe a theme party (aka "fancy dress party")

• mingen: describes gray, cold, English weather

• whinge: whine, complain

• can't be arsed: (sounds deceptively like "can't be asked") don't give a damn

• domestics: chores, as in "I'm going to knock off early to do the domestics."

• a domestic: a lover's quarrel

• scrumpy: disheveled

• scrumping: stealing fruit from others' trees

• ring (up): call (on the phone)

• are you alright?: Used instead of "hi, how are you?"

• faff (about): waste time, mess around

• muck about: joke/fool around

• wind up: to tease

• slow coach: slow poke. When I first heard this, I explained "Oh, in America we say 'slow poke'" to which my friend looked confused and replied, "... that would just mean you're bad in bed." Ha!

Second-semester lectures are drawing to an end next week, but lest anyone be fooled (including myself), this actually means my grimmest work-weeks are ahead of me. The English university system is quite unlike that which I experienced as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, and this is most apparent in the way exams are administered and the student-directed nature of exam preparation. Once lectures finish next week, we’ll have six weeks before exams start. While a few of my classmates are planning weekends away or trips home for Easter, for the most part, we’ll be spending our days on campus preparing for the exams that carry the full weight of our semester grades. I’ve gained a lot from my courses this semester, which include two courses in computer-based data analysis and economic modelling, a course in economic development, and a course in international trade. It has been fascinating to connect my experience in the Peace Corps in Benin with the international development topics, and the lessons I’ve learned through my coursework have made me more excited and confident about the contributions I can make to global economic development as an economist. Additionally, I’m beginning work on my Masters dissertation, which I will be writing on Chinese-African trade.

I spent the first day of spring hiking (or “rambling” or “hill-walking,” as it is called here) in the Peak District, a national park not far from Nottingham. While its highest peak, at 2,087 feet, is quite modest compared to the hiking ground I’m used to from living in Colorado and Washington, its stunning landscapes and picturesque farmhouses and stone walls make it a positively enchanting place.

Like any good English rambler, I got positively drenched from the mist and rain, and I ended my outing by a trip to England’s second-highest pub for a hot chocolate and pint of “chips.”

I’m hoping to do more hiking as the weather improves and my academic schedule frees me up. Several Ambassadorial Scholars are planning on participating in the Three Peaks Challenge this year, which entails climbing three of the UK’s highest peaks in 24 hours. By participating in the Challenge, we will raise money for ShelterBox, one of Rotary Great Britain’s most important causes, and will also raise awareness by carrying a ShelterBox while we hike.

My first six months as an Ambassadorial Scholar have been a rewarding and eye-opening experience, and I look forward to learning, experiencing, and accomplishing more in the next six months. Thank you for your support!

A picture from the District 1220 Foundation evening earlier this month. Pictured here with other Ambassadorial Scholars, a Rotary Peace Fellow, Rotary Group Study Exchange members, a guest from the BBC, District Chairman, and Foundation Chairman. Want to know more about Rotary's great work locally and globally? Visit Rotary

My first few weeks in England have been quite busy! After a week of orientation for international students, I moved into my flat and started “pre-sessional modules,” which were “maths” and econometrics preparatory courses. This week, I started my first actual lectures for my course.

My flat is great. I’m living in a new building, and our flat has two bathrooms and a kitchen. For our first two weeks in the flat, there were just three of us—me and two English chaps, but as of this weekend our flat is now full, with the addition of a guy from Trinidad and Tobago and a girl from the English-Welsh border. The two English guys have been good about “looking after me,” teaching me British slang, etc., and we’ve made a lot of friends in our building and general neighborhood.

Freshmen orientation in the UK is called “Fresher’s Week” and is not, really, so much about orienting as about finding excuses to dress in costume and get “pissed.” Every night had multiple parties and other events for the “freshers,” with buses shuttling everyone around, etc. As postgrads, we had our own events to go to, and I went to quite a few, most of which were socials at pubs. It was a lot of fun, and I met “loads” of people, but I must say, it was rather hard to keep up with that kind of drinking schedule. From what I’ve seen and heard about “uni” life so far, British students treat their studies as a 9-5 job. They cram all day in the library and then hit the pubs and clubs at night. Two nights ago, our hall organized a bar crawl ending at a night club, with souvenir t-shirts, and that was a Monday! The first Monday of classes, no less!

I’ve had several Rotary events to attend as well. My second weekend here, I traveled by train to Oxford to meet all the Ambassadorial Scholars in the UK and Ireland. Oxford was lovely, though I didn’t really have sufficient time to explore, and it was great to meet all the other scholars. Of the 80 or so who were there for the weekend, the majority were from the US, but there were several from Europe and Asia as well. I stayed for the weekend with an “Honorary Rotarian” who organizes the annual World Pooh Sticks Championship, and he took me to the place on the River Thames where the championship occurs so I could play. He judged me to be “keen on Pooh Sticks” and so took a picture of me in his official judge’s hat! He also took me to Windsor, which is really spectacular.

This past weekend, I went to Southport, a seaside town near Liverpool, for the Rotary District Convention. The weekend involved a lot of speakers, formal social events, and presentations about Rotary’s work. It was very inspiring to see all the things that the local Rotary clubs are doing, both locally and globally, and to see how Rotary has empowered people to do things. One guy, for instance, started working with several clubs around the world to create a sustainability trust that is doing carbon offsets and promoting solar-powered stoves in Africa (heyyyy EA volunteers!). I like their strategy of partnering with clubs in developing countries to create sustainable projects, managed by community members with a long-term investment and vision for their community growth. It was also fun to see Rotarians letting their hair down, dancing like they were kids again to “Twist and Shout,” and even getting a bit carried away with their wives in the “lift.” My host Rotarians are an incredibly nice couple, and I stayed for a night with them and enjoyed traveling to and from Southport with them. We ate lunch on the beach and sang “Candle in the Wind” together while driving through the hills of Derbyshire (pronounced dar-bish-ure). It was classically British, and I feel quite privileged to not only have the chance to study here and live the student life, but to get to know my host Rotarians and their families and see English life outside of the “uni.”

Keeping a blog on England is a rather more delicate balancing act than doing so for Benin. The odds that anyone in Benin would ever find out I had a blog or even know what to do with it were quite low, and so I could feel free to rant and vent. Plus, I had a lot to rant and vent about. I have a feeling my experience in the UK will be a bit less stressful and chaotic, so I’m not quite sure what all I’ll have to say. Plus, everyone I know here has an internet connection and is literate. So I’ll leave you with a few observations about British culture, for the time being.

Tea: I don’t think I had fully appreciated just how MUCH tea the English drink, and as with the beer, I’m almost having trouble keeping up. My first day in the flat, one of my flatmates “popped in” to see if I’d like a cup of tea, and I about died of happiness. Tea is drunk at all hours of the day. When I stayed in Oxford, my host Rotarian seemed confused why I didn’t want a caffeinated warm beverage before bed, and made sure I knew where he kept all his tea things in case I fancied a cup in the night. I do love tea, but I don’t think I’ve ever woken up in the night to brew a cup. Tea-drinking is sort of like Beninese saluer-ing, though, and I think it’s nice how easily you can make friends or find an excuse to visit someone. All you have to do is put water on to boil and ring up your mates to see if they fancy a cup.

The Queen: It’s funny how much the English love the Queen; Americans, I think, like the Royals as sort of a cultural curiosity but don’t really take them too seriously. I made a terrible faux pas the other day. I was looking at my pounds and ps in my flatmate’s room and observed that they ALL have the Queen on them. Now, my flatmate is a 20-something English male, studying international security and thus I assumed him to be, shall we say, a realist. I said, “Wow, when the Queen dies, they’re going to have to reprint ALL the money,” and he looked shocked and said, “You can’t just SAY things like that!” I stood corrected. But I’m getting better and can now toast the Queen with the best of them.

Dictionary of Slang Learned:

• Lad/bloke: a guy

• Chap: a nice guy

• Prat: not a nice guy

• Wally: not a nice guy, and sort of a loser

• Slag: slut

• Higgledy piggledy: disorderly. Especially used when describing British streets, which are the farthest thing from a grid system imaginable.

• Bits and bobs: Odds and ends

• Bits: things

• Sort yourself out: Organize yourself, settle in

• Sort: organize

• Kit out: Set up, decorate

• Ramble: Walk

• Hill walk: Extreme hiking

• Crack on: get started, stop complaining

• Washing up liquid: liquid soap, dish soap

• Wash my teeth: brush my teeth

• FYG: For Your Guidance (“FYI” is “too American”)

• Europe: continental Europe, excluding the UK

• Motorway: highway, interstate

• Self-catered: a hall that you, yourself, provide the catering for (meaning, there is no cafeteria)

• Hall: dorm

• Uni: college

• At uni: on campus

• College: high school

• A-Star: A-Plus

• Maths: Math

• Module: course, class

• Read: study

• Revise: Review, study

• Revision: Studying

• Personal Tutor: Academic Advisor

• Fresher: Freshman

• Look after: take care of

• Anti-clockwise: Counter-clockwise

• Keen/keen on: interested in

• Fancy: Want

• Take the piss out of: Make fun of, give shit

• Bollocks: Shit

• Shit: Shitty

• Dog’s bollocks: Awesome.

Two Non-Governmental Organizations in Benin that I worked with have started a fund for girls' scholarships in Bassila (the village where I lived and worked) and Manigri (a village 7 km away where I often worked, and home of Carly and Sarah P). The scholarships will cover girls' tuition and supplies, including uniforms and bookbags, and will provide the girl with mentoring sessions. Providing girls, whose families are often unwilling or unable to support them financially, with these tools means they will be less vulnerable to sexual harassment and other abuses of power and better equipped to study and succeed in school.

The Beninese school year starts in October, so funds are needed urgently to get this scholarship program moving. Consider making a donation now as a gift for a family member or friend for Christmas.

For more information, or to donate, visit The Benin Scholarship Fund. Thanks!

Hello all! I've made it through my first 24 hours of orientation at the University of Nottingham.

My flights went fine. I sincerely hope that someday I will take a trip that is short enough that I can travel with just one carry-on bag, not check anything, and not have to try to cheat the system. As it is, I brought the largest suitcase I own, plus an even larger roller duffle bag which I purchased just for the occasion, and almost all of my clothes were in those vaccum-tight bags so they were completely compressed. Both of these bags weighed in at about 52 pounds each. On top of that, I packed a small suitcase, almost entirely filled with textbooks, as a carry-on. It weighed almost 50 pounds, and since the retractable handle on it was broken, I strapped it to a plastic collapsable dolly. I wanted to bring a nice brown leather bookbag as my "personal item," but it was too small to carry my computer, more textbooks, my underwear, my toiletries, and all my other assorted electronics, so I brought a backpack instead. On top of ALL that, I also carried a wool peacoat and a hoodie onto the plane. No one can beat the airline baggage requirements quite like I can. Of course, the hoisting of my 50 pound carry-on into the overhead bin was a bit of a challenge, but luckily, someone else did it for me on both my flights.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that English people are incredibly nice; they're not just polite, but they seem genuinely as if they care about helping you. At Heathrow, while waiting for my bus with my massive pile of luggage, I struck up a conversation with a man carrying a Beatles LOVE bag from Vegas. He ended up helping me haul my luggage around, and then when I missed my shuttle stop (naturally, I got confused about where I was getting off) he politely suggested, "Well, I think you may have to take the shuttle around for a full loop again?" Also, every woman I have asked for help or bought something from has called me "my love" and "my darling" and even sometimes both in one sentence. It is both adorable and refreshing.

I must say that the only British people who seem to be an exception to this rule are the Nottingham students who picked me up at the airport. After hauling all my luggage around the airport (and literally, around the entire airport, as I missed my shuttle stop and had to take a bus around the whole perimeter of Heathrow), I finally got to the Nottingham meeting point. My luggage was stacked on top of a "trolly," and I wheeled it over to the line of 8 or so students, in uniform, who were supposed to be helping me. One of them checked my registration number, and told me a bus would be along shortly and said, "Once you sort yourself out, you can get on the bus." So I looked behind her to the line of international students, all standing with their luggage, and none of them with luggage carts, and assumed "sorting myself out" meant getting rid of my cart. I started unpiling my 50+ pound bags, and actually was on the point of removing the LAST ONE while all the official helpers looked on, when finally one of them said, "You might want to keep your trolly, as you'll have to just push all your luggage over to the bus again anyway." So I began heaving and hoisting my bags BACK onto the cart, while they all watched. It took for one bag to fall off the cart before anyone tried to actually help me with the lifting. Honestly!!

But anyway, orientation has been going well. I right away met what appears to be one of the only other American female graduate students (so far, we have met one other American female grad student and lots of American female undergrads--most of them here for study abroad programs), and she and I have been going to the various activities together. Of the 32,000ish students at the University, 8,000 of them are international, and 3,000 of the international students are just starting this year. None of the non-UK EU students are here for this week's orientation, however, which I find curious. Anyway, we and two Australian girls also went into Nottingham city center today, which was lovely. I will most certainly be getting lost LOTS, as NONE of the streets are on a grid, and the campus is sort of catty-corner to the city center. But it's lovely and very European; lots of brownstones and Tudor buildings, and even some castle-looking stuff. There's actually a castle-esque walled-in park next to the campus which apparently houses deer. Fancy! The campus is pretty and very green, with a hill of tall, gently blowing grasses, known as "The Downs." The campus is generally quite large and quite hilly, so this makes for a lot of walking. The weather has been mild to cold, with some bursts of sun and some light mists. It's quite Seattle-ish.

For lunch, we went to a pub. The clientele was almost entirely elderly British people, and they were quite entertaining. At the bar (where I ordered my food), some old guy with a thick accent and an eyebrow ring (!) said something incomphrensible to me that ended in "beautiful women," so I smiled at him. Then, sitting at the table next to us was an old man wearing a polka-dotted tie, a checkered shirt, and a blazer covered in pins, and he spent part of his beer having a conversation with someone across the room. Behind him was an old woman with very dramatic eyeliner and a very loud voice. She was later joined by another old woman who was literally poking the man at the table next to her with her cane. A drunken old guy came through and chatted up the people at every table. It was sort of like being at a center for retired alcoholics with most of their physical faculties. Quite a good show.

I'm staying for the week in a dorm called "Derby," which is actually pronounced "Darby." It's a nice room with a sink, a lamp, and a fridge, among other ameneties, and it came with a towel, a bar of soap, and a large stiff paper with a flowered border that says, in cursive "Your Peronsal Bathmat, with our compliments" which I get a kick out of every time I see. I guess I'm supposed to take this to the shower with me? How cushy! If only the Beninese could see me now.

I will move into my REAL dorm on Saturday. Until then, it's awhward social events like tonight's "barn dance," registration for various university services, and general exploration of the area. Stay tuned!

Here ends my "Under African Skies" blog.

I've decided to keep the same address but change the title and layout to reflect my new travel adventure. You can read about both blog titles, and read an excerpt of the lyrics to "Under African Skies" on the right-hand column of this page.

Check out this video of Camp Success, the girls' empowerment camp I organized in Benin this year. Thank you to everyone who supported the camp!

After five weeks at home decompressing from my two years in Benin, I am again on the point of departure on an international adventure. This time, I’m heading to England for a one-year Masters program at the University of Nottingham. It’s exciting but very strange to be leaving again, especially so soon.

I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, for a long time to think of something to say to sum up my last few weeks in Benin. It was hard to leave, but, as corny as it may sound, I did it with a lot of support. On my last morning in Bassila, I woke up at about 6 am to a knock on my door. Two friends were heading into town for the day and wanted to say goodbye before they left. I was grateful for their early wake-up call, because I got to see a beautiful sunrise—really, the only sunrise I’ve ever seen in Benin. I’ve said before that often when I tried to watch it the sun sort of just came out of nowhere, popping up into the sky without any display. My last day got off to a beautiful start. Friends and neighbors came to my house and stayed with me all morning, helping me clean and pack, taking final gifts, carrying final packages over to Melissa’s house for storage for future Bassila commune PCVs, giving last hugs, and taking last photos. It was hard to go, and surreal to drive away, realizing this tiny village somewhere in the world had changed me irrevocably and that I would never be a part of it in the same way again.

To summarize my two years, all I can say is that it was incredibly hard but equally rewarding. I was challenged by new situations and pushed far outside of my comfort zone. I shared in strangers’ greatest joys and deepest sorrows. I tried to understand what I saw, and I tried to enact change in small ways. I lived, and I learned.

I learned to prevent myself from getting overly stressed. In Benin, stress had little useful purpose. At home, stress used to motivate me to get things done. In Benin, where my control of outcomes was limited, it served only to make me unhappy. I learned to step away from stressful situations and to let off steam.

I learned the importance of maintain casual, friendly relationships, even with people I dislike. Before, I was often quick to write people off or cut people out of my life, and in Benin, I could not afford to do that. I learned the value of having many friends to rely on, and how pleasurable life is when you can always seek out someone you know in a crowd or have a friend to visit on a lonely day.

I learned to consider a problem from every side and let these considerations keep me from being angry about an outcome. I learned to meet others halfway.

I learned to look for the one tiny thing that went right (or could have gone worse) in any situation and to grasp onto that small success.

I learned to let go of control of projects. Things may come out better if I control them, but the impact won't be the same.

I learned that culture is malleable and ever-changing. Some things can be seen objectively wrong or not useful. The objective of learning about a culture should not be just to preserve all the cultural elements, but rather, to understand that they exist so that they can be worked around, and to appreciate why things don't change quickly.

I learned to find energy in both introversion and extroversion.

I learned to read in a much more focused way.

I learned to enjoy cooking, and that it is not too difficult! Baking from scratch is easy and hardly takes more time than using a mix. I learned to experiment with food.

I learned patience, flexibility, openness, and tolerance. I learned that bad days and bad situations aren't the end of the world.

I learned to push myself in awkward situations, to stick through things that are difficult, and to expand my comfort zone.

I learned to demand respect and quality treatment from others. I learned to stand up for myself. I learned how to deal with unwanted attention.

I learned to enjoy other peoples' children.

I learned that my life is unplanned and full of endless opportunities.

I learned a great deal about one tiny corner of the world, and I realize more than ever before how incredibly diverse and huge the world is. There is so much more to see and do!

I learned to be comfortable standing out and not fitting in.

I learned to be comfortable approaching new tools and objects. I am more confident in my ability to do physical tasks that I've never done before. I'm more comfortable in the space I occupy.

I learned to be comfortable calling people, greeting strangers, and going into meetings.

I learned the importance of having a practical skillset. I learned to see a job as a means of survival rather than everything that defines a person.

I learned to see the good and the beauty in the ugly.

I learned to take care of the relationships that matter to me.

I learned not to sweat the small stuff, to put my effort into what's important. And I have a better idea now of what IS important in life.

Two years down and four weeks to go! The Fourth of July marked the two year anniversary of my arrival in Benin. I have a busy several weeks ahead of me though: this weekend is the national spelling bee; next is my computer/creative writing camp; then I’ll have two weeks in Bassila to say my goodbyes. F- is baptizing her baby Elisha (named after my middle name, Alicia!) in those last weeks; I’m going to help out at the Manigri boys’ camp; I’m throwing a big fete for my departure, and then I’ll head down to Cotonou in time for Benin’s Independence Day. It’s the 50th anniversary of Benin’s independence, and so it’s a huge deal. I’ll spend the last week tying up loose ends with the bureau and doing my last souvenir shopping, and then I’ll be boarding my plane, Carl in tow!

I have to say, these last couple months have been some of my happiest in Benin yet. Knowing I’m leaving, it’s easier to not get weighed down by the negative aspects of life here. I feel almost like a tourist, stopping in for an adventure. It’s easier to laugh at how crazy life can be here without stressing out about what it means. And I feel like I’ve finally REALLY settled down here, figured out how it all works, and figured out all the tricks to being a good volunteer. I think a lot now about doing the Peace Corps again someday. And for all I’ve complained about Benin and West Africa since being here, I’d come back; I’d ABSOLUTELY come back.

Badjoudé

In April, six of us went to Badjoudé to paint a mural in the memory of Kate, the Peace Corps Volunteer who was murdered there last March. The mural shows two students (a boy and a girl) holding a globe, with Benin highlighted, and says “Students of CEG Domago, the world is in our hands” and “In Memory of Catherine ‘Kate’ Puzey: Peace Corps Volunteer 2007-2009.” It is hard to write about Kate and the impact her death has had on my experience of Benin, so I won’t delve into it too much. Suffice it to say, the one year memorial of her death was extremely hard but also very healing, and painting the mural there helped too.

The weekend was very festive. A donor organization had sponsored the construction of a new school building, which they finished painting and inaugurated while we were there working. On the first morning that we went to the school to work, we arrived to see students lined up on either side of the path to the school; we drove through their corridor on our motos, feeling a little like celebrities but mostly embarrassed. There was also a big fete in town in honor of the sponsor organization, plus another big fete for the “throning” of the new king of Badjoudé. Royalty from across the country had come to take part in the festivities, and a delegation of Bariba horsemen from Djougou was present. We watched the horses gallop down Badjoudé’s main road, dressed in bright colors and lots of fringe! A few of us even got to sit atop the horses. About 60 girls, most of them members of a soccer team that Kate had formed, showed up to help us start the project, and several of them worked with us throughout the weekend, including one girl who had been at Camp Success last year. The director of the department of education for the whole Atacora-Donga region of Benin also came! It was great to have so much support.

Afterwards, I got scarification done on my wrists by the former Badjoudé sage femme (midwife), who was Kate’s best friend at post. The midwife said wrist scars are done to give “the protection of the ancestors.” I’m glad to have memorialized Kate and the girls she defended in this way and to have a physical reminder of the profound impact Benin and Kate have had on me.

Visiting the Hospital

A neighbor of mine is a nurse and invited me to shadow him at the hospital for a day so I could “see the reality for myself.” Malaria is a huge problem here during the rainy season—it’s one of (if not the) biggest killers here, and currently, the hospital is treating about 30 kids under the age of 5 each day, all at death’s doorstep because their parents wait until the last possible moment to bring them to the hospital. We had to postpone my visit because the nurse’s own son, one of the little boys who frequently visits my house, was sick with malaria. His treatment was complicated because he wouldn’t stop throwing up and so could not eat nor absorb his medication. I visited him in the pediatric ward, where he was staying by chance only; so many kids are at the hospital with malaria right now that practically all wards of the hospital are currently housing them. After four days of treatment, he was finally given a root that made him stop vomiting, and he rapidly recovered and came home. I picked him up and he gave me a huge, but weak hug, nuzzled his head against my neck, and put his hand in my hair. I gave him a small stuffed dog while he was at the hospital, and as a result, he was very happy to see “his friend, Carl,” too.

A few days later, donning a white lab jacket loaned to me by the chief doctor, I spent the morning squeezed into the emergency room at the Bassila Hospital. In the four hours I was there, my friend treated 13 kids, and he wasn’t the only one working. The emergency room is just large enough to hold six beds, a countertop, and a sink. The beds are plastic-covered mattresses; the hospital used to provide sheets but couldn’t keep up with the wash, so now patients must bring their own pagnes to rest on—this is true for every department of the hospital. Outside the emergency room, parents clutching their children crowded together on a cement bench, where a nurse logged the patients in a book and noted the patients’ arrival in their individual “health passbooks,” small paper booklets that the patients themselves keep—a far cry from a health record file at an American facility. One by one, the parents brought their children into the emergency room, laying their small, despondent bodies on one of the mattresses while the nurse showed me their sunken eyes and let me feel their hot skin. Each time, he took a small plastic or metal tray with a needle, test tubes, cotton, and tape, and rapidly pricked the child’s hand—the left one, always, so when the child started to get better he could still eat with his right. The nurse held a test tube up to the needle and let blood drip into the tube, asked the parent for the child’s name and did his best to write it on a piece of tape, stuck the tape to the tube and put the open tube into a rack. He stopped the needle from dripping and carefully taped it into place, then had the parent scoop up the child again and move it to one of the other beds. Another nurse soon came by and attached an IV to the needle to start rehydrating the kid. Eventually, someone came in and gave each parent two small glass capsules, one containing an anti-malarial drug and the other a Vitamin B complex, and waited for the parents to pay for the meds. Once paid, she added the medication to the IVs. By noon, the beds each had at least two children on them. Parents and friends crowded around the kids. It was touching to see so many people cradling and caressing their children. One child was brought in by her grandma; her father, a mechanic, soon came to check on her. By and by, several of his mechanic friends came to check in on her too, cooing at her in their grease-stained jumpsuits before the nurses kicked them out for want of space. Mostly, it was the mothers who had brought their children, but several fathers came in too. The night before I went to the hospital, my friend was telling me how her husband—who has been having business trouble lately—won’t even listen to her when their children are sick and she needs money to care for them; “You see how our men are here in Africa?” she said, bitterly. It was all the more poignant, then, to see Muslim men in caps and floor-length bumbas placing their strong, worn hands on their babies’ bellies and nervously conversing with their wives. One little girl was severely, severely ill. Her heartbeat was rapid, and they attached her to an oxygen machine, washing the nosepiece with alcohol and cotton first and explaining to me how they don’t have the resources to give a new nosepiece to every patient. As the morning went on, the nurses seemed to work at an ever more frantic pace. My friend wore gloves for the first baby he treated, and after that, he gave up and just worked with bare hands; I saw him use a piece of a glove one other time to make a tourniquet. Another time, blood clotted in a needle, and he took it out, washed it with water in the sink, and gave it another go. A different nurse, working feverishly, took a needle out of a child’s hand and jabbed it into the mattress to hold it for awhile. Not every parent spoke French, and not every parent spoke the same local languages as their nurse; the nurses were frequently switching patients to accommodate for this, and sometimes pulling in other parents or people from outside the emergency room to translate. All the while, an assistant stood at the sink, rinsing the broken trays and arranging supplies for the next patients. I’ve never seen people work harder here than the team of nurses was working that morning.

Selected lines from Girls’ Club Evaluations

My last Girls’ Club meeting went on for an extra hour and a half. The girls didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t either. Truthfully, running this club has been the most personally rewarding thing I’ve done in Peace Corps. There’s more glamor to camp, but it’s even more rewarding to see the same group of girls troop loyally to club every week and to have them constantly dropping by my house to say hi or play a game of cards. I put my schedule for my last month in Bassila on the board so they would know when I’d be around for saluering, and they all wrote it down and insisted none of them would go on vacation until I had left so they could say goodbye. We sang all our songs one last time, and some of the girls had even committed to memory songs that I had just taught them once in English. They discussed strategies for continuing Girls’ Club next year when I’m gone, and I encouraged them to pounce on Melissa’s replacement (I’m not being replaced, but she might!) with a detailed action plan so good that the new PCV could not possibly resist them. They took this to heart and came up with very detailed activity lists, as well as a strategy for what they will do in the event that Bassila doesn’t have another volunteer. I sincerely hope that whoever comes to Bassila next will want to keep working with these girls, and I know they are desperately hoping Girls’ Club will continue in one form or another next year, too. They submitted their stories for the creative writing competition, almost all of which are true, and almost all of which are tragic. I had them write evaluations of the club and have included selections below. If you can read them in French, please do, because I think they’re très adorable in French. In the end, they sang “Everywhere we go,” flexing their arm muscles as they chanted “the mighty mighty girls!” over and over, hopping toward me and encircling me, smiling and laughing.

Ce que j’aime du Club des Filles c’est… / What I like about Girls’ Club is…

“…les chants et comment à accoucher un bébé et où ça reste.” / “The songs and how to give birth to a baby and where it rests.”

“…quand la madame est là et nous apprends plusieurs de truques drôles.” / “…when the madame is there and teaches us lots of funny things."

“…les chansons, des conseils pour parler devant un homme qui te parle de rapport sexuel, et les jeux.” / “…the songs, the advice for speaking in front of a man who talks to you about sex, and the games."

“… les jeux, les chansons, les cours et conseils qui me sont donnés par Madame Jessica.” / “…the games, the songs, the classes and the advice that are given to me by Madame Jessica.”

“…c’est les conseils qu’on me donne, qu’on m’explique, et les mouvement de la madame. “ / “…it’s the advice that is given to me, that is explained to me, and the movement of the madame."

J’ai frequenté le Club des Filles parce que… / I attended Girls’ Club because…

“… le Club des Filles est bon et puissant.” / “Because Girls’ Club is good and powerful."

“…le Club des Filles peut me guider dans le monde.” / “Girls’ Club can guide me in the world.”

“… ça nous apprend beaucoup de choses sur l’avenir qui peuvent m’aider dans la vie.” / “…it teaches us lots of things about the future that can help me in my life.”

“…je veux mon avenir.” / “…I want my futre.”

“…j’avais envie de savoir les précautions à prendre pour éviter les garçons. » / “…I wanted to know the precautions to take to avoid boys."

“Si j’ai fréquenté le Club des Filles c’est tous juste pour avoir un avenir meilleur, et connaitre les moyens pour lesquels il faut reconnaitre une maladie ou comment convaincre un garçon ou comment l’amener a utiliser le préservatif avant d’avoir les rapports sexuels. » / “If I have gone to Girls’ Club it is all just to have a better future, and to know the means by which you can recognize an illness or how to convince a boy or how to convince him to use a condom before sex.”

“…ça m’amène à passer sur la bonne voie, pour avoir mon avenir.” / “…it brings me to pass by the good route, to have my future.”

“…j’ai été attiré par tout les conseils donnés dans ce club.” / “…I was attracted by all the advice given in this club.”

Quand je suis au Club des Filles, je me sens… / When I’m at Girls’ Club, I feel…

“…bon et je suis en joie.” / “Good and I am joyous.”

“…très à l’aise, parce que j’écoute des conseils qui m’aideront dans l’avenir.” / “…very at ease, because I listen to advice that will help me in the future."

Ce que je n’aime pas du Club des Filles c’est… / What I don’t like about Girls’ Club is…

“…les comportements des autres filles qui bavardent quand la madame travaille.” / « the behavior of the other girls who talk when the madame is working. »

Ce que j’ai appris au Club des Filles c’est… / What I learned at Girls’ Club is…

“…que les garçons ne laissent pas les filles à évoluer. Ils empêchent les filles d’étudier avec une bonne conscience, ils harcellent les filles quand elles refusent leur avances. » / “…boys don’t let girls get ahead. They block girls from studying with a good conscience, they harass girls when they refuse their advances. “

“…comment il faut faire pour être une femme leader.” / “…what you have to do to become a ‘woman leader.’”

« …qu’il faut se battre pour atteindre ce qu’il te faut dans cette vie. » / “…that you have to fight in order to get what you deserve in this life.”

“…que je rêve faire quelque chose d’extraordinaire en créant des écoles de musique, en écrivant, et faisant plusieurs d’autre chose.” / “…that I dream of doing something extraordinary, in creating music schools, in writing, and in doing many other things.”

“…à penser à mon avenir, ce que je vais faire, et ce que je ne dois pas faire à l’avenir. J’ai appris ce qui peut me faire échouer avant d’atteindre mon but. » / “…to think of my future, of what I will do, and what I should not do in the future. I learned what can make me fail before reaching my goals.”

“…ce qu’il faut faire pour réussir entant qu’une fille malgré les souffrances dans la vie et de ne pas se décourager.” / “…what you must do to succeed as a girl despite all the suffering in life, and to not get discouraged."

Sexual Harassment Tour

I think I wrote a few times about how I was planning to help a Parakou-based NGO evaluate its sexual harassment project, though I’m not sure I ever wrote about how that went. In January, I spent a week travelling around the Borgou region of Benin (where Parakou is located) visiting 28 different secondary schools, where I interviewed students, teachers, and administrators about the project. The week was long, and the results were a mix of uplifting and discouraging. I was supposed to travel in the NGO’s car with a driver, but at the last minute, the car was unavailable, so I was left to my own devices… that is, bush taxis and zems. So I spent five days with a map of Benin and a list of secondary schools, calculating how far I thought I could get in a day and waiting in the sun for taxis to come along and take me there. Of course, five days spent traveling meant five days of ridiculous transportation tales, though only a few come to mind now. One day, I hired a Fulani zemijahn to drive me along a back road connecting several villages with secondary schools. We left early in the morning, and as it was still the cool season, it was quite cold, driving along on a motorcycle. I was wrapped in a pagne and huddling behind the zem, and he taught me Fulani phrases the whole way. That was a nice trip. In the afternoon that same day, I had to wait several hours in the sun for a car to come by with space for me. I sat in the shade with several kids, who took to helping me hold my things and try to flag down a car. Each time a car passed, the boys would run to the roadside and start flapping their arms, shouting the name of the next village I was headed to. Finally, a van stopped for me, and I got in. We hadn’t gotten very far when a teenage girl sitting in the row behind me threw up. She’d just eaten Sulani, a locally-produced ice-cream-like snack, and she had aimed for the window, which was closed. Thus she ended up throwing up all over the closed window, and it splattered all over everyone in the car. We had to stop the vehicle so everyone could clean off, and several people in the car berated the girl, telling her you “can’t just eat every single thing you see.” I went to the next school smelling slightly of vomit, and I talked to the director there. He was a huge jerk, the kind of man who exuded an “I harass female students” vibe, and he spoke to me in a very fake, condescending way, working on other things the entire time I interviewed him. He made a point of saying that the only thing he thought the NGO should change about the project was for it to give out more cell phones and t-shirts, and then he helped me find a zem to take me back to Parakou. By that time, I was totally exhausted and discouraged, plus badly in need of a shower, so gladly headed back and called it a day.

That first tour was mostly discouraging. The project had just gotten under way, and it seemed like anyone who had something positive to say about it was doing so just to tell me what I wanted to hear. Some directors would swear to me how the project had “revolutionized” the schools, and then professors and volunteers in those same communities would tell me the exact opposite, or even rat out those same directors for harassing students. Money was a huge issue. The project has a huge budget, including motorcycles for all its field agents, a car for the NGO, new cell phones for all the schools (to be used to report cases of harassment), per diem for all the administrators and teachers who attend trainings, and lots of t-shirts. As a result, no one seemed to want to do anything without “something more to encourage them.” They would say to me, “You can’t tell me a project like that doesn’t have the money to give ME x.”

But I did meet a few earnest people and a few very kind people who wanted to help me. In one village on the goudron, I had told the director that I was planning on heading to the next school along the goudron. I left his school around noon, and the censeur followed me outside, telling me I wouldn’t find a taxi at that time and even if I did, there would be nowhere to wait til 3:00 when the school opened up again. I was better off spending my repos with him, he said, and he invited me back to his house. I sensed a trap and tried to dodge it, but he persisted, so I finally agreed to go wait with him at a buvette. He turned out to be a shy, kind, and inquisitive man, and he called up another teacher to come meet us. They exchanged a few words in Bariba and then said to me, solemnly, “We have several questions for you. You see, we have never had a Volunteer and we haven’t had the chance to ask an American any questions.” Then they proceeded to ask me several thoughtful questions, like “In America, if a person chooses not to school, do the people say that he is retaining a valuable traditional culture?” At another school, I met a director who had taught French at a high school in Minnesota as a Fulbright scholar. As he tried to explain to me, in English, what he had thought of Minnesota, his experience came back to him, and he interspersed phrases like “oh shit oh fuck, oh my GOD!” in his speech. He was one of the most earnest directors I met and gave me a lot of useful suggestions for the project, and I was glad to have met him.

In June, I did the tour again, this time traveling to 18 different schools in the Alibori, Benin’s northeastern-most region. This time, I travelled from place to place with the NGO’s field agents via motorcycle. It was really interesting to actually see the field agents work and to see how the project had progressed in five months. Again, many people told me that the NGO’s work had caused sexual harassment to decrease, though this is hard to verify. At least, several of the agents had had cases of harassment reported to them and so had passed that information onto the NGO and the authorities. Several people had even gone to legal hearings. I spoke to a lot of students who had agreed to participate in the NGO’s “alert committees,” acting as watchdogs at their own schools. At one school, three teachers had been prosecuted for harassment, and the students on the committee there were taking the brunt of the criticism for this. The two male students I met with said they were scared, but at the same time, they were eager to continue working for the benefit of their school and the female students. That was both depressing and heartening at the same time.

It was also a great chance to see the Alibori, which is considered the backwater of Benin and its toughest, hottest region. Fortunately for me, the rains had started, and so everything was green and beautiful. This was the only region of Benin where I’ve ever seen thatched fences widely used; everywhere, gardens were closed in with fences made from dried cornstalks. One man took me to meet a teacher who was working part-time at the local clinic. I met him at the one-room clinic and took a seat outside on the porch, just next to the clinic’s front door. As we talked, I heard a “ping, ping” and looked down and noticed a cut open jerry can on the floor, being used as a trash receptacle. The noise I heard was the plinking of syringes against the porch wall; as they were used, they were being tossed at the wall and bouncing into the jerry can, literally inches from my feet! Leaving that village, we passed by an elementary school, closing for the day. All the little students were carrying loads of cornstalks on their heads. The NGO worker I was with explained to me that they were carrying the cornstalks to construct a fence for their school’s director.

Speaking of sexual harassment in Beninese schools, I heard a really depressing story this week: I may have told some of you about the teacher in Bassila who raped a student last year. He got out of jail, at the director’s urging, because the school would have otherwise been short of teachers, and so he went back to work. This school year, he got another student (actually in a class even lower than the one he raped last year) pregnant. She attempted a back-alley abortion and died, and the teacher has run away.

Camp Success 2010

Camp Success, the girls’ camp or Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World, as Peace Corps girls’ empowerment camps are generally called worldwide) that Naima and I co-led this year, was held last week. It was such a tremendously awesome, exciting, rewarding, and (if I may say so) well-planned and seamless event that I hardly know where to begin to describe it, so I’ll just tell you everything.

Sunday afternoon, the girls arrived at the weaving center in Djougou where our camp is held. We had invited the 60 top female students from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade in 16 different schools in the Donga region. Generally speaking, families and schools transported the girls to their commune center, and from there, the local governments provided transportation to Djougou. We signed the girls in and gave them t-shirts, bandanas (thank you Carly! These were popular with everyone and looked great all week!), camp manuals, pens, and name tags, and they got started learning camp songs and doing a get-to-know-you scavenger hunt. We divided the girls into six teams of ten, each led by a PCV and a “tanti” (auntie) or in one group’s case a “tonton” (uncle)—Beninese role models. These teams worked together all week, and we started them on team activities right away, so they began bonding early. The effect was obvious—by Sunday night girls had clicked and started forming friendships, and the whole camp seemed very cohesive by Monday night. I hardly saw any girls who seemed left out or ate alone or anything like that this year. We had an opening ceremony Sunday night, and then our invited guests had a snack while the girls discussed camp rules. After our first dinner together, we rotated the teams through six different activities: a tour of the weaving center, a name game based on the ever popular drinking game “Thumper,” bracelet-making, a tooth-brushing session (thanks to some university in America that donated thousands of toothbrushes to Peace Corps Benin), the “step forward if you…” game, and a hand-clap game/song about an elephant balancing on a spider web. After that, the girls went to bed, more or less. Naima and I had to get up several times the first night to make sure they were sleeping, and they started getting up at 3:30 in the morning to shower, so we had to send them back to bed! After that we managed to exhaust the girls enough that they didn’t keep us up all night every night, but needless to say, we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep all week and looked rather like zombies, though we pushed ourselves to be energetic, peppy, and entertaining all week.

We began each morning with songs or other group activities, followed by breakfast and a story by a tanti about her life. Then, the campers broke into their teams to play an ice-breaker and do a group discussion about the day’s themes. (The task of planning all the games for the week was given to Heidi. I had this book of games, produced in the early 70s, complete with lots of photos of people with handlebar mustaches, long hair, and bellbottoms, and Heidi—whom I love dearly and you will soon see why—went to town with it. When I gave her the book, she immediately started reading this game called the “Walkajabber” and exclaimed, “I LOVE this book already! Because not only does it have games, but it has facts! Listen, the walkajabber is a bird from New Zealand. It usually stands by grasping its legs with its hands… and by hands, I’m going to assume they mean wings…” before finally figuring out that it was all made up. We laughed, and we’re still laughing about it many weeks later.) For the rest of the day, the girls attended various informational sessions, with breaks for lunch, snack, and a dinner, and in the evening, we usually had a film.

On Monday, we did personal well-being activities. Heidi taught yoga (for three hours non-stop, yes), and Melissa led a craft where girls described themselves by writing an acrostic of their name. My favorite was one of the Bassila girls, Djoumai, who wrote for the O in her name “Oublier mes enemies pour m’avancer,” or “Forget about my enemies to move ahead.” Right on! In the afternoon, Melissa taught the girls about the nutritional benefits of moringa, a tropical tree rich in protein and other things, and Sarah T. planted trees with the girls and gave them each a seed and helped them plant them in bags to take home. Afterwards, we paraded over to a secondary school nearby, singing all the way. There, we played soccer, kickball, dodgeball, and relay races. The relay races, which Heidi and I led, were a huge hit, and after a few rounds in, we had a huge crowd of students surrounding us to watch. We had so many races planned that not every group got to do them all, but we did passing oranges from chin to chin, filling buckets of water with a sponge, dressing in a bunch of clothes and then passing the clothes to the next person, leapfrogging, crabwalking, three-legged races (the tantis thought the girls had figured out “the secret” when they learned to leave their middle leg in the air and go flying down the court haphazardly), and potato (charcoal) sacks. (We had several very adorable, tiny girls at camp this year, but the one who beat them all for cuteness was Gwladys, who turned 11 during camp. She actually fit entirely into a charcoal bag! Probably the cutest thing about Gwladys was that she was aware of how cute she was, and every time you’d notice how adorable she was and she’d notice you noticing her, she’d break out in a grin and hide her face as if to say, “I know, I can’t help it! I’m just the cutest thing anyone has ever seen!” And she was.) I’m not as young as I once was, and after a few leapfrog demonstrations my knees were all scuffed up and I was very sore, but the girls really got some air on those leaps. Afterwards, we paraded back to the center for showers, dinner, and a movie about arranged marriage in Benin.

On Tuesday, we focused on careers and objectives. Rather than having a career panel this year, we had five professional women come and sit with each team for fifteen minutes, then rotate. We had a doctor (who, at 27, made all of us feel quite unimpressive!), a singer/restaurant-owner, an accountant, an NGO project supervisor, and an NGO director, and they all emphasized the importance of objective-setting, education, and hard work. This event was one of the most inspiring parts of last year’s camp, and girls in Bassila STILL talk about it, so I hope this year’s panel had an even greater impact. Afterwards, Naima and one of the tantis led a presentation on objective-setting. In the afternoon, the girls decorated notebooks with tissue to make nice journals, and Sarah P. led a session on journaling. For that session, we sat in a room on mats, listening to some relaxing, alternative music, while the girls practiced free-association writing and journaling. It was about the most stereotypically hippy-ish thing I’ve done in the Peace Corps, which we pointed out to Sarah P., and she responded by then having the girls sit in a circle, hold hands, and sing kum-ba-yah. To be honest, it was the most relaxing part of my week. After dinner, we showed the girls “Bend it Like Beckham,” which went over even better than “Mulan” did last year (which I actually blogged about, so feel free to look that up if you’re curious.) This was an unexpected success. When we had first decided to show a different movie than “Mulan,” someone suggested “Bend it Like Beckham,” and we agreed to it without much thought. But then watching it with the girls, we realized how perfect it was. Here are two girls trying to follow their passion of playing soccer, hoping to make a career out of it, planning on attending university, and in the meantime being blocked by their mothers’ desire for them to behave like traditional women, pressure to find boyfriends, problems with friends and boys, and the expectation that girls aren’t as good at sports as boys. It tied in our sports and objectives themes perfectly. Plus, the girls could relate a lot to the Indian cultural elements in the movie, and it was cool to be working in a cross-cultural setting and show a cross-cultural movie. They got so into the girls’ soccer match at the end of the movie, cheering like it was a World Cup game, and they kept applauding for the girls’ fathers when they stuck up for the girls. They LOVED it.

On Wednesday, Rut, Heidi, and two of our tantis led presentations on puberty and reproduction, and Colleen and a tanti led a discussion on the consequences of early pregnancy. The reproductive health sessions are, I think, one of the most valuable components of camp; this is information most girls will never learn in school, as it is taught in 9th grade when most female students have already dropped out, and it is a taboo subject that is never discussed at home. Another tanti and I led a discussion on passive, aggressive, and confident behaviors in the afternoon, and then our tonton and Sarah T. led a session on decision-making. After dinner, the girls watched a movie on sexual harassment in schools.

Thursday was a long and difficult day. We woke up to a rainstorm, which delayed our breakfast and gave us a late start on our day. Once everyone had finally eaten, we piled into 4 mini-buses and began traveling north, through Natitingou, and 45 km off the goudron to Boukoumbé, a village in the Atacora mountains famous for its Tata Somba houses. The girls sang most of the way to Boukoumbé, and as one of our vans was not in top form, it took us about 3 hours to get there. Half the girls went with me to tour the Tata Somba houses and learn about the Somba culture, which is quite unique. The guides who took us were inexperienced and actually didn’t know much about the Somba history, but they were able to tell us what it was like to live in a Tata Somba and what kind of cultural significance it has for them today. Then we went into town to visit the shop of a man who sells African artifacts, and I asked him to come talk to the girls about his business. We relocated to a shady spot on the side of the road, and he began explaining the story of how he began his business. The girls posed lots of intelligent questions about his objectives and obstacles that had blocked him, which we took as a sign that they’d learned something from the sessions, and he went on to give the girls advice about refusing men, and even telling a story about how he was “chercher”ing a woman who he then slept with and mistreated and she got so angry that she broke his foot! Lesson: even nice men who come to give presentations at camp are probably pigs. A few random people stopped by our group and just started presenting without any introduction or request for permission from the camp leaders, which drove me crazy, particularly as none of my Beninese counterparts were at all helpful in getting rid of them so we could get on with our program. Eventually, the second half of the group met up with us and we all ate lunch at a primary school. In the afternoon, I took my group to visit a collective enterprise that exports essential oils from various local plants. Their business was really cool, and the girls really enjoyed it, so much so that it got to be quite late and I had to practically drag everyone out. Meanwhile, Naima’s group, which had the bad vehicle, had already started heading back toward Djougou. We met them on the road, and sure enough, her vehicle was puttering along, straining as it tried to climb the mountain out of Boukoumbé. It got to a point where everyone had to get out and walk while the driver kept on, though the car still kept breaking down. Girls started getting into the other cars, but one of the drivers refused to let any enter his. My driver accepted several girls, and within a few minutes of driving overloaded, he had a blowout. It was a total transportation disaster. Eventually all the girls got loaded into the other cars, and a few PCVs got into the broken down car. By the time we were even halfway out of Boukoumbé to Natitingou it was dark. I was so scared driving back to Djougou with all those girls. You come to accept how bad the transportation is here, but then, when we finally crested the mountain and saw Natitingou lit up in the nighttime… and I mean, lit up with its feeble lights… I remembered I was in the middle of Africa, in the dark, sending three overloaded vans full of girls down a dark and poorly kept road for an hour-long drive. At some point our driver started playing music on his phone, which I figured was to keep himself awake, and I was worried if I fell asleep too something would happen. We got home around 9:30 pm, everyone intact, though mostly with broken spirits. A few girls were energetic though, and we let them have a short dance party while they ate dinner, and then we sent them to bed.

The next morning, the day started early. We split the girls up into three groups and rotated them through different activities: working on skits, talking to a midwife about reproduction, and visiting an internet café. I led the internet café trip, and it went extremely well. Gwladys, the cutest girl at camp, got only more adorable by revealing that her middle name is “Audrey Amour” and then choosing to spend her time on the internet researching “the process for becoming a doctor.” Other searches ranged from prehistoric man, to the Obama family, to math exercises, to Petit Miguelito. It was a big success, though again, transportation was a hassle: we tried to send all the girls back to the weaving center on zems, which was chaotic. Finally, we just caved in and rented a van. Back at the weaving center, we led a session on girls’ clubs. Naima and I talked about our clubs, and two of her club members and one of mine were at camp, so they talked about their experiences too. Then we had the girls work with their schoolmates and members of their communities (the tantis and PCVs) to make an action plan for forming a club, and I think it went really, really well. Several groups seemed very serious about starting clubs, and I am very hopeful that at least a couple will be born out of our camp. In the evening, each team presented a skit about difficult life situations. We had three honorary judges come in, and we didn’t give them a lot of instruction but just sat them down and let them watch. Afterwards, we consulted with them, and it was so funny and brilliantly Beninese. On their own, they had determined five categories for evaluating the skits and awarded points to each team. They’d created tables (with straight edges, of course) to record each team’s points and a table summarizing the results across the teams. The final results were signed by the “Members of the Jury” with a special signature for the “President of the Jury.” Yes, we’re saving that as a souvenir! Afterwards, the girls ate fete food (fried chicken and couscous), watched a slideshow of camp photos, and had a dance party.

The next morning, we tied up loose ends, sang a LOT, and finally held our closing ceremony. We gave each girl a new school uniform, a bookbag with the camp logo, and some supplies, and they were SO excited! All week they knew they were getting uniforms, as seamstresses were working on them at the weaving center, but they were totally surprised by the bookbags. Several teams had prepared songs that they wanted to sing, and during one of the songs, which was a goodbye song, the whole team started crying. I started crying too, and then at least one other volunteer did, and by the end of the ceremony all the girls were crying, and no one wanted to go home. I gave out a lot of hugs and a lot of stickers and told the girls that camp is only the beginning and that their lives have great things in store for them. I told them that I look forward to the day when I hear their accomplishments.

And I do. I can’t imagine a better camp than the one we put on this week, nor a better set of campers or a better team of volunteers to work with. I do really think that we succeeded in moving the girls, pushing them to see themselves and their futures in a new way, and giving them the confidence to believe in that vision. I hope that their confidence and their enthusiasm endures.

Since arriving in Bassila and beginning to work with its cyber café, I have frequently envisioned running some sort of after-school computer club for high-achieving kids. But then the cyber went through some rough points where few of its computers were working and the internet bill couldn’t be paid. As happens to many excellent ideas for Peace Corps projects, it went to the side. I thought about it again a few months ago; couldn’t I use my girls’ club girls? What if I had them write short stories and selected the authors of the best stories to participate? I wrote up a grant and was ready to submit it, when the teachers’ union went on strike. For about eight weeks, none of the permanent teachers were working. (Some schools in Benin kept functioning; others were working Monday and Friday only; Bassila, true to form, quit entirely. They even decided to stick it to the man for ONE EXTRA DAY after the national teachers’ union called the strike off.) I put off submission of my grant for “Spring Break Camp Creativity” until I knew whether there would be a spring break or not. Eventually, as the weeks of striking went on with no end in sight, I forgot I’d ever had a plan.

Then last weekend, I was thinking about what to do with my girls at this week’s girls’ club. We have held TWENTY MEETINGS so far (yes! I think this project can be deemed a resounding success!), so I’ve done most of the things I sought out to do with them. And then I remembered, what about my computer camp? I told one of my girls about it, and she was really excited, so I felt encouraged. I pulled up the grant and called the cyber café director to my house, and he agreed it was a good idea and started helping me plan logistics.

I thought at first I would just announce the competition to the girls, wait several weeks, and see what they came up with in the way of short stories. And then I got really into it. I don’t know how many times in my childhood I attended “creative writing workshops,” but short story-writing was definitely a passion of mine in my youth. I started outlining my notes for the club session and listing writing prompts, getting excited about the multiple objectives this would fulfill.

The project would give me something cool to do with local girls (Peace Corps second year bucket list, check one!) and something worthwhile to do with the cyber café (bucket list, check two!). Additionally, it would perhaps give me a chance to learn about these girls’ lives in a way I rarely have a chance to, while encouraging creativity and critical thinking. One of my inspirations for joining the Peace Corps was Peter Hessler’s River Town, a book about his two years volunteering in China as an English teacher. I re-read River Town after a year in Benin, and in many ways his story made me jealous. He frequently assigned writing assignments to his students and then quoted students’ responses in his book, revealing many interesting attitudes toward Chinese politics and also several heart-wrenching personal narratives about local life. But… I sometimes doubt whether Beninese students’ command of French is equal to Peter Hessler’s students’ command of English, and certainly, the Beninese education system’s rigid structure hardly encourages creative thought (and yes, I’m comparing this to the education system in rural Communist China). I once tried to get my girls to write autobiographies, and it was a failure. They stared at their pages blankly, until I wrote a list of questions on the board hoping to get them “thinking.” I got back sheets of papers with answers to the questions, filled out survey-style. “Languages spoken: Fon, French, Anii. What do you like about school? All subjects. Has anything really difficult ever happened to you? No. What was life like for your parents? Did they attend school? Yes.” This project, if carried out successfully, would push students to think creatively and express themselves, perhaps writing their first short story (I can tell you, in a country where students cut responses on test questions short to preserve the ink in their ballpoint pens, profligate pleasure-writing isn’t exactly a standard past-time.)

I ran into this same problem quite a bit on Wednesday, too, but I think in the end all of the girls were able to come up with a good story idea. Most of the girls were really excited when I introduced the “Atelier d’écriture créative,” and a lot of them had useful contributions when we discussed creative writing in a general, theoretical sense. I asked them what the “advantages” of creative writing were, and got answers like “to express your imagination” and “to convince others.” So then I asked them to just start throwing out ideas for their pieces, and… nothing. I put up a list of story ideas, such as “an important event in your life,” “your favorite people,” and “advice,” and instead of getting inspiration from this and writing something like “the day my sister got married” they all started writing “an important event in my life” and then staring nervously at me, not sure where to go from there. I had anticipated coming up with story themes would take a lot of pushing. Certainly, if I’d tried this in my first few months in Benin I would have gotten really frustrated and gone home and written a much different blog about it. So we started doing story webbing, coming up with examples for each theme, and then coming up with examples for those examples, and so on and so on, until we had what were still very general topics, like “my mom.” But every girl had a topic, at least. I’d hoped to get started on drafting at least a little bit, but we had already run past the two hours that we normally meet in. I kept going though, and I made each girl do a web about her principal character. Only one girl had picked a man—her grandfather—and most had picked their moms. Then I had them draw a flow chart of the events in their stories, and again, every single girl had something, and actually, they all seemed pretty deep. It’s a rather tragic set of plot lines, all in all: a friend goes from being hard-working and dignified to trampy, gets pregnant, and drops out of school; a grandpa refuses to go to the hospital and dies; a friend’s father sells her into a forced marriage, the police intervene, and the girl is allowed to return to school. I think all these girls wanted to tell these stories, but were too embarrassed at first or didn’t know if they could. After all the brainstorming and me continually pushing them with “Which of these topics would be the most interesting? Which one is the most important to you?” they finally got them down.

Eventually, all the girls left except one, my sole Muslim student. She is quiet but diligent, and throughout the whole session she had been noting lots of ideas so didn’t need much interference from me. All I knew was that she had chosen to write about her mom, so I came to look at her web. She’d described her mom as beautiful, hard-working, and worried. The story timeline she’d written out was all crammed together, words spilling out of boxes, so I couldn’t make out much of what she’d written beyond the first couple words. The girl started reading them to me, quietly, and I realized, this was a hard story to tell. This was about her mom trying to commit suicide, being hospitalized, and finally going home, where she continues to suffer. One box said, “If you’re going to kill yourself, just do it already.” I asked the girl if she could write about how she felt about these events, and said it would be good if she did. “No, it wouldn’t be good,” she said. I sat down on the bench with her, and I told her I knew this story was difficult. “I meant, it is a very sad story. But if you could write about what it felt like, how you responded to your mother, the story will be more interesting.” And she agreed. I wished her “Du courage,” and she solemnly folded up the paper to take home and work on.

I think this project is going to end up being a more important one, for all of us, than I had realized at first. So I’m looking forward to the next few weeks, and the challenge of figuring out how to teach these girls to write. I’m not even concerned about the quality of the writing so much, as I just want them to have the chance to express these things, for once, and for once to have a writing assignment where they can’t go wrong with what they say, where no professor is looking to “discourage them a little,” where they won’t lose points for not having properly underlined their titles with a straight edge.

To top off a pretty inspiring girls’ club, one of my girls came back into the room. As the top student in her cinquième (approximately 7th grade) class, she was selected to participate in Camp Success. The previous day, the school’s censeur (who’s in charge of class scheduling, grades, etc.) had come to inform her of her selection. She had come to talk to me about her invitation, and she was all smiles as she gushed to me, “When I saw the censeur come to me, I was just praying, please let it be for Camp Success! Please let it be for Camp Success!” Prayer answered. A good day for us both.

Maman Jessica, Guest Blogger

April 25, 2010

Mali, as Jessica has said, was magical. Make no mistake, it was dirty, dusty, humid, hot, and there was no running water, but it was magical none the less. When Jess read form the guidebook that we were going to be hiking the escarpment, I was nonplussed, to say the least. But, what-the-heck, we were already on the bus in the middle of no-where, so there weren’t really any other options!

When we arrived at the end of our bus journey, we were met by a “friend of O’s” who took us to the Campement du Amis de Hogon Guindo, in Bankass, where we met O, PCV tour guide extraordinaire. We had a shower, settled in to our hut, had dinner, and slept under the stars. O had planned our trip with us that night, and showed us around the campement. There were two long rectangular white washed stucco buildings, one on each side of the walled compound, showers, latrines and a water pump at one end, and a thatched pavilion supported by carved ancestors, followed by another walled area, and the round sleeping huts. On that first night, we slept on mats on a roof with Sterling, a PCV from Niger. There were lines up for mosquito nets on the roof; he went to sleep before we did, and we pulled the lines and the branch holding them over on him. Oooops! Being the dry season, there were no mosquitoes.

The next day, the Niger PCVs left before we did, while we took a horse cart across the plains to the escapement. To me, this was most impressive. The fields had all been harvested, but there were a few men out gathering the stalks for thatch. O said that they planted cotton, millet, sorghum, and quinoa. Goats were then turned out to graze in the fields. Thatch was often left to dry in the branches of the baobab trees. Ingenious! Why don’t we do that in the States? Another interesting farming technique was that mangoes, neem, and baobab trees were left to grow in the fields, because they are such important plants. Again, ingenious! We saw some Fulani herding their cattle, Fulani houses in the fields, and women walking from a funeral.

At about noon, we arrived at our first stop, Yabatalu, where we dropped off our goods, and began our fist hike. We hiked across the sand to Tele, where we ate lunch, had a nap, and then hiked up to the first of the abandoned escarpment villages. The Dogon live very much like the American Indians of the desert southwest lived, and their history appears to be quite similar, as are the deforestation patterns. O said that the first people to build in the escarpment were the Telem people, whose women built tiny structures to hide their valuables, grain, and black magic. He said they arrived in the 7th century. The tiny little houses high up in the escarpment gave rise to the myth that the Tele mould fly. Enter, in the 17th century, the Dogon people. They pushed the Telem out with their fierce ways, and lived in the cliffs in order to protect themselves from their enemies (there were many…Songhai Empire, anyone?) and wild animals. They were farmers, and went down to the plains/rainforest to farm, millet being a staple crop. Living in the escarpment also helped them to avoid conversion to Islam until 50 years ago, (again, read up on the Islamic jihads that brought Islam across the Sahara and the Sahel).

Dogon houses in the escapement look a lot like the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. The rooms are small, windows are up high,

Ladders are made of carved wood. Dogon ladders are carved out of a trunk or thick branch of a tree, and are solid, however, with little steps notched in and a Y at the top. Dogon men and women kept separate granaries; the women’s had a pot like space in the middle of their granaries, again, to hide their valuables; from their husbands, says O! (Conflicts between women and men seem to be a theme of Dogon culture, to hear O tell it. Indeed, when speaking about polygamy, which is common in West Africa, O is of the opinion that men who keep wives in the same house, compound, or village are asking for trouble. “Women talk too much! Such a man will never have any peace! I would never do this! NEVER! HAHAHAHAHAhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”)

The view from this village in the escarpment over the plains of the Sahel was very, very impressive, and one of the most lasting impressions that I have of West Africa. What I had at first thought of as empty, untrammeled land was actually tilled farmland for as far as the eye could see. The little villages of the Dogon are at the base of the escarpment, or at the top, and the famers go down into the fields every day. It was unbelievable.

I have always enjoyed walking, or really, for me, strolling, but I don’t do it much at home. At the slow and leisurely pace in which we hiked the escarpment and the sands in Mali, I was able to examine the vegetation, the land, and the animals. Mali’s landscape is very similar to the American Southwest. The soil is red, the roads, except for the goudron are dirt, and the escarpment looks like any escarpment you could hike in New Mexico or Arizona.

I was especially thrilled to see my first baobab tree, which I think Americans equate with Africa. They really look like something Dr. Suess would have invented. The trunks are thick, and the branches are a variety of shapes, and the fruit pods are furry and hang from an impossibly long stem. Little children are often found standing under the trees whacking at the fruit with long sticks, hoping to knock down a ripe one. Ripe fruit I never tasted, but dried fruit is small little squares of very tart flesh that surrounds a large brown seed. The fruit dissolves in your mouth and makes you salivate, which is wonderful in the desert!

The Dogon houses are made of mud bricks, just like the adobe bricks of the American southwest Indians. Millet chaff is used to stabilize the dirt. Houses are then plastered with mud, and thatched with millet stalks. The homes were round rooms within a walled compound, both the family compounds, and the compound wall for the whole village. Doors and window frames are elaborately carved and embellished with male and female ancestor figures, snakes, lizards, alligators, egrets, and other symbols. The Dogon are known for their carving, and it is impressive.

After this hike, we went back to Yabatalu for dinner. I had sunstroke form the horse cart ride, and had covered myself in a long sleeved T-shirt, hat, and scarf, all of which I wore for the remainder of my time in Mali. I was really dehydrated, and had to drink a dehydration packet, which, at the time, tasted like nectar of the Gods, but which I real life, is just nasty, nasty, nasty! It was at that point, that I really began to question Jessica’s belief that I was up for “hiking across the escarpment, and leaping form boulder to boulder on all fours” as I imagined my self dying in the desert sands of diarrhea, dehydration, and sunburn! Those nice little mud houses in the escarpment would do very nicely, and if they just needed to wall me up in one, well, I would have died happy.

At any rate, I recovered. I had a good night sleep, drank more delicious dehydration salts, covered myself up from head to toe (seriously). And we were off. The following days we hiked to Ende, Bengnimato, and back to Yabatalu. We saw women dyeing indigo, men making baskets, men making indigo shawls, women pounding/threshing millet, women drawing and carrying water. We saw meetings held under trees, Fulanni cattle drivers, brick making works, and an Arab Iman on horseback complete with flowing robes, sunglasses, and gold. We saw and played with numerous adorable children, “Ca va le bon-bon? Ca va le Bic? Ca va la walla-ballu?” We enjoyed buying jewelry, indigo, carvings, and calabash. We talked with farmers, and took pictures of children wearing Barack Obama paraphernalia. We saw cattle, goats, chickens, mules, and a camel. We saw gorgeous scenery, and met friendly people. We watched a traditional funeral dance (“Demonstration. Just for the Whiteys. HAHAHAhaaaaaaaaaaa” ) went to sleep to drums and woke up to roosters calling, donkeys braying, and beautiful African sunrises. O talked to us of Dogon history, circumcision ceremonies, marriage, traditional religions, Islam, politics, and child trafficking. He hauled me up mountains, and made me bathe in a stream to “refresh you, Mom, while I go have a pee.” He was a gentleman, a wonderful guide, and someone we will always consider a friend.

The things that I did on this trip that I should not have done were legion, (well, at least according to the Colorado Health Department) and I will list some of them here. I was happy to do them all, and take none of them back, although I did end up with a wicked case of giardia, and, let’s just say I’m an official PCV now, and much of my reading audience will know what that means.

I ate unwashed carrots in Ouagadougou.

I drank millet beer poured from a plastic gas can into a communal calabash.

I drank fresh, unhomogenized milk from Fulani woman. Twice (O: “No, Mom! You did NOT drink that milk did you. DID YOU MOM?” This experience leads O to say, whenever the Fulani approach, “Look Mom, here come some of your friends!”

Yes, and it was delicious.

I sat, not squatted, in the shitter…

I ate peanuts and baobab fruit from the unswashed hands of small boys…(O: “Mom! DO not eat that! It is not for you!” Too late!

I drank numerous glasses of China tea made from water out of a barrel and shared with strangers… (“Strong like death, soft like life, sweet like love.”)

I ate unwashed fruit from vendors…watermelon, and citrus, and nuts…

I ate some very sketchy buille from a street vendor…

I went barefoot, a lot, much to everyone’s consternation…

When we left the Dogon, I handed one partially empty water bottle to a small boy who followed our horse cart. The joy in his eyes when I handed it to him was matched by the spring in his step as he sauntered off down the road, hoisted the bottle to his lips, and then skipped down the dusty, red dirt road. Mali was magical; I will not forget it. We cried when we left.

The trip home took three days, many busses, and taxis, some of which broke down. I kept myself amused by making friends with small children. One unforgettable little girl of about four wore a blue velvet turban in her hair, and cried when she was passed up to the front of the bus to sit apart from her Grandma. The men passed her back and she sat next to me, and fell asleep across my lap. I shared my water and lemons with her. I also kept track of the amazing tissue designs, which I will list for you here:

Dragonflies, chickens, chicks and eggs (very popular), snowflakes, eyes, Moamar Khadafy, windmills, airplanes helicopters, can openers with small cans, shrimps (very popular), pintards, leaves (a variety of leaf tissue), wine bottle pouring into goblets on a table that is a hand, Barack Obama, snails, doves, electric fans, star of David with Arabic writing, ballot boxes, cd player with CDs, Tissue boxes, conch shells, star fish, street signs with directions, birds in cages flying out into nests in trees, bananas, suitcases, watering cans, coffee pots, the Nativity, pant brushes with paint splotches, padlocks and keys, teacher tissue with ABCs and slates, flashlights with eyes, binoculars, beer bottles and openers, the rooms of a house, and last, but not least, the resurrection of Christ with the words “Christ is resuscitated” (which prompted Jess and I to respond, “He is resuscitated, indeed.” Tissue in West Africa is a wondrous, wondrous thing! I could never see enough of it!

We arrived home from our trip to Mali to Jessica’s village late in the evening. The bus stopped in the village, and our things were unloaded in the road. Jessica left me alone for a few minutes while she went to hire a pousse-pousse (sp?): someone (in this case, two little boys) who loaded our luggage on a metal cart and pushed it down the goudron to Jessica’s house. Oddly, it was at this point that I had my first moment of real panic. I was hot, exhausted, and it was night; Jessica had disappeared, and I, standing by the road on the African continent, spoke not enough French to do anything for myself; I was tired, stinky, exhausted, hungry and with a bad case of stomach cramps, and my girl just disappeared! Needless to say, Jess returned post-haste, pouse-pousse pushers at the ready, and we walked another long distance into the night to Jessica’s house. As we arrived on her road, her porch light glowed in the distance through the smoky and humid night, and her friends and Carl came running out to meet us.

After a quick rinse in the bucket shower and a change of clothes, we were off back down the road for a dinner of pommes frites and chicken. French fries in West Africa! Who knew? I, who have never met a potato I didn’t like, was instantly revived! At the restaurant, we sat in the dark with lanterns glowing, and enjoyed dinner and beers while Carl lounged at our feet.

Back at the house, we began to arrange Christmas presents and stuff stockings. It was at this point, that Jessica heard a Christmas hymn being sung nearby. She knew that there was a church nearby, so we ran out the door, following the sound, and arrived at an open thatched building which turned out to be a Pentecostal church. We arrived at what was the front door, which opened into the altar area, so we hastened to the back. There were graciously welcomed in and seated on the women’s side. The hymn that we heard turned out to be the welcoming hymn, and the only recognizable song that we heard. It is the tradition of this church, that Christmas is a time to reflect on the year that has passed, and thank God for what he has given. “Christmas is not about partying, even though we are Africans, and we know how to party!” Each family is welcomed up to the front of the church, where they make some sort of statement about what God has done for them in the past year, and the lead the church in song. Dancing and drumming then ensue, with the little kids at the front of the church really shaking what God gave them! After a few people had gone up, we were welcomed and introduced, and invited/urged/forced to speak and sing, too, and we were happy to do so! Jessica introduced us in what seemed to me to be flawless French, and then hastily, we decided-thinking that everyone would be singing hymns- that they would want to hear Christmas songs, launched into Away in a Manger. Early into the song, it became very evident to us that this was not nearly as lively a piece that the congregation was hoping for, and the drummers had a hard time livening that hymn up with their drums you can be sure, but the drumming and dancing afterwards was enthusiastic none-the-less. Following the individual songs and dances by every member of the congregation, the pastors began to sermonize. There were also readings, not three-as I am used to- but many. The sermons were in French, Lopka, Nagot, and even English. Jessica helpfully and impressively simultaneously translated everything from French. Kids began to fall asleep on our side of the room. Women leaned forward and passed out on the babies that they were holding on their laps, we began to droop… At sometime after 1:00am, we were again invited/encouraged/forced up to lead the congregation in dancing up to the offering. This was fun and enthusiastic, and with that, we took the opportunity to dance right out the back door, run across the field and home, and in to bed. The next day, Christmas morning, the pastor was one of our first visitors. He apologized for keeping us so late which was not our custom, and admitted that they went on until 3:00am. He was gracious and pared over us and blessed us, and thanked us very much for coming. It was truly a wonderful experience, and typical of the generosity and hospitality that I found in West Africa.

Once in Benin, we discovered that there are many paths to walk by Jessica’s house. Once the fields were harvested, we found a lot of good ways to get to Jessica’s. My favorite was to walk down the road, past A’s house, past the carpenter who worked under his cashew tree, and down the road to the cyber. The road to the cyber goes past a small field of cane, which is right next to a place where loofahs grow! We picked a lot of them and took them home to scrub with. There is also a beautiful huge tree/bush/shrubbery thing that grows tall wide, and massively, and looks like a giant (like 12 feet!) bleeding heart plant. Which, maybe it is. I was a little obsessed and took lots of pictures of it! So many colors in this plant: pink, white, magenta, and dark green. And palms and trees, and vines and flowers...one day we found a little kitten there. We also followed Carl on some paths, so we had a wide variety of ways to get to the same place. One day, after I had rebuffed Jessica for not knowing of a particular path which ran directly to the road by her house, we chanced to run into a girl’s club girl working at her brother’s house, right next to the path. Said she, “ I never knew this path was here, either ! “

Read the last paragraph at least. I swear it’s my best Benin story yet.

I find, quite suddenly, that I have less than four months left to spend in Benin. Four months to finish whatever projects will bear my name, four months to see the rest of the country, four months to spend time with my Beninese and American friends, four months to solidify my legacy and my memories. Knowing I am leaving is bittersweet. I am anxious and excited for the next stage of my life to start, and in some ways I am so ready to leave Benin; I’m eager to have a regular schedule, to be in a culture that I understand and am a real part of, to surround myself with people who understand me and who share my values, to eat lasagna and drink cocktails, to be clean and maybe even cold again. And of course, in some ways, I’m not yet ready to go. Have I accomplished everything I wanted to here? How much more comfortable could I get here if I stayed longer? I will miss the unexpected hilarity, the fulfillment of a day of wandering the streets of my village greeting friends, the privileges of a slow pace of life and independence.

Hot season ended briefly a few weeks ago; whereas the Harmattan dusts in November and December were red, a white dust blocked the sun for days. I couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters, and after the second day of dust, I was stressed and depressed—I’ve come to rely on the sun a lot! Everyone felt the same; Maman F- was holed up in her house under a pagne, saying she felt depressed and sick because of the dust. But the dust disappeared and the heat came back, perhaps stronger than it was before, leaving me to sweat it out. We have had a COUPLE of light rains, which have served only to make it humid and encourage insects to come out.

(dust/Carl picture)

I was half-way through an hour-long run when one of these rains started. It had been an incredibly hot day, and I felt tired, groggy, and kind of light-headed, but I decided to go for an evening run anyway. Actually, running in hot season isn’t so bad; I’m always so sweaty and uncomfortable anyway that I might as well be getting some use out of it, I figure. There were some storm clouds nearby, but as it was still very hot and not at all windy, I didn’t think they portended anything. So there Carl and I were, half an hour away from the house, in the middle of nowhere, and the wind started. I could hear it in the trees first, and it was strange, because it didn’t really sound like wind; it sounded like there was a river flowing nearby. The trees closest to me were motionless, however, and I couldn’t tell if it was just windy deeper in the forest or if the rain had started quite suddenly nearby. Then the wind hit me. The first gust was hot and heavy with humidity, and it slowed me down. The second gust came from the trees, as if it had been swirling around in the forest for awhile, and it smelled clean and refreshing. Then the rain started, light at first, and I realized that I was about twenty-five minutes from home and had left my back door open and a solar-powered lamp outside. I ran a little harder, but it didn’t matter much anyway, because the rain started coming down pretty heavily, and I knew I would just have to bear it out and hope my stuff didn’t get damaged. Carl tucked his ears back and kept right on my heels so he would be blocked from the rain. I was soaked from head to toe within minutes. Running in the rain far from home like that, nothing else mattered. There I was just in that moment, wet and finally cool, and everything smelled of sticky sweet cashew fruit and dirt and leaves. It was just me and Carl, out there alone, knowing we’d get home eventually but there was nothing I could do about the rain or my door or my lamp. Everything was green and wet and alive. It was a really happy, liberating little run.

I have had many a gross critter encounter lately, including: a snake in my latrine, a scorpion eating a cockroach in my latrine (he shelled it first!), killing a spider on my neck in my sleep, and being charged at full speed by God-knows-what one night while watching a movie on my laptop (I shrieked, and Carl came to my rescue!) I also had one very large lizard who got stuck in my shower window for a day, confused because the window seemed the only way out but blocked by screen. He then relocated himself to my living room window (not sure how that happened, but I came home one afternoon and my shower door—which I keep closed—was wide open, and the lizard had moved across the house). I tried really hard to get him out, beating him with a broom, trying to push him into a bucket, even covering my hand and arm with a t-shirt and then pulling on his TAIL—but he refused. He actually clung to the window ledge with his claws while I tugged on him, and I finally gave up. After three days, I had a kid come get rid of him. I also saw a baboon in the wild recently! I was on a run with Carl, maybe ten minutes out of town, with only forest on both sides of the road. He was a yellowish color, and I glimpsed him just before he disappeared into the bush. If I hadn’t been with Carl, who lurched against his leash when he saw the baboon, I would have missed him. It was one of those experiences that really hit me and made me think, “I’m in AFRICA! This is so AWESOME!”

All these unsettling creature encounters prompted me to come up with the idea of creating a Benin BINGO, sort of a scavenger-hunt of Benin’s craziest things. So with the help of my good friend Heidi, a list of BenINGO categories was produced; I made a game board and instructions, and it’s now being distributed by another friend! The idea is to spend our last few months in Benin pushing ourselves to live each day to its fullest. On any day in which you see any five of the BenINGO categories, you can call it a day. And by the time we leave country, we’re supposed to have taken a picture of each of the categories (blackout!) Some of them are really not too hard to see, or even to photograph, so I’m hoping we’ll push ourselves to get really REALLY excellent examples of each category. Here’s the list:

1. Romantic Proposition (Ro Prop)

2. Financial Proposition (Fi Prop)

3. Overload (Cars, headloads, etc.)

4. Unwanted guests (creepy critters in the house)

5. Cross-Cultural Exchange (out-of-place objects, etc.)

6. Funny Vehicle Paint

7. Crazy old people

8. Dirty babies or kids

9. Intestinal problems

10. Cold weather clothes

11. Obnoxious Cell Phone Usage

12. Recycling

13. Beer! (…so if you get any FOUR categories, you can treat yourself to a beer and call it a BenINGO day.)

14. Obama Mania

15. The Dark Arts

16. Boobs

17. Funny tissue designs

18. Technical Failure

19. Bureaucracy

20. Livestock

21. How’d That Get Here? (surprisingly developed things)

22. Crazy Coif

23. Grand(E) Homme/Dame

24. Child Labor

25. Interminable Wait

A few weeks ago, Peace Corps Benin had its annual “Gender and Development Weekend” to raise money for our “GAD Small Projects Fund” (which has paid for my mural, girls’ club t-shirts, Day of the Young Girl, etc.) Naima and I auctioned a “Super Girly Sleepover” in the date auction, offering Old Navy PJ pants, prank phone calls, boy band sing-and-dance along, French toast, cookie dough, etc., and it actually was one of the highest-bid dates! We went for 130,000 (over $260) and are quite delightedly looking forward to our date. The weekend was really fun, though I did manage to break a pool filter with my stiletto (purchased at the Bassila marché, thank you!) and go flying and injure my leg (you can dress me up, but I’m still a spaz). Regardless, we all looked quite glamorous, had a great time, and raised a record-breaking amount of money.

(GAD picture)

Life with Carl has been good. Carl is a very loyal pet, and he follows me everywhere. This has distinguished me in Bassila over the last several months. Bassila sees enough Yovos that I think there are plenty of people who never recognized me; but they do NOW. Actually, I get asked far more often in Anii “What’s the dog’s name?” than I’ve ever been asked for my OWN name. Everyone now knows me as “The yovo with the dog,” or actually, “White skin dog,” (“Yovo asana”). A couple weeks ago, I was riding my bike in town on some errands, and somehow Carl and I got separated. I did a loop around the town round point looking for him, and some kids called out “He went that way!” to me. So I started following that road, and literally every person I passed was saying either “He went that way!” or “Asana! Asana!” and pointing. We are such a pair that everyone KNEW if they saw Carl on his own, I must be out looking for him! So I followed their directions all the way to my house, where I found Carl, all in a tizzy because he’d lost me. Carl’s an exceptionally racist dog; having been passed from PCV to PCV for several years, he seems to think he IS a PCV—and I think the random photographic record of the Peace Corps computers bears out that he has participated in MANY Peace Corps projects in his time in Benin. Anyway, you should have seen how excited he was when I came home from Kate’s memorial mid-March in a van of about ten PCVs; he actually jumped INTO the van as soon as the door opened, and he just ran around happily wagging his tail and greeting everyone while we all stood around in my yard. It’s nice for me to have a dog who likes me solely because of my skin color, as I am not, in general, a dog person. It is rather unfortunate, however, that he does not like black people, because, let’s face it, they’re the majority here. So I’m constantly having to scold or sooth him while he barks his head off at every man, woman, and baby who passes by my house... unless it’s another Volunteer come to visit, and then he wags his tail happily. I think he’ll like suburban Colorado just fine.

Easter was fun. I died eggs with my next-door neighbor girl, who had been left home alone and appreciated the diversion. The next morning, I went with her and her family to the Catholic church. I hadn’t been to a mass since Palm Sunday last year (so much for Peace Corps leading to some kind of religious reawakening in me), so it was cool to see all the Bassila Catholics together and realize I knew almost all of them! I’m certainly not a part of the church community, but I felt like a part of it. There were several baptisms that morning. I understood the familiar liturgy “Do you renounce the Devil and all his empty promises?” and the familiar response of the parents and Godparents, “We do.” Then the pastor’s solemn tone changed and he jocularly said, “I mean, do you renounce the Fa and promise not to hang fetishes around your babies’ waists?” and the whole congregation giggled uncomfortably, and the parents and sponsors said “We do,” though everyone knew they really meant “No.” I was entertained. Afterwards, I went to my Muslim neighbor’s concession, and she and I hid all the Easter eggs plus some plastic ones filled with candy that Mom sent last year. The kids, young and old, then had a hunt. Their faces really lit up when I told them that a giant rabbit had come and delivered the eggs! After that, I took a brief nap on my dining table (I’m taking antibiotics for my GAD wound that have really been knocking me out) and then went with my watché lady and her brothers to a village about 45 minutes away by moto. We ate igname pilée with her extended family there. It was really nice to have a change of scenery and to travel with someone new. I’ve been eating watché at her stand since my first week in Bassila, but she has only very recently started to take me in under her wing. Her family was very gracious and thanked me over and over for accepting their invitation. I was just happy to be included in someone’s Easter dinner.

(Easter picture)

I went to Savalou recently for the funeral of my 30-something friend’s great-grandma, who claimed to be something like 120 years old. I had met her (AND her daughter, who looks quite ancient herself, lending some credence to her claim) before, and she was a stubborn and spunky old woman to her last, so naturally, I wanted to pay my respects. It also turns out she was an adept in a certain voudun coven, and that combination of factors seemed way too good to miss. So, decked in my embroidered, shiny white tissue of the occasion, I went to the fête. The funeral was held about a week and a half after the woman had died, so imagine my surprise to find out that the body was still around and open for viewing. Actually, the night before I arrived in Savalou, I got a text message from my friend: “Ce soir on a retiré le corp de grand mère de la morgue avec une ambiance festive très interessante. La fete continue ce soir autour du corp exposé. Bonne nuite.” (I don’t think that requires a translation). Several members of the woman’s family had arranged reception areas for the funeral, so we spent the day of my visit traveling from house to house, tent to tent, eating and drinking.

Grandma’s body was housed in a room, opening up to a small yard near a street. A tent was set up in the yard, and all day people were sitting there, eating akassa, drumming, drinking sodabi, etc. We went into the room to pay our respects, climbing two stairs into the room and then removing our shoes at the doorway. The room was pretty small—really just big enough to house the casket, and the ceiling was so low I had to keep my head bowed. It was also strung with decorations. At the foot of the casket, several photos of the grandma were arranged. She had been a twin, so two photos of her in the same pose flanked the photo collection. In voudun, when a twin dies, the living twin must always keep a wooden doll with him/her to represent the twin. So, her doll was sitting at her feet. The casket was completely open, and I felt pretty weird looking at her; I’ve never actually seen a corpse before, and I didn’t expect my first one to be in Benin. She looked quite small and as if she was wood herself; she had rather garish makeup on, including gold lipstick, lined in black. My friend encouraged me to take pictures, so we each got one last photo with his grandma. Very weird. While we were in the room, someone fired a gun outside, apparently to “chase death.”

Outside the room where her body was kept, some sort of ritual was taking place. A goat was slaughtered over the steps leading to her room; the blood was left there on the steps for everyone to avoid (or not) as they went in to see her body. An old woman with a piece of green fabric in her mouth, woven pagnes tied around her body, and baby powder all over her shoulders, danced around the crowd holding something tied in white fabric. She wove through the crowd, and people placed money on her body and in the white fabric; several women followed her to collect the money as it fell, and one of them waved a chicken around. A man with seven toes on each foot was pouring shots of sodabi and feeding them to the drummers, and other women played gourd rattles. My friend didn’t know what any of this meant and said he’d ask his mother later. It’s kind of disappointing how little I understand of voudun and animist traditions here; I find my questions never well-answered, either due to language barriers, ignorance of those I ask, unwillingness to answer, or I suppose confusion as to why I don’t understand it in the first place. Two years in the birthplace of voudun and I understand less than I would if I just picked up a guidebook.

(Funeral picture)

Later in the day, we proceeded to the house of a fetisheur. The outdoor wall of his house had a painting of him reading Fa (a local fortune-telling thing) and a chart with all the names of the different Fa symbols. My friend told me I could take a picture of it, so I did, and then the fetisheur summoned him. “You took a picture without asking me, and now you have a debt to me.” As it turns out, they were family and didn’t know it, so my friend said, “Since I am the son and you are the parent, you are responsible for any debts I don’t pay!” They laughed and my friend asked if I could have my Fa read. The fetisheur said it was a long long process and couldn’t be done easily, so we sat down. My friend served me a shot of sodabi from a bottle full of sodabi and woodchips, which give it flavor. The fetisheur had a yellow plastic bowl full of what looked like cranberry sauce, which he was stirring with his hands. Meanwhile, an old man was at his feet slaughtering a chicken. They drained the chicken blood into the yellow bowl, and the fetisheur continued stirring. Then the other old man brought a cement bag full of wooden stakes, each about 5 inches long, which he handed one at a time to the fetisheur, who carefully spread the blood-and-I-don’t-know-what mixture on the stakes, then tossed them onto a metal tray on the ground. I glanced nervously from the wooden chicken-blood stakes to the bottle of sodabi and woodchips. But my fears were assuaged. My friend asked what the stakes were for, and the fetisheur said they were for protecting the fields. My friend said he had heard things like that were buried in newly-purchased land to keep jealous people away, and the fetisheur coyly asked why my friend knew so much about it. A woman came along and took a photo of me on her cell phone, without asking. I didn’t mind. We left without getting my Fa read; my future remains a mystery.

I ended up leaving the party early and traveling to my friend Kendra’s nearby post for the night, hoping to come back the next day for more funeral festivities. The next morning, I woke up and went to pee in her latrine. It was by far the shallowest latrine I had ever been in, so the sunlight illuminated all the sludge underneath, and I was sort of casually peering in after I had peed, and what did I see? Not a snake, not a scorpion, not a cockroach… no…. a GOAT. He looked up at me and blinked, and I realized I may have just peed on his head. The door on a neighboring latrine had fallen off, so apparently this little goat had just wandered in and fallen down the hole. I woke Kendra up and together we went and looked in at the little guy. Since it was a Sunday, her neighbors were all away at church, and we had to wait several hours before anyone came around to help. The latrine was just deep enough that the goat would be out of reach, so a young man made a noose out of a rope, let it down the latrine hole, captured the goat, and pulled him up by his neck. The poor little goat was tired and covered in muck, and since he didn’t belong to the concession, no one there wanted to wash him. He got himself to his feet and sadly started walking out of the concession, get this, with a piece of toilet paper trailing off his hind hoof.

And that, I think, is the best livestock story I’ll ever have for BenINGO!

Greetings friends and family!

The best work experience I had in my first year of the Peace Corps was helping organize and lead Camp Success, a girls’ empowerment camp for 60 of the Donga department’s top female 6th, 7th, and 8th grade girls. For a week, the girls worked with dynamic local women, Peace Corps Volunteers, and a feminist male math teacher, to learn about topics for their “epanouissement” (blossoming): goal-setting, leadership, female reproductive health and family planning, healthy relationships, careers, child trafficking, gender-based violence and sexual harassment, and computers, for instance. They played sports, learned new games, sang songs, and made crafts. The week was packed with activity, tremendously fun, and inspiring.

For the girls, the rewards were great. It is rare that female students are honored for their achievements in a public way, and it is even rarer that they are given access to this kind of life-improvement information. Life skills are not part of the Beninese school curriculum; even reproductive health is not taught in schools until 9th grade, after many female students have already learned the lessons first-hand and have been forced to drop out of school to raise children. During the week of camp, the organizers observed a positive change in the girls: they became more motivated, more courageous, more willing to speak up, and more ready to see themselves as future leaders.

In my second year in Benin, I’ve continued to work with two of Bassila’s participants as leaders in my Girls’ Club. One girl, Leontine, had only recently come to Bassila. Orphaned as a child, she was sent to live with an uncle, but instead of sending her to school, he sent her to work as a “domestique.” Her older brother eventually heard out about this and dropped out of university, took a job as a teacher in Bassila, and began supporting her. At camp last year, she was one of the quietest participants, and she seemed unsure of how to handle the camp’s themes. I worried that perhaps we had selected the wrong girls to participate or that our message didn’t have an impact. It did. This year, Leontine is by far the most enthusiastic and dynamic participant in Girls’ Club. She “gets” everything I try to teach, and she brings her own ideas; this month’s “Day of the Young Girl” I held for local Girls’ Clubs was her idea—she wanted to encourage girls to succeed in school. One of the first activities we did as a club was to write stories about our futures. Most of the girls had similar aspirations: After finishing school, I will become a midwife, get married, and have five children. Leontine positively beamed as she read us her story: After finishing school in Benin, I will apply for a scholarship for university in France so I can see the world; then I’ll come back to Benin and establish my own business. After making money there, I will open an orphanage and a Non-Governmental Organization to promote the rights of women and girls. I will work my way up to become a government minister, and then, if God wills it, I’ll find a good husband and start a family: one son, one daughter. I think I know where she got those ideas!

This year, my postmate (Naima) and I are organizing the camp again, and I believe it will be even more spectacular. After last year’s success, we have tremendous community support this year, accounting for almost 40% of our budget. We will co-organize the camp with a male math teacher, a female director of a weaving center, six dynamic local women, and seven additional Peace Corps Volunteers. This year, we hope to take the girls to see Benin’s Tata Samba houses (a UNESCO World Heritage site) to learn about environmental protection, entrepreneurship, local cultures, and agriculture; we hope to have a greater emphasis on reproductive health and relationships; we hope to create a camp manual and life skills guide that the girls can take home, and we hope to provide every participant with a new school uniform and book bag.

This won’t be possible without your help. Please consider donating to Camp Success 2010 and helping solicit donations from others in any way possible.

TO DONATE:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=680-186

If that doesn’t work:

Go to www.peacecorps.gov

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Type “Farrell” in the search box

Click “Camp Success 2010”

Donate!

Coming Home: Reassessing

I’ve been thinking a lot about my trip to West Africa since I have been home. If you leave your own place, and enter a new place, without being changed, something is wrong. Africa changed me, and I have thought a lot about what I’ve learned, what it all means, and what to do with it.

It’s funny, but some of the little things that were annoying when I was there are things that I have felt a little nostalgic for. Even the travel, which is always risky, is at least, always an adventure. I find myself missing the smells...of the dust, no less! I find myself holding my fulard up to my nose and inhaling deeply, “Oh, it smells like Africa!” Or the Shea butter I brought back, which I would rather smell than use…And the non-stop calls of the roosters, which I strangely find myself missing…or donkeys braying… Another thing that I miss now that I am home is going to sleep to the sounds of drums. We heard drumming and singing at night in Mali, and during the Homecoming Fete in Benin, drums played every night until 4:00am. After the fete, we were still hearing drumming and music late into the night; it turns out that there is a nightclub down the road from Jessica’s house. The things you discover once the fields are harvested! And of course, I miss the people. I miss H’s laugh, O’s smile and kindness, the little boys and their antics, the earnestness of the Girl’s Club Girls, going for beers with A, Carl, and of course, my intrepid, intelligent, strong, wonderful, and hilarious daughter.

I also find myself missing walking. In the States, we drive a lot. As I have thought about my driving since I’ve come back, I have often contemplated how much unnecessary driving I do. I drive to the grocery store, which is four blocks from my house. I drive to work everyday, which is less than five miles. In Benin, I would be walking. Today when I came home from work I was sad, and I wished I had Carl with me to take a walk with! At first, I found the walking very disenheartening...perhaps, because we were hiking the escarpment, at the Equator, in desert sand, and I had amoebas...once we got back to Benin, Jess, Carl, and I walked all around her village, everyday. Jess was wise to minimize how far we had to walk on our adventures! I was often flabbergasted once we got going, “… just down this road!” But, we discovered new paths, saw new things, met people. I found a place where loofas grew, and we harvested them. We found shorter paths to the homes of friends, and a drinking establishment and a church right across the field! Daily, we enjoyed watching a carpenter working under his cashew tree as we walked into the village, and we always encountered children who would run to lessen our loads as we approached Jessica’s house. We found interesting things for sale and enterprising people selling them everywhere we went. On one trip (out to have dinner at a friend’s) we were stopped by a teenage girl from the Girl’s Club, who fed us a bowl of bouille and corn cakes (said Jess, This is how you get fat in Africa!) I doubt that walking in the States would be as fun, but I want to do more of it, anyway.

Our friend, M., who is from Benin, said that he one thing he misses about his country is the people outside on the streets. “In Benin,” he told me, “no matter what time of day it is, you find people outside that you can talk to.” This got me to cogitating upon the difference between an agrarian, non-industrialized society versus the system we have here in the states. In West Africa, villages are small, houses are generally clustered together, and farmers go out to their fields. In the States, the down town or business are of a village would be a small cluster of buildings, generally businesses and a few homes; farmers live on their farms or ranches, but not in close proximity to one another. The agrarian system in West Africa allows people to really function as a community, to work together communally for the good of all. I would see groups of women out threshing millet in a field near a village, groups of people congregated under trees (teaching, sometimes!) and people in their yards, in front of businesses, on the streets, etcetera conversing with their neighbors and passers-by. People seemed to really be interested in one another, and to value friendships and relationships. Also, the outdoor nature of human development and the lack of press or local news media means that news travels quickly and by word-of-mouth. The day after Jessica, Carl, and I danced at the Anii fete, everyone we met was greeting us and congratulating us on our dancing, whether they had been at the fete or not!

Greeting in West Africa has been refined into what seemed like an art form to me, with a series of prescribed questions and responses. Here in the States, we are much more casual, often only nodding or waving, and rarely greeting or making eye-contact with strangers. I have to say, the West African way seemed much more civilized, respectful, and humane than the dismissive way we treat others here at home. It really got me thinking about respect, and “civilized behavior” which, we have to admit, has appeared to be on the decline at public gatherings here in the States of late.

As Jessica mentioned in her blog about my trip, acclimating to life in a developing country is often fraught with cognitive dissonance. She was impressed that I was able to acclimate so quickly, but what I did was simple: I had to let go of my own expectations for how “Things are supposed to be” and enter a new context of thinking. My way, or the American way, or even the Western way, might not make sense or even work in this setting, so I had to release my expectations and find new ways to act, think, and live that worked within the new context. What I saw was a system that functioned rather well. There were certainly things in West Africa that were and are problematic, but I saw life going on, and happy people, laughing, working, loving and enjoying each other. I met people who had very little by Western (and even by West African) standards, yet who were invariably welcoming and generous hearted. Yes, I had to make overtures, but isn’t that what an outsider is supposed to do? By being open myself, it seemed that people responded in kind.

Religion and religious practices were very interesting to me as I traveled. Northern Benin is Muslim, as is much of Burkina Faso, and most of Mali. I met Muslims, Christians, and Animists everywhere I traveled. Of course, there is religious tension at times. It would be foolish to presume that this is not so. Heartening to me however, was that when people talked about God, and invariably they did, people talked about God in the same ways! West Africans are very pragmatic, and often fatalistic; I heard a lot about “God’s will”, whether from Animist, Christian, or Muslim. I was prayed over, and blessed by all groups. Good things and good works were given up to the glory of God, again, by all groups. People took part in one another’s celebrations; the Muslims came over to Jessica’s house for Christmas gifts, and we danced, ate and celebrated at their fete. I heard Muslims railing about the Taliban and terrorist activities, and I met Muslims who were furious about the use of madrassas to “enslave” poor boys from destitute areas in the name of Islam. I met Catholics Evangelicals, and Pentecostals; and I participated in Animist rites. Perhaps, we can all get along if we focus on our common humanity.

Of course, one of the things that is lacking in West African countries in general is public services and government oversight. There is no fresh running water, except in businesses in big cities, and even then, fresh is a relative term. There is no health care, and very few hospitals or clinics; in West Africa, people generally looked very, very healthy. The reason is that with no reliable health care, mortality is very high. Sick people die. Babies die. Children die. Women die in childbirth. The average life expectancy is around 50. Everywhere I went in West Africa, people were shocked at my age, “You look so YOUNG!” Well, yes, I do, as I have had health and dental care most of my life. Another thing, there is no press in the villages; news comes in the form of satellite dish or radio. For local information, people really on word-of-mouth, so rumors can run rampant. When the electricity generator blew up in Jessica’s village at Christmas, villagers, thinking they were being attacked, ran for Togo. There is no sewage system, no trash disposal system; everything usable is recycled, what is not is thrown out the window and onto the street. The trash, especially plastic bags, everywhere was one of the hardest things for me to get used to. People, men especially, urinate publically. While I was there, a friend’s child came down with cholera, which is common, and is caused by unsanitary drinking water. Cholera! It’s been all but eradicated in the Western World! Air pollution is a big problem, too. Vehicles burn diesel fuel or unfiltered, unprocessed gasoline from the Nigerian pipeline. The roads are a haze of dust and exhaust, and in the cities, you often see people on zemis riding with masks. And, with no reliable electricity, people burn wood and charcoal, which means lots of wood smoke, and lots of deforestation. And the transportation system…there is one paved highway in Benin; everything else is dirt roads; in Mali and Burkina we traveled on highways of dirt. In the rainy season, these are impassable. As it was, we were lucky that Jessica’s papa had a 4-wheel drive vehicle when he took us to his village and I was there in the dry season! There are no speed limits, and motor vehicle accidents are a major cause of deaths. In fact, the Brant’s Benin guide says that, “Traveling by motor vehicle in West Africa means taking your life in your hands.” Which, Africans do every day, because they have no other choice. Just last month, on the only commercial bus service in Benin, “Inner-City Lines,” on which Jessica and I rode a number of times, (including our debacle of Christmas eve when the bus riot broke out) a bus traveling to the coast had a brake failure, which resulted in 12 (I believe) deaths; besides Africans, several PCVs were on this bus, as well as some Japanese NGO volunteers. These are just a few of the big problems which will need to be addressed by the West African democracies as they continue to develop.

Finally, I comment on West Africans and the world community. The West Africans that I met and talked with were generally well informed people. We met a professor from the University of Benin who had taught agriculture who was traveling to Togo. We met an interesting fellow ho called himself "Harlem" because he was, "tall, like a Harlem Globetrotter" who was a music teacher from Mali. And, we met a fellow who could name all of the American presidents and discuss their policy, name the American jazz greats and discuss their music, and name and discuss American boxing. He put me to shame! I met a woman who was an air-traffic controller-the only one in her country-who was eager to discuss women's issues with me. I found many people who wanted to "practice their English with me" and who wanted to discuss World politics, my opinion of West African development, the war in Iraq, economic development, and Barack Obama. People in West Africa were concerned about how he was being received by the American public. It is hard to put into words what this presidency means to West Africans, and others in the World Community, as I was chatted up at the International Airports and on filghts, as well. It was humbling, I must say. People told me, more than once, how they had new hope in America's leadership, and trust in Obama's strength of character. "He is a genius," I was told. West Africans seemed far more informed about us, and about the world, than we, as individuals, are about them it appears. And perhaps they have more faith in us than we do ourselves. They certainly had more respect for the President, the presidential office, and the democratic system than I see in the States these days. It was uplifting.

All of these items, (and others!) have occupied my thoughts as I have re-acclimated myself to life in the States. While I was and am grateful to be in the land of clean water, flush toilets, and modernization, I am cognizant of what we have lost by living in relative isolation from one another. This saddens me. And, as I reflect on the political climate in this country, and the call from some for less government intervention, I wonder how many individuals would really be willing to take on the cost of life without the governmental support, maintenance, and over-sight that we have in the States? Will we continue rise to what is best in Americans and American by truly leading, thinking big thoughts, taking on big issues, and working collectively for the betterment of all human beings and the planet, or will we sink into the morass of self-entitlement and individualism? What can we let go of? What do we need to improve upon? What can we learn from developing countries?

Amis et chers invitées,

Friends and honored guests,

Lundi marquera le quatre-vingt dix-neuvième anniversaire de la Journée Internationale de la Femme. En mars 1911, plus d’un million des femmes et des hommes ont assisté aux rassemblements pour faire campagne pour les droits des femmes à savoir : droit au travail, droit au vote, droit d’être un élue, et pour terminer la discrimination contre la femme. Historiquement, la Journée Internationale de la Femme a été célébrée pour exprimer la solidarité des femmes, pour promouvoir la paix mondiale, pour célébrer l’avancement de la femme, et pour prendre conscience des obstacles qui traverse les femmes.

Monday will mark the 99th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day. In March 1911, more than a million women and men attended events to campaign for the rights of women: the right to work, the right to vote, the right to be elected, and to end discrimination against women. Historically, International Women’s Day has been celebrated to express women’s solidarity, to promote world peace, to celebrate the advancement of women, and to raise consciousness of the obstacles that block women.

Les filles d’aujourd’hui ne font pas face à un monde égal. La scolarisation des filles est moins que celui des garçons, et les filles abandonnent souvent les classes, à cause des difficultés financières, le mariage forcé, la grossesse non-désirée, le harcèlement sexuel, et le manque de soutien nécessaire pour réussir à l’école.

Girls today do not face an equal world. Girls’ school enrollment rates are less than that of boys, and girls often drop out of school, due to financial difficulties, forced marriages, unwanted pregnancies, sexual harassment, and a lack of the support necessary for succeeding in school.

Aujourd’hui, le Benin fait face au changement. Parmi nous il y a cinq femmes professionnelles qui nous démontreront, malgré les problèmes rencontrés, comment elles ont pu atteindre leurs objectifs et comment elles arrivent à gérer la profession et la famille. Aujourd’hui, les lois du Benin protègent les femmes contre les violences de tout genre et insistent sur la scolarisation de la jeune fille. Ce qui fait que la scolarisation des enfants au primaire est gratuite.

Today, Benin faces change. Among us are five professional women who will demonstrate, despite the problems they have faced, how they have been able to reach their objectives and how they manage their work and family lives. Today, Benin’s laws protect women against violence of all types and insist on the enrollment of young girls in school. Primary education is free for children today.

Aujourd’hui, je vois devant moi soixante-quatre filles qui fréquent correctement, qui travaillent pour leur épanouissement dans leurs Clubs de Filles, et qui ont des parents et communautés qui les ont soutenues à assister ces événements.

Today, I see in front of me 64 girls who attend school, who work for their development in their Girls’ Clubs, and who have parents and communities that have supported them in attending today’s events.

L’avancement de la femme exige l’action continuelle. Comme une communauté, il faut que nous luttons pour la protection des droits de la femme, en sensibilisant la population et en dénonçant quand nous sommes témoins des violations des droits de la femme. Comme des individus, il faut que nous nous battons pour améliorer nos vies, que, en face de ceux qui veulent les nier, nos affirmons nos besoins, désirs, et droits ; aussi, il faut que nous nous dévouons à l’amélioration de nos esprits et notre vie.

Women’s advancement demands continual action. As a community, we must fight for the protection of women’s rights by educating the population and speaking up when we are witness to violations of women’s rights. As individuals, we must fight to improve our lives, and when faced with those who would deny them, we must affirm our needs, wants, and rights. We must also devote ourselves to the improvement of our minds and our lives.

Mais aujourd’hui, j’ai plein de l’espoir. Depuis plusieurs mois, j’ai travaillé avec le Club des Filles de CEG Bassila. Elles ont choisi leur nom, « L’Espoir de l’Avenir », et vraiment, elles sont l’espoir de l’avenir ! Chaque semaine, elles apprennent les nouveaux outils pour les aider dans leurs vies : comment établir les objectifs, comment résister à la pression des garçons, comment éviter les grossesses précoces et des maladies sexuellement transmissibles. Et chaque semaine, elles m’inspirent ! Les filles, vous êtes travailleuses, intelligentes, sérieuses, drôles, créatives, dévouées, et courageuses. J’ai plein de l’espoir pour vos avenirs, et avec vous, j’ai des femmes leaders de demain, j’ai aussi plein de l’espoir pour ce pays.

But today, I am filled with hope. For several months, I have worked with the Girls’ Club of the Bassila Public Secondary School. They chose their name, “The Hope for the Future,” and truly, they are the hope for the future! Each week, they learn new skills to aid them in their lives: how to establish objectives, how to resist pressure from boys, how to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. And each week, they inspire me. Girls, you are hard-working, smart, serious, funny, creative, devoted, and courageous. I am hopeful for your futures, and with you as the female leaders of tomorrow, I am also hopeful for this country.

Aujourd’hui, rassemblons-nous pour célébrer les accomplissements de ces soixante-quatre filles, représentant Bassila, Manigri, Pénessoulou, et Pira. Réjouissons-nous dans la puissance et la beauté de la femme ! Rejoindrons-nous pour changer le monde, pour que demain peut être plus lumineux, plus égal, plus sûr, et plus valorisant pour les femmes et les filles.

Today, let us unite to celebrate the accomplishments of these 64 girls, representing Bassila, Manigri, Pénessoulou, and Pira. Let us rejoice in the power and beauty of women! Let us join to change the world, so that tomorrow may be brighter, more equal, safer, and more rewarding for women and girls.

Je proclame aujourd’hui, le 6 mars 2010, la Journée de la Jeune Fille !

I proclaim today, March 6, 2010, the Day of the Young Girl!

Merci.

Thank you.

Events :

* Career Panel, featuring female leaders from Bassila Commune : a nurse, a math teacher, a Village Chief, an NGO field-worker, and an NGO field-worker/entrepreneur

* Skits and dances by the Girls’ Clubs of Bassila, Manigri, Pénessoulou, and Pira, including a skit on the consequences of sexual harassment, a skit on utilization of condoms, a skit on ending sexual harassment in schools, statements of self-affirmation, traditional Nagot singing and dancing, and a dance to a contemporary Fon song called “Life Will be Good”

* Lunch

* Parade

* Dodge-ball tournament

*Songs and games throughout the day

Thanks to the Peace Corps Gender and Development Small Projects Fund, the Mayor of Bassila, the Village Chief of Pénessoulou, the Osborne Family, the McCoy Family, and the PCVs of Manigri, Pénessoulou, and Pira for helping make this spectacular day possible!

Bébé au dos au moto

A couple of weeks ago, I had to go to Kikélé, a small Nagot village 7 km away on a dirt road, for a project. I was travelling there with a friend from the mayor’s office, who recently had a very precious baby girl, named Anne, which makes her even more precious. Anne is just a few months old, and usually my friend leaves the baby with its grandmother, who feeds her formula milk via bottle. The grandma had gone “back to the village” for the day, leaving my friend with the baby, unsure and nervous about how to get her all the way to Kikélé. I think this would normally be a total non-issue for a Beninese woman, except that my friend drives her own motorcycle and it’s the sort of thing a Power Ranger would drive—massive; bright yellow; and decorated with lots of large, unnecessary, plastic accoutrements. To mount it, you have to turn the motorcycle to an extreme angle and then high-kick your leg over the seat. She’s not exactly confident driving it, so she didn’t want to go a long distance with her baby on it. She suggested that we could each take a zemidjahn to Kikélé, and so we started walking toward the road to find zems. But she seemed reluctant to do that too, and so she said, “No, I think the best solution is for me to drive and for you to carry the baby on your back.” I guess she didn’t know that the longest I’d ever held a baby on my back was to pose for a photo, and that even then I was terrified. So I bent over and she placed Anne on my back and handed me a pagne, completely competent in my ability to tie it. Luckily, though I have limited experience in tying babies to my back, I have been curious enough about the process to note well how it is done, and so I secured Anne to my back, and my friend was satisfied with my work. She tied another pagne around me like a cape to keep Anne protected from the dust and wind, and then I high-kicked my leg over the moto and hopped on. I was scared, but also really proud, the whole ride! Kikélé is a very small village, and I got a very positive reception from the villagers when they saw I was carrying an African baby on my back. Those crazy Oyubos!

It’s a girl!

My closest female Beninese friend, F-, is pregnant. We’ve been joking all through the pregnancy that her baby is my niece, and a couple of weeks ago were talking about all the hospital trips she had left to make in the last couple months of her pregnancy. So she invited me to come with her to her ultrasound (which I was surprised to find out exists in Bassila) appointment this past Friday. Her fiancé even came from Parakou for the occasion!

Friday morning, her fiancé, E-, came to my house to pick me up. We met F- at the hospital, a compound of several cement buildings, and sure enough, one of them had “ECOGRAPHIE” painted on its wall outside. We took a seat on a wooden bench outside the building and waited for it to be cleaned. We sat for a long time, talking about the baby, work, etc. E- thought the baby was a boy, I thought it was a girl, and F- said she just wanted what God would give her. We placed a bet with no terms. The first time I met E-, Naima and I had a pretty irritating experience with him, and so I’ve never really liked him. I got to know him much better throughout the day though, and I came to see him as a very sweet, sentimental guy. F- had her toenails painted a pretty gold, and I asked her casually where she had gotten them painted. She smiled at me and didn’t say anything. Finally she said, “He did it. I can’t bend over!” and giggled. Yes, E- is a Beninese man, and he paints his pregnant girlfriend’s toenails. The world is a surprising place!

Finally, we were let into the ultrasound room, a small space which (again, surprisingly!) had air conditioning (though not great). F- laid down a pagne on the bed at the doctor’s encouragement and then lay down on top of it. The doctor, a Muslim man wearing a long white robe, white cap, and red-and-white checked shawl, was friendly and jocular as he showed us the baby’s anatomy: first its head, then its beating heart, its spine, and its feet. It took a LONG time to find the baby’s sex, and then, the image was very unclear. He searched a long time, and finally said, sort of under his breath, “You could probably assume it’s a girl.” E- snickered and told me I had won. A really happy feeling came over the room, and no one could do much but smile peacefully and quietly and watch the fuzzy image on the doctor’s screen. The baby was healthy, and it was a girl!

Later, I went out to lunch and again at night for drinks with E- and F-. E- told me he had originally hoped for a girl but “the signs seemed to say it was a boy.” He was really happy it was a girl though, because his mom had no daughters, and he was happy to give her one. In a culture that highly values sons, it surprised me to hear him talk, glowing with excitement about his baby. F- said she thought it was a girl because this baby had brought her a lot of luck. I joked that the baby is her lemon; F- carries lemons with her for luck, and my grandma knit her a lemon baby cap. Over drinks, E- told me how much he loved F- and that they met in high school; she was the only girlfriend he’d ever had.

They’ll be a happy family.

March 4, 2010

I’m sorry to everyone whose emails I have not responded to in the past few months. I no longer am comfortable using a USB stick to transfer files from my computer to the cyber café computers, the internet here is crummy, and I haven’t been to a workstation in a long time to use the internet there. These are lame excuses…. I’m sorry! But I’ll see you all soon! (Speaking of which: I am planning on coming home in early August. I don’t have to be in the UK until mid-September, and I’ll probably make a trip to Philly/NYC and perhaps one to Seattle at some point.)

If I thought my birthday would go by unnoticed, I was wrong. I planned on sleeping in, but was awoken early by a sudden stream of text messages from well-wishers, Beninese and American alike. By eight, three people had come by my house to say hello and see if they could help me with anything for my fête. I greeted all of them wearing a pagne (which I had been using as a bed sheet) and with my hair standing four inches high off my head. A vision in fish-print.

Two Anii girls who are taking a computer training class that I sometimes teach at the cyber café were among my early visitors. One of them, M-, is a very cool girl who dropped out of school last year after failing her mid-secondary school diploma multiple years in a row. She’s smart, funny, and learns quickly. I put the two of them to work slaughtering the three roosters that had been delivered at my house the night before, gifts from my friend F- and her neighbors. Interestingly, this was the first time I had ever slaughtered chickens with Muslim women, so I hadn’t realized… that they don’t do it! They asked me to call some boys over to gorge the chickens, so I asked one of the little boys who normally hangs around my house to call his big brother over. He and a friend, plus the whole gaggle of little ones, came over, and soon my walled-in, all cement back courtyard was completely full of people. I hung around taking pictures and boiling pot after pot of water to aid in the chicken plucking. There was some concern over the fact that we were doing this in the back court, as this meant the roosters couldn’t properly face the rising sun before dying. I was more concerned about where all the blood would be drained, and suggested we move the party out to my front, dirt yard, but no matter, within minutes the boys were slicing through the roosters’ throats with my Leatherman, sharpest knife in Bassila.

Next F- came over to help cut and season the roosters (garlic, onions, four spices, and vinegar). (The saw feature of the Leatherman came in handy for cutting the breastbones!) She is almost eight months pregnant now and HUGE, and so she did most of this work wearing a pagne that kept falling off and just resting on her lap. Imagine me chopping through the breastbone of a dead chicken alongside a half-naked pregnant woman! She had left work to help do this and so went back when she was done. I kept myself busy cleaning the house and then went into town to get a few things from the market. On my way back home, I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time, and so he invited me to have a Coke with him and his friend for my birthday. I discussed Beninese politics and development with his friend, who said the Beninese work ethic was destroyed by the French and that Benin needed a dictatorship and not a democracy so that anything could get accomplished, railed about the teachers’ strike that has been going on for weeks, and said Barack Obama was too advanced for America. I was pressée, so hurried home to put my chicken on the stove.

Maman F- was waiting for me at my neighbors’ house. Apparently she’d arrived right after I left for the market, and I had forgotten my phone at the house. She called, and the phone’s vibrations made it fall off the table; we found it inside, broken into all its component pieces, on the floor! Her daughter, F-, was sick with malaria. The day before, I had run into them twice at the hospital; on the first encounter, Maman F- was on the brink of tears, and F- was despondent. The second time, F- was lying on a cot crying, covered with a wet cloth to cool her off. It was very sad. So Maman F- had come to update me on the drama of her life, how there’s a teacher now living in her old house and she isn’t getting any of the rent, that S-‘s little brother is now calling himself S-‘s son when he collects the rent from these people, and how she is so scared of her mother-in-law, which is why she won’t even present the case to the king. (TANGENT: I recently learned that from the 80s until the early 2000s, there was a “war” in Bassila because the current king stole the throne from the previous king. “Bassila was full of death,” and this is why Bassila has both police and gendarme stations here, and also why many people don’t take the king seriously.) I gave her money for F-‘s medication.

By then, I had only an hour before girls’ club, and I had promised my girls a birthday cake, so I hurriedly baked a chocolate cake (Carly- I finished off that cocoa powder finally!) and got ready for our meeting, finishing right at 3:00 when the meeting was supposed to start. A friend, V-, came and picked me up on his motorcycle to take me to the club meeting. For the last several weeks, we’ve been meeting frequently to prepare for International Women’s Day. Saturday, I have organized a big program: a career panel, lunch, skits and music, and a dodgeball tournament; three other PCVs and their girls’ clubs will be coming to Bassila to join us! They practiced their skit and dance, and I taught them that old Scout chant, “Everywhere we go, people want to know…” so we can sing it Saturday. Both my club and Naima’s club have prepared skits about sexual harassment in schools, and in both, the teacher who harasses the students is named “Dieu-Donné,” a fairly popular Christian boys’ name, often given to the first son, which means, literally “God-Given.” In each club, when the “teacher” first introduced himself, the girls all snickered. I guess a man calling himself “God’s Gift” has the same connotations in Benin and America. Funny! After the rehearsals, we took a group photo, and I gave the girls the cake. They presented me with a tray full of cookies and candy, which they had all pitched in for. I felt very happy.

Next, I met with my Spelling Bee Club. I think I may only have five competitors for the Bee, but they’re getting pretty heated, and a couple of the girls are so studious with their lists that I am really excited to see how the competition turns out. I will be so proud of whichever girl gets to go to the national competition, and so sad for the other one! Usually, I have them practice like it’s a normal spelling bee, but I had them race to correctly spell the words on the board instead. It was a really fun time! (Speaking of which, if someone could find me a DVD of Akeela and the Bee with a French language option, I would really like to show it!)

I rushed back home, where F- and her domestique, C-, were busy in the kitchen. Carl was very concerned about why they were there without me, and pawed and whimpered at me urgently when I got home. For the next hour and a half, the three of us bustled around to get our meal—pâte rouge and fried chicken—ready. I baked another two cakes, F- made the pâte, and C- kept up with dishes and cutting tomatoes and onions. The fusion of American cooking implements and Beninese food and cooks was interesting and totally out of my control. My filtered, boiled drinking water was quickly put to use for dishes and cooking, and soon straight well water was being used to prepare the food. I gave up on trying to control it—let’s face it, I consume straight well water every time I eat outside my house anyway. I learned why it makes far more sense for Beninese to cook outside than inside: the grease stains on my wall and floor are evidence. I also learned why a table-top gas stove makes less sense than a pot balanced on rocks or in a custom-built mud stove: C- and I had to hold the sides of the pot while F- furiously stirred the pate with a meter-long wooden spoon; the whole table was swaying back and forth, making my cake fall over in the Dutch oven on the other burner. The room was SO hot. At some point, my next-door neighbor’s baby was passed off to me, and then they all disappeared into their own back court to cook, so… I put him on my back! Standing in a sweltering kitchen with a baby strapped to my back cooking pâte … I felt quite Beninese. Actually, having a baby on my back for an extended period of time was not at all uncomfortable. I didn’t feel any hotter than I otherwise would have, and it didn’t hurt my back at all—the last time I held a baby for a long time in my arms, my spine hurt enough that I thought about foreswearing children. He fell asleep and stayed there for a long time. Meanwhile, another neighbor’s teenage daughter hauled water to the house, and her son and his friend carried a table and chairs over to my front porch.

By 8:00, everything was ready. Two guests arrived. A- had agreed to provide drinks for the party but came empty-handed. F- was annoyed, thinking it was typical of him and that he “doesn’t recognize the value of a person,” and isn’t treating me like a friend now that he realizes I will never be his “femme.” F- went home to change and invite her neighbors to the party, and the two men disappeared. By 9:00, no one was back, and I sat on the porch with a neighbor’s two teenage daughters, feeling very tired and kind of annoyed. The oldest one kept making comments about how late everyone was, how we had cut the chicken too big, how there weren’t enough chairs if everyone came, etc., which didn’t make me feel too at ease.

And then, suddenly, around 9:30, almost everyone showed up, with the exception of A- and the drinks, and F- whispered to me, “You’ll have to do this quickly; we have work tomorrow,” to which I scoffed to myself. Not my fault if people decide to show up for a 7:00 party at 9:30! The chairs were quickly filled: V-, F-, three of F-‘s neighbors, one of F-‘s neighbors’ child (who, mysteriously, was never sent to “kiddy table” plastic-mat despite there not being enough chairs and plates for all the adults, despite my hints), my neighbor H-, M- who helped kill the roosters, H-‘s daughter M- who kept me stocked with water all evening, H-‘s daughter C- and F-‘s domestique C- sharing a chair, and finally A- and later I- who I’d had a Coke with earlier in the day. Every time I turned around to the kids sitting on the plastic mat, their numbers seemed to have doubled. Bottles of sodabi, champagne, red wine, and a very sketchy whiskey were brought out. Finally, I brought out the cakes, complete with birthday candles (thanks Naima’s family!) and frosting (thanks Mom!), and a rendition of “Happy Birthday” was sung. And so in many ways, it was a typical birthday party, and I felt that people were very generous to me.

But in many ways, it was also a really strange party for me. It may have been my birthday, but I felt like an outsider through the whole meal. For instance, after eating, F-‘s female neighbor gave me a present. I asked if I should open it then, and she told me to go ahead, so I started unwrapping it… and F- and all the neighbors got up and left! The two men, who did not speak a word to me the entire night except for when I greeted them when they arrived, were practically pushing past to get out. I thanked the woman for the gift (half-unwrapped at the time) and she said “You’re welcome!” basically over her shoulder. Where were my bisous on the cheek? No last happy birthday greetings? Also, my next-door neighbors never came over, though I invited them repeatedly; I gave them drinks and cake over the railing between our porches. I spent most of the party running around arranging things, handing out food to the ever-growing flock of kids, etc. Most of the conversation passed in Fon, though I protested; even that was pretty limited, as the dinner and cake happened quickly, and then everyone left. No one came early to mingle, the men who didn’t leave right away went off to a corner to joke about girls, and the Beninese aren’t ones for polite dinner conversation—“la bouche qui mange ne parle pas”. I kind of felt like a kid tagging along with Mom at a grown-up party. The next morning, I felt like I had a bad hang-over, but without the fun of actually having had too much to drink.

The best part was really the preparation, which was really something I’ll not forget. It was wonderful to be around so many people all day and to have so much help in putting the party together, and though it may have been a huge MESS, it was fun to do all the cooking and preparation here. But should I ever host another party here, I think I’ll outsource the cooking and the clean-up to a restaurant.

Though I am often asked to do so, I don’t think I’ve given any updates on the widow (Maman F-) of my former landlord (S-) since his death last June. I continue to see her and speak to her often, though we no longer live together, and doing so has elucidated the nature of family relationships in Benin. Our relationship has become much stronger. She was always my favorite wife (of the three) in my old concession, but I was never exceptionally close to any of them while we all lived together; it was only once S- died, Maman F- was forced to move into her mother-in-law’s house, and my next-door neighbors moved out of the concession that I became close with the last remaining wife, and in being one of Maman F-‘s only regular visitors in a very hard situation, I became one of her confidantes.

S- had a long-term illness and had been previously treated at a hospital in Lomé. Just prior to his death, he was sick, suffering from “tension,” but to my eyes seemed to be up to all his usual activities. Supposedly, Maman F- and others wanted him to go to the hospital, and a doctor made a house call and recommended he go to the hospital as well, but S-‘s mother refused to let him go. She was at the house when she died; she brought him a plate of food and a glass of sodabi (locally made grain alcohol), and he died within minutes. Naturally, the entire village accused his mother of sorcery, but this accusation amounted to nothing—she seems to still hold all the cards, at least in Maman F-’s life.

S- was a businessman who owned several trucks, making him fairly well off. He had three wives, and Maman F- was his second. Usually, the first wife comes from an arranged marriage; subsequent wives are chosen by the husband, leading to a lot of animosity among the wives. I’ve met some co-wives who live fairly harmoniously together, but I’ve never met any who live happily together. Maman F- was obviously the preferred wife, anyway, because I never even heard of or saw the other wives. S- was at the house every day, and every night, laying out in our concession yard with Maman F- and their daughters in the evening. His other two wives had given him sons, but Maman F- had given him only three daughters. The third wife lives in Nigeria, but the first is in Bassila. When S- died, Maman F- was immediately taken to S-‘s mother’s house, where she and the first wife and their children were made to share a two-room apartment, Maman F- occupying the front room, with a bundle of clothes and a plastic mat to sleep on with her daughters.

Three little girls lived with S- and Maman F-, and they were all called their daughters. The oldest, A-, was about 7, and she often referred to Maman F- with pride: “My mother, MY OWN MOTHER, went to the market,” she said to me, tapping her chest, when she explained that Maman F- had gone to market to buy us a new pail for our well. (You may recall the incident with the broken pail and the housefire.) When S- died, A- was a wreck, crying and screaming, “Papa!” The next daughter, F-, was about three, and the baby, M-, had just started walking when S- died. As it turns out, A- was S-‘s niece, his brother’s daughter. S- and Maman F- had another daughter, A-‘s age, who lives in Lomé with one of Maman F-‘s relatives. It is common to share children in this way, and it fulfills several purposes. Estranged relatives are brought closer by sharing children, for one thing. Also, a family can scarcely get by without the help of daughters to do chores (cooking, sweeping, carrying water, looking after children, laundry, etc.), so families will often bring in a niece or a servant until their own daughters are old enough to do the work. If you ask me, this leads to a lot of abuse: for instance, one of the families in our concession had a niece living with them, and her uncle refused to buy her school supplies; his own two daughters, meanwhile, lived in the South with his family so they could attend a (supposedly superior) Catholic elementary school. A- was often kept home from school to work; I have to wonder how Maman F-‘s oldest daughter is treated, and if she would have been treated better than A- if she’d lived with us in Bassila. Anyway, this whole arrangement broke down when S- died. Though they’d lived together, and were both sent to S-‘s mother’s concession, Maman F- and A- no longer seemed to have anything to do with each other, and they didn’t talk about each other in the same way. Maman F- finally explained to me how they were “related.” A-, now under her grandmother’s care, became a street-seller. Sometimes, I see her roaming the streets of Bassila, her head piled high with plasticware that she sells for her grandma’s profit. She recently came over to my house and played a game of UNO with me as a break from her work; her face has changed, and I hardly recognized her.

A- and two other kids.

Maman F- stayed at her mother-in-law’s house for four months. She said the mother-in-law hated her, and she refused to feed her and her children, except for one meal of bouillie (porridge) a day. She lost weight and seemed scared and depressed. Her father was sick, staying at a traditional healer’s house, and she said often, “If only my father was well, I would be at ease.” Eventually, he got better, and she seemed to do better; I often saw a child deliver her a bag of beans and rice to eat, which she paid for, so I think her family was bringing her money. Her spirits improved; she stopped talking about S-‘s death, and she started talking only about how tired she was of sitting inside all day with nothing to do, how she would do whatever she had to to care for her daughters, and how she yearned for her freedom. She started talking about different connections: her brother was going to Mecca, another relative lived in Europe, she had sisters in Cotonou, she knew how to knit and could open her own workshop.

By then, all of S-‘s wealth had been looted by his relatives, according to her. His younger brother, one of the oldest boys in his sixth-grade class, dropped out of school and took to crusing on S-‘s moto around the streets of Bassila full time. All S-‘s money that he had saved up, planning to cement the yard of our concession and put ceilings in all the rooms, was stolen from S-‘s bedroom. His brothers took his trucks. They changed the key to Maman F-‘s room so she couldn’t get in. The younger brother and Maman F- both started asking me what had happened to the rent for my room.

Around the time I moved to my new house, Maman F- was finally allowed to leave her mother-in-law’s home. She moved in with her brother, the businessman who did the Hadj this past year, who owned his own house—much nicer than ours had been! She called me often about the rent, hoping I could help her get it before the mother-in-law did. My rent, about $25 per month, was paid for by the mayor’s office, and I never had anything to do with it. But I asked for her, and I was told that the mayor’s office still held six months of rent—three from the time when S- was alive, and three from after his death. As a second, illegal wife, Maman F- had no legal entitlement to any of it, but everyone at the mayor’s office felt bad for her and knew she had lived with him. We visited the mayor’s office often to explain the situation, but without legal documents verifying her right to S-‘s property, it didn’t seem the mayor’s office could do much. The mother-in-law needed to come in with her so the dispute could be settled, but the woman refused—for her, it was all or nothing. Seeing the deadlock, someone at the mayor’s office suggested an old man from the village sign a statement, though exactly what it said I’ve forgotten, and Maman F- claimed the three months rent from before S-‘s death.

Just before New Year’s, M- got very sick with malaria. She lost a lot of weight and peered out at me through tired eyes in hollowed sockets. Maman F- brought M- to the mother-in-law, pleading for help. Each time she went, the mother-in-law gave her 100 F, enough to buy a bowl of rice with no meat, two liters of pure water, or a motorcycle trip half-way through town. Maman F- is nothing if not dignified, and she took the 100 F each time and left.

About a month ago, people of the village—Maman F didn’t know exactly who—heard what had happened and saw how sick M- was. In a group, they went to the mother-in-law’s house, accusing her of sorcery and injustice. They stayed through the night arguing, but to no avail.

M- eventually was taken to a traditional healer, after the hospital treatments failed to work. Maman F- brought a goat, a chicken, and a cat as sacrifices, and the healer prepared an herbal tea for M- to drink and bathe in. She was to spend each day there getting treated for months, but she recovered suddenly after the first few treatments.

Now, Maman F- is bored, and she is tired of sitting in the house all day with nothing to do. She can’t be at ease being useless, she says. Her brother’s wife is tired of having her there, too, and she has started refusing Maman F- food now. If Maman F- tries to help sweep or cook, the wife stops her. “If you want to sweep, you can wake up at 5:00 to do it,” the wife says. Waking up before the rest of the family to sweep is a girl’s chore, the kind of thing A- did. So Maman F- refuses. “Am I not a married woman?” she asks. Now, she searches for a new place to stay, and hopefully, something to do so she can take care of her girls.

Mom teaching kids how to play a color-coded version of Sudoku, on a clay board she made herself, on my porch in Bassila.

Mom stepped off the plane in Cotonou with a headscarf from a Moroccan woman around her neck, a bulging backpack au dos, and two giant rolling suitcases trailing behind her. She didn’t speak any French, had never been outside of North America, rarely travels alone, and generally doesn’t tolerate hot weather or excessive perspiration too well. But let’s just get this straight: my mom’s a badass, and from the second she walked out the airport door and started saying “Oh, this weather is just like San Diego!”, to her last wave good-bye through a plexiglass partition at the same airport three weeks later, she was indefatigable, unflappable, up-beat, insightful, and inquisitive. I’ve never seen anyone click so quickly with a foreign place nor react so positively to Africa, and let’s remember, I came here with 63 people who had committed themselves to living in Benin for two years. Mom just came here to visit her daughter, but she beat us all with her spirit.

It’s a good thing she was so positive, because after having lived here for almost two years, I’ve kind of forgotten how overwhelming Benin can be: trash strewn everywhere, motorcycles whizzing past, bright colored clothing, streets packed with vendors hawking Chinese products under corrugated metal roofs, spicy food, over 50 linguistic groups, oppressive heat and humidity, and everywhere dust dust dust and people people people! I’ve forgotten how long it takes to get from Denver to Cotonou: three hours to New York, another eight hours to Paris, and six to Cotonou (plus layovers). I barely recall what jet lag is like, or what it’s like to get off a plane in the world’s 10th poorest country, not knowing what on earth awaits you. Which is why I had scheduled a whirl-wind trip for my 51-year old asthmatic mother. I just wasn’t thinking!

I had allotted absolutely no recovery time for my mom. Her flight got in at 9 PM, and I planned for us to spend the next day with my host family and then to embark the following day on a three-day overland trek to Mali, where we’d spend four days backpacking and sleeping under the stars, before heading back to Bassila on Christmas Eve. I realized that this was a mad plan only when she arrived, and so planned on going to the Peace Corps office myself the next morning to get some work done while she slept in our air-conditioned hotel. Instead, she woke up when I did and began bouncing around our hotel room hugging me and saying, “I’m in Africa! I’m in Africa!” Naturally, she came with me.

For me, our trip to Mali will forever be one of the highlights of my time in the Peace Corps. The Dogon Country (Pays Dogon) is a region of Mali I’d heard positive things about from other Volunteers, but I really didn’t have any idea what it would be like. On the second night of our over-land trek north, Mom asked, “So what exactly are we DOING in Mali?” I said, “Good question,” and pulled out my Lonely Planet guide, which offers this admonishment to the faint-hearted: the trip involves “winding through caves, scrambling on all fours, [and] leaping from boulder to boulder.” By the way, the sturdiest shoes my mom had brought were Keds. I feared for us, and to keep our spirits up, we took some dramatic photos leaping from hotel bed to hotel bed.

Mom and our guide overlooking Ende, a village in the southern Dogon Country.

The Dogon Country is breath-taking. To travel there, we took a horse-drawn cart 17 kilometers from a small town called Bankass. The Bandiagara Escarpment runs 150 km long, and along the top of the escarpment and in the fields below are the villages of the Dogon people. Around the 7th century, the escarpment was settled by the Tellem people, who built small mud and stone buildings in the cliffside, where they stored their grains and magic. The buildings were so high and so inaccessible that myth held the Tellem could fly; actually, the cliffside used to be covered in jungle vines, allowing the Tellem to climb high up. Their buildings were so small that the Tellem were also believed to be miniature people, like pygmies, but actually, these buildings were just used for storage. Following the Tellem, the Dogon moved to the escarpment, building their own set of structures on the cliffs. Only fifty years ago, when the jungle below was cleared away, making the valley safe, did the Dogon finally climb down from the cliffs (or settle on top of the escarpment).

Me at the top of the escarpment.

As a traveler in the Dogon country, you camp at the “campements” built for tourists: mud structures built in the same style as Dogon houses, with “ladders” (tree trunks with hunks chopped from the side) propped against the buildings to lead up to the rooftops, where you sleep. The Dogon country manages to be extremely well set-up for tourists without being “touristy.” Every village has campements, and though you sleep on the roof, you’re provided with a mattress; though there is no running water, there are shower stalls with taps and showerheads powered by barrels of water and gravity itself. Every village had shops for the tourists, but not selling the usual mass-produced “Africrap” you can find all over West Africa. The Dogon have a rich artistic tradition, dying their clothes with indigo, carving their doors with elaborate motifs, and surrounding their homes and public spaces with large wooden sculptures. Despite being one of the most-visited tourist sites in West Africa, the Dogon Country felt relatively untouched. The government has little to do with it; every school or clinic was financed by donors—tourists who had passed through and been enchanted by the Dogon and wanted to give back. The kids did have their own set of Yovo greetings, like “Ca va le bon bon?” (“What’s up the candy?”) and “Ca va le walaballou?” (Dogon/French for “What’s up the water bottle?”), but thank God, no equivalent to the Yovo Song. And the elderly would reach out their hands expectantly for a cola nut. But otherwise, the tourists sort of inhabited the Dogon space in a peaceful way, mostly running into one another at the campements; I never heard a nasty word about the tourists being there, and in general, everyone just seemed kind of... happy and at ease. Unlike Benin, where at every turn people are helplessly asking foreigners to provide for them, the Dogon are extremely self-sufficient. Nothing was wasted: they built rope from the bark of baobab trees, cut dried grasses to feed their animals in the dry season (in Benin, absolutely everything gets burned, and I cannot figure out why), making potass and indigo from the chaff of millet, using calabashes as waterbottles, and protecting saplings with thorny acacia branches so the muttons wouldn’t eat them. It was basically Africa as National Geographic would like to portray it: isolated, friendly, a beautiful and fascinating traditional culture preserved through the years, stunning landscapes, and enchanting people. My days in the Dogon were nothing less than beautiful.

Our guide has been guiding Peace Corps Volunteers for years, and was charming, informative, kind, and likable. He called Mom “Mom” and constantly looked out for us. We took to him like a brother and enjoyed his company immensely in the days we were with him. Each day, he brought us breakfast, then hiked with us til lunchtime, when we were obliged to rest through the hottest part of the day, before hiking until dusk.

The biggest oversight in our planning for the trip was not checking to make sure our sunblock worked, and in fact, it did not. So I brought my mom, one of the palest people I know, to the African Sahara without skin protection. After our 17 km horse ride the first day, she was red, dehydrated, and not at all feeling well. She sort of meekly said she hoped she could make it through the trip, and I panicked, not wanting to have to find an alternative vacation and not having any idea how I would pull that off anyway. But I gave her an Oral Rehydration Salt packet, and she covered herself with a long-sleeve shirt, headscarf, and hat, and she spent the rest of the trip hiking like that, against the odds.

Mom on the afternoon of our first hike day, showing me that she feels good after all!

By the end of our days of hiking in the sun, we were both exhausted and a bit overcome with emotion. We rented a car to take us back to town, and said goodbye to our guide. I looked at Mom as we drove away, and she put her hands over her mouth. “Are you crying?” I said. She nodded, and I cried too. We threw one last wallaballu to the kids of the Dogon as we drove away, and the waved it in the air like a prize.

I hope I can go back someday.

And then, the magic evaporated. Back on the streets of Africa-as-I-Know-It, we had no guide to take care of everything for us, and we were left to fend for ourselves against the rats at our Bunghole of a hotel (where we indulged in NOT keeping our spirits up by taking fake prison photos of ourselves) and dishonest drivers looking for a way to scam the Anasaras. Mom got sick at the hotel, and on the next day’s trip to Burkina Faso, we got repeatedly ripped off. All we ate that day was a tiny lemon, a small sack of hibiscus juice, and a little fried millet cake. We kept expecting a chance to eat something real, but when we arrived at our hotel in Ouagadougou, the front desk woman stormed off saying “Kitchen’s closed.” For the second time in two days, I cried. It was weird to have my mommy around, and not have to be strong all the time, and get to indulge in my emotions. The only good thing that happened today was that we were let back into Burkina without having to pay for a second visa. Luggage got lost. I yelled a lot. It wasn’t pretty. When we finally got back to Benin the following day, we got into a van with a very pushy driver, who tried to fit four wide-hipped women in one small seat, shouting at us to move faster and squish in. I keep mentally ranking Africans by friendliness, and so far, Benin’s last. It certainly wasn’t Burkina, where our driver bought watermelon slices to go around. My heart was heavy as I tried to fit my wide hips between those of strangers.

It didn’t get better until we got to Bassila, late Christmas Eve night. We’d planned to take the morning Christmas Eve bus from Natitingou to Bassila, and had made reservations to do so, but were then told the bus wouldn’t stop in Bassila and so we would have to take the 3:00 bus instead. I got into a big argument, though my anger didn’t make me any less attractive prey to the fat man in a shiny bubu who hit on me anyway, making me cast perhaps my most cutting line yet: “The thing white women hate most about Africa, is that the businesses are all poorly run, and the men won’t leave you alone!” My anger was for naught. We had to take the 3:00 bus, which didn’t leave til after 5:00 at anyway, and regardless, the driver ended up stopping on the roadside and spending an hour bewildered by the choice of letting a passenger on with yams and guinea fowl or refusing to take him. A riot broke out on the bus, and a man outside was held in a choke. It was absolutely ridiculous. I even got out and hoisted a sack of yams on the bus, but it didn’t do us any good. We got to Bassila after dark.

And the magic began again! It was wonderful to give my mom a chance of my post, and we were well-received everywhere. Everyone greeted her by saying, “But you are still YOUNG, eh?” and they were honored to have her there. We had a constant stream of guests and food, and I mostly tried to keep up with my mom, who still subscribes to an American work ethic and sense of time. I, the 20-something, kept saying, “Mom, don’t you wanna like, nap or read a book or something?” I’ll leave the details of our Bassila ramblings to her.

Mom dancing in Bassila with friends, the night she seduced the bar owner.

Mom was great. She learned a tremendous amount of French, and she inspired me with her unceasing generosity. She made friends easily, sharing snacks with women and children whom she couldn’t communicate with, and often finding men who spoke good English. She even seduced someone! I’m sure she’ll write about how proud she was of me, but I was proud of her too. My mom’s amazing.

January 10, 2010 Saturday

Shari Maman Jessica, Guest blogger

It has been four and half days since I arrived home from West Africa. I know that I do not have adequate words to convey the depths of my feelings about my time there; it is difficult to speak about what the trip meant to me, and my emotions are high. I can converse about my adventures, describe people, places and food, and entertain you with stories of “public transportation” but what was truly important about this trip I may never fully begin to articulate.

My purpose for going was two fold: first, of course, to spend time just being with Jessica, and second, to immerse myself in her life and the life of her village. While I only began to get my feet wet (an oxymoron in West Africa if there ever was one!), by the beginning of my second week I knew where some things were, could communicate in basic French, and had begun to make some relationships. I found the people of West Africa to be generous of spirit, warm hearted, and friendly. People are people, no matter where they are, and common people should never be judged by the political actions of their governments or their religious groups. I have never met any one who didn’t want a good life for themselves and their children, and the people of West Africa are no different.

Our first adventure began at the hotel in Cotonou, where we stayed when I arrived. It was one of the nicest in Cotonou, but nevertheless, a cockroach the size of my big toe awaited me! Not quite the size of a Madagascar Hissing cockroach, but way bigger than the cockroaches we had in California, and enormous compared to what we have in Colorado. Naturally, I took a photo! It was pretty amusing. We unpacked, and I went through the gifts that I had brought and we sorted them out for people. Jess was overwhelmed by the largess, and devoured the Toblerone bar for my Air France flight. Air France, I love you!!!!!!

The next morning, we went out and about: my first zemi ride! We stopped by Peace Corps headquarters in Cotonou to store our luggage, send an email home that I had arrived safely, and meet a few people. We stopped at a lovely little café for Café au Lait and a chocolate croissant, and then we went to a “supermarket” to get wine for Christmas, and some snacks. Shopping was fun. Lots of wine from countries I did not know even made one, and lots of interesting food items. We bought some goat cheese balls in oil, a bottle of red wine, and some champagne. My second zemi ride, and then, we were off to find conveyance to Maman and Papa’s house in Porto Novo.

My first impressions of the city were of the heat and humidity, and the greenery. This was not unlike San Diego, where I lived in my 20s, so I felt pretty comfortable, mentally. Same plants, same temperatures. I remembered the constant “sultry-ness” (as my grandma would have said), the incessant drip of perspiration down my back, and my constantly moist face! My second impressions were of the dust, the litter of plastic bags everywhere, and the busyness of the city. People, zemis, cars, chickens, goats, charcoal fires, and harmatan dust. The plastic bags, chickens, and especically, the charcoal fires surprised me: I guess I had expected wood fires in the villages, but not in the cities.

I had my visor on during my first zemi ride, and had foolishly put my glasses away, so I couldn’t really see much, but for the next trip, I left the visor up and put my glasses on. I was excited to see what was going on, to watch people washing clothes in the river, and to look at the landscape. Riding a zemi was fun! I was a little worried about how you rode one without touching the driver, or holding on, and without leaning when the driver leaned (all of which we generally do when riding bikes in the US) but it worked surprisingly well. The big challenge for me was hiking my dress up my lusty American thighs so that I could throw my leg over the seat, without creating an international incident. We resolved to always travel with a pagne in our bag for future modesty requirements, but we didn’t have very good follow through on that resolution. I was pretty scandalous. I am sure that the Africans were even more shocked that Americans are by the luminous glow of my milky white thighs!

Porto Novo, home of Maman and Papa is a colonial town, and the architecture of the Portuguese is evident. Maman and Papa’s house must have once been resplendent. It is a big stucco house with a garden patio and embellishments along the bottom of the house and walls that are similar to the fleur de leis. The original chandeliers were still in the house, and it also had molded ceilings and other architectural embellishments, so it was easy to imagine what it was like in it’s hey-day. By Beninese standards, it was still a lovely home: lots of rooms, well laid-out, toilets…Maman cooked lunch for us of couscous and hotdogs (!) with sauce. Papa came home from work and joined us. They are really warm and lovely people who laughed a lot and seemed to really have a lot of fun. When we passed out the gifts, everyone was very happy, and they applauded each time. Papa absolutely LOVED his multi-tool and Maman was thrilled with her cosmetic bag, jewelry, and make up. Her best praise was for her picture frame, which she quickly filled with a photo of herself and Jess, sent by Emily. “With this gift, you have shown me that you understand the value of a person,” she told Jess.

After lunch, Papa took all of us on a tour of his village, to the Mayor’s office so we could see where he works, and then to dinner for some “real Beninese food.” Papa is second in command at the Mayor’s office, and he had some pretty nice digs. He had an air conditioner and a TV in his office, so when watched music videos while he signed some papers. He dedicated one of the songs to me. Hilarious. Papa’s village was just a turn down a street in Porto Novo, and then suddenly we were in the little rainforest community with people running up to the car to wave and saluer Papa. In a generous move, he bought us a HUGE bag of various bananas. Hahaha .Anyone who knows me knows that I find the smell, texture, and taste of bananas repellent. Everyone was eating bananas right and left, and Maman kept telling me to have one, so I took a deep breath and forced myself with a smile…I have to say, it was, hands down, the WORST thing that I ate on my trip!! Jess said I looked like I was eating a giant slug and that I was truly brave! LOL

Papa is a very visionary man, and one of the things he wanted to show us were his fish farms. He had taken a course on fish farming, and had started with just a couple of ponds. He is now up to 8, with 4 more in the process. He was raising cat fish and tilapia. He had the fetisher from his village guarding his gardens and farm plots, and the fish farms (and by the way, this guy’s scarification marks covered his torso, and were beautiful). The fetisher fed the fish some cracked corn, and they were pretty amazing! Papa showed us all of his family lands, and explained his plans then: where he would plant crops the buildings he was planning to put up, how far the fish ponds would go. I was really impressed. All of the roads in Benin except the highway are dirt roads, and the roads into Papa’s village and to his farm were really rutted. Luckily, he had an SUV jeep with 4wheel drive. He was a most fearsome driver, and I can see why he was excited about the multi-tool. He’ll need it.

After seeing the farms, we had to stop for gas at the road side stand (gas embezzled from the Nigerian pipeline, in glass wine bottles, yes!) and then to dinner. The “restaurant” was a thatched mud-brick building with open windows, by the side of the road on a family compound. I did not see that it had a sign of any kind. We pulled into the yard and parked, and they led us to a thatched pavilion in the back of the yard. The yard was strewn with plastic bags other debris, goats and chickens wandered at will, small fires were smoldering, and the man of the house was being shaved under a tree by the family house. The waitress brought us water to wash our right hand with, and then brought fried pork strips, soft drinks, plates of chopped tomato, peppers, and onions, and two pates (“pots”): that is thick meal paste. One was corn, and one, I think, was manioc. To eat, you picked up the pate in the fingers of your right hand, picked up a piece of meat, and added some of the vegetables. It tasted a lot like carnitas. Delicious. Papa was very happy with my pepper consumption!

The next day, we left our lovely hotel in Cotonou, and began the arduous three day taxi and bus trip (and three days back, I might add) across Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali, into the Dogon country of Western Mali for our one tourist excursion. You have read enough of Jess’s travel adventures to perhaps get the point that travel in West Africa is always an adventure, certainly risky, and never without drama, so I will just give you some brief highlights.

Most bush- taxis are small imported cars, stripped own to their bare essentials (I only rode in one that had a door handle or window rollers on the inside, for example). They should seat 4-5 at the most, and generally hold eight people, plus luggage in the trunk, and various and sundry items strapped to the top. They have no seat belts; Peace Corps recommends that you ride in the middle seats. On one prong of our adventure, we actually saw a live ling-horn cow--feet surely trussed--complacently riding along in the trunk. “Bush buses” are mini-vans or SUVs. SUVS should hold 8 comfortably. They can actually hold 12-16, uncomfortably. The most we had in one was 16. It was the only conveyance that we rode in that had actually had padded, plush seats and music (it was new). For this ride, I reclined in the arms of the fattest man I have met, while another man rested his left buttock and leg on my right hip, and eight high school boys sat across from us on a wooden bench, with their legs entwined with ours and our knees in one another’s respective crotches. Hilarious. I had several other memorable bus rides; Most involved 22 people (plus children/babies) in a bus that should hold 12 comfortably. One bus also carried 12 550 K bags of millet on the top, along with a motorcycle and a bicycle, and a goat under the back seat. On one bus, Jess rode on a jerry-can of water for 12 hours. We had one bus that broke down, as well as one taxi. One bus, a former AIDS van, was completely stripped and had wooden benches along the sides of the bus: Jess said she felt like she was riding in a Holocaust van. We rode on this into Koro, and we had delightful travel companions, and I mean that most sincerely. Our traveling companions along our journeys included some musicians from Portugal and France who were traveling to a music festival in Mali, a former university professor who had taught agriculture on his way to visit family in Togo, a Chinese water expert who was working on water projects in West Arica, various Fulani women, a Tuareg man in a turban, lots and lots of adorable children and babies, a chicken, a Burkina tour guide, and three PCVs from Niger, who ended hiking with us in the Dogon. I made friends with children and mamas by sharing fruit and PURE water bags.

At every stop in Burkina, people swarmed our vehicles to sell us things: you could get “PURE” water in little plastic bags, Cela (sesame seed cakes), millet cakes, corn cakes, peeled oranges, bananas, watermelon slices, avocado sandwiches (delicious), loaves of fresh baked baguettes, or pre-packaged “LOVE” bread from Nigeria, bags of peanuts, cashews, citrines, cooked bush rat, kabobs of pork, apples, pineapple, to name a few. You could also purchase cell phone credit, or bottles of soda, (but you had to return the glass bottle). The most delicious thing was baggies of fruit or hibiscus juice (Bisap) sweetened, and sometimes frozen. Very reviving. Once we had bisap flavored with ginger! Yum!!!

One of the most interesting things about this journey was just watching the scenery. The architecture throughout West Africa appears to be very similar, but subtle differences emerged as we traveled. For one thing, Benin is a wealthier country than Mali (10th poorest versus 3rd poorest), so in Benin, it was not uncommon to see cement houses with stucco. In Northern Benin were the traditional Bariba houses, which consist of an enclosed family concession, some rectangular buildings and some round buildings with peaked thatched roofs. These concessions also had granaries and poultry houses that were shaped like giant pots with hats. In Benin, the style of agriculture is slash and burn, so fires are constantly smoldering. Once we saw a palm tree behind a family concession go up and explode! Crikey!!! Seeing so much dry brush and being from Colorado, I was petty alarmed by this; I kept expecting wild fire to break out. Once you cross the border into Burkina, the burning stops. Burkina is very, very poor; “We are poor, but we are well organized,” a travel told me. Cultivated fields stretch to the horizon. People primarily farm millet, we were told, but lots of corn and some sorghum, as well as vegetables and fruit. We saw fruit orchards, and were very impressed that important trees were left in fields. Donkeys and goats were grazing in fields that were pretty much stripped. Every part of the plants are used: stalks are used for animal food and for roofing and basket making. In Burkina, we saw fences made of woven stalks, bins made of woven stalks, and thatch drying in trees. The agriculture was very impressive there and in Mali, and it gave me great hope.

Thirteen kilometers north of Bassila is a Kotokoli village called El Hamdou (the only Arabic-named village in Benin I know of—I believe "Al Hamdu" means "praises" or "thanks"). Every fifth Sunday, I meet with a group of women there who do various “petite commerce” activities, mostly producing charcoal from wood, to guide them in a self-managed savings and loan group. They’re a motivated and attentive group with a few spunky leaders ho have done a great job so far of acquiring the savings and loan skills. But the problem with working in El Hamdou is that it has neither electricity nor reliable cell phone coverage, and it takes me an hour to get there by bike. Usually, to remind the women of our meeting date, I bike to El Hamdou the week before, sometimes continuing 15 km on to Penessoulou to visit Naima and sometimes continuing one km to Frignon to meet her at our “water hole,” a bar called “Mets-moi l’eau là,” literally “Put me the water there.”

This week, I was too busy to bike to El Hamdou, and yesterday morning had come down with a cold so didn’t want to go “advert” them. I called one of the members, and for the first time, it worked. This morning, I decided to take a taxi rather than bike, and after a long wait for a car to fill… and leave without me… and then for another car to fill, I headed north, one hour late for my meeting. Three of the groupement members were on the road when I arrived, all with babies on their backs. They apologized; the cell phone battery had died so they couldn’t clal me to cancel the meeting. There was a Fulani whipping fête in Frignon and all the women were there to watch. I was discouraged and sick on the one hand, but intrigued to see how the Fulani—West Africa’s nomadic cattle herders—fêted on the other hand, so I decided to “profiter” from the occasion, and I set off for Frignon.

I saw a few men with drums near Frignon’s center, but the village was mostly tranquil. I walked toward the marketplace, figuring that’d be the most likely public fête space and hoping to run into one of my groupement women. Even when I first got to Bassila, I had a few people looking out for me who showed me around, and even today, though I don’t know everyone or every part of Bassila, I can always walk with purpose and the knowledge that I’m in my home village. So I haven’t had to do an awkward, solitary walk through a foreign village in almost two years, and I felt awkward and out of place! I greeted a few women as I walked, but no one seemed too outgoing, and I couldn’t find the women I knew. Finally I found myself at a tchuke stand, where two women were sitting on benches behind large plastic buckets of millet beer and basins full of calabashes. Sitting on a bench sipping beer at 10:30 seemed like as good a solution as any, so I sat.

A few other customers trickled in, and I asked them questions about the fête, hoping for guidance or even a guide. About the fourth client to arrive was a young man, wearing a button-down tissue shirt, dress pants, and loafers. His name was Inoussa and I struck up a conversation and explained how I’d come to be in Frignon today and how I hoped he could show me how to get to the fête. He agreed, and we drank our tchuke, c hatting animatedly with the other clients, who were now numerous. A bearded Muslim in a long bubu and skull cap came and greeted me. He had just heard I did work in El Hamdou, where he lived, and he came to meet me. He said El Hamdou had a group that met to save money and give out loans, and I said I had taught them! He said it was very important, and I felt proud. His name was Issaka, and he was a cotton-grower.

Fulani men carrying sticks occasionally walked past, and I was eager to get to the whipping fête. Inoussa and I finished our tchuke and walked toward the fête. It was hidden from the main road, and my first view was a thick wall of people boys filling the trees, and men piled on top of a van. The fight occupied a large clearing, and all around there were spectators, at least five thick, clamoring to see. Hundreds were there.

Above the clatter and occasional whack of a club were the noises of metal whistles that the fighters were blowing. I squeezed into the pack of onlookers and watched as a group of fifteen men or so beat each other with sticks. One was brandishing what looked like a piece of rubber fire hose, and the fight seemed to be a free-for-all. At the Lokpa fête, the fighters squared off one-on-one and mostly defended themselves from the blows, blocking their opponents’ whips with the handles of their own. These men were just laying into each other. I later looked closely at several men’s sticks, and one was completely covered in barbs, except for a handle he’d made with electrical tape. Ouch.

The fighting stopped suddenly, and a new group of men came into the clearing. They lined up, facing each other, and strutted and posed. After a few minutes, a new group came up and did the same. The man standing next to me (who said he’d seen me recently in Bassila with my mom!) said the men were just “amusing themselves.” Finally, fighting erupted again. The crowd cheered and pushed forward, everyone trying to see the action. The man with the rubber hose lashed out at the crowd, and we all ran backwards, one of my new friends holding my arm, and everyone kicking up a cloud of dust. This happened a few more times, the crowd ebbing in and out, until finally it was all over, and everyone spilled toward the village center. It was fun to watch the fight with Lokpa and Kotokoli, who seemed just as curious about the scene as I was, all offering up their own theories about this Fulani tradition, shuddering at its brutality, and saying “The Lokpa whipping fêtes are NOT like that!”

Innoussa and I went back to the market for a second round of tchuke. At a sodabi (moonshine) stand nearby, I recognized a short, chubby girl named Gloria who had been at my first girls’ club meeting. I greeted her and asked her to come back, but she said she had tutoring at club time.

After the tchuke, Inoussa walked me to his family’s home. We passed Mets-Moi l’Eau-La, and a boy who often plays and studies on my porch was there. Apparently, it’s his family’s bar. I wondered at how small Benin is that a boy I’d taken a picture of two days prior was actually the son of the owner of my water-hole 14 k away.

Inoussa’s family was friendly and funny. His younger brothers went to school in Penessoulou and asked me about Naima. Inoussa bought them bikes and rented them a house in Penessoulou, so they lived there during the school week and biked home on weekends. We began discussing my travel plans, and Inoussa’s brother offered to drive me home by moto. I explained about how rigorously Peace Corps enforces its helmet rule, and they offered to FIND me a helmet!

I shared a calabash of tchuke with Inoussa’s grandma, got everyone’s contact information, and went with Inoussa to a shop by the road, where we waited for his brother. The groupement president walked past, and we talked. She’d met my mom during her visit to the Bassila market, and now she wanted to come visit my home. I explained where it was, and everyone knew. Inoussa’s brother finally arrived, with the moto and helmet, and we got ready to leave. As I shook Inoussa’s hand and said goodbye, he said it was God who knew I needed to find a friend and brought us together. I’d been thinking something similar. I blessed African hospitality and headed home with the brother of the man I’d met just hours before.

There are many reasons I haven’t updated my blog much lately. My computer has been broken since July, and I grew tired of writing journal entries by hand and so just gave up on journaling at all. With the wisdom that has come as a second year Volunteer, life has been much smoother and less note-worthy (or at least, less rant-worthy), and so I’ve felt less of a need to share things online all the time. This is my last chance to post before the nouvelle année, however, and my computer has been fixed, so I guess I’m out of excuses.

Most Volunteers find a project that eventually consumes most of their time at post. I’ve never really found that, and I’ve been happy to dabble in lots of different things; this has given me the chance to work with many people in many sectors, and I’ve learned a lot about development in this way. The downside is that I’ve never really settled into a regular work rhythm; some weeks I’m extremely busy, and some weeks I have little to do. On the chance that my blog gives the impression that all I do is take horrendous(ly entertaining) taxi rides and go to fêtes, here are a few stories about things I’ve been doing these past few months.

Student Activities

A year ago, I decided to get involved with the local public secondary school by forming a business club. In my first weeks in Bassila, I met the school’s administrators and prepared a speech to give at the weekly Monday morning flag ceremony to invite the students to participate. I was a spectacle, and I felt the two-thousand-odd students, dressed in matching khaki uniforms, staring at me while I sweated in my tissue modele waiting to be called. When I finally walked to the flag platform to give my announcement, their rigid military postures broke down, and they began tittering and whispering “Yovo” to one another. They laughed when I started speaking, and afterwards, I went back to the mayor’s office and cried.

No more. This year, I had learned my lesson, and I had the director make the announcement at the flag ceremony himself. I later accompanied the school’s surveillance officer to each class to invite the female students to participate in my girls’ club. In each class, he asked, “Do you know this woman?” And they nodded and said, “Oui!”

My first club meeting was a madhouse. Over eighty girls showed up, cramming themselves into the desks and floorspace of the classroom, and pouring in and out of the doorway while I shouted over them. I hadn’t anticipated so many girls would come, and so, mistakenly, had organized a craft for the first class. It was chaotic, but it wasn’t overwhelming, and I felt great about how I managed so many girls scrambling for supplies and needing help with their projects. What made the meeting so different from my earliest efforts at teaching was my confidence; I knew few of the girls individually, but I knew them as a group somehow, and I knew how to take the stage.

Since then, the group has gotten smaller, and I’m down to a cadre of about 10-15 girls who come faithfully each week. We’ve done sessions on women’s health, peer pressure, sexual harassment, and dreams for the future; they’ve done skits on resisting romantic advances, played dodgeball, and a few of them have written me stories about their lives. Two of the girls who are most active in the club were Camp Succès girls, and they are by far the two most outstanding participants in the club as well. It’s inspiring to see how focused and how much more confident they are now; their dreams for their futures were lengthy imaginings of study in France, campaigns for women’s rights, entrepreneurship, and public office, and they both wrote about camp as a defining point in their lives. It’s also inspiring to see the other club participants in action; our campers were the 60 best students in the entire region, but my club is open to all. Even those who aren’t at the tops of their classes have ideas about their own empowerment that sometimes surprise me. A year ago, I was far less sanguine about Benin, and particularly Beninese education and prospects for girls. I’m starting to feel a little better about these girls’ futures, and hopefully, I can give them some of the tools and ideas they will need to build better futures for themselves.

Add to that an English spelling bee, a mural-painting project that I’m organizing (to be executed during my mom’s visit later this month), and continued sexual harassment formations in Bassila and Manigri, and I spend enough time in the schools to be jokingly referred to as an “Honorary TEFL Volunteer.”

I have not yet started the sexual harassment project in Parakou that I mentioned earlier, but I’ve continued to work with my local team of “animateurs” to teach about sexual harassment in our schools here. Like last year, this has been a mix of frustrating and encouraging. Both of the men I was working with constantly badgered me about funding, either by asking whether I’d contacted the US Embassy about providing funding for the project, by telling me they needed something to “encourage their motorcycles,” or by insisting that I needed to buy beers and Cokes for the school directors to encourage their cooperation. This has been maddening. Perhaps the most exasperating part is that I could easily dip into a collective Gender and Development project fund maintained by Volunteers’ own fundraising efforts, but I’m resisting this on principle. A Peace Corps Volunteer is supposed to work for the benefit of the community with community members who share similar goals, not who are looking only for a financial benefit. A school director should help me find an open classroom not because he’s getting a beer at the end of the day. Yet while I explained this many times, over many months, the men heard only what they wanted to hear, even asking me in front of the students why I wouldn’t just hand them money to thank them for coming to our training. At that point I finally snapped and told them it hurt me to constantly be asked for money, especially by friends who knew I was a Volunteer and didn’t have a source of funding for them. Haven’t heard a peep about financement since.

The trainings themselves have been mixed in terms of success. Some groups we’ve talked to have been very quiet, but others have been rousing debates. In one, every student shared a story about sexual harassment. One boy said that in his class, a teacher had asked a girl to buy him fried dough balls. She said she didn’t have money, and he wouldn’t give her any but insisted that if she didn’t buy him dough balls he would come to her home and find her. Another boy told a story about how a teacher had made him into an intermediary, harassing the boy to harass a girl, until finally the boy had pleaded with the girl to go out with the teacher to get him off his back. The teacher in question, actually, is a member of a family I know fairly well; he has been to my house to discuss girls’ empowerment projects. Another girl told a story about a teacher who pressured her to give her his phone number, and then began harassing her so often that she finally just stopped going to his class and failed that subject. She asked if we had the same problem in the West, and I got sad, recounting the only story of the only time I’d ever been harassed—it was by a father, and I turned to a male teacher for help, and he protected me. It’s a different world.

Savings and Loan Groups

The two groups that I’ve kept going are still going well, and they’ve both finally gotten to give out loans and have pretty good reimbursement rates so far as well. It’s pretty exciting, knowing I’ve made it possible for village women to take out about $700 in loans so far. My hope is to get them to take full control of the accounting and run the meetings reliably without me there. Wish me luck. Now that I moved houses, I’m really close to the first group I worked with—the fish sellers who stopped meeting. They keep asking me when we’ll meet again, and I keep saying they just need to get themselves organized and give me a date, but I don’t think it will ever happen. You win some, you lose some. At least now I know not to spend 3 hours a week sitting on a bench waiting for a meeting to happen.

The orphanage

Land has been allocated, deliberated over, voted on, and approved for donation to the Bassila Center For Children in Difficult Situations. With a lot of prodding, a budget was finally produced too. The civil engineer who is helping design the blueprints disappeared to China for a few weeks for training (what… the….?), and the communal council is voting on what its financial contribution will be. It has taken months and months to get this far, and I’m sad that I obviously, at this point, will not be able to see an orphanage built in my stay in Bassila. My goal, however, was to at least get Bassila ready for an orphanage, and I’m achieving that slowly. I hope that with the help of the new Manigri Volunteer, within a few months we will be able to do a major fundraising endeavor and break ground on construction, so that I can leave the actual building project to her.

And the obligatory non-work-related story

My last big news is that I’m now the owner of the first dog I’ve had since the catastrophe that was Obi Wan when I was about five. Carl, a dog who’s lived with at least three other Volunteers, has passed into my care. He was last owned by Kate, and since her death has been living with her Beninese neighbors in Badjoude. The two other Volunteers near Badjoude were worried about Carl’s happiness and well-being; after living with many Volunteers and the traumatic year he’s had, he has a clear preference for White people, serious separation anxiety issues, and had become aggressive once or twice. He’s also an old dog and needed a little R&R. These two Volunteers came to Bassila to give a presentation to my girls’ club, and they thought my spacious house and open fields surrounding it would be a fine place to romp. So Good Dog, Carl came to live with me.

Retrieving him, of course, was no easy process. I traveled to Badjoude with the two Volunteers, where we met the vieu (old man) who was taking care of Carl. It was Tabaski, the Muslim holiday remembering Abraham’s sacrifice of a sheep, and old man Un Jour (literally “One Day”—he said it is because “One Day, a man is born, and One Day, a man dies”) was lounging in a reclining pool chair in glossy basin tissue. The three of us sat with him in the shade of his tree and chatted about Carl, Badjoude, his name, and the history of his family. We ate rice and party-mutton, and finally, I got to meet Carl. Carl clearly sensed something wasn’t right, and he wouldn’t come too close or linger too long around the three of us. We tried to get a good hold on him a few times, and each time he bolted for the fields. Putting a leash on a dog and getting him into a taxi shouldn’t be too complicated a process, but it was. Suddenly, everyone and their mother was gathering around offering insight into Carl’s feelings, how to trap him, and what kind of vehicle we should take him home in. Did Carl even want to go to Bassila? Were we doing the right thing? Could we bring a taxi directly to the house? Would the Anasaras rent a whole taxi just for the dog? Carl refused to be put on his chain, and we all got discouraged. Finally, someone remembered that the very next morning, a “dog expert” would be taking a taxi to Djougou, and he would surely know how to capture Carl. I got on a moto and rode about twenty minutes away to the dog expert’s village to inquire. Through a translator, the old man assured me that he had a product he could put in Carl’s food to make him tranquil, and that he would be able to catch Carl and put him on his chain. No problems. To me, it seemed like the culturally appropriate thing to do: defer to the wisdom of Un Jour and the authority of the Dog Expert. If nothing else, at least this path would garner Un Jour and his family’s approval, and responsibility would be taken off of us.

I spent the night in one of the Volunteer’s villages, a teeny tiny post out in the bush. It was like nowhere in Benin I’d ever been before. Whereas the people of Bassila are conservative, polite, and quiet, in this village they were loud, bawdy, and drunk. Bassila has only a few tchuke brewers, and they are scattered across a wide distance; in this village, a huge chunk of the marketplace was for tchuke. Bassila’s market is a women’s domain; at least in the tchuke market, this village was co-ed. Everyone loved my friend, who speaks great Lokpa and thus could have long conversations with them in their local language. Being in their tchuke market was like being at an out-of-control cocktail party. We kept sipping on our calabashes, and walking from group to group, mingling with men and women who were drunk and had lost their inhibitions. One woman grabbed my hand and put it on her leg near her crotch, telling me what she was going to do with her husband that night! It was a fun night—fun to see a Volunteer so well-integrated and loved by her community, and fun to see market women going a little wild.

The next morning we were back in Badjoude at 7 a.m., greeting the elders while we were assured the Dog Expert was tending to Carl. We gave them a wide berth, but finally were curious and went outside the concession to see what was happening. We found Carl hog-tied on the ground, a canvas strap around his mouth, and several ropes and chains around his neck. Apparently, there was no sedative to put in his food, and our Dog Whisperer was really a Dog Trapper. Why we were expecting greater finesse, I’m not so sure, but we were not happy with the situation. My friend tried repeatedly to let Carl free, but everyone else kept getting nervous and insisting Carl would be aggressive and needed to be tied like that. Finally she got them to untie Carl’s legs, and he began leaping in the air, thrashing.

She got upset, not wanting to see Carl suffer and angry that we had been deceived; I got upset, the treatment of the dog coming to represent how every animal and child is treated with misdirected brutality here; they got upset, not understanding that dogs, when treated nicely, are nice. Emotions were high. She got hold of his chains and started to take him for a walk. I came along, and he ran up to me and put his head against my leg. We walked like that down the road several times, making sure Carl was comfortable with me and gloating a bit at how well he responded to us. I had thought the advantage of the Dog Expert would be his expertise; in the end, I think the advantage was that he made Carl pretty desperate to go away with anyone who would be nice to him. Eventually, a taxi came along. I got into the front seat, and Carl, now completely untied, climbed right in after me and sat on my lap. We snuggled all the way to Bassila.

And something completely different

I am happy to announce that I’ve been admitted to and have accepted to attend the University of Nottingham’s Masters in Economics program! Classes start in September. Also, my mom will be here next week! Tune in later for her guest entry and a recounting of what will doubtless be my most extraordinary adventure yet.

My great-grandma, Roberta Bell Easter, is being buried in Iowa this week. She was the wife of Arthur Roberts, and mother of my grandma Betty (referred to here as “Non”) and great-aunt Mary, and grandmother of my mom, Shari.

My earliest memories of my great-grandparents center on holidays, when they would take the train from Iowa to Denver to visit my grandma, her four kids, and her two grandkids—my older brother Seth and I. I remember one Christmas morning, when Non, Seth, my parents and I were opening presents at our bungalow in Denver, and Grandma and Grandpa surprised us at our house. The snow was almost completely melted, revealing dried brown grass in our yard, but we all were so happy and said it was a real “white Christmas” with Grandma and Grandpa there.

They babysat me once that I remember. I was only a few years old and had been left with them at Non’s house. I was running around the house and eventually got in trouble with Grandpa, who sent me to fetch my own “switch.” I didn’t even know what a switch was, and Grandma was sympathetic and scolded him—“Arthur!” She was generally sympathetic to whatever silliness I was up to.

I was five when I first went to Iowa, and to Seth and I, Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in Keosauqua, with its old barns, tractors and threshers, fields, silos, and hay bales galore was a good place for adventures. In the summers I spent in Iowa, I spent a lot of time outside and in the barns with Seth. By day, we climbed into the hay loft and found a dead opossum; caught tree frogs, tadpoles, and tiny crawdads; and drove the lawnmower and the tractor, “Henry,” and at night we captured fireflies in Grandma’s Mason jars. At the end of the day, Grandma would draw me about an inch of water in the tub for a bath, because there was no shower on the farm!

I also spent a lot of time inside the house with Grandma. She taught me how to play Triominoes and Quadominoes, worried over me getting my fingers caught in her ringer washing machine, and taught me how to do dishes by hand. She often talked about the neighbor boy, Cassidy, who came to visit her. I loved the words she used and the way she spoke; she teased me by telling me I was a “snoop,” called her dining table a “supper table” and her sofa a “davenport,” called Missouri “Missoura” and said “warsh” instead of “wash.” She always prepared huge mid-day “dinners,” and while I’m sure they were always different, the way I remember it, we had delicious, thick egg noodles every time, and we always had dessert. I remember her dipping a finger into a sauce or batter for a quick taste, and giving me a conspiratorial wink or eyebrow raise. She always set food scraps aside in an empty plastic container, and at the end of the day she would shuffle out to the barn to give the scraps to the wild cats that lived there. Grandpa didn’t like me brining the cats too close to the house, but I always thought Grandma loved the cats as much as I did. She let me feed them, too. Once, someone hurt his finger, and Grandma gave Seth and me fudgesicles so she could use the wooden sticks to make a splint. I thought she was “mighty clever,” knowing how to treat an injury like that! There was no trash collection in Keosauqua, so Grandma would take her trash out to a metal barrel and set it on fire. I remember her standing in her yard, tending to that roaring fire with a huge metal silo towering over her.

Our trips to Iowa were always a time of antique-hunting and exploration of the family tree. We women stood in Grandma’s room looking at photos and trinkets from her female ancestors—her mother who spoke Crow and danced Irish jigs, and the one who was kidnapped by Natives. During one of those conversations, I inherited a piece of chalk in a slender wooden case that had belonged to Grandma when she was a school teacher. I think it was during those conversations that I established in my mind that our family was a matriarchy!

We celebrated my eighth birthday in Denver as a joint party for me, Mom, and Uncle John. Grandma and Grandpa gave me a teddy bear that they’d received for their 50th anniversary and Dr. Seuss’s “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!” We played Guesstures, and Grandma wore one of my Aladdin birthday party hats. For most birthdays and Christmases, we didn’t get to see Grandma and Grandpa, but they sent cards without fail, and Grandma always signed hers “g. grandma.” She wrote me long letters, too, which usually said something like “Well, there’s not much to say,” and then continued on for another few pages. As she got older, her letters often said that her arm hurt from writing, and so she’d pause in her letter and come back to it later. In my freshman year at college, she was my best pen pal. She was worried how I was doing on my own “up north” in Minnesota, and she worried especially about what I was eating. She sent me newspaper clippings about freshman weight gain!

The last time I saw Grandma was on my trip home from Minnesota that year. My dad came to pick me up, and we drove to Grandma’s house together and stayed the night. She and Aunt Mary prepared a big meal for my arrival, and Grandma even maid a butterscotch pie for me. Living alone in Cedar Rapids, away from all the routines of farm life and without Grandpa to keep her company and “bicker with,” she did not have much to do but keep her house spotless. She missed Grandpa, and she talked about him a lot and showed me photos of him. At the house in Keosauqua, she’d had three TV channels; in Cedar Rapids she had digital cable, and when the Harry Potter movie came on, she said she’d read about it in Newsweek. She accidentally woke my dad and me up an hour early the next morning, and she’d prepared us breakfast. As we left, I spotted a rabbit in her garden. “Grandma, there’s a rabbit in your garden!” I said. “Well kill it!” she responded, and proceeded to shake the chain-link fence on her garden, shouting “Shoo! Shoo!” To her last, she was a spunky old woman, and she made a fine butterscotch pie.

There is no easy way to get from Bassila to Parakou. As the crow flies, the two places are quite close—about 90 km apart. A paved road connecting the two would allow travel time, even at the slow pace of a bush taxi or bus, to be cut down to about two hours. But of course, in Benin, nothing works quite so well. To get to Parakou, which is slightly northeast of Bassila, I have to travel two hours north to Djougou (86 km), switch to a different taxi, and then travel another three (at best) hours southeast down a poorly paved road to Parakou (134 km). Every time I travel via taxi between Bassila and Parakou, I swear it will be the last time I do it. This past weekend, I decided to try a different strategy.

A narrow dirt road heads east from Bassila, through Manigri and many tens of kilometers of undeveloped, barely populated land. About forty kilometers west of Parakou, this road connects to the Djougou-Parakou paved road. By motorcycle, it takes about two hours to get to Parakou from Bassila this way. The road is frequently used by commerçantes transporting semis full of cotton, corn, wood, and packaged goods. In the rainy season, parts of the road are washed out, and in the dry season, it’s too dusty to be a desirable path to take. But against the choice of another Djougou taxi adventure, I decided to give it a try, just once.

I met up with two other Volunteers in Bassila at 9 am. I had phoned the Bassila taxi boss, Souraji, the day before to arrange our trip, and sure enough, he had a car waiting for us. It was a neuf-place, an eight-seater that a Beninese taxi driver will generally refuse to allow budge without at least nine passengers inside. There were three of us only, and we were afraid that we’d never get to leave without renting the whole car. But to our surprise, we left pretty quickly, stopping in Manigri to let a woman in back. We were sitting in the middle row of seats, and the driver said, “Get out. We have to put the blacks in back.” Kind of an embarrassing thing to have an African man say to post-Civil Rights era Americans. She traveled with us down the road only a short way and then got out, forgetting a small handbag filled with baby clothes in the trunk. The rest of the first hour or so of our trip was pretty uneventful, save for the time we plowed headfirst into a 15-meter stretch of dirt piled two feet high. We all cringed in the backseat as the car slowly lost momentum. At the end of the stretch, the driver turned the car off. “What’s happening?” we asked. “We drove through some dust,” he answered. “Now we have to sit and wait for the dust to fall out.” A few minutes passed silently, and we continued on.

At about eleven, we passed a few mud houses. A man ran to the roadside, and the driver stopped the car so they could talk. Our car pulled into the yard of the houses, and the apprentice in the passenger seat turned to us and said, “We’re going to bother you just a little bit.” The driver parked the car in the shade and began unloading our stuff. Naturally, neither of the back doors worked, and we had to holler at the driver and tap on the windows to get him to come around and let us out. We had no idea how long we’d be there. We got out and dusted ourselves off; our skin was covered in a thin layer of red dirt by that point. A couple of women retrieved a bench and set it in the shade of a house for us. We sat and took in the surroundings.

It was a rather surreal experience, because this particular village was like nothing I’d never seen before. A few slight adjustments to the typical Beninese village made it seem slightly unfamiliar, like it was a village picked out of a picture book and didn’t quite match the reality I’m used to. The yard we sat in was immaculate with a blocked-off cement bed for drying corn. Cornstalks hung to dry from a shaded paillote facing us. There were few houses to be seen, and we were surrounded on all sides by nothingness; still, power lines hung from industrial metal posts, and TV antennas were posted in the dirt. Where were electricity and a TV signal coming from? Several people approached us to talk, and they spoke proper French, of the type you only hear bureaucrats using in a big village like Bassila. But here? I hardly expected even a “ça va.” Several white long-necked birds were circling overhead, and though we couldn’t confirm it, it sounded like we heard a chainsaw in the distance. It was altogether quite bizarre.

While we took this in, the driver and apprentice were busy stuffing the trunk of the taxi with 100 kg bags of dried corn. After half an hour, they got back into the car, and we stood to leave. “No, no, there’s a little left!” they said. We sat back down while they moved the car and then began climbing all over the roof to attach another several bags. Another half hour passed, and finally, there was no more space for more corn. The driver walked across the corn bags, smoothing them with his feet, and then tied them in place with a rope. The passenger-side door seemed to have come loose or something, and it was now tied to its frame with a piece of rope too. Finally, we were told it was time to go. The driver paid a man for the corn, and an argument erupted. Apparently, they hadn’t decided on a price for the corn before we stopped the car. Unbelievable. We huddled in the shade of the house and kept on waiting.

When we finally got back in the car, it was now so weighed down by the corn that it sunk low to the ground. Shortly after pulling away, a huge truck came toward us from the opposite direction. The driver slammed on the brakes, but our taxi could not stop quickly, and we rolled slowly toward what I thought would surely be a bad situation, finally swerving off the side of the road into a ditch at the last moment. Our car clung to the side of the road as we plowed through a cornfield, and we all held our breath for fear the car would roll. Luckily, it didn’t, and we were back on the road in the midday heat.

For awhile, the trip was smooth again. Living on the goudron, I never feel too isolated. I always know that I could get on the goudron and follow it all the way to Cotonou, traveling on uninterrupted pavement all the way from Bassila to the airport, and from there anywhere in the world. Often this bothers me; Bassila feels a little exposed, corrupted, too easy. I like Bassila’s size, but I wish I lived in an enclave that dirt roads provide. Traveling on the dirt road to Parakou reminded me that even Benin’s biggest cities are pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Aside from the fact that we didn’t see any animals, it felt like we were on safari. The landscape was pure savannah, and our taxi crept through it without encountering anyone else for a long time.

At long last, we reached goudron again, and our taxi stopped at the intersection. The driver and apprentice got out and walked away, and we yelled out the window: “Chauffeur! What are we doing? Let us out!” The apprentice came back and said, “We are going to bother you just a little bit again. The driver is buying yams.” We grumbled about the availability of yams everywhere in Benin’s north, the amount of time we had already wasted, and the injustice of our driver not even telling us what was happening, but no one listened. Vendors swarmed our windows, and I bought bananas and an ice-cream-like product from Nigeria. I ate them all, and our driver still wasn’t back yet. We banged on the doors and yelled at the apprentice again, and finally he let us out of the car, saying, “There is just a small problem with the tax collector, and we will be leaving in just a minute.” We grumbled and moved to the shade of a building. After a lot of waiting, I went to investigate. I found the tax man in uniform, lounging in a fold-out chair in the shade of a large mango tree. I greeted him politely and asked what the hold-up was. Apparently, the driver had a debt to a woman, who had a signed document explaining the debt and the driver’s license plate number written on it. It was the first time the taxi had come back to this village in awhile, and so the first opportunity anyone had had to claim the debt. The driver was refusing it, and so the driver, the woman, and the tax collector were trying to sort it out. I explained that I had a meeting in Parakou in an hour (I really did) and so was in a rush, and he kindly said that if our taxi was going to be much longer he’d arrange other transportation for us. I thanked him and went back to my friends, and we settled down for some beans and rice for lunch. Sometime around 2:00 we finally got back in the car, but the driver disappeared again. We looked around and found him negotiating for his yams.

He finally got back into the car, and in my good French that comes only when I’m angry, I laid into him for everything he’d put us through all day and the lack of courtesy he showed by buying yams on top of it all. He laughed and said, “Sorry! Haha,” and I yelled at him more. Then I started yelling at the apprentice, a young, bright boy who probably had only recently dropped out of school. I said, “What are you going to learn from this type? What will your future be? La pagaille!” which means, basically, sneaky irresponsible behavior. The apprentice smiled at me with a look sort of like, “OH! You just went there!” I demanded that as repayment for all he had done, he drive us directly to our workstation instead of making us get zems at the taxi station. Yelling at taxi drivers and other pagailleurs makes me feel, sometimes, like an arrogant wealthy snobbish American. But really, it’s good diplomacy. In Benin, to get things done, you have to yell at people. Probably 75% of the time that a Beninese person talks to a taxi driver, it’s really screaming. I am not a mean foreigner when I’m yelling; I’m bien integrée. The driver takes it and doesn’t hold it against you, and you’ve communicated your dissatisfaction with his service. The car moves on.

Our car, however, didn’t get very far. Smoke from an unknown source started billowing up from the stick shift, and we asked, “What is happening?” “Smoke is in the process of coming out,” we were told. Well, no kidding. We were coming over the crest of a hill, and I watched the driver pumping his brake pedal. The car didn’t slow at all, and again I watched as a truck headed toward us from the other direction. We passed the truck, thankfully, and the driver kept driving, not worried about our inability of stopping. The smoke kept coming, and I started coughing; the apprentice reached around and cracked my window for me, using a wrench because the handle was missing from the door. He wrapped a windbreaker around the stick to try to muffle the smoke, but it only came up thicker. Eventually, the car slowed to a stop. It could go no further.

We got out of the car and assessed the possibility of us ever making it to Parakou. Another taxi appeared, and we started moving our things to his car. We were all fed up, and no one said much; we just took our things silently. Everything was unpacked, and the apprentice looked at us and said, “It’s finished.” I said, dead-pan, “And my yam?” He turned around and picked one of the biggest yams, a beast of a good two feet in length with three large knobs on one end, and laid it in my outstretched arms. He was smiling, amused, and I couldn’t help but smile and shake my head too. Even in my anger, I could see how this was funny. This too, was très Beninese. If someone has a lot of something, you can ask for one and will receive it. And now I was exacting a price for his bad service.

I settled the Victory Yam in the trunk of the new car, and we climbed in. This car, with cushioned seats and a stuffed Christmas elf and car deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror, was a big step up. The old driver came running to our window, carrying the handbag full of baby clothes, which the other passenger had left behind many hours before. He insisted it was ours, and we insisted it wasn’t. He left and came back, really trying to convince us it was ours. “But, you are girls! And these are girl things!” he protested. We opened it and pulled out a baby outfit, and I said, “No, this is too small for me,” and reluctantly he realized he now had another debt to another woman in the middle of nowhere.

Our taxi got going, and without problems, we arrived in Parakou, and we even got the driver to drop us off at our workstation without any added fee. Half an hour late to my meeting, I ran inside and showered, and then headed off.

I went to the office of a women’s rights NGO. Peace Corps’s previous Gender and Development Coordinator worked with them last year, and she asked me to take over one of her projects, helping oversee a sexual harassment training program that affects 73 high schools in Benin’s two northeast regions. Our meeting was brief and packed with rapid instructions. I apologized for being late, and the project coordinator said, “It’s no problem! Benin isn’t like a developed country where you know exactly what time your car will leave and arrive.” He loaded me down with manuals, notepads, t-shirts, and hats, introduced me to the project staff, and told me a little about my role. It was very exciting!

For the rest of the night and the next day, I had a typical workstation meeting: trying to get too much done in the short amount of time I had there, running around the city stocking up on groceries, spending way too much money on food and beer, and behaving ridiculously with friends I haven’t seen in a long time. As it was Halloween weekend, I had to get some final touches for my costume; I spent many hours picking through used jeans at Parakou’s large Dead Yovo market. It was a hot day, and tucked in a poorly ventilated tin-roofed shack, I was overheating as I tried on pair after pair of jeans. Frustrated, I walked off, and approached the first used stuffed animal table I found, vaguely hoping that someday I might find a Snuggie bear in Africa. And what did I find at this table, but a Snuggie! I bought it for 700 CFA while the vendor crouched in the dust, cutting open a doll and transferring its stuffing to a bear. At the next stand, I found a pair of jeans that fit and paid 1800 CFA for them. After being sold from European secondhand stores to Africa for pennies, these pants had probably passed through many hands before getting to me and ended up about the same price I would pay for them at a US secondhand store. But Africans are willing to pay these prices; used Western clothes are known for being much higher quality than new Chinese imports. For the rest of my costume, I wore a tanktop that I got in the Bassila market, paid for by a man I didn’t know who was selling cockroach killer and just wanted to be nice to me because I was a foreigner—he didn’t even ask my name before disappearing; I wore a Bassila zemidjahn shirt, which I had custom made with the number 3 on the back; I had a hologram Barack Obama belt, large gold hoop earrings, a woven scarf around my waist, and a purple sequined scarf on my head. I was Bassila’s first female zemidjahn! It was a night for the memories.

After finding that the direct road from Bassila to Parakou was not any more pleasant than the Bassila-Djougou-Parakou route, Naima and I decided to take a bus from Parakou to Djougou the next morning. At least then I could count on a smooth, air-conditioned voyage for the first half of my trip. We reserved seats on the Sunday 8 am bus. Around 6:30, Naima got a phone call to tell us that the bus was broken down and wouldn’t be moving; we were rescheduled for the 3:00 bus. We spent the rest of the day tired and cranky and wanting to go home, and finally at 3:00 got on our bus. The bus was packed, and the AC wasn’t working, but at least we were able finally to leave.

Somewhere at least 30 km from Djougou, our bus stopped. The bus stewardess announced that something—I didn’t understand what—was stuck, and so we all climbed off the bus. There were six Volunteers on the bus, and we all waited together, smelling burning rubber and watching while someone from the bus company threw cups of water on the smoking front wheels. This hardly seemed like a good solution. Eventually the driver got back in the bus and tried to start it. The back wheels turned but the front wheels wouldn’t, and the bus jerked forward violently a few times. I went to the stewardess to ask what her plan was, and she said a mechanic was on his way from Djougou to fix the wheels and that we would be leaving shortly. I argued that repairing the wheels was going to take a long time, and she said it wouldn’t; I said it was already getting late, that I had planned to leave at 8:00 and had now had my entire day wasted as a result of her bus company, and that since I had to continue on from Djougou to Bassila I would never get there before dark, and that it was her responsibility to help me out. She refused, until finally we saw some other passengers negotiating with a taxi and muttering about the bus’s responsibility to its clients. I pressed her further, and finally she agreed that we could take a taxi to Djougou. I made her write a note on the back of my ticket for the responsable in Djougou, and we went to collect our things from the bus’s undercarriage. The driver refused to let us get our things; he said it was against the rules, and Naima argued with him until he let us get our stuff. We settled into the taxi, and some bystander made a remark about having to be white to be treated decently. This is probably true, but I maintain that you have to stick up for yourself either way.

We arrived in Djougou to find that the bus’s office was actually just a wooden table on the side of the road, and we got to arguing with the man selling tickets there. We wanted the bus company to pay for our taxi fare from the site of the breakdown to Djougou, and it took him a long time to come around. We threatened him with the strength of the Peace Corps network and how easily we could tell all 100 something Volunteers to stop taking this line, and he relented. Again, it’s good diplomacy. He paid our taxi fares and arranged a taxi for Naima and I to get back to Bassila. It was almost dark.

Our taxi, with music blaring, wove around the backstreets of Djougou and parked down the road past the taxi station. Two women entered our car with us, but the driver said he wouldn’t go until his car was full. There was no way he was going to find anyone there in a short time, and all four of us started complaining and telling him he would find passengers on the roadside if he just set out, and that anyway it was dark and he needed to get going. He refused, and Naima and I said either he went or WE would go. We stormed out of the car and started jerking on the trunk to get our bags out. Out of nowhere, Naima’s next door neighbor appeared. We ran to him like he was Jesus rising from the grave, ready to throw our arms around him in gratitude, but he just held out his hands for a friendly shake. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so happy to run into a friendly face. He arranged for us to switch into another taxi, and in moving our luggage, he said, “What’s with the yam?” “It’s a long story,” I said. “It’s the price we demanded from another driver who wasn’t serious,” Naima explained. He bent over, hands on his knees, laughing hard.

The next driver took our backpacks toward his car and popped the trunk, ready to nestle our bags next to the ribcage of a bull, freshly slaughtered. Naima and I shrieked and ran at the driver, saying “no no no no no!” The whole trunk was filled with the various pieces of a cow carcass, including its horned head. “We’ll hold our bags in our laps,” we said. We settled into the car with the two women from our other taxi—they’d followed our lead—and now, with night setting in, we set out from Djougou. About ten minutes outside of Penessoulou, in the middle of the dark, the driver stopped and agreed to let four adults plus children into our car. There was absolutely no place for more than one other person, and we started complaining, again. He took the bag that held my Parakou groceries and yam and carried it around back, setting it on top of the trunk. I refused. “It’s good,” he said, “The apprentice is going to sit here and hold it.” I absolutely refused, on principle, to condone packing so many people into a car that the only space left was the top of the trunk, and said if he couldn’t manage to fit all my bags in the car, he shouldn’t be taking so many people. A woman in back agreed to hold my bag, and Naima and I squished into the front seat with the rest of our stuff. The driver said, “This is how it is in Africa,” and I grumbled that wanting to earn an extra 300 CFA was no reason to risk the lives of a car full of people on a dark street, and that being in Africa was no excuse not to respect human rights. After our grumbling, we settled in under the weight of all our luggage. And that’s how we drove for the rest of the way. I finally got home at about 9:00.

Next time I go to Parakou, I ,ight take the morning bus 172 km south to Dassa, a southern town that sits at the point where the goudron splits into its western and eastern branches. It will take me three hours by bus to get to Dassa, where I will find a northbound bus or taxi to take me 212 km to Parakou. Another three hours later, I will be in Parakou. And maybe, maybe, it’ll work out ok.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Ten of us set out together in an eight-seat bush taxi on Monday afternoon, driving west along the red dirt road that connects Djougou to Badjoude. The dry season has begun, and the road was dusty; motorcycles ahead of us kicked up a cloud of dirt that hovered above the road the whole way. The grasses along the side of the road are still mostly green, but going brown. They made waves in the wind. But our eyes were mostly on the sunset. It was pink and lavender, with rays of sunlight bursting though the clouds in wide, bright bands. It was by far the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.

After spending the night in a nearby village with another Volunteer, we woke up at 5:45 and traveled back to Badjoude before the sun was up. We sat on wooden benches and tree stumps in the dark, outside of Badjoude’s marketplace, and we waited for the village to come to life. Slowly, we were able to make out the shapes and sounds of goats, climbing onto benches, head-butting, leaping over one another. The first local to approach our group was an older, slightly crazy-looking man. He smiled at us and laughed, and he mostly kept his distance. At last, before the sun had come up, a group of men danced their way toward our group. Some wore rattles made of leaves on their ankles. They sang in Lokpa and French; like other groups of men, they’d been dancing from house to house all night, singing in order to “warm up” the village’s men. Finally, a girl on her way to school carrying a bucket of fried breads passed. We called her to us and ate. A few other vendors soon arrived, sweeping the previous day’s garbage and leaves from the ground before setting up their stands. I bought a bowl of hot tapioca with condensed milk. The morning was passing slowly, and I was cold and hungry!

Gradually, others started to gather in the open space. The sun was finally up, and the fete still hadn’t started. Why had we gotten up so early, and where was everyone? Then suddenly we heard chanting and stomping in the distance. We looked down the road toward the sun and saw a pack of people marching and dancing toward us. As they approached, another group started coming from the opposite end of the road, converging on the marketplace. The quiet morning was suddenly plunged into chaos.

Men young and old, and a few young women, were among those dancing with the pack. Some of the men were dressed like women, wearing skirts and stuffed bras. Others hung metal scraps from strings on their waists, which clattered as they danced. Many wore rattles on their ankles. Some wore paint or white powder on their faces. Some had their mouths died bright pink. Some wore woven pagnes around their waists and heads. A few, older men had huge feather headdresses on. Everyone was carrying whips, long pieces of wood with lithe branches or roots attached to the handle with dark bands of rubber. Most everyone had plastic or metal whistles in their mouths, which they blowed in and out in a constant rhythm.

The two groups danced toward each other and back a few times, and then suddenly poured off the road into a grassy hillside on the other side. The music stopped, and the men began furiously hacking at the grasses with machetes and sticks. Grass and whips were flying. The crowd moved down the hillside around the clearing, and I saw some of my friends had crossed the open space into the shade of the trees. I decided to run down in the relative calm and join them. I was scrambling over small grasses when the men began to flood into the open space. Hands reached out from the crowd on the sidelines, pulling me in to safety.

Suddenly, the music and the rhythm of the whistles picked up again, and with whooshes and cracks, the whips began cracking. Everywhere, men of the same age groups were fighting. The youngest were boys of about eight or ten, wearing only shorts. “Here, we do not keep track of age. Instead, when a boy is of a certain number of years he will participate in the fight. Then he comes to know who are his adversaries, who are the boys of his same cadre. They will know who are their elders through the fight.” Young teenage boys wore headscarves and pagnes around their waists; the oldest fighters were in their 20s and wore the feather headdresses. Some men passed from group to group handing out replacement whips. Each fighter had a whip in his right hand, and a wooden stick that acted as a shield in his left. Most times a whip cracked, it seemed to slap the wooden shield. But occasionally it hit flesh. Many boys were scarred from previous years’ fights; bright streaks of blood began to show.

Just as suddenly as the fighting had begun, it would suddenly stop. Everyone would begin dancing in the clearing. A drum used only to announce wars and at the time of the whipping fete kept time; it was covered in chicken blood. Then, again, the dancing would cease and the fighting would continue. I was expecting some sort of structure and ceremony to the whipping; I thought boys would be brought out into public by age group and made to withstand the lashings while everyone else watched. This idea was clearly not based on anything else I’ve experienced in Benin. As Naima put it, it was typical Benin: chaos with a dance break.

Finally, the whipping was over, and everyone headed out of the clearing toward the marketplace. We began dancing in a circle, stomping our feet and swiveling on each step as we went around and around. Girls threw baby powder on themselves and on others; I came out almost covered in white from the chest up, and bursting with adrenaline.

The crowd paraded on to the king’s house, where they demonstrated their fight for the king, who sat in the shade of a tin roof, holding his silver staff and surrounded by his advisers. The same process repeated itself. In the bustle of the dancing, I picked up a little girl, who was delightedly playing with the powder on my skin. Women approached me, and though I don’t speak any Lokpa, I knew they were saying, “Take her home with you!” I pulled a pagne from my bag and put her on my back when I got tired of holding her. The dancing died down, and suddenly I felt something pulling at me. I turned my head around to see the gnarled hands of a hunched old woman pulling at the baby. Young girls stood around, and I asked them if the old woman didn’t want me to take the baby with me; “No,” they said, “She wants you to let her down!” It was nice to know that at the end of the day, people didn’t REALLY want me to take the village’s babies away.

The group began to divide, as the men went to “show their uncles their fighting.” The whipping fete is a tradition that dates back to times of inter-tribal fighting, and the villagers were proud of their continued warrior tradition. They continually said that they were prepared for combat, that they were prepared to be conquerors. I followed one group down the side streets of the village, and one man gave me one of his extra whips, a souvenir I brought home. As we wound our way along the narrow back roads, past tiny plots of grain, corn stalks that towered over houses, and huge baobab trees, I noticed what a beautiful, special village Badjoude is.

Around noon, all the Volunteers were back together, and we were invited to drink tchuke with the king. We gathered under the shade of the trees in his court, and various men talked about the tradition of the whipping fete. A group of dancing men came by several times. One was wearing the skin of a wild cat, strung around his neck by a cord. The men were going crazy, and the guy with the cat skin kept biting its tail, and showing us the cat’s rear end. We couldn’t do much but laugh. One of the men announced that though we had only planned to drink tchuke with the king, it would be wrong for him to let us go without letting us at least “taste something,” so igname pile was being prepared for us. It finally arrived, and we were offered more igname pile to eat than we really felt hungry for, and the idea of “eating as a family from the same bowl” was explained to us. Next came rice, but we were told to wait because there weren’t enough spoons to go around: “seeing as we are in the village, there aren’t enough spoons!”

Finally, the king’s magistrate vacated a seat and invited one of the only male Volunteers, the Volunteer leader for Benin’s northwest, to come sit in his place and hold an audience with the king. I overheard the king describe how happy he was that we had come to Badjoude, and how scared he had been that we would not come this year, after what happened to Kate. He said they wanted all of Peace Corps to come back in February for their week-long fete, and that housing would be provided for us. The Volunteer thanked him excessively. We took several “family photos” and finally were allowed to leave for our lunch!

Lunch as at the second deputy to the mayor’s house. He seated us in a round building with a thatched roof, where we were joined by the former mayor and several other men. Another meal of igname pile was served, and the men began asking us questions about America, which rapidly sped out of control into nothing we could answer coherently: “In American hospitality, everyone is provided a minimum standard of living according to welfare law. True or false: Americans all have degrees. True or false: In America, you are no longer using the death penalty but instead beginning to favor public humiliation.” The former mayor fell sound asleep. Finally, we were offered parting words by the deputy, but his speech was cut off by the arrival of dancers. The cat man was there again, as was someone with a large, bottle-shaped calabash, and a man with a wide, long snakeskin wrapped around his body. They kept sticking the tip of a whip into the calabash neck and eyeing us suspiciously. The men were all but shooed out of the building so the deputy could finish his speech, and finally we were allowed to go.

I’m glad I went to Badjoude, and I gained some peace of mind in knowing this is where Kate lived. In the shadow of the ugliness and pain of her murder, it’s sometimes hard to reason with myself why I’m here, why I bother trying to give anything, why anyone would stay knowing this could be the place they die. Badjoude is the kind of village Volunteers dream of being placed in. Off the beaten path, it’s surrounded by little but still doesn’t feel isolated. The people are friendly, the culture is interesting and alive, and the landscape is beautiful. Benin does have its flaws, and there’s nothing romantic about the poverty and disempowerment faced by its people. But despite those flaws, occasionally something illuminates the beauty of this place. I know why she loved it here.

I spent all that Sunday waiting for the mason and menusier, and I called the menusier repeatedly. His phone rang and rang, but he never showed up. At 5:00, I went into town with Antoinette to buy her a lantern for school (a prize she's getting for being the only Peace Corps Scholarship Girl to complete a community service project last year). On our way back into town, I ran into a friend who I'd hadn't seen in awhile, and he took me home on his moto. One of my neighbor babies wandered over to my front yard while I was talking to my friend, and eventually she (the baby) fell asleep while I was holding her. My friend left, I took the baby home, and I caught the end of the Benin-Ghana soccer game at their house.

The next day, the menusier came to my house at 8:00 while I was showering, so I didn't come to the door. I called him back afterwards, and he was all put out that I didn't answer the door earlier.

"I am very mad. I called you all day yesterday, and you had said you would come, and you never came," I said.

"...I was sleeping."

"You were NOT sleeping ALL DAY."

"But... there was the match too."

"You told me you would come, and I waited all day for you. I called and called you, and you could have at least picked up and said you weren't coming. And that's after I waited all Saturday for you, too."

"Pardon."

"Oh, OH!"

"You must excuse me."

"You cannot just say pardon like that. I spent my entire day waiting for you and now I am mad."

Now he seems to really get it, and he sincerely begs me, "Pardon."

He came and worked on the door, but it still wasn't quite right.

On Tuesday, the mason came again. He oiled the hinges and left.

On Thursday, the menusier came again and inspected the door. He concluded there was still work to do and left.

On Sunday, the mason and the menusier came back, and the menusier shaved down the side and top of the door so it could finally, more or less, fit into the frame. He then asked me to pay the mason, and requested what I thought was a rather ridiculous amount of money for hammering two holes in a wall and attaching two hinges to a door.

"It's too much," I said.

"But it took him two weeks to do!" the menusier begs.

In Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama describes his emotional reaction to his first visit to Africa. In Kenya, he for the first time was able to look at a crazy Black person on the street and say, “that man’s crazy” without having to ponder the social structures that had pushed that person to the margins of society. I read Obama’s reaction and nodded knowingly; on the other side of the continent, a fou is a just a fou, too.

Every village has its fous (“foos”), and every Volunteer has her fou stories. As Volunteers, we develop our own set of names for them. In Bassila, there’s naked man, who is perpetually without clothes. His right leg is forever crossed in front of him, his toes pointed in a permanent cramp. He crawls around the streets of Bassila on his two hands and one good foot, swinging free. There’s also the walking man, who spends his days walking the goudron between Bassila and Djougou, carrying a huge empty tomato paste can. He approaches street food vendors and bangs his can on their tables, demanding food. He approaches individuals and demands food. Usually he’s only wearing a shirt, but sometimes his outfits change. These days, he’s been wearing a ragged hooded sweatshirt over his dreadlocks. Then there’s Bassila’s sole crazy female. When I first got to Bassila, I used to see her in the ditch on the side of the goudron, sleeping or sitting or whatever. After a few months she moved her perch to the ditch on the other side of the goudron where it is grassy. One day, a broken pot and a plastic sack of rags marked her perch. Within weeks, her collection had grown to several plastic sacks full of rags. Suddenly she was wearing an ankle-length, sequin-covered evening gown.

This story is about another fou, unfortunately named Foudou (“foo doo,” a fairly common Muslim man’s name). Foudou is a young man with one completely white eye. He works as a pousse-pousse, pushing metal carts around town. He’s generally friendly, and he always greets me in town, but he doesn’t speak French—just Anii.

One morning this week, I had been working at home and was finally ready to leave the house. I was putting my bag together when I heard a knock on my front door. I went out and saw Foudou there. I said hello, ca va, and then told him to leave. But he wouldn’t leave, and he kept holding his hand to his mouth—“feed me.” I opened the door and tried to shoo him off the porch, repeatedly telling him goodbye, you must leave, and opening the gate for him to go. But he shook his head and climbed up onto the railing of my porch. I went back into the house and closed my door completely, hoping he’d get the point. Eventually he wandered over to my next-door neighbor’s house. The wife and babies were home, with the front door open, screened only by a curtain hanging in the doorway. He walked right in, and I heard the wife yelling at him.

I looked around for help, but could see only a few sheep and one teenage boy, Jules, whom I called over. He came and sat with me on my porch for awhile, but Foudou seemed to have disappeared, so Jules left and I went back to getting my things ready to leave. Next thing I knew, Foudou was back. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the gate, but he refused to move. He shook his head, and pointed to his crotch, with the same sad expression on his face as when he made his “feed me” gesture. I started yelling “NON, NON, NON,” and “goodbye” in Anii—“i lee cei.” I closed the screen door and went into my house, and he approached the screen, making another lewd gesture. Now I was annoyed, but what could I do? Throw a pitcher of water at him? I’m not afraid of Foudou, but I didn’t want to provoke him at all anyway. I closed the door and called a friend. Meanwhile, I could hear my next door neighbor shouting, “The brigade chief is coming, you hear?”

My friend, the same guy who defended me when the man tried to steal a hair off my shirt, was on a bus. I’d been betting on him sitting at his computer at work listening to music and hoped he’d be able to come get rid of Foudou. No luck. He said he’d call someone else for me though, and so I hung up and waited in my living room while Foudou continued to lounge on the railing of my porch. Finally he disappeared, and about ten minutes went by without anyone coming to “rescue” me. I left the house and headed into town.

On the road, I met another male friend, speeding toward me with a student on the back of his moto. This friend, a teacher, had left class to come take care of me. He happened to cross my path right about where Foudou was, and I explained what happened. “Cet imbecile?” my friend asked, and then he proceeded to chew Foudou out in Anii. “He’s just a fou, he isn’t aggressive,” my friend said. “I know, but he was standing in front of my door doing THIS,” I said, and made the same gesture. My friend about lost it shrieking with laughter, and insulted Foudou in Anii some more.

I walked into town, and on the road, I passed the crazy woman near her usual perch in the ditch. This time, she was wearing a tshirt, pulled up on one side so one breast was completely showing. She had a strip of plastic from a bag stuck to her face, as if her mouth had been taped shut.

You have to wonder what the fous’ stories are, and why it is that in a communal society they live on the streets by themselves. Unlike Obama, I generally think if anyone in this society is so genuinely on their own, their families must have had reason to cast them out, and I use that as a justification to not feel like it’s my job to take care of them. There’s a glaring error in this reasoning, of course: I’ve seen plenty of children essentially abandoned by their parents, plenty of wives abandoned when their husbands’ families refused to keep them, and plenty of peoples’ lives ripped apart by sickness or death. Still, they aren’t alone—at the end of the day, they get their food and find clothes to wear. After a year in Bassila, the same set of fous are still there every day, characters in village life whether they’re on the inside of the community or not.

One of the tasks I've had to complete to settle into my new house is attaching grillage (screen) to all my windows (a Peace Corps requirement) and getting screen doors made. Menusiers (carpenters) are sort of regarded as the slimiest, least reliable "artisans" in Benin; they always take too long and demand far too much money. Beninese people are always throwig their hands up in the air and saying, "Menusiers! They're all the same! They're not serious!" Any interaction with a menusier is bound to be stressful.

A friend found me the menusier who attached the screen to my windows. He's a tiny, young man, who I have only ever seen in a pair of grey sweat pants and an extremely thin grey, red, and white polo shirt. He did a decent job and charged me only $4 for his two days of labor attaching wooden strips and screen to the six windows at my new house and deconstructing my bed at my old house. I was pleased with the quality and timeliness of his work and asked him to construct my screen doors too.

So one day a few weeks ago he came over to my house with a measuring tape, and did a rather slap-dash measuring job: he didn't hold his tape straight; he didn't even make sure it touched both edges of the length or width of my door frames. But I figured, doors must come in standard sizes, and he probably needed only a rough measurement to know how big they should be; plus, the man's a professional. Who am I to tell him how to measure my doors?

A few days later he and his apprentice, a young boy who wears blue and white tissue pants, dropped off the doors. And then began a game of waiting for him to come back and install them. I spent many hours on multiple days hanging around my house waiting for the menusier to show. Finally, one day, two apprentices showed up to install the front doors (I have a double door). They lined them up in the door frame only to find that the width was not sufficient, and somehow, one of the doors was long enough, but the other was about an inch too short. They spent the rest of the day and part of the next sawing and banging away, while my little neighbor kids played delightedly in the curly brown woodshavings on my porch. Overall, I was satisfied with the doors, though they fit a bit awkwardly. The back door would be a different story: that door jam is cement and thus required another type of almost equally universally detested artisan--a mason.

And so weeks have gone by without my back door getting installed, with many of my plans (and even Naima's) getting derailed by having to wait for the mason and the menusier to come. Finally, yesterday morning, the two showed up.

Now, I don't claim to know a lot about door-making, but I have used many doors in my life. And I can tell you that every door I have ever used is slightly smaller than its frame and fits into it fairly neatly. This door was slightly too big for its frame. The mason and the menusier lined the door into place, and rather than saying "we should shave this down a bit" told me that doors can also be placed completely over an opening and that the hinge would just have to be placed appropriately so this could work. I'm not too concerned with the aesthetics of my door, and I was tired of all the waiting for the mason and the menusier, so I thought, ok, I'll just see how they handle this. And I let them to do the work they're trained to do, which in the mason's case, is chipping away at dry cement, and mixing and applying new cement. The menusier left, and the mason got to work. I tried to find things around the house to amuse myself with (which included getting a girl show me how to prepare mouse poison).

Eventually, he finished and went outside to sit on my porch. After not hearing him banging around for awhile, I wet out to check on him. He was sitting on my porch with a big smile on his face and said he was just going to wait for the cement to dry. I went back to what I was doing, but after awhile was really tired of being inside. I wanted to leave the house, so I went to look for him, and he was gone. I went to inspect the door. The metal door to my back court was open, blocked by the screen door. Two huge chunks of cement had been hacked out of the wall to make a place for hinges, and the holes had been filled in. Fresh cement extended from the wall to the door frame. Great, I thought. Now my door is cemented to the jam, and I can't get past the door to close the metal door so I can leave my house. With all the cement between the frame and the door jam, there was no way the door would even open. But the mason was nowhere to be found, and so I could do nothing but hang around my house.

After a few hours, he reappeared at the house and tried to open the rear screen door. The cement he'd just placed all came falling out, and he reported to me, "It didn't work." I pointed out to him that the door had been badly placed, and how due to its superfluous size, the hinges would have to be placed in the wall a little to the side of the door frame. He agreed and went back to work, mixing cement directly on the dirt outside my front porch.

After a little while he came to find me: "It's finished!" I inspected his work: this time, the door was placed so that there was a one-inch gap between the door jam and the frame on the left hand side. The hinges stretched awkwardly from the jam to the frame. The point of a screen door is to allow air in while minimizing the possibility for insects and small animals to get into the house, and this set-up would support only one of those goals. "A door," I said, "is for covering an opening. This door does not reach its objective. I don't want a door like that." He nodded thoughtfully and said he would redo it, and got back to chipping out the cement he had placed. He finally finished, setting the door about how he had placed it the first time, but now at such an angle that the un-hinged side of the frame couldn't touch the door jam at all. It was clear to me that the door needed to be resized, and this whole business of pretending a too-big door could be used was getting no one anywhere. I tried to call the menusier but got no answer, and so sent the mason home and asked him to come back in the morning.

By that time I was really frustrated. I was walking around the house looking at every door and frame and contemplating how ridiculous it was that these two so-called professionals could not manage to place a door that fit. Moments like these make me think dark things about Benin. Mostly I thought about how pathetic it was that this man had spent his entire day working for me and had not managed to place a working hinge. No wonder he's poor. You don't get rich on incompetence.

And I was desperate to get out of my house. It was 4:30, and I hadn't left all day. I didn't even take the time to change--I got on my bike in a skirt and t-shirt and headed south. An hour later, I had reached a village that I'd never reached before, and I was feeling really strong. But I knew if I wanted to get back to Bassila in time to give the menusier a piece of my mind, I'd have to turn around. Plus, two hours is the most I've ever biked in one stretch. It was a good point to turn back. The bike ride is extremely hilly, but heading north on the goudron, you face a slight increase in altitude. The bike ride home was much harder than the ride out. Fifty-five minutes into my return trip, I powered up what I thought was my last big hill. From the top of it, all I could see were more hills. How far had I gone anyway? And where the heck was Bassila? I kept on, but I started getting more and more tired. It was getting dark, and I was losing faith in myself. I stopped and sipped my last sip of water, and said aloud "CHRIST how much farther do I have to go??" Suddenly, I heard a little metallic rattle behind me. An old man on a bicycle, wearing a Muslim skull cap, pulled up next to me. "Ca va?" he asked, "How's it going?" "Ca va. And your evening?" "It's fine," he said. "On y va!"--"Let's go!" He'd stopped just to make sure I was doing ok and to let me know he was right there with me. I felt really, sublimely happy. "C'est Bassila, non?" I said. "Oui, oui!" he replied. And we biked the rest of the way--another fifteen minutes or so--together.

By the time I got back to Bassila, it was almost dark. I stopped by the menusier's shop, but he was gone. I headed home, utterly exhausted, and very thankful for the old man who'd appeared out of nowhere just to let me know I wasn't alone. I took a shower and didn't feel so angry anymore. In fact, I felt bad for the mason, who probably was just trying to make the door work and didn't want to criticize the menusier's work. He came back this morning, and we assessed the door situation together. "Look, the door just is too big, and that's not your fault," I said. "The menusier made the door to big, and he needs to come back and figure out a solution." He laughed shyly, gave me his phone number, and left. I fially got ahold of the menusier a few hours later and explained that the door really just wasn't going to work in its current size, and he agreed to come back later and fix it. That was at about 9:00; it's now 2:00 and I've spent yet another full day on house arrest waiting for these guys.

But I guess, eventually, it'll all work out ok.

Despite the relatively low educational attainment of most Beninese, the school year is one of the most prominent organizing factors of community life. For months, Bassila’s streets have been fairly quiet, with most of the students absent for vacation. Now, they’re back in force, hustling to school in the mornings in their matching khaki dresses and shorts, and strolling home in the evenings, many carrying hoes and brooms that they’ve been using to clear the school grounds. Here’s how the first day of school went for a few people I know.

The high school senior

Antoinette is in the Terminal class at the Bassila CEG. Her family has long been connected to Peace Corps Volunteers (her dad told me that “the first Volunteers had a choice: they could go to Vietnam to die, or to Africa to suffer”), and as a result, she has a scholarship financed by Peace Corps that I administer, aimed at keeping girls in school. She also does my laundry, and so we’ve had a long and consistent relationship.

For the summer break, most young people do not stay at home. In a society where family connections are maintained by sharing children, most kids pass their “vacation” living with a relative far away, often going to summer school or working in a big city. Antoinette went to Cotonou to help her big sister out with her newborn, her first child. Her sister, having been helped by a former Volunteer to take secretarial classes in Ghana, works at the German embassy. She bought Antoinette a new khaki uniform, a stylish bag to carry her notebooks in, and a Barbie zip-up pencil case. With these things, she is already better set for the school year than most of her peers, who will go to class in hand-me-down uniforms that stretch and burst in the wrong places and make them thus fair targets for harassment by their teachers.

She skipped the first day of class but went for the second. She said she was really happy about her History/Geography teacher, who she had before and understands very well. She said last year she didn’t understand her History/Geography teacher at all.

We went shopping for her school supplies together. She picked two packets of notebooks (one packet of 100-page notebooks and one packet of 200-page notebooks), one large graph paper notebook, a plastic ruler, six pens, an eraser, a tube of glue, and a tin box of geometry tools. This cost about $10. I will also buy her a math textbook and pay to have a German textbook copied for her; she also has asked for a lamp so she can study at night. I guess last year she stopped studying when it was dark.

The teacher

One teacher and I had talked about doing something for “descholarized” girls, and so he organized a meeting, inviting all the girls who dropped out of Manigri and Bassila’s high schools this year. Eight girls showed up, and he gave them a questionnaire about why they dropped out. Most dropped out because they are pregnant, and they plan to re-enroll next year. One wrote that she did not have enough to eat and had dropped out for a lack of ability to pay her school fees. The teacher was really distraught by this, and I ran into him outside of the high school as many kids were leaving. He showed me her questionnaire and explained the story. He said she cried when he approached her about it, that she had passed the last school year and wanted to continue. He said her mom is a petite commercante and doesn’t have much money; I asked what her dad does, and he said, “What father? If she had any kind of father she wouldn’t be suffering like she is. He wants her to quit school so she can work and begin to support her little brother.” I felt bad, but I’m not surprised to hear a story like this; Benin is full of drop-out girls whose parents don’t have the money or the will to pay for their daughters’ school fees. Many of these girls have approached me for help, too. I wonder if for some reason he hadn’t realized this was a reality, but I don’t know how he possibly couldn’t know.

The collegiene

One of my neighbor girls, Cherifath, passed primary school last year and is entering high school this year. Everywhere she went in her uniform, people were greeting her, “Bon soir la collegiene!” They share her pride in moving onto secondary school. She’s a bright girl with a supportive family, and I think she will do very well. She was at the top of her class last year.

I ran into her outside the CEG while I was talking to the teacher, and later, she and I walked back to our neighborhood together. She was leaving school early. That same teacher is her last period teacher. He had come into class, said he was tired, and sent the students home.

What good is it to curse the conditions that cause girls to drop out of school, and then not show up to class to teach the girls who are in school?

The kindergartener

We also walked home with Yazid, a skinny little boy with a big smile who had gone for his first day of kindergarten. He wasn’t talking and looked stunned. Cherifath explained that Yazid had shown up to class late, and he was so afraid of getting beaten by his teacher that he spent the entire day waiting outside the classroom.

With the close of my first year in Benin came a mandatory physical. I was poked and prodded and made to bleed, asked to give not one, not two, but three stool samples, and had high-pressure water squirted into my ears for a thorough rinse. In total, I was found to have three separate fungi inhabiting various parts of my body and an intestinal bacteria that will supposedly disappear on its own. My year of comfort-eating yams had also left me bien grossired. I went home a little depressed by all this news, and within days, managed to get an infected toenail too. Time for a dramatic change. In the spirit of renewal and with my eye on an ever-quickly approaching return to America, I decided to start a new work out plan. I ran for seven days in a row, which is probably more times than I ran at all in college—I absolutely hate running, but I have few other options here; naturally, I managed to hurt both of my knees badly enough that I haven’t been running again since Monday and have been grumbling whenever I have to walk long distances too. *sigh*

Life hasn't slowed down since my trip to Ghana, girls' camp, and my adventures with Carly. I continued traveling through August: to Ouesse with two of my co-workers to visit another PCV who constructed an orphanage during his service; to Parakou to do some shopping and visit the work station; to Savalou to participate in the country's largest igname/Assumption fete (a fine mix of Catholocism and voudun); and to Bohicon for a week of training for a community health program. I spent only one night in Savalou and then came back to Bassila to leave for the Bohicon training the next day (note: Savalou was a five-hour taxi ride south of Bassila and is north of Bohicon), and came home to find my neighbors celebrating a birthday at another concession, so I joined them—the Beninese equivalent of party-hopping! After Bohicon, I had one week back in Bassila, where I worked hard on the orphanage and community health projects, packed my things and moved to my new house, and suffered a fever. At the end of the week, I moved to my new house and the next day headed south again, this time to Porto Novo to work at the training (stage) for the new members of Peace Corps Benin.

Stage heightened the surreal sense I've had for the past few months of déjà-vu. It's like running on a circuit the second time; I'm beginning to pass recognizable landscape, and I know what the course ahead of me holds. Having made it through the circuit once already, I feel a sense of closure and ease, even though the race is not yet done; I've hit my stride. When the new arrivals landed, I started reading my journal from my first weeks in Benin, and I realized how some of the things that bothered me about Benin don't bother me anymore. For instance, I used to think children here were practically despondent, and it made me sad to hear women constantly yelling at their children. I hardly notice these things anymore, and I've come to accept the differences in parenting and childhood without constantly dwelling on whether these things are worse than in America. I also noticed from my journal that some of the things that bothered me about PCVs and their attitudes toward Benin are attitudes I've adopted too; I wanted so much to “know people for who they are,” but I've found it's much harder to get to know individuals here than I thought it would be, and I rely on many of the same stereotypes I heard my trainers employing last year. On one hand I wonder how well I am doing at accomplishing my personal goals here. Watching the new Volunteers begin their journey, I realize how little time I have left here, how much I do like living here, how much I've learned and how much I have yet to do. With all the knowledge I've gained in a year here, I feel like the adventure can really begin.

Still, after spending three weeks in the South enjoying good things and being constantly surrounded by other Americans, I was nervous to come back to Bassila. Would people like me? What would I do with all my time? Wouldn't I be lonely? But I'm anything but lonely and without things to do in my new house.

The best feature of my new house is its porch. It's rather ostentatious, with waist-high cement pillars enclosing it and a floor of broken tile pieced together in a mosaic of color. Of course, part of me appreciates the showy beauty of it, but mostly what I like about the porch is being on it. Every day, I climb up onto the wide, flat railing and sit with a book or my work or the company of the many women and children who have come to visit me since I've moved in. My house itself is quiet, but there are many un-fenced houses and walled-in concessions surrounding it. There is a mango tree right in front of my porch, and unfarmed land on the sides, alive with weeds and mint. The family that I moved here to be near has at least twenty muttons, and many of the other neighbors have them as well. There's consequently a steady stream of goats and their babies walking past. There are dogs and chickens and roosters. One day, a Peuhl man came by grazing his cattle on my yard. I watch men and women farming, a very small girl in an unzipped dress untying her goat from a clump of weeds, a man pushing a ratty, rusted wheelbarrow full of containers of well-water.

The neighborhood is teeming with kids who are excited to befriend me and play on the jungle-gym that is my porch, gate, and mango tree. I knew a few of them before coming here, but most of them, I didn't. A lot of them knew my name when I got here anyway; I know some of their parents, and some of them are friends with the kids from my old concession. One of them came to my house and climbed up on the porch to greet me: “F- gafal!” (The daughter of my former landlord, still living on the other side of Bassila in her grandparents' concession until her mother's mourning period ends, sends her greetings in Anii.) I scrubbed my porch down when I first moved in; six kids came, first splashing around in the soap suds that I swept off the porch into the yard, and then slowly taking over the scrubbing duties, a couple of them rolling around in the water and the oldest boy sweeping and shouting, “Nagez, nagez comme poissons!” (Swim, swim like fish!) There's Sherifath, Warissa, Zakiat, Jowar, Farid, Zaynab, Asana, Yazit, and I hear one of them has a little sister named Jessica, but I haven't met her yet. Another boy, curiously given both Muslim and Christian names—Abdulai Noȅl—rode his bike to my house and said, “Excuse me, can I pull water for you?” On Sunday, the end of Ramadan, kids stopped by my house all evening, wearing new tissue and shiny shoes; the girls almost all had their hair braided for the occasion, and some of them had glitter on their faces and hair. Three of the littlest ones were wearing plastic glasses shaped like animals with googley eyes.

In my old house, a closed concession in a neighborhood of bureaucrats and other “wealthy” people, I was the fourth Volunteer, and few people seemed very curious about me or worried that I needed any help or friendship to get by. The two gendarme-wives who lived in my old concession came to visit my new house. I was excited to see them coming and leapt off my perch to welcome them. They asked how I was and said my new house was beautiful, and then got to their point: the electricity bill for our last month in the house hadn't been paid yet, and I owed money. Also, one of the women had broken her shoe while walking and wondered if she could borrow a pair of mine. I gave her a pair of cheap flip flops, and she said, “These are pretty! I'm going to keep them.” Then, as suddenly as they'd arrived, they left, and I remembered what it had been like to first arrive in my old concession and feel less than welcome. I wouldn't say I was unhappy there, and I did love the kids in my old concession and my landlord's wife, and once she was gone I got to know the other two women better and enjoy their company. But there was some unspoken negativity palpable there, and it makes me a little regretful to think that my first year in the Peace Corps was spent dealing with that. But things are better now: a new year, a new house, a new life.

Two months after my work partners told me they'd have a new house for me by the end of the month, I've finally moved.

For weeks, I'd been contacting the proprietaire of my new house (it's actually a proprietress, and actually, she's the Princess of Bassila, making my house a Residence Royale) about the finishing touches needed to my house: installing a door and lock on my new latrine (even the Anii princess has a pit latrine), pouring the cement floor of my shower, wiring the electricity. Things were dragging, and the situation was making me nervous: the only family left in my concession was getting ready to move out and asking me every day if my house was ready so we could quitter ensemble. Finally, the house was ready. My responsable came down from Natitingou to inspect the house, and with his approval, I was set to move in.

A woman friend of mine offered several times to help me move my things; her idea was that she would put my possessions into basines, balance them on her head, and carry them over to my new house. God bless her. PCVs like to believe they live at the same standard as locals, and when someone says something like this to you, you realize, we absolutely do not; no matter how strong this woman is, there's no way she could carry all my stuff, head load by head load, across town. Time to rent a U-Haul, right? When my well-off next door neighbors moved out, they loaded four hand-carts with their possessions. This seemed like the most likely solution for me too, so I asked a friend from the mayor's office to help me arrange them on Saturday.

Some other neighbors offered to rent a pousse-pousse (a “push push” hand cart) and help me with my stuff all day, so between that idea and my friend's plan, I felt pretty confident that something would work out, and I packed all Saturday until about lunch time. No one came to help me, and around noon I realized there was no cell phone service. I took stock of my house: in addition to a bed, book shelf, two coffee tables, three tables, four chairs, a dish stand, and two mattresses, I had about eight boxes of books, multiple cement bags full of clothes, several containers of American food, and various other boxes and buckets and basines full of other things. This would require about twenty hand cart trips; I don't know how my next door neighbors (a family of nine) moved with only four, but I'm guessing it says something about the differences between how Americans and Africans live. I went into town for lunch and stopped by my friend's office. He was in a meeting but said as soon as he finished he'd come help me; I told him I thought we'd have to rent a car to carry all my stuff, and he said he'd figure it out. I went home and relaxed for awhile, until the sun started to set and I got nervous. I went back to my friend's office, but he was gone. I sat on a bench outside and started feeling really crummy. A rainstorm was rolling in, and it was getting cold and dark. I was supposed to leave for Porto Novo the next morning to work at training for the incoming Volunteers, and so I really only had a few hours to get moved. Otherwise, I'd either be a few days late for training or would have to make the mayor's office pay rent at two houses for me for the month of September, and I didn't like either of those ideas; mostly, I just wanted to finally be out of my housing limbo and into my new home. I've gotten into the habit of having Beninese friends arrange expensive purchases for me so I don't get cheated on prices, but I felt stupid for having put someone else in charge of my move. Would it have been that hard for me to rent a taxi on my own? I am far more passive here than I ever was at home; I was kicking myself for this and feeling like it reflected some sort of personal failure.

My counterpart and the mayor's accountant showed up and found me there, looking pathetic, and pointed out that the mayor has a covered pick-up truck that we could use. I rather wonder how for two months they know I've been planning on moving and had not thought of this, or how my other friend who also works at the mayor's office hadn't thought of this, but regardless, I was encouraged. They sent for the driver, and in very little time, he pulled up in a white pickup with “Commune of Bassila” stenciled onto the side in an uneven arch. The driver, whose name is Salaami, drove me to my house, where we found another truck and a couple of angry workers waiting. Oops. Salaami sent them away, and we got started on packing all my things. About six little kids were loitering around, and Salaami yelled at them, “Are you going to stand around or are you going to help?” and they all burst into activity, scurrying around picking up boxes and buckets and basines and passing them to each other assembly-line style to place in the truck. Within minutes, all but the biggest pieces of furniture was packed into the truck, so we headed off to my new house. The load was unpacked in a flurry again. Salaami informed us that he had to go pick up his boss and so would meet us later; my friend estimated this gave us at least an hour and so we'd have time to eat.

We went to the market to pick up chicken to prepare for dinner for some friends visiting from out of town. But we didn't take the chicken home; instead, we stopped at a female friend's house. She had prepared igname pile for dinner, so we sat down to eat there. Meanwhile, my friend sent a petit (young boy) with the chicken to his house so his little sister could prepare it. We had a long, leisurely meal, and eventually my friend concluded he was too full to go back to his house and eat with his friends, and anyway Salaami was probably done with his errand already, so we went to my old house to find him. Salaami wasn't around, and the kids told us he had come and gone. The carpenter who had been installing screen on my windows had also come and gone. By now it was long past dark, but my friend was not deterred. Next began about an hour of motorcycling across Bassila searching for Salaami and the carpenter. We went to my new house, Salaami's house, my friend's house, back to my old house, the mayor's office, the garage where the truck is usually kept, the carpenter's house, and finally back to Salaami's. The truck was parked at the house of one of the elected officials, so we drove there and went inside to ask permission to use the truck at this absurd hour. I felt humbled entering his house. He's the second most powerful man in Bassila, and his house is smaller and far less grandiose than even my old house, let alone my new one. But I'm the foreigner, and so they've really put me in the best house Bassila has to offer. I'm both honored and a little ashamed.

With his permission secured, we took the truck back to my new house and started clearing it out. At some point in the fray, Kikele made a run for it and hid somewhere outside. The 14 year old girl in my concession was standing idly, watching the process. I had a framed poster of a couple swing dancing; she picked it up and threw it into the yard. This girl asks me for things constantly, and frequently doesn't return them, even when I ask her to, and this made me very angry. I walked over and asked why she was throwing my things, and she sneered and said, “It was spoiled.” I yelled at her about not respecting my stuff, and she sniffed and looked away. Finally the house was totally cleared out. I was holding onto a few fragile things and about to get into the truck, when I realized the same girl still had a board game I'd loaned her long ago. I used to let her use it every day, and she'd faithfully bring it back, and then one day she just stopped bringing it back, and I forgot about it. So I asked for it, and she said she didn't know where it was. We looked around her house for it, and I found it in their refrigerator (which isn't plugged in and thus serves as a storage cabinet). All the pieces of the game were missing, and she lied and said she'd already given them back to me. I scolded her pretty hard, and she sassed me back, and I yelled at her for her history of never returning things when I asked her to; it was a pointless fight to get into on my last day living with this girl. She may be disrespectful, but she's also a 14-year-old who doesn't live with her own parents and is responsible for all the chores in the house of her uncle who refuses to buy her school supplies. But my frustrations with her had built up over the course of the year, and had gotten particularly bad in the last couple months when they've been the only other family in the concession, and I lost my temper.

After unloading everything at the new house and paying all the workers, I took my friend out for a beer. By the time I had finished the beer, it was midnight.

The electricity in my new house wasn't working, so I set up a candle in my room. I unrolled a plastic mat in my new bedroom and put my mattress on top of it. I took a bucket shower in my new shower room, which is attached to my bedroom. I locked the door to my new room and fell asleep. Early in the morning, I woke up. The key to the door was tricky, and it took me a good five minutes to get the door open; since cell phones were down, I was mildly worried I'd be stuck in there for days. But I made it out ok. I walked into town to pick up my bike from the mayor's office, and then biked to my old house. Kikele was on the latrine roof and refused to come down, though I tried to ply him with sardines. Eventually he caught a bird and scurried off; I had a bus to catch and had no other choice than to leave him. I went into town and found a zemi, who followed me to my new house. I loaded him up with my bags for Porto Novo, and he took me back into town to catch my bus. All the buses were full—it's the summer holiday and many people are traveling on vacation—and so I was forced to take a mini bus. My trip to Cotonou took eight hours, and the whole time I was sitting next to an open window. By the time I got to Porto Novo at dinner time, my face, according to Naima, looked like a chimney sweep's. When I washed my hair that night, my soap suds ran black, and I had black streaks down my face as if I'd been wearing heavy makeup.

I said goodbye to Shira with a scrambled egg on sweet bread sandwich in hand. Both of us were suffering amoebic ghiardiasis, which made me nervous for my long, solo journey from Ghana to Benin. I took a taxi (by myself! In Ghana, there are no zemis, and taxis are what you expect them to be in the US: clean, functional, and not packed with people) to downtown Accra. Accra is a Westerner's paradise. It's got highways, shopping malls, and public trash receptacles. It's clean and developed, though you have to wonder who gets to take advantage of Accra's perks: my guess is it's mostly Westerners and the privileged Ghanaians who do business with them. For my villageois eyes, Accra was extremely overwhelming... but there were a few places with a familiar feel, like the taxi station. Amongst multiple story buildings, paved roads, and controlled landscapes, the taxi station is an anomalous, fenced-off, dirt-ground pit of frenzy. It's one of the few places in Accra where littering is acceptable, and it's packed with people hawking their various wares and pushing you toward their cars and tro-tros. I headed toward a sign marked “Aflao,” the name of a town on the border, and paid 6 Ghana cedi (about $4) to an old man at a rickety table. He gave me a paper ticket and put my backpack in the back of our tro-tro. With a typical sense of urgency, he hurried me into a seat on the tro-tro... where I waited for the next hour or two. I sat there watching the steady stream of vendors who came to the tro tro windows. In Ghana, you can buy: Ghanaian chocolate, the complete works of William Shakespeare, leather or canvas belts, groundnut paste, cookies, and toiletries. The young man sitting next to me purchased a small box of Q-tips, but I didn't buy anything. He quietly started grooming his ears, and then with customary politeness, held his box out to me, offering me a go.

Finally we set off. Our tro-tro ride was far less eventful than a typical bush taxi ride. We stopped for gas at a real gas station, where the driver filled our tank without shutting off his engine as I quietly prayed for my life. At one point, we stopped on the side of the road and let a woman with a large tray on board. She climbed on, but the driver was in a rush and stepped on his gas before she had a chance to sit down, and her tray went flying. She sat next to me, and I helped her collect her things. She was friendly to me the rest of the way and repeatedly offered to help me carry my things across the border... but I was planning on being smarter this time across (maybe) and declined. On the way, we passed through “Gallywood,” the “capital” of Ghana's film industry.

It took a few hours to get to Aflao, and the tro-tro was swamped with money-changers, vendors, and people offering to carry luggage across the border. I navigated my way through all this and headed toward my first check point. A man approached me asking, “Are you going to Cotonou?” I said, “Do you have a taxi?” and he said, “Yes.” He offered to carry my bags, but I wouldn't let him. He walked practically at a run, but I took my time; I didn't want to commit to this guy's help so early on in the crossing, and so I wasn't concerned about keeping up with him. I passed through the Ghanaian side of the border without problems and found the guy waiting for me when I came through. At the Togo entrypoint, he waited for me while I filled out papers and got my passport stamped by a rather vicious guard, who was processing a huge group of Europeans and Indians. At the Togo exit point, I received the business card of the guard, who offered me a place to stay at any time (great).

And then things got complicated. The guy who'd been following me had been joined by a second, older man, and they were both speaking to me in low tones about hiding my money, and trying to convince me to step out of view with them so they could show me how to hide it. They were acting rushed, and I didn't trust them but didn't know if maybe I should—maybe they WERE looking out for me and I was about to walk into some sort of danger. They kept saying, “You have to wrap your large bills in your small bills. They're going to take your money if you don't,” and I kept asking, “WHO's going to take my money?” They wouldn't tell me and kept urging me to wrap my money. I asked them to show me what they wanted with their own money, and they did, and I finally was exasperated and stuffed all my cash into my bra and said, “There, are you happy?” They sort of sighed and let me go.

A line of African men, women, and children was pushing through the final checkpoint, a dark, narrow corridor. I joined the stream and got out my passport. Everyone was passing money into the hand of the border guard, and he wasn't stopping long enough to check how much each one gave. I felt a sense of dread, not knowing what he'd want from me, and I gave him my passport. He looked at my visa and let me through.

On the other side, the men were waiting for me. They walked briskly to the lot where taxis leave for Cotonou, and the younger one whispered, “Just give me a dash when we get there.” I called out “Cotonou” to the drivers, and one approached. The young man walked with me to the taxi and held out his hand: I gave him my last couple cedis, not because he'd been of any use to me, but because I didn't have any use for them anymore anyway. I was annoyed by the situation with the men: the border crossing would have been easy and safe had it not been for the complication they made in trying to convince me I needed to trust them. And while I never fully trusted them, I'd still been duped enough to let them walk with me all the way across the border and talk to them at all.

My taxi ride to the Togo-Benin border was fine. The car was supposed to take me over the border, and as my taxi had done on the drive to Ghana, it took off at the border crossing with all my stuff in the trunk. I tried to follow it to ask the driver where he was going to meet me and copy his license plate number, but he sped off. I crossed the border without any problems and only one or two marriage proposals from men in uniform, and went to the Beninese side of the border, a sprawling taxi park where I had no idea which taxi was mine. I had gotten through the border quickly and so went to the official entry for cars to meet my driver there. I tried to remember exactly what his tissue had looked like but could only remember the colors, and I started to worry. Where was Sugar when I needed him? I stood there a very long time, until finally a pale-skinned, green-eyed man approached me and said, “You are waiting for your taxi?” I said, “I already have a taxi, thanks,” and he said, “I know. I'm in it. I came to look for you.” Despite the man's unusual appearance, I hadn't noticed him in the car. I felt both really stupid and really grateful. In Benin, you often have to trust others to take care of you. Fortunately, they usually do.

My former next-door neighbors had a baby last week. Named Lyz Favorite, she is the third girl in a family with no sons; I'm not entirely sure her parents know what "favorite" means, but I hope it indicates they are not too disappointed she isn't a boy. Her baptism was yesterday; this didn't involve any public religious ceremony, but was instead a party hosted at the family's house to announce her name.

It was a fun day. The last family left in my concession has its two little girls visiting for the summer vacation; normally, they live with their aunt in the South. I've been enjoying their company a lot. In what has lately been a very quiet concession, it has been quite delightful to have two little girls visiting me, coloring in my house, meowing softly at my kitten through the door, saying things like "Jessica, you are TOO beautiful!" and "Do you know what 'huevo' means in Fon?" Anyway, we all went to the party together, and they spent the day braiding my hair and running around taking photos with my camera. We also ate, chatted, drank soft drinks and table wine, and watched my three-year-old neighbor boy get drunk by sneaking wine.

To close off the day, I was invited to watch Lyz Favorite have a bath, a process which takes a lot of work, apparently; several women from the neighborhood have been going over to the house each day to help wash the mom and baby.

I went into the mother's room. One of these women, a Fon who speaks very little French, was sitting on a bench in her underwear with the baby laying on her lap. She had a big plastic basin under her legs, and three buckets on her side: one for hot water, one for cold water, and one for a mix of the two. She had an empty tomato paste can with a hole cut in the bottom, and she was using it to scoop the "melange" water and pour a gentle stream of water over the baby's bottom and genitals. She did this for a very long time, and I was a little unsure of why she was devoting SO much attention to that area (and before you ask, female circumcision is not really practiced in this area, so it wasn't related to that). If I thought this indicated the bath would be a delicate affair, I was wrong.

After this gentle cleaning, the woman soaped up a loofah and began vigorously scrubbing the baby all over; Lyz had been peacefully sleeping before, and now started wailing. Her whole face got soaped down too; no one worries at all about soap in kids' eyes here. Then, to rinse her off, the woman took a piece of cloth soaked in water, and started pressing it with a fist against the baby's body. I don't even scrub myself this hard when I come off a long bike ride on a dusty road. One of the women asked me, "Do you wash babies like this where you're from?" And all I could say as I tried to suppress my horror was, "Not exactly."

The baby clean, they began the process of "forming" her. First she turned the baby on her stomach, and with one hand, the woman pushed upwards on the baby's butt. With the other, she pressed downward all along the baby's spine. White people, they said, have flat backs and hips, and this would give her the swayed-back and big-butt characteristic of West Africans (ideal for carrying a baby on back). Then she worked on forming her skull into a nice round shape and pushed upward on her calves to make them nice and round too. And then, to top it all off, she did what they said was for "sport": first they picked her up by one arm and shook her around. Then she picked her up by the other arm and shook her around. THEN she picked her up by her head and shook her around, making sure to get a good rotation on the neck as she did this. Then she threw her up in the air a few times, and picked her up by her feet and shook her some more. I come from a country where things like "shaken baby syndrome" and snapped spinal cords due to lack of neck support are a real worry, so I was pretty horrified. And I have to wonder: are African babies more resilient? Are White babies coddled unnecessarily? Or is this harsh treatment of newborns a possible cause of the high infant mortality rate here?

Africa's a tough place, and even the babies have to be strong to survive. When it was all finished, they powdered and dressed the baby and handed her to me to hold. I clutched her tight; apparently we were the only two in the room horrified by what had just happened. The woman dried herself off and dressed, and all the other women in the room said "Merci, Maman."

Happy August, and happy Beninese Independence Day! Yesterday, August 1, was the national fête, marking 49 years of independence from French rule. I celebrated the day first with a meeting, and then by taking a motorcycle a long ways a way to Aledjo, the seat of one of Bassila commune's arrondissements and the site of the commune's festivities for this year. I did not have high hopes for the spectacle but was pleasantly surprised. Crowds lined Aledjo's main dirt road and various groups from the commune paraded past: the police, the gendarme, the army (which couldn't get their march in time, sadly), the zemidjahns (doing various stunts, like standing on the seats of their motos or driving with their feet), the taxi drivers (one van driver was standing out his window and also driving with his feet), the artisans, variouis traditional singing and dancing groups, the hunters, and--my favorite--the Bassila commerçantes--fat marché women dancing by carrying their wares, such as containers of chocolate milk and tomato paste. Perhaps this is a testament to how sappy and pro-democracy I am becoming, but it all made me a little teary; it was awesome to see that so many people had traveled from all over the communem and joining across ethnic and religious lines, to spend the day celebrating their freedom. Incidentally, this was the third independence day I've celebrated in a month: Ghana's was July 1, while I was still with Shira; I spent the Fourth of July (also the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Benin) with Naima--we made "hot dogs" (spicey goat meat on bread, with ketchup from the States!) and apple pie (with Granny Smiths from Cotonou!) and drank white wine (also from Cotonou) while watching fireworks and photos of the US on my computer and listening to all songs that had geographical names from America in the titles.

I am currently at the cyber café listening to Josh Groban singing "Angels We Have Heard on High." Such is what happens when you share your CDs with the cyber café--you get Christmas music in August! My laptop is en panne (not working) at the moment, and I've been making a list of all the things I wanted to write about, so I've come here to type it up and thus get to experience some Christmas magic.

I mentioned in my last post that coming home from camp, I had one of the hardest weeks in my Peace Corps service. So here's why: since my landlord died and his wife was forced to move out of our concession, the other residents of my concession had all decided to move out too, and apparently may have been asked to leave by my landlord's family. Since I was travelling around so much, I didn't hear any of this, and came back from camp to find just one family (a husband, wife, and two kids) and one very hermit-like man left in the concession, and only temporarily at that--both had found new houses and were just waiting the finishing touches on them before moving out. A huge group of the people I knew best in Benin had disappeared from my life within a month; much of what I understand about this place came from living with them, and I relied on their constant company for a sense of belonging and security. Especially since the death of our landlord, I had thought the two other families and I were all leaning on each other a bit, and so I felt pretty abandoned and alone. Peace Corps and the mayor's office both agreed that I had to move out too; I can't live alone and my concession is quickly becoming a ghost town. This launched a very stressful couple of days as well; I'd been hoping to come home and hibernate for a week or so, but instead got to go out and search for a new house. This is easier said than done; Bassila does not exactly have a realty system. To find a house, you either usually build it yourself or know someone who is building one and ask for a room. Bassila also has had a housing shortage for several years (according to my friends), so my prospects for finding something were not too good.

I started going around the city asking everyone I knew if they knew of any open rooms, and to keep an eye out for me. This was pretty encouraging: one friend offered to move into my concession, which I thought was just a nicety, until she actually called me up to find out if she could come by and negotiate the rent and such; another friend had heard while I was in Ghana that all my neighbors were being forced to leave and so had already started negotiating with a landlord on my behalf; and finally, I approached a family that I know well and asked for their help, and the next day I got called back for a tour of houses. (I felt quite loved all-around.) One of them was a really beautiful house right next to their family's concession; I'm not supposed to give identifying information about my housing online, but suffice it to say, this house is really pretty, so pretty that I felt kind of guilty even looking at it. But... as it turned out the rent on that was not much more than the rent on another house the mayor's office wanted to put me up in, and since I already am close with the family right near this house, my counterpart and the accountant at the mayor's office both thought I would be much happier at the really beautiful house. Negotiations with the landlord got underway, in a frustratingly slow manner of course, so that it's already a new month and I still haven't moved in. But... sooner or later, I should be moving into this brand new, beautiful house, right across a narrow dirt path from a concession full of people whom I already visit whenever I'm having a bad day just because they make me happy. I'll be closer to town, in a neighborhood with fewer bureaucrats and more families, in a place where no PCV has lived yet (as opposed to my current house, where three PCVs have lived already). It's a fresh start for my second year of service, and except for the sad circumstances that are making this move necessary, I couldn't be happier about it. Stay tuned for information on my actual move...

Still, my current concession has been quite quiet and lonely, and this makes time seem like it's passing very slowly, except for a few nights that I shared with one family and 63 roosters. Yes, 63 ROOSTERS. The family was getting ready for a fête in Abomey (I never did quite find out the logistics for transporting all those roosters) and so the wife spent a few days scrounging up what appeared to be all the roosters in Bassila. It was a slow process so I didn't quite realize how extreme it had gotten until one night when it was raining and they had to all be brought onto our porch for the night, and we did a headcount. Over the next few nights, I learned a lot about rooster noises. Not only do they crow (and, most people don't know this, but the crow doesn't end with cock-a-doodle-doo; it's followed by an inhale that sort of sounds like the crow skids to a stop), but they snore and also make a screech that sounds like a child going "yeeeep!" I was worried that all 63 would crow in the morning, but actually, only a couple of them did. Must relate to some sort of heirarchy thing.

The last two weeks were FULL of adventures with Carly, who left Manigri Friday for good and had a long list of things to accomplish before her departure. First, we spent several days finishing up girls' camp paperwork and such, and eating lots of delicious American food (including half a container of confetti frosting--thanks Mom!) while we were at it. Second, we spent a day preparing a feast to celebrate Carly's birthday and to say goodbye to the Germans who live here. When I heard there were Germans living in Bassila, my thoughts were first, "I can practice my German!", then "I wonder if they drink beer?" and third "I hope they know how to make spaetzle!" Since I've been here I've been trying to set up a date to make spaetzle, a lumpy, delicious egg noodle indigenous to southern Germany that I ate a lot of when I studied in Freiburg, but they've always avoided it by talking about how difficult it is. This was my last chance. But you can't eat spaetzle by itself when you're honoring your friends, so we had to buy a rooster too. Thus, we ended up a good part of a day marching all over Bassila with a live, mostly silent but occassionally quite rowdy, rooster who we called "Chuckles" hanging by his legs from my hand. As you may recall from my stories about Travis's visit, I have only personally killed a chicken once, and I have never gutted one myself, so we called in an expert: A--, a high school senior (who helped me earlier in the week to paint country names on the world map at the Bassila secondary school). What we learned from this experience is that the red crown and gullet of a rooster both turn white when a rooster is submerged in boiling water. We cooked the chicken by boiling it with vegetables and lots of spices for a few hours. When our guests arrived, we all took a turn at the oh-so-difficult (not really) task of flicking the noodle batter into boiling water and scooping up the spaetzle as they floated to the top. It was a very successful, delicious dinner, if I do say so myself; I think I deserve a pat on the back, considering my first meal in Bassila was spaghetti with chopped up tomatoes and a can of tomato paste. You can learn a lot in a year.

The next day, we took a bus about an hour south to the village of Pira, which was having the season's first Yam Fête in the region. If you recall from my blog post about the Kikele yam fete last September, a village's yam fetishes must be honored before yams can be eaten there. Bassila is quite lacking in interesting voodoo stuff--I'm told by one neighbor that the people of Bassila do private yam ceremonies in their own homes because there is no public yam fetish--so it was a surprise to see how full of fetishes Pira is. We first greeted a vendor on the side of the goudron, the woman who we can thank for having told Carly the date of the ceremony, and she arranged for her brother to accompany us for the day. He took us on a tour of the village, which included a visit to the house of the king of Pira, where we drank a local millet beer that tasted sort of like tchuke but thinner and sweeter (not that that means much to you all, I suppose), and admired his assortment of fetishes and Muslim and Christian icons. We then sat in plastic chairs under some trees and watched: girls singing and dancing, women in purple and pink woven fabric with coins sewn to the fringe singing and dancing, an old drunken man going on a long tirade, all the village elders and delegations from other villages dancing. We each took a turn entering the walled-in area where one of Pira's yam fetishes is. We watched others drink the local brew, pouring some into a bowl-like divet in the ground for the fetish, and say prayers; then we had a chance to do the same. Next there was a parade through the streets of Pira, and finally, a ceremony involving two larger fetishes and lots of offering of vase-shaped calabashes full of millet beer. We didn't have a very good view and were hot, tired, and sunburned, so we left a little early. We waited on the side of the road for our bus, and while we were waiting, the daughter of the vendor dressed us in fetish-jewelry and painted our faces with red fetish-paint, and we took pictures. Then, the very first yams of Pira were brought out, and we bought up about half of them, got on our bus, and headed back to Bassila. That evening, we relaxed with face masks and baked a chocolate cake (thanks to John, the previous Manigri Volunteer, whose cocoa powder is still useful to us) to use up the rest of the confetti frosting. Virgile came over to share the cake and say his goodbyes to Carly.

The following day, we put on our matching orange tissue known to the people of Benin, to my amusement, as "maccaroni" and headed to the market with our Pira yams in hand. To prepare a sesame sauce, we bought the following: a can of tomato paste (500 F), tomatos (100 F), onions (200 F), garlic (50 F), sesame seeds (500 F), two wheels of wagasi cheese (1600 F), and palm oil (325 F). We took it all to the house where my landlord's wife, Maman F, is currently living. Her situation is not good; I've mentioned before that she is in a four-month limbo where she must stay inside at her husband's parents' house, after which she will be sent back to her own parents. Her husband's family supposedly never liked her, though he clearly loved her, and so he built a house on the other side of town (the same house where I live) and took her (his second wife) there to live. Now that he's gone, his family is rapidly wasting the money and posessions he left behind; already, his little brother is sporting a fancy camera phone and driving around town on his motorcycle; they've been back to the house several times to "clean it out." In the meantime, they're only giving Maman F a bowl of nearly nutrient-less corn porridge at morning and night. She's looking a little thinner, but she seems resolved to make it through the next few months and then do "whatever she must do to feed her children." Given these circumstances, we weren't sure how our visit would go over and envisioned ourselves hiding the food in her room while we prepared it so the other family members wouldn't see it and become jealous and further cast her out. Luckily, these fears were for not; she was able to come outside and cook with us, and several other women (including her husband's first wife) and lots of children joined us in the preparations. We had brought a ton of food, so there was plenty for everyone, and Carly and I shared a communal bowl with the two wives and three kids (including the first wife's son, who at some point peed on the dirt where our bowl was sitting while we were all eating; he had a conveniently placed rip in his pants to enable this; no one said anything). It was a really fun day, and I was happy to get to spent such a long time with Maman F and her three daughters, who I tickled mercilessly.

The following day, Carly went home, and I went to Balanka, an Anii village in Togo. Two German girls volunteered there for the last year, and so I joined their going-away party and checked out the library that they've been working on--which featured an Obama painting made by a local kid! The party was fun, and I was forced to dance in front of all the villagers, but I was really very exhausted from my week and so was happy to go home.... except....

While all this adventuring was happening, Carly and I had gotten really frustrated with my cat, Kikele. Since I came home from camp he'd been peeing and pooping in my kitchen every day, and I was fed up. He's an extremely whiny cat as well, and he hates going outside, so I decided he was going to become an outdoor cat whether he liked it or not. The day I went to Togo was the third day he'd spent outside, and each day, he spent the entire day hiding in a broken down truck and didn't come in until I called him. So I came home from Togo and called Kikele. With me there, he had a little courage and so came out of the truck long enough to eat some grass and walk around a bit, but when I went inside he got spooked and ran back into the truck. It got dark and he still hadn't come to the house, so I went out to pick him up again. I called his name as I approached the car, and he mewed softly and then peeked his head out of the car, with about six inches of foamy spit hanging from his mouth. I flipped out, thinking he'd been bitten by a rabid bat while hiding in the truck and was now rabid. This would be just my luck, as I've been trying for months to get a vet to come vaccinate Kikele, but the vet never held our appointments. I read up on rabies symptoms, and concluded Kikele had nothing except for perhaps over-salivation, but I was too scared to bring him inside (meanwhile, someone who I will not name suggested I would have to have someone come SHOOT Kikele because he was a danger to my village, and then went on to suggest that I was KNOWN for over-reacting!) and so left him out for the night. I did leave him some food as well, which unfortunately attracted another, far less timid cat, who then spent the entire night on my porch. The two of them were growling and yowling and fighting all night, so I was very glad that my neighbors weren't around, and I wouldn't have slept well anyway because of course I was slightly nervous that Kikele had been contaminated for awhile and surely had scratched or bitten me since then, and so it was only a matter of days before I too was foaming at the mouth and running away from water. I called the vet first thing in the morning and insisted he come over. He did come, finally, and by that time Kikele was behaving completely normally. But I wanted to be sure, so feeling very stupid, I asked, "Est-ce qu'il a.... la rage?" and Kikele chimed in with a very timely, innocent mew and scampered out from under the truck. The vet looked like he was trying not to crack up, but bit his lip and said, "Non," and gave Kikele his shot. All's well that ends well, and as often happens when couples have their first fight, Kikele and I have been getting along quite well ever since.

Carly's and my last big adventure was our Gender and Development date. Back in March, in what may have been a poor exercise of judgment, our friend Lindsay (a SED volunteer) bid about $100 to come do a bike tour of Bassila with Carly and I in a fundraiser for our GAD small projects fund. With just a few days left in Bassila, Carly wanted to honor that promise. Also, Volunteers worldwide often paint world maps at local schools; it's sort of a staple project, but neither of us have had a chance to do it because previous Volunteers had already painted them at our schools. They had all used permanent markers to write the country names on, which is an easy solution but not a long-term one, leaving the CEGs of Bassila and Manigri with beautiful, but not so useful world maps. We thought painting the names on the Manigri map would be a great last project. So, in one very hectic day, we spent about six hours painting the map in Manigri, even though our paint was drying up and our brushes becoming quite gloopy and even though a tropical rainstorm was beginning to hit us as we did the last few countries; we then washed up and zemed to Bassila (Carly carrying her bike on her lap), threw some stuff in our bags at my house, and zemed into the center of town to meet Lindsay. The next day and a half was really fun. We had dinner at La Romance, Bassila's nicest restaurant, and picked up a very proper looking street bike with a sticker on its frame that said "NEDERLAND" to borrow for our trip. The following day, we went to the cyber cafe, visited a local baboon, biked to Kikele to see the sacred monkey forest (with photo stops at designated termite mounds! and we saw a SCAREMONKEY--a garden guardian much like a scare crow, but aimed, yes, at monkeys), biked in an absolute downpour from Kikele to Manigri, made tacos with delicious nacho cheese sauce (thanks America!) and Ghirardelli chocolate brownies (thanks America!), did pedicures, and watched a movie. It was a blast.

Lindsay left the next morning, and I returned the Nederlander to its home. The next day, Carly and Naima both came into town for yet another farewell dinner (this time with our resident Frenchwoman) and so Naima could tell us all about the arrival of the NEW class of Peace Corps Benin Volunteers, who have just arrived! And so it begins again! :-D

After a week of “recovery” (actually about half of it being some of the most stressful and sad days I’ve had in Peace Corps… more on that later), I finally have the time to sit down and write about what was by far my busiest and most rewarding week in Peace Corps—Camp Succès 2009 (that’s “ka soo-say duh meel nuff” for all you non- French-speakers).

For one week, the PCVs of the Donga region (that’s Carly, Naima, Melissa, Rut, Heidi, Miriam, and me) ran a sleep-away girls’ empowerment camp for 59 of the department’s highest-achieving girls, age 11-19, in Djougou, the department’s capital and Benin’s third largest city. Worldwide, PCVs organize these camps, usually called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Ours was the largest and perhaps most ambitious in Benin this year. Last year, the Donga had two smaller camps, one in Manigri (led by Carly) and one in Badjoudé (led by Kate). But this year, we wanted to reach out to more girls and cover the entire department, and so ever since I got to Bassila, we’ve been working on organizing this spectacular project. And it. Was. Awesome.

We were not, of course, alone. Olivier, a Manigri math teacher, has initiated the Manigri camp with the assistance of PCVs for the two previous years. We also had the help of Déhana, a woman who runs the weaving center in Djougou where we held the camp. The two of them organized most of the day-to-day logistics, so that a lot of the time none of us PCVs even knew how something worked out, but were just grateful that our counterparts had thought to invite an MC with a speaker system for our opening ceremony, and things like that. It was awesome to have Olivier as one of our key organizers—he led lots of our presentations and worked alongside the other women and Volunteers in group discussions about things like female health, sexual harassment, goal-setting, girls’ clubs, etc. etc. Then we had five “tantis” (aunties)—young women from around the department who stayed at the campsite with us for the whole week, participating in and leading some of the activities, leading morning small-group discussions, and just generally being inspiring examples of young womanhood. Community participation: check!

Most of our activities were held in an open-air room at the weaving center. The girls slept in the center’s conference room and weaving room, sleeping on a cement floor on top of the plastic mats they brought from home. The tantis and PCVs had slightly nicer accommodations: most of us got to sleep on beds with mosquito nets the whole week. Though we were a little pressed for space, the weaving center was really a great place to hold the camp. It’s a beautiful facility; for most of the girls, it’s the first place they ever got to use a flush toilet. From 7:30 AM to 9, 10, or 11 PM every night, the days were packed with activities. We had days devoted to sports, careers, and health, and one day in which we traveled to the Atacora department to visit Natitingou and the village of Tampegré. We sang, we did crafts, we played Honey if You Love Me (Ma chéri, si tu m’adores…). It was an exhausting week, and I almost lost my voice many times. Everyone contributed a lot (especially Carly, our fearless leader), but instead of running through a play-by-play description of the week, here are the highlights of my involvement and how some of my ideas were made into action:

• Puppet-making: Originally, I had wanted to teach the girls to make dolls. The idea was that they could learn a craft that they could do at home, either to make gifts for little sisters or to sell. But once I actually tried to make a doll myself, I realized that this was not too easy of a task, and certainly something I would be unlikely to achieve in two hours with 60 girls who didn’t know how to sew. So I scaled back, way back, to finger puppets. We paired this with a discussion called “The woman I admire,” in which girls discussed the characteristics of their role-models; the idea was that they could think about these qualities while they fabricated their puppets, and then they could later tell the stories of the women with the aid of the puppets. So… “The woman I admire” was kind of a bust (anything involving creative thinking is not generally the strong suit of a teenager in Benin) and they spent the majority of their time trying to make the written copies of their stories “look pretty,” and I think the tantis ended up having way too big a say in the final written versions (though the one story selected by the group overall really was quite well done). As I watched that activity flounder, I got really nervous about how the puppets would go over. If we couldn’t even explain to girls what it meant for someone to be a leader, how could I explain to them how to embroider and sew? Yikes. But the puppets saved the day. I made posters and examples of various steps of the project. The girls broke into their groups of 12, and I taught the whole group how to cut their fabric and embroider the dolls’ faces. Then I popped Feist on our sound system (that is, an iPod), and with the help of all the volunteers and tantis, they got to work. I regrouped them again to teach them how to sew the edges of their puppet together and to attach scraps of tissue to make a fular (head scarf) and pagne (skirt). It was so FUN! They actually understood my instructions about how to cut out their fabric, and then with all of us trying to teach a few girls at a time how to tie their thread and pierce their needles through their fabric, and those girls then teaching the others, everyone got the hang of it. Naima tried to talk to one girl, and she said, “I can’t talk now! I must realize my puppet!”

• The camp manual: I also really wanted the girls to have a book they could journal in and use as a resource once they got home. Lots of the PCVs contributed notes for their presentations, and we scrounged up some resources on studying tips and other useful things, and I added questions for reflection for the morning group discussions. The girls each received a bound book, which they used throughout the week. I think this was a success. During one lunch break, I saw a group of girls huddling together going over their morning questions and writing answers. Many times I spotted girls reading up on sexual harassment law. Next year, I hope we do this again and add in a feminine health section (by the way: their appalling lack of understanding of anatomy and reproduction went quite far to challenge my beliefs about “traditional knowledge” and how so-called “less developed” societies are closer to nature and therefore understand it better. Reproduction may be a very indiscrete aspect of life here, but that doesn’t mean people know much about it).

• Informatique: During our trip to the Atacora, we broke the girls into two groups to take part in two activities. One was a visit to the village of Tampegré to learn how to weave bracelets from raffia grass, and the other was a visit to an internet café to learn how to use computers. I led one of the computer sessions; of the 28 girls in my group, only one had ever used a computer before. I’ve come a long way over the last year in terms of my patience in teaching computers, and I think I was a pretty darn good teacher on this activity. They learned how to use a mouse and keyboard, got to type a few things on the computer (a few of the girls were writing things like, “I love the volunteers and hope they live long and prosperous lives”), and learned to use Google to search for whatever they wanted (among their search topics: Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, AIDS, and the history of slavery.) Their first Google search was a profound moment for us PCVs; I had them all typing the address at the same time, with periodic pauses to make sure they’d gotten the various components right, and by the time they were all ready to hit “ENTER” in unison, all the Yovos in the room were quite excited.

• How to Start a Girls’ Club: I wanted to encourage the girls to start clubs at their high schools, as a way of adding some “sustainability” to our camp, and so we had a session on this, and I wrote up instructions for their manuals. Naima, Olivier, Christopher (guest PCV from the South) and I all sort of led this together. It was a really frustrating illustration of the bureaucratic Beninese mindset (see my post on Ghana vs. Benin). It took us probably an hour to get the girls to STOP just telling us the hierarchy of people they would contact within their schools in order to form a club and to start brainstorming actual activities they would want to do with a group of girls. But by the end, they broke into teams with the girls from their schools and got some good ideas flowing. One group wanted to focus on theater; another wanted to do health discussions; the Bassila girls listed “English lessons with tanti Jessica” as one of their activities. All in all, a success. I can’t WAIT to start a club with the Bassila girls!

• General merriment: Many summers of Girl Scout and church camps equipped me with lots of songs and games to play, and as the week went on, we got a lot better at throwing these in during down time. (Next year: more songs and games!) I taught them “The Lion” (which I learned in a primary school in Ghana that Shira and I visited!), “Vista” (Girl Scouts), and “Honey, if you love me,” all of which they liked a lot. We also taught them several camp songs from Camps Succès past, including the one that this blog post title is stolen from. Now, if only we could have a campfire… One of the culminating activities of the camp is a theatrical presentation; each group of 12 girls was given a challenging scenario (for instance: a girl’s boyfriend is pressuring her for sex) and had to act out the scenario and the resolution. Some of the girls did a really excellent job (particularly one very feisty mother who mistreated the orphan living with her, and one very sketchy young boy looking for action). So the PCVs and tantis decided to do an informative skit too, and at the last minute threw together a piece in which I was a 12-year-old girl who got my period for the first time (while at the marché buying piment, naturally) and had to ask various people for help until finally my mom explained it all to me.

The girls were really great; it was inspiring to work with them, see them open up, and hear their answers to questions. Every single one of them said she wanted to go to university after high school, and the theme of the week became, “Diploma before marriage, career before men,” which wasn’t our intention but really just sprang up organically from the girls and our presenters. I was especially proud of one of our Bassila girls. At 11, she was one of our youngest and tiniest campers; when I first met her in Bassila, she was wide-eyed and looked terrified about going to camp. Her dad at first refused her to go, and so I visited the family a few times and talked to the dad a few times too before he relented. I was very proud that she got to come, but even more than that, she turned out to be one of our best campers. She went from very timid to very open during the course of the week, participating confidently in discussions, and working very hard in the informatique and puppet sessions especially. By Friday night, she was dancing like crazy at our end-of-camp party. She got one of our five outstanding camper awards.

Last, I wanted to comment on Mulan, which we watched one night. This has not ever been one of my favorite Disney movies, and I think perhaps because of its stereotypical, non-feminist portrayal of China and women (Mulan dresses like a man to join the army and ends up a hero, but of course, the movie doesn’t end happily until she gets the man too), I was never really encouraged to like it either. I remember in my freshman year at Macalester, my Cultural Anthropology professor made some comment about how much she disliked Mulan, and I agreed. I haven’t watched it since then and was a little unsure about showing it at our girls’ empowerment camp. But watching it in Benin was a very different experience. Many elements of the movie resonated with life here. I think the girls were able to understand it well because so many of the artifacts in the movie are part of life here: a charcoal stove, a bamboo mat for a bed, a bowl of porridge for breakfast, spirits inhabiting statues, etc. And while I cannot speak for the accuracy of Mulan’s cultural themes for China, some of them, like ancestor worship, bringing honor to the family through marriage, and the subservient role of girls, were spot-on for Benin. American life is so individualistic, and we don’t really understand what it is like to live somewhere that your life is supposed to follow a strict model, and I think for this reason, I looked at Mulan as “stereotypical” because it DOES present a strict model of life, and “degrading” because Mulan is not ultimately fulfilled until she fits into the mold. But here, those same attitudes toward women and marriage really define life here; what I saw as a stereotype is really more of a depiction of everyone’s reality here. Sure, I would love to have been able to tell the girls, “You don’t HAVE to get married,” (or even to boldly suggest that romantic love between women is possible) but that wouldn’t be realistic for Benin; the message “Graduate high school before you get married” is much more relevant. So while Mulan “bringing honor” to her family once she gets married is maybe an ending that feminists would oppose for an audience of white American girls of the post-Civil Rights era, I’m not so sure it isn’t a culturally accurate ending, and anyway, it was a good message for our girls.

Tremendous thanks are owed to all of our donors. I don’t have a donor list yet so can’t thank you personally, but I know many of you read this blog, so: THANK YOU.

One of the things I like most about traveling throughout Benin and West Africa is to try to figure out how much I can really generalize my experience to the rest of the country, the region, and the continent. I realize that I did not see very much of Ghana: I visited the Keta region and the capital, Accra. From what I’ve heard from other PCVs, while Accra is extremely developed, the rest of Ghana isn’t, and might even be less developed than Benin. Perhaps Ghana’s higher GDP per capita really translates to greater income inequality than Benin, instead of higher incomes for the majority. I’m not really qualified to say. So, when I refer to “Ghana,” I really mean only Keta and Accra. But when I say Benin, I mean all of Benin. Anyway, here are some of the differences I noticed:

• Ghana’s cleaner than Benin. In Accra, pollution is legal, and public trashcans are available; people seem to take good care of their surroundings there and in Keta. In Benin, people throw their trash on the ground liberally; sometimes people burn their trash, but otherwise they just toss it over the wall of their house, nevermind that it falls on ground that someone (possibly even that family itself) uses for farmland. In Accra, a girl who was selling plastic baggies of pure water collected all the empty baggies from her clients. I’ve never seen a Beninese pure water seller do that. The streets of Ghana were for the most part very clean. Add to this the fact that the buildings seemed to be holding up a little better, painted a little more brightly, and stocked with a greater diversity of things, and on the whole, I’d say the streets of Ghana are more pleasant than the streets of Benin.

• Ghana’s friendlier than Benin. African culture is very open, community-oriented, generous, and friendly. But even against that standard, Ghana stands out. In Benin, you don’t pass someone on the street without greeting them, and usually asking how they are. In Ghana, people would stop what they were doing to approach Shira and I and say hello, ask us how we are, where we were from, where we were staying, what we were doing in Ghana, and what day of the week we were born on. Ghanaians seemed genuinely curious about and interested in us.

• Greeting is very important in Beninese culture. At the very least, you must always say “Bonjour” (good day) or “Bon soir” (good evening) and “Ca va?” (How goes it?). But then, there’s a long train of potential possible questions that can be asked, including: And this morning/evening/day? And your health? And your house? And your family? And your children? And your job/work? And your journey? And (name of place you are in or from)? And the people from there? And your morale/courage? And your fatigue? And your fatigue from yesterday? Did you sleep well? Did you get up well? …The list goes on. In addition to this, there are many little filler comments that you use throughout the day. For instance, if you see someone working, you say “Bon travail!” (Good work). There’s also “Bon appétit” (Enjoy your meal), “Bon digestion” (Good digestion), “Bon assis” (Good sitting), “Bon route” (Have a good trip), “Bon repos” (Good rest), and “Bonne arrivé” (Good arrival). On top of THAT, you can always say to someone “Tu es la?” (You are there?) or just “Ca va?” (How goes it?) (Of course, there’s also the local language equivalents! In Anii, for instance, there’s “Gafala ni?” (and your house/family), “Bapi ni?” (and your children), “Ntema ni?” (and your work?), “Suuru ni?” (and your patience?), etc. etc. and then various blessings, such as “Gaja ga shee lada,” which means “May God reimburse you.”) At first, I thought this was all a little silly, but now I see the beauty of it. In Benin, you are never without something to say to someone; there’s never an awkward pause, and you can always show someone that you acknowledge them. In Ghana, I kept trying to ask people these things, but found that they were sort of confused by me asking more than “How are you?” and a lot of the time, there’s no English equivalent (I mean, “Good sitting?” really?) I found myself with a lot more awkward moments in Ghana than in Benin. I will miss this art when I get back to America.

• Benin is generally pretty apathetic to names; plenty of people that I interact with regularly are content to just call me “Yovo,” and I can have long conversations with people in which they never ask my name and then even seem embarrassed that I ask theirs. Old friends in Benin don’t always know each others’ names (“Oh, we don’t do that in Africa. Here we just call each other by the names of their kids”). In Ghana, everyone who talked to us wanted to know our names and what day we were born on. (In Ewe, I go by Adjo, which means Monday-born. A group of men were so curious as to what day I was born on that they went and found a universal calendar and calculated my birthdate. Shira’s Afi, or Friday-born.) In Benin, I know a few kids who are called something like “Born Thursday” or “Third girl” or “Twin,” but for the most part, birthdays and birth orders do not seem too important for naming. My Anii tutor taught me the whole order of names for girls and boys, but I’ve never actually heard a child called any of these names. It must be a thing of the past.

• In Benin, you can call a woman “Maman” if she is of child-bearing age, “Maman (name of a child)” if you know one of her children’s names, “Tanti” (auntie) if she is a young woman and particularly if she works at a bar/restaurant, “Tata” (auntie/sister) if she is a young woman and older than you or your same age, “Grande soeur” (big sister) if she is a little older than you, “petite” if she is a little girl, or also “Soeur” (sister) or “Madame.” In Ghana, you can call women “Madame” or “Sister,” and I think that’s it. In Benin, you can call a man “Papa” if he is of child-bearing age or an old man, “Toto” (uncle) if he is a young man but older than you or your same age, and of course “Frere” (brother) or “Monsieur.” In Ghana, you can call men “Brotha” or “Charlie.” Yes, Charlie.

• There’s no pidgin language in Benin. In Ghana, both English and pidgin English are spoken. Example of pidgin, from a song: “Mama, Mama, com make we tako, I wanna talk about Barack Obama.” This means “Mama, Mama, come let’s talk…” I am very glad I have not had to deal with pidgin French!

• Ghanaians seem to think that Benin is a scary place because the voodoo is so strong there. But actually, I think I saw equally many references to voodoo in Ghana as in Benin. There, it’s called “juju.” Here, it’s “gris gris.”

• Scarification seems more prevalent in Benin.

• Matching tissue (called “cloth” in Ghana… boring!) is important in both cultures, but in Ghana there were two distinctions I noticed. For funerals, everyone wears tissue with patterns in red and black. (On the other hand, I think wearing red might be almost taboo in Benin. I have seen very few tissues that were mostly red, and at one voodoo site Travis and I visited, he had to take off his shirt because it was red.) For baby naming ceremonies, weddings, and possibly some others, everyone wears white tissue with small patterns of black lines, checks, boxes, etc.

• Ghanaians seem to be better-educated than Beninese. Granted, I was speaking English the entire time I was there, whereas I still struggle with French here, and I was also generally in wealthier circles than I seem to find myself in here, but it seemed like people tracked with our conversations better, and when it came to discussions of education, people realized its importance more in Ghana. Many people were hoping to go back to, were currently in, or had finished post-secondary education. They seemed more understanding when I talked about my ambitions for continued study, and less like “But shouldn’t you be married and having babies?”

• In Benin, even the best-educated people I know drink well or tap water without treating it in any way. If there is any realization that it is in any way unclean, they think it is only bad for ME because my “organism” is not yet “habituated” to it. Purified water baggies are available, but people seem to drink them when they’re on-the-go just because no other source is available and because pure water is often refrigerated. In Ghana, I never saw people drink anything BUT pure water from baggies. When I mentioned that people in Benin drink well and tap water straight, they said, “But don’t they get sick??”

• Ghana is very Christian, which I think may be due to the continued Anglo-American presence there and that perhaps there are more English-speaking than French-speaking missionaries in the world. Benin’s South is predominately Christian, but still, mosques can be found everywhere. I didn’t see a single mosque in Ghana, but I did see plenty of taxis with the words “Clap for Jesus” painted on them. A Beninese friend who had visited Ghana seconded this opinion. He said when he traveled there, his car broke down, and all the Ghanaians were saying “Jesus! Jesus!” until it got fixed. (This friend is Catholic!) Also, I visited a primary school in Keta, and all the kids said a prayer before they were allowed to eat lunch. There’s no prayer in Beninese public schools.

• All public school kids in Benin wear khaki uniforms. In Ghana, every school had a different uniform, many of which were quite pretty!

• There are many Rastafarians in Ghana, and very very few in Benin. In Ghana, Rastas greet by pounding fists and then each holds his fist to his chest and says “Respect.” There’s also a lot of pot in Ghana.

• An affinity for bureaucracy seems to be one of the most unfortunate things Benin inherited from its French colonizers, but since Ghana was an English colony, it has avoided this. Knowledge of bureaucratic rituals seems to be one of the most important things imparted by the public school system; anyone who can write knows how to properly address a formal letter. Every speech begins with an incessant stream of acknowledgements (“Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, Sir the president of such and such organization, madame the director of such and such organization, etc. etc.”) The girls at camp even thanked us by writing, and reading aloud, formal letters to us; at least three girls began by reading us the date and objective of their letter. In contrast, in Ghana, every speaker seemed to begin with “Good morning! Well, I don’t want to waste too much time, so let’s start right ahead with our program.” Ah, so English! It was very refreshing.

I like to think of myself as a pretty intelligent, observant person, and to believe that I have adapted fairly well into the culture here and know how to successfully navigate through life’s obstacles. So without much worry, I scheduled a trip to Ghana to take the GRE (ok, worried a lot on that front) and visit a friend, and I didn’t think too much about how I was going to actually get there or deal with border guards from three West African countries. And so it was that last week, I woke up at about the crack of dawn in Cotonou to scarf down a quick oatmeal breakfast and flag a zem to a nearby taxi station.

Taxi drivers always seem rushed when you first pull up to the station. They grab your bags, demand where you’re going, and rush off to put your luggage in their car and show you your seat. My driver followed this routine, and I climbed into the back seat, where I waited a good hour before another single passenger arrived. He was an Ivorian, traveling home to Abidjan from Nigeria, where he had bought a bunch of cheap watches to sell at home. We talked a little about his business, which has taken him across Africa and to Hong Kong, and he told me how Côte d’Ivoire is so much better than Benin, and how Lagos has horrible traffic. In the next two hours, two more men got into the car, and I guess two of them paid the driver double, because we left with two “empty seats” (…the emergency break and my wiggle room). The guy joining me and the Ivorian in the back was a Togolese Rastafarian named Sugar. He sells CDs to benefit a children’s NGO that he runs. He smiled brightly at me and shook my hand excitedly, introduced himself, and then pulled out an envelope of pictures, showing his recent marriage to a Belgian woman. The man in the front was a Ghanaian who spoke English to the driver the whole time. We made quite the multinational party; it was a friendly group.

Our taxi driver was annoyed to have me in the car, because it meant a long wait for him while I went through immigration at the Benin-Togo. Never mind that only the driver and one passenger were either Beninese or Togolese; all the Africans got to just walk through. I, on the other hand, had to pass through at least four different buildings, fill out papers for both countries, get my passport stamped for each country, and show my passport to innumerable big men in camouflage uniforms. I even eased my way past one of the men by giving him a packet of Ibuprofin; he was loudly grumbling to me about how he didn’t have any “good things” as I reached into my money belt for my passport. The packet fell out at the same time; he was curious as to what it was, and I handed it over to him happily, chatting away. He was happy with his loot and I got through without even a marriage proposal. It was sort of ridiculous, but I was pretty pleased with how fluidly the whole thing went; it may be a stupid game, but I knew how to play it, and I played it well. But then I realized I didn’t actually know what had happened to the taxi, which had my backpack and helmet inside, nor was I sure I would actually recognize the driver or know where to find him. I walked into Togo and found the driver waiting for me (demanding more money for having had to wait, of course, though I didn’t give him anything). Sugar was standing by the car and called me by name as I approached, and he asked me if the officials had given me any problems. I got into the car, and the Ivorian opened up a sachet of spicey goat meat and encouraged me to share (even pretty much forcing me to take the best parts long after I said I was finished). The whole thing had worked so well; I’d made it to Togo and felt protected by the other passengers in my car, who were treating me like we were old friends. I felt very loving toward Africa, and it seemed a very auspicious beginning for my trip.

Togo is a very skinny country, and the drive across its southern end didn’t take long at all. Immediately after crossing into Togo, the road went from decently paved to muddy and washed out. The Ghanaian in front was disgusted by it, and said, “Why the gov’ment do this to its people?” Togo has significantly more industry along the coast than Benin does; the slightly Westward-leaning palm trees that grow along the road in Benin gave way to massive factories, including one with a series of long, corrugated metal-enclosed ramps or chutes of some sort that stretch over the road and between several buildings. I wouldn’t exactly call Togo’s coast pretty.

The Ghanaian guy and Sugar got out in Lomé, so I continued to the Ghana border with the Ivorian. The taxi took us all the way to the border, and when we got out of the car, we were immediately swarmed by vendors, money changers, and women wanting to carry our bags. Everywhere, people were suddenly speaking English. It was like stepping out of the car into a different world. One of the women who approached us was an old woman with a weathered face. She wore fabric tied around her head, and a pagne tied around her body like a halter-top dress, the tissue slung low revealing her old, sun-worn back. The Ivorian negotiated a price with her, and she picked up his small rolling suitcase and balanced it on her head and offered to take my massive backpack.

We passed through what seemed like another endless series of buildings. The first Togolese boarder agent grabbed my arm before I even got near his table and pulled me over to a chair where I filled out my papers. He said gruffly, “I want to marry you!” I said, “I already have a husband,” and he said, “Who, him?” pointing at the Ivorian. And I said, “Yes.” The Ivorian had no reason to be waiting with me, but I was grateful for his presence, and that he didn’t seem to expect anything or mind in any way that I had just used him to defend myself.

We proceeded on to the Ghana side of the border, where the Ivorian was stopped to have his bag searched. I was confused by all the buildings and the ways different people were being routed. Both the Ivorian and I had to fill out immigration papers, though he didn’t seem to need to have his passport stamped. I got to walk past the baggage inspectors with a bag twice the size of his and wasn’t stopped, while he had to get his cleared; meanwhile, the old woman and many others were freely moving across the border without anyone speaking to them at all. The Ivorian and I got separated, and I was stamped and ready to go. The old woman stood by me and brought me a money changer and a SIM card vendor. She didn’t want me to leave, and I didn’t know if I should or not; the Ivorian and I weren’t really traveling together, I didn’t know what was holding him up, and I wanted to get on with my trip. But then, the woman was running back and forth between me and him, telling me he was coming, and I felt like it would be rude to just ditch him when he waited while I did my immigration papers. So I waited and waited, and finally she said something to me which I thought meant she was going to take me to find a van to Keta and that he would maybe meet me there. I walked with her behind the immigration offices to what looked like a car lot, but we walked through this to some sort of warehouse. This didn’t seem right, but it didn’t seem unsafe, so I kept walking with her, and I found myself in some sort of customs office. The Ivorian was sitting inside, so I said hello and then tried to explain to a customs officer that I wasn’t really actually traveling with the Ivorian, but the woman kept interrupting me and telling me to sit. The customs officer told me to sit down too, so I just gave up, sat, and watched the business of duty collection. This took awhile, and I got tired of waiting, so I approached the table where the Ivorian was involved in a negotiation. He spoke very little English, and the customs officer had no French, so they were at an impasse, and I translated. The problem was that the Ghanaian officer was charging twice as much in duties for the cheap watches as the Ivorian had originally paid for them, and he didn’t have enough money to pay the fee and didn’t think it was just. I did all the translating I could, and the customs officer looked at me like I should do something about it, and I said, “Look, I don’t even really know this man. We were just traveling in the same taxi and I thought maybe we could continue in a van together.” He looked at me with surprise and amusement, and called another man over so I could explain again. They seemed kind of touched that I had given up all this time to help this man who I barely knew, so one of them told me it would be OK if I left at this point, that it wasn’t my problem anymore, and he sent another man to walk with me so I could find a van.

Every African country I’ve visited so far has a different system of transportation. In Benin, short distances are by zem and long distances are by tightly crammed bush taxis or large private buses; mini vans are used less frequently. In Burkina Faso, locals used donkeys, bikes, and very very few motos, and paid traffic was all by private taxi. In Ghana, local and long distance traffic are most frequently by “tro tro,” mini vans with three rows of seats for passengers. With the assistance of the customs official, I found a tro tro heading toward Keta, paid the old woman (who, realizing the Ivorian wouldn’t have money to pay her, was now following me) and I set off toward my friend Shira, passing an octagonal, metal stall painted with an American flag design called “The Pentagon Café,” of course.

It’s been a year since I arrived in Benin, so I thought some sort of post was in order. This past month has felt incredible, just in knowing how far I’d come. I have weighed the concept of “two years in Africa” every day in my mind for about a year and a half now, and it has felt heavy. But all of June, knowing I was in Month 12, I’ve felt like I’m running toward a finish line. I have felt the weight of each day here. Imagining two years in the Peace Corps is a scary concept. One year in the Peace Corps seems like a piece of cake. I’ve already done it once! And you know, I liked it! I am ready to do it again.

Here are my goals for year two:

- Do every free-time activity I brought with me at least once. That means I have to complete at least one drawing and play my solitaire peg game, among others. Good thing that harmonica got lost in the mail! I am far less bored than I thought I would be.

- Get into, and get ready for, graduate school.

- Study French. I need to finish Harry Potter, read Matilda, and work my way through my grammar book, at the very least.

- Read all the books family and friends have sent to me.

- Explore more: more bike rides, more rambling walks, and maybe I’ll even start running.

- Spend more time with my Beninese friends and neighbors. Invite people over or out more often. Be more generous.

- Put more effort into learning Anii.

- Learn to greet in Kotokoli, and get better at my greetings in Nagot.

- Visit the Alibori.

- Maintain my journal.

Work-related goals:

- Run an equally awesome girls’ camp as this year’s.

- At the least, get Bassila leaders to fully flesh out a plan for an orphanage so that a future volunteer can raise the funds for construction. At the best, complete the construction of an orphanage.

- Become more involved with girls. Two ideas are doing a monthly program in Djougou and doing a girls’ club.

- Get my oil and charcoal groupements to run their own loan programs.

- Do something worthwhile with the cyber café.

Happy Fourth of July everyone!

My favorite baby girl, M, the first time I've seen her try to help with laundry. This is the one who calls me "Geka." Her dad died a week ago.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

One of the men who lived in my concession died this week. He was a Muslim, an Anii, a businessman who transported goods throughout Benin and neighboring countries. He lived here, in a two-room house adjoining the two-room house where his wife (Maman F-) and three daughters lived, and he owned our concession and one other in Bassila, where his parents live. Every night, he and his wife and three daughters (A, F, and M) would lie out on a hardened patch of dirt in the middle of our concession, to talk, look at the stars, and watch TV while their baby nursed and the two older girls played and inevitably fell asleep. They lay on separate mats, observing rules of propriety while, through their evening ritual, being more intimate than any couple I’ve seen here. I think it is easy for Westerners to write off relationships here, where arranged marriages and polygamy are common, where children are beaten regularly and sent away to live with family or strangers, where people comforted me after the death of my friend by saying, “It’s just a life.” In the face of all this, I always felt warmed by the closeness and tenderness of their family. I felt safe going to sleep knowing they were just outside.

Monday morning was pretty normal; Maman F came by to pick up my part of the electricity payment, and she went into town, wearing a pagne and an American university t-shirt with the definition of “mentor” written on the back. I was mostly hunkered down in my house working. Around 12:30 I heard shouts and a couple of the little girls crying. Several women started shouting, and I tried to ignore it, thinking one of the kids was probably in deep trouble. A few minutes later, I couldn’t concentrate for all the noise and so went outside. Two of the older girls in the concession were standing by my porch, and I asked what happened. “Papa F is dead,” one of them said. I was shocked, and it took me many rounds of questioning to make sure I had heard right. Yes, they meant the owner of our house, the father of the three screaming girls in our yard, the husband of the woman bent over wailing, the older brother of the teenage boy who lives with us, the son of the visiting old woman who is crying. I was panicked and didn’t know what to do. The man’s mother had been visiting for a few days and was running in and out of his house, screaming. His wife was shouting and almost growling in Anii, frantic. His oldest daughter, who’s about 7, was clutching one of the cement pillars on my porch and screaming, “Papa, Papa!” I alternated between holding her and her three-year old sister, F, who couldn’t understand what was going on and was afraid. I wanted to protect the little girls, to give them even a small sense of safety in this horrible, threatening situation. I felt so useless, knowing that for as tight as I could hold them, I couldn’t protect them or offer them any promise that things would be ok. Life doesn’t have the luck we Americans are used to, where things usually turn out fine in the end. Later, the neighbors told me that Maman F was screaming over and over, “My husband, you have left me impoverished.” I tried to shield F’s face while her uncle and a neighbor carried her father’s body, naked except for a cloth tied around his waist, across the yard where they heaved him into the back seat of a car. Days too late, they took him to the hospital. Minutes later, his younger brother came to the house and took his wife and their kids away on a moto. They haven’t been back yet.

He had been sick for years, apparently. Colleagues told me that several years ago he was treated at a hospital in Togo for a long time. A few days ago, he became sick again, and so his mother and a nurse came to the house. The nurse told him he needed to go to the hospital; his mother said no, and he said he wanted to just take some pills and be treated at home. On Sunday, he took a nap, and when he woke up he said he felt much better and that some of the tension in his body was gone. On Monday morning, he ate bouille for breakfast. At around noon, his mother bought a cup of moonshine from my next door neighbors; he drank it and within minutes, he was dead.

People keep asking me if someone can die like this in America. I say that people get sick and die everywhere, but that I have seen it too much here. One of my neighbors said, “Yes, it happens too much. Here, we die like animals.” Everyone seems to realize, at least, that maybe this would have been prevented if he went to the hospital. Even Benin is too advanced for someone to die so senselessly and suddenly. “In this country?” they say, incredulous that he died sick in his home.

Yet, that afternoon, my neighbors were all accusing his mother of sorcery. Her daughter died in childbirth late last year, and now, they said, she had either poisoned her son or used gris-gris against him. “In the South, you would be killed for eating your children like that. I’m afraid of the sorcery in the North,” one of the girls told me. They were all afraid that if he was buried in our concession, his body would rise up. I don’t believe this, but I hate how sinister people tend to turn here when something bad goes wrong. Nothing is an accident or a sickness; every bad event is caused by sorcery, and sorcery always by jealousy or malice. Frankly, it creeps me out. I spent the night with one of my Beninese friends.

Maman F has called me every day since Monday, and I’ve visited her twice. She sounds a little better every day, but still very hopeless. When I visited her Wednesday, she kept telling me over and over what happened, and recalling the events of the days before his death. “You were sitting on the porch, and I said ‘Papa F is greeting you!’ and you looked up and said ‘Good morning!’”

Since it seemed like he was always in our concession, I was surprised to find out he had two other wives. His first wife lives in Bassila and has two sons. His second wife is Maman F, and his third wife lives in Nigeria with a son and daughter. Maman F’s fate is now in the hands of her husband’s family. She is at his parents’ house and will stay there for four months, only leaving with a male escort. While she is mourning their son, the men in his family are deciding who will inherit which possessions and what will be done with his wives. Since she is only a second wife and had only daughters, all four of them are being sent back to her parents. Even while the concession was in chaos on Monday afternoon, my neighbors were whispering about what would inevitably happen: “You know, what awaits her is bad.” The fourteen-year-old neighbor girl came to my house that night and started explaining. Her story began, “The problem of Maman F is the problem of polygamy in Africa.”

During training, one of my language teachers asked me what advice I would give to girls about entering a polygamous marriage. I said I couldn’t give them any advice; in my culture, we don’t have polygamy, but here, it is part of the culture, and so I couldn’t tell a girl not to do it. He seemed almost angry that I wouldn’t denounce polygamy. “In a polygamous marriage, the women always suffer,” he said. I see the point now. Polygamy can provide some social security; often, if a woman is widowed, a brother-in-law will be obliged to marry her, keeping her and her husband’s descendants in the family. In this case, the family is choosing not to keep her children because they’re female; while he was quite well-off while alive--he built two large cement concessions for his family to live in, and he had two trucks and two cars—his family can’t provide for all the wives and children he left behind. Also, polygamy is illegal; if their marriage had been legal, she would have inherited part of his house and possessions. Her father will now have to take care of her, but he’s been sick for several months, and so her future is even more uncertain. I visited her again Friday, once the decision to turn her out had been made. I began the conversation with the usual greetings, including “et tes parents?” (and your parents?) and she barely mumbled, “They are well.” Later, once the rest of the women who had been keeping her company had left, she began confiding to me her situation. “If my father was at least well, I would be at ease,” she said. Who can arrange for her future now, and what can she bargain with? She has three daughters and probably no dowry. A colleague was talking to me about how horrible this situation is for her, and I blamed polygamy for leaving her with nothing, despite how wealthy her husband was. “That’s just it,” he said. “In Africa, when we get a little money, we think first of getting more wives. After that, it’s cars and motos. Only after that do we maybe start thinking about the future. It’s a long-term idea.”

I would like to think that no matter what happens to her, if she is smart and works hard, she can make do; she’ll start a garden, raise some animals, sell fried dough balls at the market, put her daughters through school. She’s certainly not the first widowed woman in Africa; she’ll find a way. But the idea of a woman taking care of herself independently scarcely exists her. I said to another friend that I hoped she would find something to do and would be ok, and he looked at me skeptically and said, “doing WHAT?” So while cursing the system that has brought my friend into this predicament, I’m becoming guilty of the same kind of thought that causes this system in the first place. Won’t anyone marry her, to at least provide her with a position in society and the security of a house and some food? How can a single woman with children survive here?

Yet again, tragedy has touched me, and again, it makes me realize how close I am to people here already. I have thought of Maman F and her daughters all week. I passed Papa F’s family’s concession this week, and A and M called to me from the side of the street, “Jayska!” “Geka!” I’ve never been so happy to see those girls. I handed my bike over to another kid so I could pick M up. I miss them. I wish they could come home.

Despite having told them my names many times, the women of one of my groupements always call me “Yovo.” So I was quite surprised this week at the Bassila marché to hear someone calling my name and turn around to see the president of their group coming towards me, waving. I honestly had no idea she remembered my name. She approached me and took my hand, and we walked together through the market a ways before parting. Then yesterday, I went to her concession for our weekly meeting. The treasurer was sick, so the meeting was cancelled. Whether our meeting falls through our not, I am generally offered to sit on a chair on the opposite side of the concession from where the women are usually busy cooking, washing, etc. before our meetings. I see their offer of a chair, a cup of water, and usually rice or bouille as a sign of honor, though it feels distant and a little cold to me. But yesterday, instead, the president pulled out a foot stool for me and offered a seat next to her by the bowl of beef skin (…delicious…) she was cutting. I sat with her while she worked, until the smoke from her fire made my eyes too watery. She moved my stool to a safe distance, and then actually picked up her stool and came and sat with me. There was work to do, yes, but she gave it up to come sit by me away from the smoke. In low conspiratorial tones, she asked me about monogamous American relationships and explained to me the stories of her husband’s three other wives. I don’t know why the dynamic of our relationship changed so suddenly, but I’m really happy it did.

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The youngest baby in my concession, who is just learning to walk and make noises, is a very cute, grinty little girl who waves earnestly at me whenever sees me. Her first word was “Geka.” Her first French word is “chat.” While the other little kids come to my house about ten times a day and say, “Jessica, je veux saluer ton chat!” (Jessica, I want to greet your cat!), she is now waddling up to my door and saying, “Geka, chat!” It breaks my heart a little bit every time.

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For the past couple weeks, I’ve been getting regular visits from an 9th grade girl and her little sister. They visited me a few times when I first moved in, always asking to do work for me, and then their visits stopped. But they’ve been coming back lately, and so far it has been very pleasant to have their company. They explained that since I live alone, they think I must be very bored and lonely, so they come to keep me company. (Unmarried and alone at 23, I’m viewed as an old maid with only a cat for company. Great.) Last night they stopped by and brought me a bunch of religious pamphlets and a Gideons’ pocket Nouveau Testament avec Psaumes. Stateside, I grew up hiding behind the couch and pretending no one was home when people brought by religious literature. Here, I welcome these girls’ effort to find common ground for us; they are sharing with me what are probably some of the only written documents their family owns. Plus, they said, it will help me practice my French.

Add to wish list: toothbrushes

Photos! Because, at the end of the day, I am really happy I'm here, and my last post doesn't show it.

Kids after Papa's family meeting. This is while they're getting excited about the prospect of a photo being taken, not yet realizing I'm taking the picture. The next one was much more serious!

My awesome host siblings: Ricardo (NBA pants), Emmanuella (classy modele), Genevievre (Spongebob Squarepants plastic purse).

One of my neighbor girls, proudly showing the pages she and I colored.