Towards the end of last school year I finally decided on a secondary project to do in my village. Many TEFL (English teacher) volunteers do other projects outside of our daily teaching job such as clubs, building a new school building, etc. I could never think of a project that I really wanted to do. Everything I could think of revolved working with my students on some level and since I did not enjoy teaching much last year, the thought of working with my kids outside of regular school hours seemed like something I did not want to do. My school is currently working on building several new classrooms, so it appeared to me that I wasn’t needed there either. Also, every time I brought an idea up my colleagues, they would instantly agree that it was exactly what the village needed, but didn’t give much input aside from that. No one asked me to help them with any projects or came to me with an idea. I know as a Peace Corps Volunteer I am supposed to find out my communities needs and try to address them on some level, but this idea has always been difficult for me. I never wanted to swoop in and give my village a new set of magic latrines and then leave. I wanted to work with people to help them help themselves. And since no one ever seemed to have any ideas besides asking me for money, I did my job and not much else. I tried to integrate into my community and tutored kids. I helped other professors come up with lesson plans and improve their teaching and I participated in a girls empowerment camp last summer. Mostly I just spent my first year in Benin trying to survive.
Even with all that, I felt like I should be doing something else, especially my second year. I tried to think of things that I’m passionate about and what kinds of interactions make me happy. I wanted to do a project that was interesting to me as well as beneficial to my community. One thing I am passionate about it reading and discussing themes and issues found in books with others. So I decided to start a reading/discussion group. I can count on one hand the amount of Beninese people (outside of a few of the other professors at my school) I’ve seen reading a book for fun. I often read a book at school if I’m not in class or waiting for a meeting to start and I always get comments on it. People want to know what I am reading and usually comment on how I am “improving myself”. If the worth of reading is recognized by people in Benin, then why don’t they read more? For one thing, books are expensive and difficult to find just anywhere. There are book stores in major cities but not in smaller towns and villages. There are not many public libraries and the ones that exist are not exact equivalents of what we consider a library in the States. I decided that I wanted to instill in at least one person the love of reading and the magic that can be found in books.
I thought of doing a reading group in French, which would improve my French and be easier for anyone who wanted to join since they speak French here. But then I remembered that I am a native English speaker and there are many people who want to improve their English, so I decided to make a group for the upper level students at my school that would be in English. I teach the first few years of English (the American equivalent of 6th,7th, and 8th grade-ish) and that’s not much fun for me outside of the very beginner level students. My school goes all the way up to the American equivalent of 12th grade so I figured I would work primarily with the upper level students who have been taking English for at least 4 years. That way we could actually read and speak in English and have good conversations. So fast forward several months, and we had our first meeting last week (November 16). My work partner and I decided to create an English Club at the school in which he would work with the younger kids and I would work with the older kids and then at the end of the meeting we could all come together. We made signs for the club and asked the other English teachers to tell their classes about it. Our meeting time is on Wednesdays at 3 o’clock. We don’t have school on Wednesday afternoons so I figured many kids who weren’t serious about being involved wouldn’t make the trek back to school for the club. I was wrong. Perhaps it was the lure of the white woman. Perhaps it was the lure of doing anything other than going to the market or sitting around their concession on a Wednesday. Perhaps it was the Vodun gods plotting against me. But for our first meeting there had to be like 60 to 70 kids who showed up. And kept showing up. It seemed like every ten minutes a new group of kids would wonder in and start making noise. For the first meeting we decided to have all the kids together to explain the group and get them excited. I had planned to get the kids excited about the club by playing an American song on my ipod with speakers and giving them most of the lyrics with some of them omitted. Then they would have to listen to the lyrics and write in the missing words. Simple, right? Uh, no. I had ONLY made 40 copies of the lyrics so about half of the kids just had to sit there with nothing in front of them. I wrote the lyrics on the board but that didn’t seem to help matters much. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit so it was essentially just a big crowd of kids who couldn’t concentrate but were excited about something new. We finally got them calmed down, did the activity, and explained how the weekly meetings would work when a new group of kids walked in, one of them with a guitar strapped to his back. I will call them the Teenie Boppers.
The Teenie Boppers used to be in an English club with my work partner at his old school. Without telling me about it, my he invited them to come and say hello to our English Club/uncontrollable mob. The Teenie Boppers said hello and then broke out the guitar and proceeded to have a concert for themselves in our already overcrowded classroom of 70 kids that should have only fit 40 at best. From what I could glean over the excited noises the kids were making in reaction to the heartthrob newcomers and their music, the song they played was a mix of random popular/not at all popular American/Reggae songs. They were a hit. My English club was in shambles. There were some shining moments of hope though when some of the upper level kids spoke to me and responded to the original song (Yesterday, by the Beatles. Please see the irony in this song being upstaged by a young group of boys singing to a rabid crowd of Beninese teenagers) with very thoughtful comments IN ENGLISH!!!! Which is quite a change from the 16 months it has taken my students to correctly ask to go to the bathroom in English. So I left the club with hope that the next week, when we split the group in two and I got my decent English speakers, would be better. And oh how it was!!!
This week I got to work for almost 2 hours with the upper level students and it was awesome. Well, it was awesome after we spent the first 45 minutes sitting in silence because of the torrential downpour that decided to commence right at our starting time. Teaching while rain is pouring on a tin roof is impossible. You can’t hear anything. So we just sat there and they copied the material I wanted to cover off the board while another professor took a nap on an empty desk. I gave them the poem, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and they had to summarize it for me and when it stopped raining we discussed the theme of the poem. Its probably impossible for many of you to understand how much this event meant to me. I spend much of my time in village communicating in mediocre French or Sahoue about mundane things. Aside from my work partner, Hyppolite, and a few other teachers, I rarely have real conversations about anything meaningful. So in this meeting, I got to speak about interesting and meaningful ideas in English! AND I was helping kids improve their English! Win, win, win! I’m super excited to continue on and hopefully get to read at least one book with the group. I’m thinking of starting with The Alchemist by Paolo Coello and then the first Harry Potter! I have found a couple organizations that may send me books, but I need to look into it further. So if you have any info on groups that send books to Africa, let me know!
So the final and most entertaining thing about this English Club adventure so far happened at the end of the second meeting. We decided to let the kids suggest names for our group. We could just be the Lobogo English Club, but we were hoping for something more creative and oh my lucky stars did we get it. Here are some of my favorite suggestions for the name of the club: The Best English Club, American English Club, Gracias English Club, Young Boy English Club, Awesome English Club, Vive le club d’Anglais!, Blaise’s English Club (submitted by an enterprising 9th grader named, appropriately, Blaise), School English Club, Good Like English Club, Powerful English Club, Overcoming English Club, Eleven’s English Club, Go!Go! English Club, and my favorite……The Lion King English Club! Tune in next time to we see which one of these I convince everyone to choose!!!
Friday, November 25, 2011
“Maybe the curse came in the form of the disease you have?”
Recently one of my best friends in village, Dorcas, has become very sick. Dorcas is about 30 years old and has two small children. She is a neighbor of mine and lives in a mud hut with the parents of her husband (who died last fall). Many women in my village make money by selling things at the market, sewing, or doing hair. I’m not exactly sure what Dorcas does for money aside from the money I pay her every month to help me with my laundry and bring me water once a week. She has been a very good friend to me over my last year in village. When I have been sick she has brought me food from the market and is generally just really nice and thoughtful. She is very poor but has never asked me for anything except for a mosquito net for her 2 year old daughter who kept getting sick with malaria. She fed my cats when I was gone in America and refused to take money from me when I offered it to her afterwards. She is an honest and hardworking person and she sees me as a person as well, not just a rich white anomaly in her world. Also, she speaks some English, which has probably helped us get closer.
Anyways, recently Dorcas disappeared from her house across the street and when I finally found her at her mother’s house near the market it was a sad shock. She was lying on the ground and could barely get up to greet me. The last time I had seen her she had complained about a pain in her side. When I found her, she showed me these horrible open sores on her side that looked like the skin was being eaten away. It went all down her right side and onto her stomach. She was also very tired and occasionally dizzy. She complained that her heart would suddenly start beating really quickly and she couldn’t breathe. Apparently she went to several doctors in the area and they gave her a bunch of medicine that cost a lot of money but could not explain what was wrong with her. After she explained all this she told me how she believed that someone in the village had cursed her and sent bad spirits to her and that was what was making her so sick. Benin has very strong Vodun traditions and many of the slaves that were taken from here went to the Caribbean and created the voodoo traditions there. Essentially there are many good and bad natural spirits. The bad ones can be sent to others in the form of gris gris or a curse and can make that person sick, die, or have bad luck. It may seem sort of crazy but it makes more sense when you live here and you see the kind of lives that many people live.
I tried to work within this structure when I talked with Dorcas and I asked her maybe if the curse had come in the form of the actual disease or sickness she had and she said yes. When I asked her what disease was, she said it was a bad spirit, so we were back to square one. It was so frustrating to me to not be able to understand the sickness that she had and do nothing to help her. She couldn’t even lift her two year old daughter. As I sat with her next to her mother’s mud hut and watched the other women prepare a meal on the fire, it made more sense to me why so many people here resort to blaming evil spirits for their misfortune. Who/what else can they blame? Many of them wash with and drink water filled with parasites. They eat untreated fruit and vegetables. They go to the bathroom in a field next to their house. They sleep without mosquito nets. They are not vaccinated against any diseases. The cause of Dorcas’ ailment could have been any combination of these factors and perhaps exacerbated by others. She has little money to pay doctors and the ones around can’t even properly diagnose her problem. When you have no explanation, no options, and no education an evil spirit makes as much sense as anything I could have told her about the transmission of parasites. It was just so frustrating and heartbreaking to sit there with her and know that there were not many options. I called the male nurse who works in my concession and he came over to look at her and decided to give her infusions of some liquid that he said would reduce the infection. When I asked what the infection was he couldn’t really explain it. Even if I had the money to pay more/different doctors for her, they would probably all say the same thing. There I was sitting with my best friend who could not get access to decent medical care and I could at any moment call the Peace Corps doctors and tell them of any ailment I had and it would be taken care of. The sad difference is that she is a real citizen of a third world country and I am an American citizen.
Currently, Dorcas is still sick but slightly better. The last time I saw her she was living in a local church and spending her days praying with other women for God to take away her sickness/curse because there is nothing else she can do. Regardless of the state of health care in America, none of us will ever have to experience the kind of powerlessness my friends here do.
Anyways, recently Dorcas disappeared from her house across the street and when I finally found her at her mother’s house near the market it was a sad shock. She was lying on the ground and could barely get up to greet me. The last time I had seen her she had complained about a pain in her side. When I found her, she showed me these horrible open sores on her side that looked like the skin was being eaten away. It went all down her right side and onto her stomach. She was also very tired and occasionally dizzy. She complained that her heart would suddenly start beating really quickly and she couldn’t breathe. Apparently she went to several doctors in the area and they gave her a bunch of medicine that cost a lot of money but could not explain what was wrong with her. After she explained all this she told me how she believed that someone in the village had cursed her and sent bad spirits to her and that was what was making her so sick. Benin has very strong Vodun traditions and many of the slaves that were taken from here went to the Caribbean and created the voodoo traditions there. Essentially there are many good and bad natural spirits. The bad ones can be sent to others in the form of gris gris or a curse and can make that person sick, die, or have bad luck. It may seem sort of crazy but it makes more sense when you live here and you see the kind of lives that many people live.
I tried to work within this structure when I talked with Dorcas and I asked her maybe if the curse had come in the form of the actual disease or sickness she had and she said yes. When I asked her what disease was, she said it was a bad spirit, so we were back to square one. It was so frustrating to me to not be able to understand the sickness that she had and do nothing to help her. She couldn’t even lift her two year old daughter. As I sat with her next to her mother’s mud hut and watched the other women prepare a meal on the fire, it made more sense to me why so many people here resort to blaming evil spirits for their misfortune. Who/what else can they blame? Many of them wash with and drink water filled with parasites. They eat untreated fruit and vegetables. They go to the bathroom in a field next to their house. They sleep without mosquito nets. They are not vaccinated against any diseases. The cause of Dorcas’ ailment could have been any combination of these factors and perhaps exacerbated by others. She has little money to pay doctors and the ones around can’t even properly diagnose her problem. When you have no explanation, no options, and no education an evil spirit makes as much sense as anything I could have told her about the transmission of parasites. It was just so frustrating and heartbreaking to sit there with her and know that there were not many options. I called the male nurse who works in my concession and he came over to look at her and decided to give her infusions of some liquid that he said would reduce the infection. When I asked what the infection was he couldn’t really explain it. Even if I had the money to pay more/different doctors for her, they would probably all say the same thing. There I was sitting with my best friend who could not get access to decent medical care and I could at any moment call the Peace Corps doctors and tell them of any ailment I had and it would be taken care of. The sad difference is that she is a real citizen of a third world country and I am an American citizen.
Currently, Dorcas is still sick but slightly better. The last time I saw her she was living in a local church and spending her days praying with other women for God to take away her sickness/curse because there is nothing else she can do. Regardless of the state of health care in America, none of us will ever have to experience the kind of powerlessness my friends here do.
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