Last year, I spent Christmas in the far north of Benin on the border on Niger and then went into Niger with some friends to do some sightseeing and see the last wild herd of giraffes in West Africa. This year I spent Christmas in a town on the other side of the north called Natitingou and then went on safari with 3 friends. I should probably write a whole blog about the safari but it would actually be kind of a boring recount of animals we saw (baboons, crocodiles, other monkeys, various deer/antelope/water buffalo looking things,ELEPHANTS!,giant velocoraptor bird creatures,warthogs (surprisingly sleek and majestic creatures for their hideous face),lots of exotic birds,hippos, and the barren Burkina Faso border lands). I did get to see an elephant really close up and that was amazing. We also spent one afternoon riding around on the top of the SUV drinking wine from boxes. Probably the classiest safari you’ve ever heard of. Since we are poor volunteers and all, we couldn’t afford to eat at the restaurant at the hotel so we brought in baguettes and a cheese substitute and peanuts and ate that for all meals except the last evening when we splurged on a meal and one beer each. After the safari we stopped at some beautiful waterfalls, which was also amazing. It was a really good experience and I’m glad I got to do it with some really good friends as well.
What I really want to talk about is my New Years Adventure in village. Since I spent several months’ salary on safari, I went back to village to eat rice and beans with my villagers for New Years instead of traveling more to be with volunteers. It was actually a great time and I’m glad I did it. My new closemate, Wes, came to my village for New Years Eve and we hung out in my market at the two story bar (one of the few actual two story buildings in village) and drank and danced with some villagers. Wes went back to his village the next day and I went to the next village over to spend the day with my work partner, Hyppolite, or as I like to affectionately shout at him, “HYPPO!!!”. I took a moto on to get there and on the way, we ran into a group of drunk adolescents. These are not exceedingly common here but it was a holiday even in Benin. A drunk kid stepped in front of my moto and the driver told him to get out of the way. Instead of moving, the kid rapid fire punched the light on the front of the moto for no apparent reason and broke it. This led to an instant drunk fighting mob and me jumping off the moto and running with my helmet still on to a safe distance to call my work partner to come get me and help me pay my driver who was in the process of wrestling the kid to the ground. Hyppo came and got me and all was settled but it was kind of scary for a few minutes. Hyppo’s wife made some delicious food and we spent some time at his house with his two daughters, Modukpe (not sure about spelling) and…wait for it….Ursula! They are adorable little girls and are slowly becoming less terrified by my spooky skin and more enamored with my ipod. After dinner, Hyppo and I went to a local bar and got a beer. I explained to him the concept of a New Year’s Resolution and asked him what his would be. He said that he was going to stop teasing his daughter so much. Then, without even allowing me to answer, he says, “Wait, what is yours? To sleep less?”.Somehow even my work partner who lives in another village knows of my excessive love of sleep. The problem is that, yes, sometimes I do sleep kind of late when I have nothing to do, but even if I get up at 8 or 9 o’clock everyone here thinks there is something wrong with me. The only reason you get up that late is if you are sick. Most people here are up by sunrise doing morning tasks like sweeping. Also, many of them have real lives with children and such, so it is much more difficult for them to sleep in. Whereas I have nothing to do in the morning if I am not working that can’t be done in the afternoon or put off to another day, and since I love sleep, I do that thing.
Anyways, after being teased by my work partner, I went home. The next day I spent with another English teacher. He took me to the village he was born in that is outside of Lobogo and super tiny. The soil there is dark black, which is in contrast to most of Benin where the soil is reddish brown. There are no mud huts because that type of soil doesn’t lend itself to mud hut making and the village isn’t accessible during rainy season because it is prone to floods. It is made up of 2 large families and their extended families. It is a very poor village but people looked healthy for the most part. I found the fattest Beninese baby I have yet to see there! I met the chief of the village in his little hut. In the center of all the huts there is a thatched hut with no walls that is encircled by giant logs on their side and one really big log in the center. This is where everyone meets and discusses and the chief sits in the middle. I also was able to see where they make the villages sodabe, or moonshine. It is made out of wine made from palm trees. They take the palm wine and boil it in a big metal container. There is a tube that siphons the real good liquor off the top and then takes it through two puddles that cool it down while it is still in the tubes. Then the liquor comes out of the tube and flows into a giant glass container and it is magically sodabe! Palm wine itself is actually very good, but for some reason it has always been served to me with various species of flies and ants floating in it. I think it is because they flock to the sugariness of the wine and it is just too difficult to constantly get them out, so they embrace the extra protein. I saw a dead man as well. The story in the village was that he had died of a broken heart after losing his wife and daughters in a tragic accident. He was laid out on a mat in one of the straw huts with a group of men sitting outside mourning and periodically taking shots of sodabe. My friend told me that they do a few things to preserve the body and sometimes it stays in the hut for viewing for several weeks or months. They have to put gauze over the eyes and mouth and stay vigilant because mice have a penchant for corpse eyes and tongue. And since the dead are laid out in a straw hut full of hidey holes and entrances for mice, someone (maybe the group of sodabe men?) is always on guard to shew away pests. I also met the village voodoo man, who was pretty cool, and saw a small childrens fete where they were all dancing like crazy. The joyful abandon with which people dance here is incredible and is one of my Benin happy thoughts. I have two good videos of people dancing that I need to post to fb when I get good service. So that was my holiday season that wasn’t quite one since the weather is either hot or real hot year round. I hope everyone else had a good one and I can’t wait to be in ‘Merica for the next one .
Friday, April 6, 2012
Babies! Inspired by Babies!
Funny things people in village have said to me regarding babies and my lack thereof:
-You look good with that black baby. You should have one before you leave! (women)
-You look good with that black baby. You should let me give you one! (men)
-Madame, you like too much the black babies. You should take one home with you.
So as I’ve stated many times in the past, I LOVE the babies in my village. They are just so cute and diverting (when they aren’t peeing on me for lack of diapers). Also, I would say a good 50% of the women I know in village are pregnant or just had a baby. This was actually perfect timing because I am on a mission to get someone to name their baby after me before I leave. My main tactic for accomplishing this mission is to (semi)jokingly point to the bellies of my pregnant friends and ask how “Petite Dione” is doing. We all giggle and move on to another subject, but I figure if I do this enough the name has to stick with at least one of them, right?!? I had a moment about a month ago when I thought Project Petite Dione was a-go. One of my friends had her baby and her daughter saw me on the way to the market and told me all about it. She literally said, “Petite Dione had arrived!” I asked her several times if that was the real name of the baby and she said yes. It is traditional in my village to gift a new mother with soap because she will have to be washing a lot of things now that her baby has arrived. Wanting to surprise and impress everyone with my integration skills and thoughtfulness, I jumped on this tradition with rabid dedication. So I bought some soap and went to visit the new mother of “Petite Dione” and see my namesake. I walked in and they dumped the tiny infant in my arms. She was everything I could ever want in an African baby namesake; cute, tiny, adorable, and sufficiently plump. I turned to the mother and asked what the baby’s name was. She said, “Dione!”. Just to make sure they weren’t humoring the yovo, I asked again, “But…what is her real name?”. She said, “Oh, its Geraldine”. Wa wa.
-You look good with that black baby. You should have one before you leave! (women)
-You look good with that black baby. You should let me give you one! (men)
-Madame, you like too much the black babies. You should take one home with you.
So as I’ve stated many times in the past, I LOVE the babies in my village. They are just so cute and diverting (when they aren’t peeing on me for lack of diapers). Also, I would say a good 50% of the women I know in village are pregnant or just had a baby. This was actually perfect timing because I am on a mission to get someone to name their baby after me before I leave. My main tactic for accomplishing this mission is to (semi)jokingly point to the bellies of my pregnant friends and ask how “Petite Dione” is doing. We all giggle and move on to another subject, but I figure if I do this enough the name has to stick with at least one of them, right?!? I had a moment about a month ago when I thought Project Petite Dione was a-go. One of my friends had her baby and her daughter saw me on the way to the market and told me all about it. She literally said, “Petite Dione had arrived!” I asked her several times if that was the real name of the baby and she said yes. It is traditional in my village to gift a new mother with soap because she will have to be washing a lot of things now that her baby has arrived. Wanting to surprise and impress everyone with my integration skills and thoughtfulness, I jumped on this tradition with rabid dedication. So I bought some soap and went to visit the new mother of “Petite Dione” and see my namesake. I walked in and they dumped the tiny infant in my arms. She was everything I could ever want in an African baby namesake; cute, tiny, adorable, and sufficiently plump. I turned to the mother and asked what the baby’s name was. She said, “Dione!”. Just to make sure they weren’t humoring the yovo, I asked again, “But…what is her real name?”. She said, “Oh, its Geraldine”. Wa wa.
Working Hard/Hardly Working
If you’ve seen any of my recent Facebook updates, you probably know that the teachers in Benin were on strike since January. At first, this caused little to no problems as the teachers were mostly still teaching and were more of on a metaphorical strike if you will. Then in the middle of February the teachers realized that their methods weren’t working (surprise!) so they decided to actually strike and stop teaching. I would like to preface these stories with the clause that it may not be entirely factual/the whole truth. Anything I know about the strike has come from various professors who don’t always tell me the truth or the whole truth so it has been very difficult to figure out what is actually going on. These are my observations from my village. A lot of the northern villages seem to not be affected much by the strike and many small schools have likewise not been affected either because they hire primarily teachers who are not on a government contract and have therefore not been striking. Anyways, the school system in Benin is much better organized than I would have thought it would be but it still has a lot of problems. The teachers are not paid very well and some of the newer teachers didn’t have a signed contract with the government but more of an ‘understanding’ which involved them teaching full time and getting paid whatever/whenever the government decided it felt like it. This led to anger on the part of the teachers and they decided to strike in the middle of a school year. Also, somewhere in the strike process it became known that the President of Benin, Yayi Boni, decided to give all government workers a 25% raise (no you did not read that wrong, 25%) and after the fact decided that teachers were not included in this raise even though they are government workers. I think this is when the strike got even more serious.
So starting in February most of the teacher’s at my school were not coming to their classes. Since I am not paid, I continued to go to work as did the few non-contracted professors at my school and the administration. This led to problems because the students began to stay at home since none of their professors were coming. I know I wouldn’t walk for an hour to get to school on the mere hope that a professor might show up if I didn’t have to. Even though I told my students I was still coming, many of them did not want to come to school for just my class or took the opportunity to slack off cuz, you know, they’re kids. So even though I was still trying to teach a good portion of my students were not there which makes things difficult if you are trying to make any progress. Also, as anyone who works with kids knows, the lack of any organization or structure led to the kids I did have acting like total fools and making my life hell. Beginning in March, the government still had not responded to the strike, so the teachers got even more desperate. The non contracted professors get paid by the hour, so they were continuing to come to school to make money while the contracted teachers were striking and continuing to get paid their salary. The striking professors began to convince administrations to completely close schools and when, in the case of my school, that didn’t happen, they created even more chaos. On March 5, I went to school and taught a class from 8-10 with about half of my students. The striking professors decided to come to school and have a ‘sit-in’ of sorts. They all came to school but sat in front of the administration building and did nothing. This angered and confused all of their students, some of whom are preparing at the end of this year to take a very difficult exam that will determine if they can continue on to the final years of secondary school or university. The students could do nothing about it though and the professors seemed to think it was all a big joke and incited the students’ anger and turned it against the few professors who were in classrooms teaching (i.e. me and that one other guy). I finished my very unsuccessful attempt at an English class at 10 and went to the teacher building to get a snack. The students started yelling and ripping branches off of trees and parading around the school yard as the professors egged them on and the administration did nothing. My school director told me to wait to start my 10 o’clock class, which I was angry about at the moment but in retrospect very grateful for. In a “if we can’t learn, no one can!” moment, the students mobbed the few remaining teacher’s in their classrooms and ran them out of the rooms and then proceeded to block the entrances to the doors with old desks and tree branches. It was probably one of the saddest moments of my school experience here. The professors had convinced the students to cheer at the demise of their own education and were laughing while doing it. It was awful. Everyone appeared to me to think that this was all just so entertaining. I got up and left the school an walked home and needless to say did not come back the next day. My students told me that any teacher who tried to teach was met with the same reaction all week long. And it was the students who were keeping their classmates from learning. It was extremely frustrating.
The other frustrating thing was the lack of any clear communication from anyone on what I should be doing during this time. I was told by various Peace Corps and school administrators to go to school, stay away from school, try to teach, or go each day and see what happens. No one could give me a clear answer on when the strike would end or what was going on. I was also told by people that the school year would be extended or most likely cancelled. I waited a week for things to calm down and then went back to teach to even less students with less of an attention span. This lasted for 2 weeks until the teachers’ representatives met with the government and the government basically told them to get back to work or they would no longer be paid and probably get fired. So now the teacher’s are back at school and many of them are just beginning to calculate the grades for first semester (which ended in January) and we have no date set for any of our exams for second semester, which should be about ¾ of the way finished. I had expected to be done with school by the end of May, now I have no idea when things will finish. As you can probably tell from my tone in this note, my general attitude towards work has greatly diminished in the last few months, as has my respect for many people at my school. There are about a million things one had to have patience with while living and working in another culture but there is an end to one’s rope and I’ve found it. This is just on top of a lot of other general nonsense at school that I have managed to accept over time, but now just can’t handle.
But wait! The title of this post says I’ve been working hard! Lies! Well, not exactly but outside of school (and the Go! Go! Lobogo English Club which floundered and died as a result of the strike), I’ve been doing a radio project with my work partner that is pretty awesome. We record a message every week on various health and life skills topics and then broadcast them from a popular local radio station. They are sent out in English, French, and Saxwe to maximize comprehension. We use some free air time from my work partners English radio show he does every Sunday and have so far covered Malaria prevention, the importance of hand-washing in reducing disease, women’s awareness/rights, and family planning. It’s a really cool secondary project and I’ve really enjoyed doing it and spreading helpful information around my area. I’ve also submitted a grant proposal to paint a world map mural on one of the classrooms at my school which I am super excited about. So there’s an update on the work stuff going on in my life. For an update on nonsense, see the next post!
So starting in February most of the teacher’s at my school were not coming to their classes. Since I am not paid, I continued to go to work as did the few non-contracted professors at my school and the administration. This led to problems because the students began to stay at home since none of their professors were coming. I know I wouldn’t walk for an hour to get to school on the mere hope that a professor might show up if I didn’t have to. Even though I told my students I was still coming, many of them did not want to come to school for just my class or took the opportunity to slack off cuz, you know, they’re kids. So even though I was still trying to teach a good portion of my students were not there which makes things difficult if you are trying to make any progress. Also, as anyone who works with kids knows, the lack of any organization or structure led to the kids I did have acting like total fools and making my life hell. Beginning in March, the government still had not responded to the strike, so the teachers got even more desperate. The non contracted professors get paid by the hour, so they were continuing to come to school to make money while the contracted teachers were striking and continuing to get paid their salary. The striking professors began to convince administrations to completely close schools and when, in the case of my school, that didn’t happen, they created even more chaos. On March 5, I went to school and taught a class from 8-10 with about half of my students. The striking professors decided to come to school and have a ‘sit-in’ of sorts. They all came to school but sat in front of the administration building and did nothing. This angered and confused all of their students, some of whom are preparing at the end of this year to take a very difficult exam that will determine if they can continue on to the final years of secondary school or university. The students could do nothing about it though and the professors seemed to think it was all a big joke and incited the students’ anger and turned it against the few professors who were in classrooms teaching (i.e. me and that one other guy). I finished my very unsuccessful attempt at an English class at 10 and went to the teacher building to get a snack. The students started yelling and ripping branches off of trees and parading around the school yard as the professors egged them on and the administration did nothing. My school director told me to wait to start my 10 o’clock class, which I was angry about at the moment but in retrospect very grateful for. In a “if we can’t learn, no one can!” moment, the students mobbed the few remaining teacher’s in their classrooms and ran them out of the rooms and then proceeded to block the entrances to the doors with old desks and tree branches. It was probably one of the saddest moments of my school experience here. The professors had convinced the students to cheer at the demise of their own education and were laughing while doing it. It was awful. Everyone appeared to me to think that this was all just so entertaining. I got up and left the school an walked home and needless to say did not come back the next day. My students told me that any teacher who tried to teach was met with the same reaction all week long. And it was the students who were keeping their classmates from learning. It was extremely frustrating.
The other frustrating thing was the lack of any clear communication from anyone on what I should be doing during this time. I was told by various Peace Corps and school administrators to go to school, stay away from school, try to teach, or go each day and see what happens. No one could give me a clear answer on when the strike would end or what was going on. I was also told by people that the school year would be extended or most likely cancelled. I waited a week for things to calm down and then went back to teach to even less students with less of an attention span. This lasted for 2 weeks until the teachers’ representatives met with the government and the government basically told them to get back to work or they would no longer be paid and probably get fired. So now the teacher’s are back at school and many of them are just beginning to calculate the grades for first semester (which ended in January) and we have no date set for any of our exams for second semester, which should be about ¾ of the way finished. I had expected to be done with school by the end of May, now I have no idea when things will finish. As you can probably tell from my tone in this note, my general attitude towards work has greatly diminished in the last few months, as has my respect for many people at my school. There are about a million things one had to have patience with while living and working in another culture but there is an end to one’s rope and I’ve found it. This is just on top of a lot of other general nonsense at school that I have managed to accept over time, but now just can’t handle.
But wait! The title of this post says I’ve been working hard! Lies! Well, not exactly but outside of school (and the Go! Go! Lobogo English Club which floundered and died as a result of the strike), I’ve been doing a radio project with my work partner that is pretty awesome. We record a message every week on various health and life skills topics and then broadcast them from a popular local radio station. They are sent out in English, French, and Saxwe to maximize comprehension. We use some free air time from my work partners English radio show he does every Sunday and have so far covered Malaria prevention, the importance of hand-washing in reducing disease, women’s awareness/rights, and family planning. It’s a really cool secondary project and I’ve really enjoyed doing it and spreading helpful information around my area. I’ve also submitted a grant proposal to paint a world map mural on one of the classrooms at my school which I am super excited about. So there’s an update on the work stuff going on in my life. For an update on nonsense, see the next post!
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