Summa Summa Summa Time!

I haven’t written any entries in a while and a lot has happened in my life over the last few months so I figured I should probably give my readers what they want: an update on my life! This summer has been kind of crazy. I ended my first year of teaching in Benin, woot woot! Then proceeded to have some of the most boring days of my life in village since school was out and I didn’t have anything to do. I made it my goal to learn more Sahoue (my local language) this summer and started on that but didn’t actually get very far. I spent a lot of time sleeping and reading and sitting with mamas in the market trying to learn local language. I was realllllllyyyyy bored. A lot of my village left for the summer to work in Nigeria or visit relatives in another city, so my concession (the walled complex I live in) was all but empty and many of my friends were not around. By friends, I really mean all the little kids that I hang out with on a pretty regular visit. Sometimes it is easier for me to hang out with little kids in village because their French is not much better than mine and we just play games or sit around coloring and I feel much less awkward then with adults. Usually with adults I greet them in local language or French and then they all start speaking local language really quickly for a long time and I just sit there staring blankly. This is also why I have become obsessed with babies in Benin. Babies are everywhere here and they provide a perfect distraction for me while I am sitting around staring blankly. Well expect for when they pee on me or start crying because they are afraid of my spooky white skin. Most babies in Benin don’t wear any kind of diaper and half the time are sitting on my lap with only a string of beads around their waist so you could see how that would happen.
I also happened to make friends with a new family in my village which has been awesome. I went to meet this family to ask permission to take their daughter to a girl’s camp (which I will talk about in a bit) and they were super nice and welcoming. They live on the other side of my village and it is quite a hike to get to their house. Plus it is about on the edges of the jungle and down this tiny dirt path, so I would never have found them accidentally. The mama works in the market on market day selling medicines and the father must work outside of the village because I have only met him once. Anyway, the mama doesn’t speak much French but is always so happy to see me and so welcoming. I greet her on market day at her stall and she always makes me sit down and eat something (which she buys) and promise to come eat with her family the next day. They don’t ask me for things and generally seem to just really like my company. This development is especially nice because my mama in my concession has been disappearing a lot lately to another village and is generally unhappy and unpredictable and I’m not sure how to deal with her on a day to day basis. There is also this ridiculously adorable little boy who loves in the family complex with this new family and his name is Rodrigi and he is delightful. He always runs up to me and hugs me and then hangs all over me while I’m there. In America that would most likely annoy me but here it’s nice to hang out with Rodrigi while everyone speaks Sahoue around me..
In June I had a break from monotony when I took 5 girls from my village to a weeklong girl’s camp run by PCVs. They were the top girls from all my classes and the camp was to help them make connections with other hard working girls in the south of Benin and also successful Beninese women who had worked really hard to get where they are in the hopes of inspiring them to stay in school and make Benin a better place for themselves and their daughters. There were also hygiene, sex ed, study skills, and malaria prevention sessions, to name a few. It was really cool to be a part of such an awesome event. There are very few girls who graduate from secondary school in Benin and go on to university to become professional women. Most girls drop out to get married, have children, or work. It is also very difficult for girls to keep up in school while they have so much responsibility at home. The best part of the camp, I think, was the small group time the girls had to talk to various successful Beninese women. There was a mayor, a doctor, an entrepreneur, and several other professions. I can tell my girls a thousand times to stay in school and work to become something more but if I strong independent Beninese woman says it, there is such a big difference. This camp inspired me to attempt to do a girl’s camp in my region next year for all the top female students in the surrounding schools. I’m currently talking to my work partner and other people in my village to see if it is possible. If anything comes of this, I’ll let you know…probably by asking for money for it lol.
After the camp, I went directly to Cotonou to welcome the new volunteers who came to Benin this summer!!! It was really cool to be with them their first few days in country and explain life in Benin to them a little bit. It was also weird to have that many new Americans around. I’ve become so used to seeing them exact same people all the time that having new Americans here was surreal. Seven of them are coming to live and work in my region and 2 of them are going to be around an hour away from me!!! New friends! I am going to bombard them with intense energy. They swear in on Sept 15 and move to their villages a few days after that. I also had to say goodbye to the volunteers who were leaving this summer as well. We serve for two years and a new group comes every year so all my friends from the group who came the year before me were leaving to go back to America. That was very difficult, especially with the people from my region. Those were the volunteers I saw the most and they became my support network and my family. We had regular taco nights (not real tacos, but close) and hang outs and it is going to be a little difficult at first to not have them around. But with the new volunteers replacing them and coming to new posts in my region, I should be good. And to think, I have less than a year left here! Crazy! School starts in a couple weeks, along with my reading/discussion club, so bring on the machetes!!!!
Funny story/ridiculous story: When I was buying fried yams in my market a few weeks ago I was handed a coin straight from the red hot coals of the mama’s fire. How did this happen? Well I handed her a bigger coin and needed change. She exchanged the coin with a different woman and in the transfer, dropped one of the coins in to the fire that she was frying yams on. She proceeded to pick up the coin out of the fire with her bare hands and then hand me my coins. Not paying attention, I grabbed the coins and one of them burned a hole into my palm. As I drop the coin and swear, the woman says, “Doucement!”, which means “watch out!” two seconds too late. Beninese women have oddly thick skin on their hands from a lifetime of work. They can grab boiling pots from a fire without oven mitts and apparently pick change out of a pile of hot coals. As I was walking away from this woman and nursing my hand, another woman yells at me, “What are you looking for?!?” I distractedly said I was looking for oranges. She shouted at me, “Those do not exist!” and walked away. I have heard my village name, Lobogo, means “under the orange tree”….It was not my day in the market.