Il y a 2 jours

…which literally means, “There are 2 days!” and is the French equivalent of “Long time no see!” Even if you’re gone for weeks people will still say that it’s just been 2 days, sometimes 3.

Ok. Yes, I realize it has been months since my last post…and yes I realize you are all waiting on the edge of your seats to hear what I’ve been up to and the anticipation is just killing you….and yes, I know that last bit is most likely false….BUT I’m back on my computer after a few months hiatus and am ready to share all the wonderful, bizarre, eye-popping, and sometimes stomach churning things that have happened since the start 2011.

You may remember one of my earlier posts where I shared from my “observation journal,” well I’ll be doing the same here.

Let’s go back to…

November 2010
-It’s the culture to be barefoot, and naked if you are under the age of 7 or happen to be crazy person.

-It’s also the culture to take at least 3 showers a day before and after rolling in the dirt.

-Baby goats are my favorite of all the indigenous African animals.

-Found sweet potatoes today in the market.

-Beninese have no shame. I think that’s why they can spit, pee, go #2, and make any other bodily function in relatively public areas without a care. I’m thinking it’s because they are not ashamed of their normal bodily functions like westerners are. I’m not saying that I will or have done any of those things listed above (at least not the really offensive ones) but there is something to be said in realizing that when you gotta go, you gotta go and when you have no toilet or running water, you don’t really have a choice. Needless to say, I have been working on starting a latrine project to address the issue of squatting since it’s not so sanitary.

-The women are always trying to get me to buy new sandals. Are mine really that disgusting and ugly?

-Advice for any visitor: NEVER eat, carry food, or buy mass amounts of food in front of anyone, especially children if you are very hungry. They will 100% of the time ask you to share. NOT because they’re starving but because their culture is to ALWAYS share what you are eating with the people next to you.

-The leaky Chinese batteries that I must buy if I want to use my fan are going to give me cancer I swear. They always explode!

-It’s great to realize that I do have something in common with the villagers: we are all human. Heck, even the Muslim Mamas in Prekete drink beer!

-I also realized that what we call “common sense” is not universal. But, the gesture of a hand-wave to say hello is, so at least that’s something.

December 2011
-It seems as though all of the “strangers” are flocking together. By strangers I mean people who have come to “work” in Prekete especially at the schools. I found myself showing others around town, ironic. I'm the strangest of all the strangers.

-Note to self: your day can start off frustrating, hot, miserable, and you’ll be ready to leave but I can guarantee that by the end of the day you’ll feel so blessed to be here.

-All the young men who have been working the farms in Nigeria (supposedly their soil is better) are coming back into town on their fancy new motos. This means there is a whole new wave of people that have to get “used to” me being in their village.

-I HAVE A KITTEN.

-The boys are shooting bats out of the mango trees. Very entertaining because the bats fly out for 0.5 seconds and are right back in the tree.

-How funny to be able to guess what an entire country is eating for dinner…PATE (pronounced “pot”… the corn, stiff-porridge dish) with sauce.

-Visiting the school today I felt like a circus freak. You’d think I was made of candy the way the kids were herding around me.

-Woke-up to dense fog. Very eery and amazing. I’ve been wearing long-sleeve shirts too! Wintery weather, well kinda.

-I’m convinced that African food tastes better when eaten with your hand. I have become quite accustomed to the whole no fork thing.

-How are the students expected to understand what’s happening at school when they don’t really understand FRENCH? French is rarely spoken in their homes and NO ONE will EVER say French is their FIRST language.

-Quote from Tao of Pooh, “No matter how useful we may be sometimes it takes us a while to recognize our own value.”

-Fact: Everyone loves gossip, arguments, fights, and other people’s business. Not many interesting things happen everyday here in village so when you hear people yelling its only a matter of seconds before every person in a 23 kilometer radius is listening in.
They yell quite a bit.

-African kids really do love chasing me on my bike. That stereotype is dead-on.

-What is their idea of home? I really don’t think it’s their physical house…it’s gotta be the people that they see everyday, their village, Benin, and most of all Africa.

-Felt like the coolest kid in school today when about 20 students walked me home after class.

-I saw a chicken hunt and devour a cockroach today. Maybe I need a house-chicken?

-Old man asked me why the Anglophone countries are so much more developed than the Francophone countries. Ask France...?

-How can people not know their husband’s name, their child’s name, or even their last name? Perhaps when you don’t have to have a birth certificate or an obligation to register yourself in any official way with the government you can't blame them.

-It’s cold! I’m drinking hot coffee, wearing a hoodie, and long pants!

-For a culture that lives, works, eats, showers, and even sleeps outdoors, they are not very “outdoorsy” in the “we love to be out in nature” sense.

January 2011
-Partied with all the women for New Years’. Even danced and drank Beninoise beer and wore fancy clothes, kind of like American New Years’ right?

-Sounds of the New Year: Young people walking around beating drums and playing trumpets, churchbells allll the time, and lots of loud music as I walk down the road coming from all the places with generators.

-The Fulani (a lighter-skinned people who live “in the bush” and are nomads across West Africa) had a whipping event today. Basically all the young boys beat each other with sticks to show their manhood in hopes to impress a young lady. Romantic? Chivalric? Violent?

-Celebrated New Years’ on January 1st NOT on December 31st. Woke=up and it was 2011.

-Why is it that the dirtiest, most unsanitary, and always naked little twin girls have come to really like me?

-The 20-year old girl in my concession told me today that if there was a medicine she could take to get pregnant she would. Here, if you are 20 and don’t yet have a child you are pretty bizarre. Reproducing is the priority in this society.

-On that baby note…I never knew African babies are born with pretty light skin. Every time I hold one people assume it’s mine.

-All the citizens have been registering for their identity cards this month for the election in March. Think a makeshift DMV set up at the school, but one that functions a little better.

-Some guy had a Tuolomne Meadows shirt on today. I must say it made me a bit nostalgic.

-The other night I had a sort of art hour in my house. I was invaded by the kids and to keep them occupied I told them to draw. What did they draw? The digestive tract (they are currently learning it in school), a square bag, and robots.

-Top 3 questions I have been asked this week:
1. Why do white people make pornography?
2. Why does she (a women in a magazine) have red on her lips?
3. There’s no corruption in America, right?

February
-THIS IS AFRICA is a phrase that is the equivalent of “That’s the way it is.” People never say “Well, it’s Benin…” It’s always “This is AFRICA” as if all of Africa is the same.

-I woke up thinking the following thought: Peace Corps is not for the faint of heart.

-Went into the forest with the foresters and Sarah, the volunteer in the village near me. Pretty interesting to see the “forest…” no mountains or pine trees but much deforestation and brush fires. Unfortunately, people start the fires so the animals will run out and they can poach them and sell the meat. It sounds way more intense than it really is, I promise. They're hunting elephants or gorillas but rather bush-rat (literally a giant rat) and antelope.

-The kids and Mamas LOVE to look at my magazines. It offers a little window into the strange western world of which they have never seen and know very little about. National Geographics, Reno magazine, and the Arabian horse magazine are the favorites. You can just see their eyes growing wide with each turn of the page. While looking at my Peace Corps magazine the Mama swore that the women in the photo was someone who lives in Prekete. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the photo was taken in Ghana.

-Sometimes I just sit back and think, “Wow, my life is weird.”

March and PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN and ELECTION
-The campaign…how it works: starts one week before the election (which was postponed twice due to complications distributing the identity cards); because there is no tv the candidates (there were 3 major guys but 15 total candidates) print posters and give out flyers and have huge parades to get their name out there. People get pretty involved in the process perhaps because the candidates pay them to campaign.
-Voting…each person is given a sheet of paper with all the candidates’ faces and names and they stamp who they want. The votes are then hand counted that night.

-Complications: The current President was declared the winner with 53% of the vote. The runner-up filed appeals saying the votes weren’t counted correctly and demands a secondary election…the appeals were denied and Yayi Boni will give his “state of union” address next week. There have been a few demonstrations and protests in the big cities but nothing to lose sleep over. Benin has a repuation for being incredibly peaceful…lets hope it stays that way for the next year and a half.

-A white guy’s car broke down in Prekete today. Of course people went to help him push it out of the road but what caused a bigger fuss was when he took of his shirt to fix the car…I believe that was the oldest and largest amount of white skin anyone had ever seen. He caused quite the commotion.

-I bought 4 “dead yovo” (dead yovo means dead white person…the Beninese think that all of the white people clothes that come to Benin are because that white person died, hence the name dead yovo) shirts today for 400cfa. 400cfa is less than $1.


WORK…yes I DO work.

I have started an environmental education program at the primary schools in my village. I teach to students who would be 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. So far so good…it gets frustrating but I think the students are genuinely interested. Or, perhaps they just want to hear what their white stranger has to say. Either way, as long as I reach a few kids I’ll be satisfied. I am starting an environmental club at the other school to see the difference between a more formal setting verses the club setting and what works best for the students.

Next week I am helping the health center do a formation/information session/sensibilization for the mothers who bring their children to get vaccinated. I believe we are going to discuss malaria and how to avoid it but the theme may change.

I’ve been making frequent visits to the gardens just outside Prekete to get to know the gardeners and learn how I can help them improve their crops. There is a guy who is trying to gather the gardeners to form an organization and I’ve been helping him promote the idea. This will really help me because I want to do formations for them on topics like natural insecticides, composting, diversifying their crops, etc. but it is nearly impossible to get them all together. Communication to large groups of people is usually by word of mouth so if they were more organized, I would be able to better help them. Hope this happens soon. Things here take a while to get going. No one is really in any hurry to get things finished which is a nice laid-back attitude that I have had to learn to accept and not become frustrated with!

My favorite activity lately has been riding my bike to Biguina, the post of my closest fellow volunteer, to help her with her girl’s club. The girls are in middle/high school and many come from Prekete because there are only primary schools there. It has been so fun to get to know these spunky young girls. They are much more motivated to learn about new things than I thought they would be. I doubted how receptive they’d be because of course I think of the apathy of young people in the states to new ideas and information. But, I haven’t seen much of that here. We have covered topics such as sexual harassment, female and male reproduction, how to avoid getting pregnant and contracting stds, etc. We truly take for granted how much we know just by exposure. Here, they are not exposed to as much information, especially concerning family planning, as we are. Plus its fun to just hang out with the girls and get to know their likes, dislikes, boys, girly stuff, yadda yadda yadda. What I have come to realize is that girls here go through the same problems that girls in the states go through. I'm not lying when i say we are all HUMAN.

To sum up…I have been incredibly happy over the past few months here in Benin. Even though work is slow at times, people are always in my business, and I’ve been taking 3 bucket showers a day because of the heat, life is good. Plus, its mango season AND there has been a lady selling salad in the market every Thursday, what a treat! I have also been blessed by an incredible distraction in the shape of a young gentleman named Christian Allognon. (No, I will not be surprising y'all by bringing him to the wedding.)

Honestly, you have to search for those little victories here and accept the life that has been “given” to you in the form of your village and work opportunities. There are many volunteers who will never stop complaining about blah blah blah because yes, life is challenging here and everything is a process but the truth is, there are always those comforts of home that we will miss but we also have this amazing chance to learn to do without all of those unnecessary distractions and complications. I’m sure enjoying the simple life.

Through this time of war, crisis, and disaster across the world it is a wonderful moment to realize how lucky we are to have a safe place to rest, good health, and the millions of opportunities to make our lives better. That is not the case for the rest of the world, which may seem obvious but it really couldn't be more true than in the year 2011.

Of course, I can’t wait to be back home for a while. May 11-June 2 is going to be a great time to rejuvenate!

See you all soon

Peace and Love