tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27705005423236271842024-03-12T17:01:32.056-07:00The Adventures of EnoidI'll be living in Benin, West Africa for the next two years serving with the Peace Corps. Here are some of my stories.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-89120903094299755222012-04-06T06:47:00.000-07:002012-04-06T06:48:51.665-07:00How I celebrated New Years Day(s)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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /><br /> 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 .Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-20413976837700747342012-04-06T06:46:00.000-07:002012-04-06T06:47:31.682-07:00Babies! Inspired by Babies!Funny things people in village have said to me regarding babies and my lack thereof:<br /><br />-You look good with that black baby. You should have one before you leave! (women)<br />-You look good with that black baby. You should let me give you one! (men)<br />-Madame, you like too much the black babies. You should take one home with you.<br /><br /> 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.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-37655683318728164502012-04-06T06:43:00.000-07:002012-04-06T06:45:49.230-07:00Working Hard/Hardly WorkingIf 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.<br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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!Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-31860983438241031932011-11-25T06:55:00.000-08:002011-11-25T06:56:57.661-08:00Go! Go! English ClubTowards 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!!!<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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!!!Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-25962416416441213482011-11-25T06:53:00.000-08:002011-11-25T06:55:26.030-08:00“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.<br /> <br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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. <br /> 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.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-69113470166945044022011-09-14T05:58:00.000-07:002011-09-14T06:07:02.474-07:00There and back again…and 10 lbs heavier.So I didn’t mention in my summer post that I got to go HOME!!!! For the month of August and a little bit of September I was in Cleveland, Ohio spending time with family and friends. This was all thanks to the donations of a lot of people who gave money to my ticket home and I am eternally grateful and humbled by how many giving people there are. I really needed this trip back and I couldn’t have done it myself, so thank you to all of you! It was really weird to get a on plane home. I must have looked a little special in the plane before it took off in Cotonou. It looked so shiny and new and fancy. I just couldn’t believe I was going home. I had also been stressed for days by the idea that somehow this was all a cruel joke and my ticket wasn’t real and that I would get to the airport and they would just laugh at me and tell me to go back to whatever village I crawled out of. Well, surprise, that didn’t happen and I got on the plane. Did you know they feed you awesome food on planes? They were feeding me like every four hours and it was delicious and a little bit too much. So many tiny little morsels of goodness. By the morning I couldn’t handle it any more but didn’t want to waste my food so I started wrapping it up and putting it in my bag. Benin has made me like an old person who lived through the Depression. Napkins, jelly packets, salt and pepper packets, plastic silverware, and wet wipes all made it into my bag. I just kept thinking, “I could use this in my village!!”. Except I was going to America and looked like a fool lol. I finally realized I had a problem at the airport in Paris. I had wrapped up a baguette with some butter and a plastic knife while still on the plane from Cotonou and placed it in my bag so that it wouldn’t get waster. I mean, butter?!?! I never eat butter in village! So sure enough at the Paris airport I got hungry and decided to pull out my baguette and eat it. The problem was that now I was in fancy society and I also looked sort of like a bum. I had old, baggy, faded linen pants on and a sweat shirt. My hair was slightly disheveled and I was real tired. As I sat huddled over my piece of bread I realized the Americans sitting next to me were addressing me. “So where are you coming from?” they asked, confusion and pity in their eyes. I told them I was coming from West Africa and saw nods of comprehension. “What were you doing there?!?” I told them I am a Peace Corps volunteer and they said, “oohhhhh” and turned away and started chatting in hushes undertones. Looking down I realized that I had crumbs all over my sweatshirt and a few on my face. My first day back in civilization and I looked like a homeless person.<br /><br />Aside from the first episode I think I did pretty well in the first world. I had a minor break down in Target when I realized that the five pairs of underwear I picked out would be the only new ones I would have for another year so I better choose wisely. At times I felt a little disconnected from people but I think that’s probably normal. I’ve spent the last year of my life trying to fit in here and that means a lot to me but I know it’s hard for someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand or appreciate that. It was so nice to see my family and friends and make new memories with them to tide me over for another year. It was also nice to eat American food. I managed to gain close to 10 pounds while I was home, which I feel is no mean feat. I would say almost every woman friend I have in village has commented on how fat and beautiful I got in America, so there’s that. They also do this arm movement and “boom, boom” sound when they say this that makes me picture a jolly fat person and makes me a little uncomfortable. Beninese people don’t see calling someone fat an insult. They just see it as the truth. In their eyes it’s similar to calling a doctor, “Doctor” or a tall person “tall”. Also I’ve taken it in stride since I’m quite certain my rice and bean diet and close proximity to all the parasites and amoebas the world has to offer should slim me down again once more.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-36737079260931382942011-09-14T05:56:00.000-07:002011-09-14T05:57:49.116-07:00Summa Summa Summa Time!<blockquote></blockquote>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. <br />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..<br />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.<br />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!!!!<br />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.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-42644473594029729352011-05-02T12:50:00.000-07:002011-05-02T12:56:42.190-07:00Who wants to send me to America?!?!So I would really love to come home to Cleveland for a few weeks in August/September but I have no money, being a Peace Corps Volunteer and all. This is why I have created this super awesome paypal button on my blog!!!! The money will go into an account that my older sister Mandi manages for me and she will buy the ticket! I need about $3,000 for a ticket and I'm hoping people will be willing to contribute! I realize that it may sound silly to me living in Africa and asking for a donation for myself, but I would really love a break before starting my second year of teaching here. So please donate!!!! :)<br /><br /><br /><form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"><br /><input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"><br /><input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="CNQX6F2NGSX68"><br /><input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/WEBSCR-640-20110401-1/en_US/i/btn/btn_donateCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!"><br /><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/WEBSCR-640-20110401-1/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"><br /></form>Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-26638615938622200912011-04-17T08:49:00.000-07:002011-04-17T08:53:26.563-07:00White trash bush womanMy friend Scott came to visit for the weekend and I think my maman was excited to show off two white people for all her guests. In Lobogo, everyone calls her “yovo” which is the term for a foreigner or white person. Angele is definitely black, but she has an albino daughter and has had three different white women live in her concession over the last six years, so she has gotten the nickname, “Maman Yovo”. A few weeks ago, some white people were visiting my village and saw my albino concession sister and asked to take a picture of her. Angele agreed and then said something along the lines of, “You know…we have a real white person who lives here too…”. She brought them to my house to greet me. I had been taking a nap and was extremely disoriented when all of a sudden there were three white women standing outside my door. I got up and walked outside and I must have looked like a crazy white bush woman to them. I was wearing only a tissue wrap and my hair was disheveled and my normally adequate French was hindered by my sleepy state. I could barely form a coherent sentence and the fresh from Europe Frenchwomen looked horrified to find someone in such a sorry state in a remote African village. “You live here? By yourself?” They asked with a mixture of confusion and pity. It was ridiculous. There have been a lot of random white people in my village lately which is strange and they always seem to catch me at my most unkempt. But I guess I can't fault that since I am in an unkempt state quite often here. The problem is that I only notice it when I occasionally go some place nice in Cotonou and instantly realize that I look like a homeless person and that it isn't necessary to look like a bum all the time here. Honestly, I think Peace Corps Volunteers are like the white trash of the aid workers in Benin. We always have less money and look so much more stressed out and dirty than any other people I've seen here.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-46753371123828635282011-04-17T08:46:00.000-07:002011-04-17T08:48:35.635-07:008 months in (a month later)So depending on when I get to post this I have been in Benin for about 9 months. That is about 1/3 of my total time here, which is crazy to consider. It feels like a lifetime and yet it feels like just yesterday I left home. It is hard to reconcile my two worlds with each other. I knew when I made the decision to come here that my life would change completely. The most interesting part is how many ways I have changed that I didn’t expect. It is both beautiful and terrifying to realize how much the people here, both volunteers and Beninese, have come to be almost my entire world. That doesn’t diminish my relationships with people back home, but it is really difficult to imagine life back at home while I am here in the bush. January was a rough month for me and I even considered maybe coming home, but with the support of other volunteers and a change of perspective, I am becoming incrementally more happy here. I was getting very frustrated with teaching and life in this tiny village but I have been doing a lot of little things to make myself happier. I’ve started trying to sing a song or play a game with my students at the end of every class. Even when I have a bad day and the kids are horrible or don’t understand what I was trying to teach, it makes me feel much better to leave the classroom to a chorus of Beninese children butchering, “We are family! I’ve got all my sisters with me!” or “L is for the way you look at me!”.<br /> A few weeks ago my maman, Angele, had a fete for her father who died in December and it was ridiculously awesome. I had heard from the previous volunteer that my concession papa, Quirin, is one of the wealthiest men in Lobogo, but it is kind of hard to grasp that when we have no running water and sketchy electricity. Although, seeing as how all the houses surrounding our concession are mud huts and we live in a cement house, maybe I should have known. Beninese people love to throw parties, especially when the deceased was really old. Angeles father used to own a buvette (bar) in town and was pretty well known in Lobogo. I never met him because he got sick before I came to Lobogo. Angele told me about the fete two months ago and I expected a reasonable sized party that lasted all day. Little did I know. Every day of the week leading up to the fete there seemed to be more and more women and children congregating in my concession bringing water, huge cauldrons, and food items. I really loved this week a lot. The women were overjoyed and entertained when I offered to do any simple task to help out. They thanked me profusely when I washed like five dishes one afternoon and in my mind they responded like this when I sat with them on mats in the concession pealing garlic, “Look at the yovo pealing garlic! Isn’t she cute!!” It was beautiful to see the network of women who came to offer help. One afternoon a group of about twenty women came into the concession with basins of water on their head to help fill the huge jugs of water that were to be used to prepare, cook, and clean. They called Angele out and sang to her and offered her the water. Then they saw me standing there with a Beninese baby on my hip and proceeded to sing to me and dance around me. It was amazing. It really made me think about all the women I have in my life who have helped me and supported me over time and miss them a lot.<br /> The fete was scheduled to happen on Saturday. By Friday night there were two canopies set up in the concession and four huge speakers. The music was turned on Friday night and did not stop until Monday afternoon. People came to greet Angele, offer condolences, and eat and drink for three days straight. When a new group of people came into the concession, the dj would yell, “Wuezo! Wuezo!” which is welcome in Sahoue and that group would find some empty seats. Angele and her husband would them come to greet them and thank them for coming. Then one of the women (family members, friends, neighbors, etc.) would bring the group beers and the first round of food, which was rice and goat meat. I know for a fact that it was goat meat because I had to listen to the goats being slaughtered and hacked apart every morning before the fete-ing started. There are always goats wondering around my concession but on Friday three special goats had been brought into the concession and tied to a wooden post. Saturday morning I woke up to a mysterious hacking sound and theorized on what it might be but I didn’t realize it was goats bone being hacked apart with hatchets until Sunday morning when I walked out of my house and saw a guy doing it. The second round of food was pate or akassa, both of which are made with corn flower and sort of the consistency of mashed potatoes accompanied by a sauce and fish and eaten with your hands. After this there was a lot of dancing and yelling and funness to be had by all.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-28827292344179222512011-04-17T08:28:00.000-07:002011-04-17T08:30:18.878-07:00That's Actually A Dog That You're Eating...<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDione%21%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDione%21%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDione%21%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> 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margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">I just ate a potentially E.Coli filled half-raw omelet sandwich. My second gas can ran out of gas just as I was about to flip my possibly delicious onion omelet over in the skillet. My options at this point were numbered and pretty obvious. I could walk over to my concession maman’s while wearing my requisite panya house wrap, raw egg filled skillet in hand, or I could flip the omelet over as fast as possible and attempt to use the remaining heat in the pan to partially finish the job. Guess which option I went with?!? I placed the soggy omelet onto a loaf of bread, which managed to soak up/disguise some of the raw egg goop. It was surprisingly delicious. No one told me one of my areas of personal growth in the Peace Corps would involve discovering what new lows I can bring myself to where food is involved. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Here is a list of gross or just plain sad things that I or PCVs I know have eaten:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-Crystallized slugs disguised as pretty pink candy in Niger</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-Little round mystery meatballs suspected to be goat testicles</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-A piece of goat that appeared to contain both teeth and a hairy nostril</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-An entire log sized igname after an ill fated first trip to the marche in village</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-About 10 pieces of gum all at once that exploded from the container and landed on the ground</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;">-Mashed ignames mixed with a potentially 2 year old Mac n Cheese cheese packet left by a previous volunteer</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.75in;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I had a dream recently in which I was hurrying around a grocery store, Super Market Sweep style, and frantically putting everything I wanted to eat in my shopping cart. I stopped short at one of those giant plastic jars of dill pickles that appeared to be illuminated from above by something more than mere supermarket fluorescent lights. As I excitedly reached into the jar to get a pickle, a pair of tongs appeared in my hands and the jar turned into a hot dog dispenser. Next to it were all the ketchup, mustard, and relish you could ever want. As I continued through the store, the hot dog in my hand turned into a peanut butter container that I began attacking with my bare fingers. I’m not exactly sure what point I’m trying to make in telling that story, but seriously, how awesome is the idea of a huge pickle jar/hot dog dispenser?!? Also, think about how much more tolerable our mystery meat food would be here if it came in a delightful hot dog shape and was served on a bun with endless amounts of ketchup and mustard. A hot dog made of real dog meat? It’s at least got to be more visually appealing than my runny, undercooked excuse for an omelet sandwich.</p> Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-20150778272234861702011-01-01T10:28:00.000-08:002011-01-01T10:31:13.069-08:00Wait....those Giraffes Really live here?! Wierd or Day 3 in NigerDay 3: Niamey to Malanville (and Giraffes!)<br />6am – Sam wakes up with eyes swollen shut from mysterious and invisible bugs. Dione: “Well, is it better now?” Bevin: “I don’t know, I didn’t put my glasses on to check.”<br />6:50am -- Man with bus who's taking us to Malanville is, confusingly, 10 minutes early. He's also brought 3 extra men with him, one of whom is wearing a ski mask. The van has bars on some of the windows. Briefly wonder aloud if we're being kidnapped, then get in the car anyway.<br />9:13am -- Arrive at entrance to giraffe park! Get cameras out and practice our action shots while taxi man negotiates with guide. Also buy omelette sandwiches -- you can't be a National Geographic-quality photographer on an empty stomach.<br />10:30am -- After driving around in the bush (like on sand and stuff -- we had to get out once or twice because the bus got stuck) for an hour plus, the taxi man tells us that there's a pretty good chance we won't see giraffes because of the season. The guide, who's riding on top of the van, talking fast in Hausa, and pointing at things with a stick agrees. Try to be tough and not cry, despite crushing disappointment.<br />10:36am -- Bevin, who is not riding on top of the van, speaking in a local language or carrying a stick, spots a giraffe on the horizon. <br />10:42am -- We get out of the van and take pictures of a pregnant giraffe! Trip is ruled an automatic success. Also, giraffes are determined to look/move a lot like dinosaurs, based on our highly qualified opinions.<br />11:37am -- Leave park. Super-professional taxi man announces that he'll leave us here, but we're in good hands with his driver. We depart for Malanville.<br />12:03pm -- Driver stops van on side of road to tell us that he won't take us to Malanville, but to a city in Niger on the border. He also tries to add more people to the van, which we've spent extra money to have all to ourselves . This begins a series of arguments over the next three hours that leaves everyone angry and headachy.<br />2:30pm -- Finally get to the border, pay the *$^&$% driver a reduced fee. Discover that it's actually easier to cross the border without the mandatory WHO Card than with it. Rosa is almost refused entry into Benin, thanks to the visa that the Nigerien embassy filled out incorrectly. Rosa sweet-talks the border guards, and we make it to Matt's house alive.<br />5:30pm -- Decide we're starving, make a massive pile of spicy eggs and breakfast potatoes for dinner. Share life plans (Lissa determines that she should probably have a life plan). Roll out mats on cement floor, and go to bed early, content to be "home" in Benin.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-50965006128899041832011-01-01T10:24:00.000-08:002011-01-01T10:27:47.281-08:00Day 2 in Niger!Day 2: Niamey<br />8am – While eating breakfast in Niamey (Niger) Rosa receives phone call from Peace Corps vice head honcho Lauren: “Whatever you do, don’t go to Niger.” Um…<br />10am -- Go to Musee National, discover that the actual museum is closed. Vendors outside are, however, excited to see us. Buy Nigerien jewelry and gorgeous batiks. Find man to take us to Malanville tomorrow; are surprised and slightly suspicious about how professional he is.<br />10:15am -- Sam, Lissa and Rosa go to bank to see if we've been paid (we haven't), while Dione, Bridget and Bevin wander around the Musee grounds and zoo. The latter three spend 15-20 minutes blocking small children from playing on giant slide because they want to slide themselves.<br />Noon -- Meet at Grand Marché for rice, beans, and lots of talk about our lack of money (thank you, hotel). Calculate how much we need to get back to Benin, realize we're short by about 50 mille ($100). Brainstorm alternative sources of income, most of them legal.<br />1pm – Lissa calls her mother: “So… we may or may not be stranded in Niger. Can you Western Union me $50?” Two hours later, she receives $300. To the same question, another volunteer’s mother responds, “I am going to kill you.”<br />3pm – In order to be bien integré, we try crystallized slug “chewing gum.” Street urchin subsequently receives a cadeau (gift).<br />6:25 pm – Eat dinner/watch sunset at awesome buvette on the water. Bridget: “What is this weird, awesome sauce on my peas?? ...Oh my god, it’s butter!” (Everyone gasps.)<br />7pm – Bevin tells story about how father and brother make fun of her math skills.<br />7:30 pm – Spend 45 minutes trying to figure out dinner bill because 7 and 9 look similar. Determine that this is the fault of “Bevin Math.”Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-16856559989957471982011-01-01T10:21:00.000-08:002011-01-01T10:22:54.030-08:00Adventures in Niger: Day 1The following is a log of important events from our trip to Niamey. Collectively written by Bevin Kloepper, Rosa Lehman, Bridget Kennedy, Dione Folmer, Lissa Glasgo, and Sam Speck.<br />Day 1: Malanville to Niamey<br />7am -- Leave our amazing friend Matt's house. Get zem to border, cross border, get taxi to Niamey. Cram four people into the back row of a poorly designed mini-bus... poorly designed because Rosa, who stands about four feet tall, could not sit up straight in her seat. The rest of us looked like pretzels.<br />9am -- After waiting for an hour in very uncomfortable seat (sans explanation, of course), we begin 6 hour hell ride to Niamey on a very very broken road. Are collectively amazed at how tiny Nigerien villages are. We live in tiny villages here, but at least the PCVs here are guaranteed a cement house...<br />4pm -- Arrive in Niamey! Our spines cry tears of joy. Find a buvette to grab a cold drink and a snack, and to call the Peace Corps Niger Safety & Security Officer, because we don't know how to get to their office (where we're planning to stay).<br />4:13pm -- Are told by S&S Officer that PC Benin wasn't supposed to allow more than 4 people into Niger over break. Including us, there are 11 PCVs in Niger. Are told not to come in or near any official PC Niger buildings.<br />4:47pm -- Finally find a hotel, which is nine times more expensive than staying at Peace Corps Niger would have been. Are angry on behalf of our damaged budgets. <br />4:52pm -- Check in, go to rooms. Discover hot water, decide that all is right with the world.<br />7ish pm -- Eat expensive but delicious meal at hotel (coconut chicken!), drink actually delicious Biere Niger. Toast to a wonderful vacation.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-46358024604048603792011-01-01T10:19:00.000-08:002011-01-01T10:21:18.699-08:00Going North!This is a commentary complied by me and my friends of our trip up to Parakou before Christmas. Travel in Benin is always an adventure!<br /><br />5:47am -- Leave PC Office, get zems to bus place (Etoile Rouge)<br />6:03 -- Arrive at Etoile to mass chaos.<br />6:04-6:25 -- Attempt to make sense of chaos, are told to stand/sit/be in three places at once. Are subsequently ignored by four different bus officials when asking for clarification.<br />6:32 -- Get on bus that might be headed to Parakou. Maybe. Or Nigeria.<br />6:33 -- Get off of bus to put bags underneath (as instructed by angry bus man). Walk against tidal wave of angry Beninese men and Kleenex-selling Beninese women.<br />6:35 -- Back on bus, get settled.<br />6:48 -- Get yelled at to move to extreme back of bus so that it can leave on time.<br />6:49 -- Rumor spreads that something is wrong with bus. All other passengers get off of bus, decide that rumor is stupid, and get back on. Crisis averted.<br />7:03 -- Bus leaves, weirdly on time.<br />7:08 -- Realize that Official Bus Man is wearing a shirt that reads, in English, "Lazy and Proud."<br />7:13 --Someone throws a candy wrapper out of the window. It flies back into our window and hits Dione in the face.<br />7:18 -- Stop to pick up more people.<br />7:19 -- Same man throws another wrapper out window. It hits woman in front of us in the face.<br />7:48 -- Bus stops in the middle of main road for no known reason. No one gets on or off. Six minutes later, we go.<br />7:52 -- Feel strangely cold, thanks to the first moving air I've felt in a month. Use extra jeans as a shawl/mini blanket. Jeans were clearly not invented to be blankets.<br />9:07 -- Michael Jackson songs start playing from a mysterious source in the back of the bus. Mysterious, as the bus has no speakers.<br />9:52 -- Man falls asleep on Bridget. We giggle, take many pictures.<br />9:40 -- Start to get out of jungly south and into the drier Collines -- rolling hills, tall grass/scrub, and considerably worse roads.<br />10:12 -- We watch in horror as bus almost backs over three women and a giant pile of pineapples. The women make it out alive.<br />11:27 -- Pass 2 semis going up a steep hill, one of which is labeled "GAS." Surpisingly, do not die.<br />11:29 -- Road block: cows.<br />12:16 -- Dione gasps "OH. MY. GOD," next to me as I'm dozing. I wake up and, terrified, clutch the seat ahead of me, certain that I am about to meet Jehovah. It's more cows.<br />12:59 -- In the middle of nowhere, there's a bunch of logs on the road creating a kind of stunt driving course for all passing vehicles. Our driver zigzags through at minimum 80mph.<br />1:21 -- Woman in front of Dione literally just reaches up, tilts her hand back, and throws her garbage directly onto Dion. We die giggling (silently).<br />1:30 -- We have a mini dance party in the back of the bus. All other passengers fail to noties our genius on the improvised dance floor.<br />2:05 -- Another woman throws trash on Dione. We're not sure she even tried to find the window.<br />2:08 -- Drive into giant cloud of "ass-smelling" smoke. Wording courtesy of Bridget Kennedy.<br />2:56 -- Arrive at stop in Parakou, successfully avoid getting trampled in mass exodus from bus. Buy wine at nearest supermarche. We made it!Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-52319820594820858732010-12-20T12:43:00.001-08:002010-12-20T12:53:52.131-08:00A few of the ridiculous things that have happened to me so far in Benin.Lots of ridiculous things happen to me all the time here. This is a selection of them:<br /><br />-I accidentally got pee in my eye once.I was at a restaurant that actually had a real toilet but no light in the room. I hovered over the abyss that I couldn't really see and when I started to go my urine hit the brim of the toilet bowl and shot up at the perfect angle and hit me right in the eye ball.<br /><br />-One time while I was riding a Zem in Cotonou the Zem driver reaching up while still in motion and almost caught a pigeon with his bare hands and then continued on driving as if nothing happened.<br /><br />-Once at a buvette in Dogbo (which, by the way has an awesome African mural painted on it that includes Mickey and Minnie in safari gear taking pictures) I had to go to the bathroom so I asked a woman where it was. She pointed to the back area. I went back there, past a group of women doing laundry and cooking, and found the “bathroom” that was actually a 4 foot wall behind which I was apparently expected to pee while making eye contact with the women while they worked. Some thoughts that ran through my head while I did this: “What is a person’s face supposed to look like when they are peeing?” “Should I talk to the women and act like this is normal (which it is for them)?” “ I wonder what they are cooking?” and finally “OMG What is that creature?!?!?!?!”. That last thought was in reaction to the thing I saw laying in a basin on the other side of the wall. It looked like a 3 foot long, hairless, hampster. I stared at it in wonder for a good five seconds and then ran/skipped back to my friends to tell them all about it in excitement. I think it was a bush rat, which apparently taste pretty good.<br /><br />-I have had a lot of ridiculous, scary, and uncomfortable “taxi” rides here. A taxi here is a car that you flag down on the side of the road that is going the direction you want and carrying other people that are going that same direction. It is quite common to be showed into these taxis with 4 other people in the back seat (plus a baby) and 3-4 people in the front seat. Sometimes it’s nice to sit in the front seat because it’s a little roomier and the Beninese will often give it to you because you are white. One time, though. I had a horrific front seat experience. I got separated from my friends and had to sit in the front seat with an enormous Beninese woman. She would not move over at all so I ended up sitting where the gear shifter was. One option in this situation is to sit with one leg on each side of the console and the gear shifter between your legs. As can be expected, I didn’t like this option much. The one I ended up choosing by default was to lift myself up every time the driver had to shift all the way down and hold myself up like that until he shifted back up again. At various times in the trip he would try to push my back down while the gear shifter was still down. It was hellish.<br /><br />-Last weekend I went to a funeral fete near Lalo for a Beninese woman who was reportedly over 100 years old. The Beninese have huge parties for funerals with lots of food, drinking, dancing, and obnoxiously loud music. I went with five other volunteers from my region, one of whom had actually been invited. When we got there we had an opportunity to see the body and of course we jumped on it. The woman was being kept in an air conditioned box that was big enough to fit her and six other people perfectly. We waited in line and then piled into the death chamber. As we stood silently in the glass box surrounded by Beninese people pressed up against the glass to observe the white people observing the dead woman, a song began to play from a tiny toy next to the casket that captured the mood exactly: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”. One of the most unique and beautiful moments of my life so far.<br /><br />As for a real update on my life, I am doing really well. I am feeling more comfortable in my village and my French is getting better. It’s my goal to force a bunch of the female teacher at my school to be my best friends and then get them to start a girls club to encourage girls to stay in school. I am also thinking of working on a Book Club with my students. Beninese people don’t read much and don’t have easy access to books so maybe I can help my students discover the world outside Lobogo through books. The previous volunteer had a bunch of books donated to the school from America and I am going to look at those after Christmas break to see if any of those serve my purposes. For Christmas I am traveling to the north of Benin and then going to Niger to see giraffes in the wild with some fellow PCVs and then spending New Years in Parakou. I miss and love everyone and hope you are all doing well! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-56556435442490176812010-12-20T12:35:00.000-08:002010-12-20T12:40:38.619-08:00Incidents in the Life of a Cat Lady...in AfricaYou would think that by doing something so exciting as moving to Africa and participating in this whole “Peace Corps” thing I pushed off the inevitable future I have as an Old Maid in her house with only her cats to serve as companions. Not so. I am a cat lady. It probably doesn’t matter that these cats aren’t my preferred companions. That doesn’t negate the fact that I talk to them all day long and that we frequently have very strongly worded one sided arguments on a weekly basis. Sometimes I even give them the silent treatment.<br /><br /> I inherited two cats from the previous volunteer and was actually pretty excited about getting pets. I’ve never had pets of my own as an adult and I thought we could be gal pals in my little African house (see what I mean about the inevitability of Old Maid-dom?). They really are adorable cats, especially for this country. Most of the cats here are real sickly and mangy looking. You would think that fact would keep people from killing and eating them. But it doesn’t. My cats are getting fatter by the day. They constantly harass me for food even though I feed them regularly and they supplement that with mice and lizards that they catch and I recently found out that they go to my neighbors house and bed for food as well. I’ve learned to tune out a lot of animal noises here, including the sound of a lizard skull being crushed by a cats jaw under my bed while I’m trying to sleep.<br /><br /> My first night at post my cats scared the shit out of me. I was already a little nervous being in a new place surrounded by strangers and also certain that I was going to die in my sleep because I had electrocuted myself earlier in the day. How’s that for your first day in an African village? I tried to plug something into my converter and accidentally touched the prongs with my middle and index finger and nearly killed myself. I couldn’t get the thing off my hand for about 5 seconds. During which I had time to consider the fact that it was going to be real pitiful to have died on my first day in village from electrocution among the million other things that could kill me in this country. I also made a strangled animal-like noise that I’m certain everyone in my concession could hear. This fact explains what I did immediately after I got the thing off my hand. I went straight to my shelf and pulled out my dictionary to figure out how to say, “I electrocuted myself!!!” in French. I think I was in shock. My fingers were burning and tingling and I was shaking all over. My next reaction was to call two other volunteers to let them know why I would be found dead and being eaten by my cats in a few days. Finally, I sat down and put my hand in cold water and searched my PC health book for what to do if you seriously shock yourself. So you can understand (please understand?) why I was a little unsettled that night as I went to bed. On top of that, I am taking an anti-malaria drug called Larium that gives you crazy dreams. I woke up at like 3 AM from a really weird Larium dream to the sound of animal cries above my bed. In my half sleep state I could only explain these noises as coming from some terrifying bush creature that had found its way into my house. I grabbed my phone and used the screen to illuminate the area above my bed only to find my two cats on top of my mosquito net staring down and me and crying. It was a special first night.<br /><br /> The cats have also caused me a certain amount of embarrassment in my concession. I heard that you could get cat food in a magic store called Erevan in Cotonou, so, on a trip to the city, I stopped in the store to buy some. The sign next to the bags of cat food said “Cat Food’ and there was a cat on the front, so I figured it was a safe bet and grabbed it. This was the first time I had been in anything resembling an American store since coming here and I was just too dazzled by everything to pay much attention to any one thing at a time. It’s amazing how quickly you lose your ability to deal with overwhelming varieties of things that you can find in America. In my village I can literally fit on a post it note all the things I could buy at the market. That’s because the only food I can get in my village is as follows: onions, tomatoes, garlic, peppers, eggs, soy cheese, fish, some obscure type of leafy vegetable used here to make a sauce, yams, bananas, rice, noodles, bread, and oranges. There may be some other random things, but I don’t eat those things. Anyways, this store in Cotonou confused me greatly. I stood in the aisle with air fresheners for at least 20 minutes and there were like 5 options. Anyways, I bought the cat food and air freshener and then escaped from the store as quickly as possible. I lugged the bag of cat food home in a taxi and on a zem and was greeted by my neighbors who had apparently missed me. As I was talking to them about my trip my cats were at my ankles bothering me for food so I grabbed the bag of cat food and poured it into their bowl while my neighbors watched. What came out of the bag at first baffled me. It was little pellets of grey stuff. I took a look at the bag again and realized that the cat on the front was indeed frolicking in a litter box, not poking around at its food in a bowl. I had bought cat litter. I tried to explain to my neighbors what it was but they just could not comprehend that a human being would ever spend money on something for cats to go to the bathroom on. I could see their point. It was an epic fail.<br /><br /> Soon after this little debacle, the cats and I got into a bit of a tiff over some soy cheese. Soy cheese, or ‘soja’ has become one of my favorite foods here. Every time I buy it at the market I have my own little Iron Chef competition to top my previous efforts to come up with new ways to incorporate it into my meals. I am basically a vegetarian in my village. I don’t like eating the fish they sell here very much and since I don’t relish the thought of buying a live goat or chicken on market day, leading it home on a rope, slaughtering it in my front yard, and preparing it, I don’t eat much meat. Soy cheese is a good source of protein and it is delicious, so win-win-win! Anyways, one day I brought home some soy cheese and left it on the table while I went to greet my neighbor. When I came back in the house my cats were ripping my soy cheese apart on the kitchen floor. I decided they needed to spend some time outside to learn a lesson mostly because my only other reaction was to give them to a villager and tell them and eat the cats as payment for my lost soy cheese. (Please keep in mind that I can only get soy cheese once a week and it’s my main/favorite addition to my primarily rice diet)The only problem with my “time out” plan was that the cats had recently eaten a perfectly cat sized hole in my screen doors so that they could come and go as they pleased. I solved this by grabbing a big piece of cardboard and taping it across the hole so they couldn’t get in. This seemed to enrage them. Instead of disappearing into the foliage behind my house like I had hoped. They staked out the 2 inch piece of screen below the cardboard, pressed their faces to it, and cried nonstop for hours on end. Just when I was ready to spray them in the face through the screen with insecticide to teach them another lesson, they eerily quieted down and disappeared. Twenty minutes later, I realized that this was only an attempt on their part to regroup and plan a new strategy to get back into the house. I was sitting on my couch reading when I heard a funny scratching noise from the back door. I looked over and the cats were using their paws as human-like hands to lift the cardboard off the screen and shove their deceptively cute faces underneath it and through the hole in the screen. It was that moment that I realized that these cats have been surviving in a culture that sees them as food and probably fighting off pythons as well as hungry children in their free time and that there was no way I was going to defeat them on their turf. Cats 1- Me 0.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-74696712980001769382010-10-15T03:23:00.000-07:002010-10-15T03:25:00.204-07:00In Benin, Kids Bring Machetes to the First Day of School!I LOVE the first day of school. I love everything about the “back to school” season. Back to school shopping was one of my favorite experiences growing up. It was more than just the excitement of getting to pick out a new backpack, lunchbox, and crayon box. For me, back to school was a time of giddy anticipation. I didn’t love getting up early or having to do homework, but for some reason I loved going back to school in the fall. I loved seeing everybody after what seemed like ages. I loved waiting to see if there were any new kids in our class of kids who had all basically gone to school together our whole lives. I love the feeling in the air the first day of school as well as the smell of the school on the first day. Maybe it was all the new plastic and polyester accoutrements that made the first day of school smell that way or maybe it was just me. I never really told too many people about my love of “back to school” because I’m sure they would hate me or laugh.<br />Obviously, back to school season is a little different in Benin. The kids wear uniforms but they are all these khaki outfits that are made for them by the tailors in the village. There is a tailor across the street from my house who has been “working on” three dresses for me for three weeks but has really just been making little khaki outfits for all the kids who are going back to school. The tailor across the street works in a building made out of mud brick and has a sewing machine but it is powered by a foot pedal. I just got one of my dresses back from her and it was done really well. Anyways, back to the “back to school”. In Benin, the first day of school is official, but most of the students don’t show up and neither do the teachers. Students generally trickle in for the first few weeks of class. Teachers show up only to write their schedules on the board. I think I was the only person teaching the first week of school and I had about twenty of my supposed sixtyish students there. My classrooms are open air cement rooms with a chalk board, desks, and a dirt floor. The “cafeteria” is a thatched roof pavilion where moms come to sell food around lunch time. The kids who do show up for the first week of school come with brooms and machetes. The brooms are to sweep the garbage out of the classrooms and the dirt off the desks. The machetes are to hack away at grass that has grown in the school yard over the summer. I was so confused when I saw the kids walking up with machetes on the first day. At lunch time I stood in the “cafeteria”, ate some rice, and watched a bunch of kids hack through chest high grass. Suddenly there was a lot of yelling and running and pointing. It turns out that the kids found a python! They got a big stick (more like a branch) and lifted the python out of the grass with it. The python was at least 4 feet long and HUGE! One of the older kids carried the stick and the snake over to the jungle and through them both into it. They also found a hedgehog in the fifteen minutes that I was standing there. I almost didn’t want to leave for fear that I would miss an African bigfoot emerging out of the grass.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-72754840936979851372010-10-15T01:40:00.000-07:002010-10-15T03:22:53.026-07:00Life in LobogoIts been a really long time (like a month or two) since I’ve updated my blog and I’m sure my loyal readers are dying for more stories on my life here! I’m currently in my village, Lobogo and have been here for 3 weeks. Village life takes some getting used to. It is really slow moving and laid back which was nice for like three days and then got really boring. A typical day for me (before school started for me last week) involved sleeping until around 10. Then I would get up and make myself some coffee in my French press and eat some oatmeal and feed my cats. Then I would sit around and read (I went through like 5 books in my first two weeks) and stare at my walls. Then I would walk around my village and to the market. I attempt to do yoga in the afternoons and then at night I make myself dinner and read for hours or socialize with my neighbors or walk around. Lobogo is a decent sized village but still pretty small compared to other villages and towns here. It is very green and lush and to get here you have to drive on a jungle-y red dirt road for about twenty minutes. Most of the houses are made of mud and have thatched roofs. My house is cement and in a walled concession with other houses but all the houses around me are mud houses.<br /><br />Some things I like about my house and village:<br />-Everyone is ridiculously excited when I greet them in my terrible Sahoué.<br /> Mi fon! = Good morning<br />Mi dahoué!= Good afternoon/evening<br />Na de mi le do?= How are you?<br />Ko le nyuedé= I’m fine<br />Ézahndé!= Goodbye<br />I have no idea how to spell any of those things really, but that is how they sound and look in my mind.<br />-It is really beautiful. I have visited some other volunteers in my region and some of them are in bigger towns and they are surrounded by dirt and cement. They generally have better access to the goodness that is cheese and internet but I think I’d trade that for what I have here. Plus, we have a big market day every five days and I can find almost anything there (except cheese and internet, lol).<br />-My house was basically fully furnished by the volunteer before me (Thanks Angelina!) and there was also some food left behind that helped me survive my first few days when I couldn’t figure out where to buy things or how to cook anything decent with Beninese ingredients. I have a couch and a bed and shelves and while that may not seem like a lot, it really makes a big difference. Volunteers who are opening a new post have to furnish their own house and that takes a lot of time and money. When they first get to their post all they usually have is their PC issued trunk, a mattress, some buckets, and a portable stove. That means that they sleep on a mattress on the floor and that basically everything in their house is on the floor and their house is really bare. Angelina left me lots of cool stuff that I didn’t even know I would want. For example there was a bunch of sticky putty to put things up on my walls and tons of cool books and games to keep me entertained. She also left me Febreeze and candles so my house smelled a lot less like dirt and cats pretty quickly.<br />-I have seen more stars here then I have ever seen in my life, even out in the country in the States. I went to Catholic Mass with my concession Maman, Angele, just to see what it was like one night and when we walked out of the church I looked up and was made speechless by the night sky. It seriously felt like the stars were falling down all around me. There were so many stars- it was overwhelmingly beautiful. It is moments like that in which I am forced to stand still and realize what an amazing experience I am having here. It is so easy to lose perspective in the struggle that I have every day here but then there are always those little moments that it occurs to me that I am really living in Africa. Crazy.<br />-A million other little things and experiences: the market mamas feeding me when I come and sit with them even though they don’t speak French and I can’t really speak Sahoué so we just sit in silence while I eat and smile at them; the time my laundry lines broke twice in one day and my laundry fell into the dirt and my neighbors helped me rewash my clothes twice by hand and rehang them; my first day in the market when I was totally lost and my neighbor, Dorcas, appeared out of nowhere and basically led me around by the hand and helped me find everything I needed; the fact that there are other volunteers about an hour or two away that I am growing to love and that are there for me if I really need it; all the people who have come to my house to welcome me to Lobogo; etc etc etc.<br />-The mail and packages that everyone has been sending me from home. Every little thing in those packages is appreciated, whether it is tampons or candy!<br />Some things that are challenging:<br />-The language barrier. I was spoiled during stage by the language facilitators who spoke very clear and slow French for me. It seems like the people in my village all speak so fast and don’t open their mouths when they talk. I guess that’s how people speak their native language. Haha Its just really hard for me to understand people sometimes and the most simple activity can become so frustrating when I can’t communicate right. Part of the problem is that I have a strong accent as well, so people don’t understand me. One day I was walking to the market and started talking with a girl who was along them way. I said something to her in French and she turned to me and said, “I don’t speak English!”. I was definitely speaking French to her but either my French was so terrible that it was unintelligible or my American accent was so strong that the girl thought I was speaking English. It was a sad day. Luckily my French is getting better and even more luckily, I don’t have to use it much in the classroom because I’m teaching English!!! I am hoping to get a French tutor though soon to help me a little bit more.<br />-The abundance of free time. I am an over-thinker already and given this much free time my mind has tons of time to evaluate every issue under the sun. This is a terrible idea when one of your most recent ideas was to move to an obscure African village away from all of your friends and family. With school starting this past week things have gotten a little better and I imagine I will only be getting busier as time goes on so maybe I should appreciate this alone time more, but it has been really rough.<br />-I am always worried that I am doing/not doing something here that I may or may not be supposed to do. The smallest interactions can become stressful when the language/culture barrier takes away all of the small indicators about how you are supposed to act. I am always worried that people think I am either too forward or too shy on various occasions.<br />All in all I am beginning to love my village and get used to life here.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-21068332666057339612010-09-01T15:03:00.000-07:002010-09-01T15:05:57.457-07:00Lesson 1 from Benin: The World is Your Trash Can and ToiletRecently I peed in a near stranger’s yard in the middle of the night and I didn’t have the excuse of being drunk or five years old.<br />I was staying with a different host family while visiting my village. I already have a house in my village that is mostly furnished but as this was my first time in village I stayed with a host family who could introduce me to a lot of people in the village and give me tips on living there and show me around and such. This family had electricity but no running water and the nearest latrine was next to some jungle-y looking trees and across the yard where there were no lights. I had to go to the bathroom after dark and this was my only option. I took my book light with me and wandered out to the latrine. I opened the door and was greeted by a moving wall of giant cockroaches and other bugs. With thoughts of touching these bugs with my hands or having them jump on me as I tried to balance and pee into a hole while holding my book light in my teeth I quickly decided that the latrine was not a viable option. This left me with either holding it until day light (about 10 hours) or peeing in the yard. Peeing in the yard obviously won. I won’t describe the scene that ensued but I’m sure you can imagine something just as comical and sad as the real thing without my help. Oddly enough, my biggest problem came when I realized that I had nowhere to dispose of my toilet paper if I didn’t want the family to know that I was using their yard as a toilet. Most Beninese people don’t use toilet paper. I haven’t asked exactly what they do as an alternative but I think it has something to do with their aversion to using their left hand for anything related to shaking hands and eating. Luckily we can find toilet paper here but there was no way that I could blame the toilet paper on one of the kids in the family or something because I was probably the only person within a 50 mile radius or more using toilet paper. The option of disposal that I chose was running back to the latrine, opening the door really fast, and throwing the toilet paper in the direction of the hole in the ground, squealing, and running back to the house.<br /><br />In my last post I mentioned a moment when I saw a current volunteer hiss at a Fan Milk guy to get his attention. (Well actually I didn’t mention the Fan Milk which is strange because Fan Milk is a delicious Beninese treat of joy and joyness. There are different flavors but I have become a loyal fan of Fan Milk Vanille. They are about the size of a hot pocket but utilize the concept of a GoGurt. They are sold by guys who walk around with little freezers on wheels like old school ice cream men, complete with a bell to ring and attract children or Americans from blocks away. The vanilla one tastes like a vanilla pudding pop. SO GOOD.) In the previous post I talked about how I thought I could never hiss at a person and then I went ahead and hissed at students without even thinking about it. I had a similar thought around the time of the “I will never hiss” that was similar but regarding littering. That same day I saw a volunteer buy something at a street vendor, take off the wrapper, and drop the wrapper to the ground without a thought. I saw volunteers and Beninese doing this everywhere for the first couple weeks. I mentioned my surprise at all this littering to a current volunteer and they recalled feeling the same way when they first got to Benin. At first I tried to keep all of my garbage and find a trash can to put it in. The problem is that there are no trash cans anywhere. Seriously, you could walk around a major city all day and not find a trash can and there is likely no way you would find one in a village unless a current volunteer or NGO has placed it there. Everyone just throws their trash in the street or in piles behind their house or someplace else. Most of the time there trash piles are picked through for a time and then burned. I guess it wouldn’t be that bad if plastic bags weren’t such a hit here. Little black plastic bags are used with every purchase here and are all over the place littering streets and such. Its such a weird concept to get used to.<br /><br />Interesting Story: We went to a local healer last week and I got my fortune read by a medicine man! Another stagier, Wendy, went before me and he used what looked like a Jumanji board to tell her that she was born under the sign of a very grand tree and that people are going to be jealous of her in her life because of it. It was this really long and intricate fortune with lots of cool metaphors having to do with the tree. I was not having a good day and had in fact just organized a strike amongst the stagiers. I had gotten at least two people to agree to strike to the soundtrack of Newsies and then had to spend several minutes explaining Newsies to a few poor souls who had never seen it. So instead of continuing to sulk in the back I decided to play the African Jumanji game and get my fortune read. To my surprise, once I sat down the guy put the Jumanji board away and brought out a few strings with seashells tied to them. He asked me to use my money and the marble he gave me and rub it to my fore head and then put it on the ground. I accidentally dropped the marble while doing this and blurted out in front of everyone, “Oh no, now I’ll have gris gris!” which is a sensitive topic for Beninese since they are the home of the original Vodun or Voodoo and are constantly having to discuss voodoo curses with people (i.e. Americans). I am choosing to believe that the combination of singing Newsies songs under my breath for his first fortune telling, the likening of his fortune telling accoutrements to a Robin Williams movie, and the dropping of the sacred marble explain my subsequent “fortune”. The man rubbed the strings with shells over my marble and money and then basically said that I am in good health but that my biggest troubles in life will come from not being able to keep my mouth shut. He said that I will have trouble with language and how to say things and that this can be helped if I am generous to churches and poor people. No grand tree metaphors for me! Shut your mouth and give us money! I guess I won’t be going there to have them cure my malaria if I ever get it.*<br />*On a serious note, that health center had a lot of cool plants that are natural remedies to many ailments and they help a lot of people and don’t accept much money (or any, I can’t remember with all that ‘French” they were speaking).Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-73167501477144747162010-09-01T14:58:00.000-07:002010-09-01T15:01:31.034-07:00Good Morning, Madame Dione! OR That Time I Hissed at My Students and Threw a Rock at the Feet of Some Kids Cowering in a Latrine. (8-28-10)I may have hissed at a student this week and/or whipped around and made a noise that sounds like “Ehh!” in response to students talking behind me as I wrote on the board. Also, a few weeks ago I chased after some kids, followed them into their house and back to their latrines, and threw a rock at their feet while yelling at them in broken French. In both scenarios I instantly realized that while this response would have been out of character for me, socially unacceptable, and generally unheard of in the United States it came almost naturally to me in a classroom here. You see, in Benin, it is common for people to hiss at people to get their attention. <br /><br />The first time I heard a Beninoise do this I was perplexed. The first time I saw an American do it I was in awe. I remember thinking something like, “Wow , I don’t think I would ever feel comfortable hissing at another human being.” Some other common ways to get someone’s attention here include: Making smooching noises with your lips as if you are calling a dog, snapping your fingers, or yelling out the most obvious physical characteristic or perhaps the profession of the person such as “Fat! Short! White! Foreigner! Blond! Bar Lady! Carpenter! Teacher!”. All of these things appear to be rude to an American, but are completely acceptable here and unquestioned. When the Beninese Peace Corps trainers first started working with Volunteers they could not comprehend why the volunteers would get so upset by all the Beninese people screaming “Yovo” at them all the time. It is just so common here to call someone by what they look like or what they do that they couldn’t understand why having “White/Foreigner” shouted at you would make someone upset. It took them a while to understand that in our culture it is usually seen as an insult to refer to someone in that way. That we don’t like to be loudly pointed out as the foreigner by every person we see on the street every day even if we walk down the same street past the same people every day came as a surprise to them I guess.<br /><br />A few weeks ago I was hanging out at the TEFL house with some other stagiers (those of us who have not yet sworn in) and some of the local kids began to mildly harass us from outside the walls of our courtyard. I’ve gotten used to the fact that we are a constant source of wonder and amusement for local kids, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying sometimes. The kids kept coming and opening the metal door to our courtyard a little bit and then running away. I got so annoyed because we have very little privacy here and those kids knew that they were not allowed to come into that gate unasked. Children here have very particular cultural restrictions on how they can interact with adults. Teachers are often bowed to by students and in most cases a child is not allowed to say that an adult has made a mistake or lied about something. That being said, children are children, and there are troublemakers and punks everywhere and in Benin it is super fun for the punk kids to harass the foreigners who don’t speak English very well. Eventually the kids got bored with opening the gate and decided to start throwing things over our wall. A rock came flying over the wall and I had had enough. I picked up the rock and along with another girl went out into the street. Some little Beninese girls who were sitting in the street watching this entire exchange told me where the kids went and led me into the courtyard of their concession. I couldn’t find the kids anywhere and the little girl pointed to one of the doors of the houses. I asked if their parents were around and she said no. If I didn’t do anything the kids were just going to keep bothering us so I walked straight into their house with the other stagier and the little tattle-tale Beninese girl and found the kids in the back of the house hiding in the latrines. They looked terrified when they realized that I had followed them back there. I took the rock that they threw over our wall and threw to the ground at their feet and it bounced back up a little bit as I yelled “Ce n’est pas bon!!!!”which basically means, “It is not good!!!!!”. And then attempted to say something along the lines of “Your parents will hear about this and you better not come back to our house again!” in broken French. As I walked away I thought of how much my power had probably diminished the moment I opened my mouth and sounded like a 2nd grader but I was still oddly proud of myself for at least trying to get my point across. I know that American Dione would never chase children into their house or throw rocks at them. I know that American Dione wouldn’t gesticulate wildly and argue prices with a vendor of any sorts. American Dione definitely wouldn’t hiss at students or make unintelligible noises like the one I made at my group of kids the other day. Benin has already changed me. I am giving you fair warning to forgive my breaches of American cultural norms in two years when I return and hiss at a waiter at a bar to get their attention. There is a phrase that volunteers in West Africa when there isn’t much you can say or do about a situation: WAWA- West Africa Wins Again. So WAWA America, I’m becoming bien integre.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-89650449743683654852010-09-01T14:55:00.000-07:002010-09-01T14:58:07.560-07:00So, I’ve been in Africa for over a month? (8-22-10)It’s hard for me to comprehend that I have been here for that long already and at the same time I feel like I have been here forever. Time is flying and going ridiculously slow at the same time and I don’t like it! I have recently had a few rough days/series of days and a lot of moments where I try to figure out how the hell I got myself here. That happens to me a lot. I generally work really diligently to get myself where I want to go but then once I am there I can’t even remember all that and it just seems like I magically got myself to Africa and it is hard to see all the little moments that came together to make this happen. I got to talk to my mom, Bonnie, and Mandi (sisters), last weekend and that made me feel a lot better about being here. It is really easy to lose sight of why I came to Benin in the drama/drudgery of daily life here. It was extremely helpful to take a step back for a second and see what I am doing through the eyes of the people who know me best. Also, Jeremy (love interest/creepy stalker) asked me to describe what I am hoping to gain out of this experience and the process of thinking about that again and writing it out and trying to explain it to someone else really helped me refocus myself. For those of you who are intrigued by what I am hoping to gain out of this, these are some things I came up with:<br /><br />1) I am a very curious person and it is hard for me to accept other people’s descriptions of things as true. I have a strong desire to figure things out myself. I wanted to join the Peace Corps because I want to experience what life is like for the majority of the world outside of America. I wanted to live in a developing country and figure out what drives the people there. I want to know about their daily lives, their quirks, their hopes, their opinions, their culture, their habits, and basically everything about them there is to know. I realize that as an American who knows they can go home whenever they want and is for sure going home after two years, my experience isn’t going to be the same as the people who actually live their entire lives here, but I want to get as close to what they have as possible.<br />2) I love languages and learning languages and I know the best way to do that is to get immersed in the culture and language. Hopefully I will become somewhat fluent in (West African) French and also become somewhat proficient in Sahoué, which is the language spoken in my village. By the way, I haven’t yet addressed in my blog which village I will be in. I will be living and teaching at a middle school/high school in the village of Lobogo. It is in the south western region of Mono/ the Mono-Couffo in Benin. If you are intrigued you can look at my facebook album “A Little of This and a Lot of Lobogo” or you can Google “Lobogo, Benin” and see a map and some pictures.<br />3) Whenever I told people that I was thinking of joining/actually joining the Peace Corps, a good portion of them responded with something along the lines of, “Oh I thought of doing that but I got married/got a teaching job/had kids/did something else instead. But that’s awesome that you are doing it!” Every time I think about wanting to come home I remind myself of my gut reaction to these responses to my decision: thinly veined horror. I don’t want to ever have to say something like that to someone twenty years from now. Even if this experience is one of the most difficult things I will go through in my life, deep down, I still want it. Relatively speaking, two years is not that big of a chunk of my life. Before I found out in late May that I was coming here I was also looking into a teaching job in the school corporation that I student-taught in. I interviewed for the job, it’s a good school corp, and it would have been perfect for me, but every time I thought about actually taking it I had a slight panic attack. I just couldn’t imagine doing that next. It didn’t feel right to me. This experience is what I wanted and begged the universe for over the last year. I re-read some of journal entries from the last six months and came across what I wrote in my excitement during my flight from New York to Paris on my way to Benin:<br /> “ I am currently on my plane to Paris that will connect me to my flight to Benin. I am feeling so many emotions. When the plane began to take off I started to cry a little but and had a moment of panic. I can’t believe I have actually done this. I have made my dream come true and joined the Peace Corps. Its going to be awful and amazing. I’m going to love it and hate it. I’m going to desperately want to come home. I’m never going to want to leave. I’m going to feel isolated. I going to feel like a part of something. I can’t wrap my mind around it yet.”<br />I don’t even remember writing this but when I found it I was struck by how much it already has come to be true. I’ve already experienced all of these emotions and many more since coming here and I know it is going to get better/worse. I just need to remember that this is what I want and if I can’t remember that then I am eternally grateful for the expensive phone calls, the packages, the letters, the hidden cards in my luggage, and the emails/facebook messages that have come to mean more to me than you can probably realize.<br /><br />Funny/awkward story: I created havoc at my host family’s house the other day with Silly Bands. I have no idea why, but the Silly Band obsession has been brought to Benin by current volunteers and now I have spread it to my family. A few weeks ago I got a bright pink T-Rex silly band from my roommate from the first week of training. I wore it all the time and the kids in my family were always asking me about it and wanting to see it. I decided it would be a fun game to have my sister send me a bunch of them from the States so that I could give them to the urchin children in/around my house. I knew it was going to be a delicate situation just because there are so many kids around here and I was going to have to give one to any kid who was near, so I was waiting for a time when just my favorite kids who actually live in the house. My opportune moment came one day after school. I walked up to the house and my urchins had trained all the urchins in our neighborhood to sing the Yovo song to me but instead of “Yovo” they said “Dione!” So it went something like this:<br /> “Dione! Dione! Bon soir!”<br /> “ça va, bien? Merci!”<br />I was so excited that instead of screaming “foreigner” at me that they remembered my name that I decided this was to be Silly Band Distribution Day. Little did I know that it was going to cause so many problems. Once I handed out a silly band to all the little kids, the older teen sisters wanted them. I had planned on that so I gave one of the sisters a pile of like 15-20 Silly Bands to disperse to the other sisters. I went out back to sit with the women while they were cooking and I got mobbed by like 10 people wanting more Silly Bands. The kids wanted new ones. Some of them were chewing on them like pieces of gum while other hitting each other with them. The sisters all claimed that I didn’t give them any Silly Bands when I personally helped the one sister hand them out so I knew that wasn’t true. In this confusion, the little kids starting seriously injuring each other in an attempt to supply their newly acquired Silly Band addiction. The parents who were sitting around either looked at me like it was my fault or started beating their kids to get them to stop complaining/fighting OR chastising me for not giving them a Silly Band. The sisters kept harassing me for more Silly Bands and when I said I had already given them to them they held up their Band-less wrists and said, “Well then where are they?”. Then they started grabbing at the blue duck bracelet what I was wearing on my wrist that has sentimental value and saying I should give them that one. They tried to physically take it off me. This and the mob of kids pawing at me and demanding more broke me. I shouted in broken French something like this, “NO! This is a little gift from someone in the United States. Someone in the United States sent it to me and it is for me and you CANNOT have it. Stop you! Maybe it was not a good idea for me to give the Silly Band!” After this I could hear the sister mocking my over emotional reaction in the alley behind the house from my bedroom window. What could have been a sweet little moment with my host family turned into a shit storm in which I was alternately made to feel guilty, embarrassed, or super bitter and angry for having to deal with this unintended scenario. It was AWFUL.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-39810066957119663852010-09-01T14:49:00.000-07:002010-09-01T14:52:41.952-07:00Africa: Where T-Shirts Go To Die (8-14-10)Have you ever wondered what happened to that obnoxious Mickey Mouse t-shirt that you bought when you were twelve at Disney Land and then never saw again? How about that festive “Curves” t-shirt you worked out so hard for last fall, ladies? Well don’t fret; it’s probably on the back of some African. More particularly it’s probably being worn by someone in my host family.<br /><br />I have been noticing for weeks that people often wear the most random clothes here and I was compelled to write this entry because of a very special t-shirt I saw some ten year old kid sporting this evening while on a walk with my host sister. The shirt said something like, “Mabel’s Whore House: Las Vegas”. All I know for sure is that the shirt said “whore” really big on the front and a kid was wearing it. I laughed out loud and then tried for twenty minutes to explain to my sister why and then gave up and decided to share it all with you! Last weekend one of my host brothers came into the room wearing a Halloween “Curves” shirt-yes, like from the women’s workout club! My best guess is that it was used as an incentive for women to not eat so much Halloween candy?! Moving past the irony of a weight loss t-shirt celebrating a candy-coated holiday, we must examine how in the world a Beninese teenage got a hold of this t-shirt. I’m thinking some good intentioned women’s group got together to help the “Africa children” and decided to clothe them with donated t-shirts and such. Or maybe Africa is where the Salvation Army sends its extra drop-offs? Or maybe Curves has gone global and I just didn’t know.<br />In addition to t-shirts, one can find a smorgasbord of inappropriate/misinterpreted clothing here in Benin. My sister wears a bathing suit tank top that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen in the States for a shirt several times a week. It is common to see women walking around with shower caps during or after a rainstorm to protect their hair. Every once in a while I come home to one of the children around the house wearing a puffy winter coat. I was stuck in the middle of an argument between all the adults in Hausa the other night and when I looked around for help, the only person around was one of the urchin children and he was spinning around in circles in the corner of the courtyard while wearing a bright pink winter coat unzipped over his birthday suit. I couldn’t find a single reason to critique this child’s fashion choices. It had gotten chilly that evening but he was prepared in case his spinning caused his body heat to rise too dramatically for him to maintain homeostasis. Smart kid.<br /><br /><br />In other news, I visited my future village this past weekend and it was crazy.<br /><br />Highlights:<br />-There is a little midget woman who works in the market and who is going to be my best friend.<br />-There is another marché maman who sent me Sangria as a welcome gift and told me that she knew I would do well in the village because of my smile.<br />-There is a monkey that hangs out in the marché (market).<br />-I ran into a ragtag group of kids who were blocking the dirt path out of my village with a rope made out of leaves and demanding a toll. I’m sure if they are there playing an African version of Lemonade Stand or if they are an actual orphan gang who set up the toll for a living. Either way I am also going to make them be my friends.<br />-My village is beautiful and everyone seems really nice.<br /><br />Some not so awesome things:<br /><br />-It’s a tiny village in Africa and it really just hit me that this is what I am doing with my life now. I haven’t really gotten a chance to sit down and think about how much my life has changed in the last 6 months until now and it hit me really hard this weekend. I left all the people and things that have come to define me and it is going to be harder than I thought.<br />-I have a nice private latrine, but it is still a latrine. Latrine= hole in the ground that I have to squat over whenever I want to go to the bathroom. Some other volunteers with latrines have to walk out of their house and across the yard to get to the latrine every time they want to go to the bathroom so everyone in their concession knows what they are up to and will often stop them to chat on their way even though it is obvious that they have toilet paper in their hands. My latrine is a room attached to the back of my house and has a pipe that directs unseemly smells out of it.<br />-I have a nice outdoor shower but that just means that I will be standing outside (in a roofless room of sorts) and pouring water over my head from a bucket.<br />-A lot of people in my village don’t even speak French so I have to learn Sahoué, the most common local language. This is both exciting and a little discouraging because I am struggling right now to learn French and I probably won’t be able to use it with a lot of the women who will become my friends L. On the upside, if I work really hard I could be fluent in two more languages instead of one by the time I’m done here. Since most of the local women only speak Sahoué (and other African local languages)and they will most likely be the people, aside from my students, who I will be spending most of my time with, it is possible that I can become fluent. We’ll see!<br /><br />Funny/awkward story: When I got home from visiting my village I walked straight through my gate into a Muslim prayer session of about 30 people. Literally the entire family was in the courtyard alternately standing and kneeling on rugs in a ceremony being led by a Muslim priest of sorts. I was carrying a bunch of bags and a cement sack of oranges that I brought back as a gift and I had to inch around all the people as they were praying to get to the door of the house. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I wanted to make sure I greeted my maman and didn’t seem anti-social and I also wanted to present her with the bag of oranges I brought back from my village since I had lugged them all over Southern Benin for the previous two days on various modes of transport including a crowded car full of strangers that included a woman breastfeeding her baby amidst the 6 of us who were shoved in the back seat as well as a Zem. I say all this like you should be impressed but you would be amazed at the things one can find delicately balancing on the back of a Zem here. My personal favorite so far includes two people and two live goats. Back to my story, I basically just sat on a chair in the courtyard and waited for the ceremony to be over completely unsure if I was offending anyone n any way. It was super awkward.<br />I had forgotten that Ramadan had started while I was away and the family it pretty serious with the whole Muslim thing, which is to be expected. They are currently fasting from five in the morning to seven at night. Last weekend I realized too late that I accidentally fed some of the urchin children and probably made Allah very unhappy with them. I was eating a delicious lunch that I had guiltily watched Aisha (one of the sisters who I spend a lot of time with but who does not speak French so there are a lot of awkward silent pauses) make me in the middle of her long day of fasting. It was an omelet with onions, tomatoes, and peppers on top of some fried ignames, which are basically yams but taste sort of like potatoes. This has become my favorite meal that the host family makes me though it is quickly becoming edged out by these fried vegetable dough things that the second or third wife has started making since Ramadan started. The family starts eating them as soon as the fasting stops for the evening and usually they give me an entire bowl of them and they are so good. Anyways, I didn’t realize until days later that the reason the urchin children were begging me for food more than usual was because it was Ramadan and that I had provided several of them with pieces of the pineapple I had eaten for lunch. Oops.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-77721960102164621572010-07-31T05:06:00.001-07:002010-07-31T05:06:35.856-07:00The Mamans and the PapasThis evening I had a chat with my maman in which I discovered the source of at least some of the millions of urchin/slumdog children that run around my house. Apparently, my papa here in Benin has 3 wives and they all live on different floors of this house! It is actually quite common in Benin for men to have up to four wives but I just thought that most of the women around this house were sisters, daughters, and aunts. I could care less either way but it would have been nice to know that I was living on the set of “Big Love: Africa” before now. But you should all be aware (because my maman made sure that I was very clear about this) that my maman is the first wife and the most powerful. She told me about how she is in charge of all the cooking and cleaning and the running of the house. That is a source of pride with many women in Benin and that means that the 2nd and 3rd wives don’t really get to feed their husband like my maman does so they have a different status. The husbands here with more wives typically spend two days in a row with each wife and then move to the next. Many of them have families in different houses in different parts of the city and move around to each house every few days or every week. Apparently in my house, the papa can conveniently just walk up or down a flight of stairs to see his wives.* <br />*I want to be clear that I deeply respect the women of my house and the family that I am staying with as well as the Beninoise people as a whole even if for some reason my comedic writing makes it seem like I am mocking. That is not my intention. I’m trying to relate their culture to you so that you can understand it a little but more and maybe also respect it. <br />My maman is middle aged and wears beautiful tissue (the patterned fabric that everyone wears here). She is pretty funny and really nice. She has a few gold teeth which sort of makes her look pirate-ish but that is common here (the gold crowns, not pirates). She is going to help me hand wash my laundry this weekend which should be an adventure. The thing that I am most stressed about is having to hang up my underwear, bras, and the rest of my clothing outside for every person in this house to look at. There are at least 10 women/teenage girls who do the work of women who live/work around here and I’m sure that they would love to chat about my underclothes with or without me. Although I guess that wouldn’t be as bad as the children who run around here. I can barely get them to stop pawing at my hair, skin, and general self. I cannot imagine the amount of times they would rub their grimy hands all over my stuff if they had the chance and I wasn’t there yelling at them to stop. <br />Back to my maman, the first day we met she told me that since I was American then that must mean I was Christian and that she was a Muslim but she told me not to worry because, “We have the same heart, you and I” and gestured from her chest to mine. Now that I have seen her bare chest at least a dozen times, I’m beginning to wonder if I misunderstood what she said. Maybe she was pointing to her chest and saying something like, “You poor thing, I hope you are comfortable living in a house full of Muslim women who feel it necessary to cover their head at inane moments throughout the day but do not find it at all odd to sit around topless in front of strangers.” It is common (at least in my house) for the older women to sit topless in my maman’s room at night and watch Spanish soap operas that have been dubbed into French. Some other shows that might interest you: Campus (pronounced Cam-poose)-An overacted drama about a group of West African students living on some college campus somewhere in West Africa and doing scandalous things. And this other show that I have dubbed “The Fallen”-a series of old photographs of people who have just died followed by their obituary all presented in silence on the tv screen with a fancy blue background. The women actually watch this procession of the dead for at least a half hour every night. So odd. One time I watched the French Spanish soap operas with my sister in the corner while maman did her prayers right in front of us so we had to crane our necks to see if the dying grandpa was going to remember his daughter or keep calling her “Maria” and believing that she was a former lover while she sat there crying, “Papa, c’est moi, tu fille!” (Papa, its me, your daughter!). Riveting.<br />Yesterday I exchanged $100 USD (which is a good portion of the money that I have to my name) with a man sitting on a bench on the side of the road. Shady? No, it was ridiculously sunny and hot. I have been trying to exchange money since I have gotten here and it has proven quite difficult. The banks all close around the time that I can get to them after school and sometime the people at the bank just don’t want to exchange your money. I don’t really need to exchange money for anything because I am getting paid enough money by the Peace Corps to eat and stuff but I really want to buy a phone so I can talk to people back home. Apparently all the volunteers here have one and many of the people in my staging group already have them. I decided the other day after school that I was going to exchange my money and that my family was going to help me whether they liked it or not. I harassed my siblings until they convinced one of my brothers to go with me. We walked several miles and got the banks only to find out that they were all closed! I should probably tell you that the only other significant experience I have had so far with this brother was when I got a little but snippy with him one day after school when he kept mumbling at me and would not enunciate and then attempted to grab my arm every 5 five minutes which the pretense of crossing the street but I really think he was just trying to touch me. It’s mostly inappropriate for a man here to touch you if you are not family. And while I am a host sister, I think maman and Allah would think there is still a big enough difference between me and my brother to warrant him keeping his hands off of me. Plus, I am pawed pretty regularly by the ragamuffins around my house and I was not having a good day and he was a convenient target for my anger. <br />Back to the money story, I’m almost certain that if my brother (his name is Halelo) didn’t hate me before we walked several miles in the heat that he was going to hate me now. Then a Nigerian saved the day! Well, I am assuming he was Nigerian because every time I tell someone that I changed money with a shady looking person on the street they say something along the lines of, “Oh you found a Nigerian?”. We were about to give up our search when my brother said something that translated to, “I know a guy…”. At this point I was more than willing to give my money to “a guy” because it was just worthless paper in my wallet at the moment and I just wanted to stop walking and to have him quit asking me what I was going to do about “the money problem” We walked up to the guy and he was sitting on a wooden bench and leaning against a building. He had a table in front of him that held an enormous stack of West African money and a calculator. Legit. Too legit to quit! I actually got a really good exchange rate from him and lucked out. Plus, on the walk home, we ran into my brothers funny old English teacher and that was an awesome conversation starter. The teacher sort of reminded me of what Jafar looks like in Aladdin at the beginning when he is pretending to be a toothless old man and he convinces Aladdin to go to the Cave of Wonders or whatever it is called. Except this old man was wearing an impressive hat and was sporting an even more impressive beard. After that, my brother and I bonded and little and I am really glad I forced him to take me to get money.<br /><br />Some things I am excited about for the near future: <br />1) I just bought some awesome tissue to make into dresses and I can’t wait to take them to the seamstress person.<br />2) I should be receiving tons of mail and packages soon (wink)<br />3) I find out which village I will be teaching in NEXT FRIDAY (August 6)<br />4) I get to visit my village and meet my school director the week after that!<br />5) I should be buying a phone soon and will actually be able to talk to people I love for more than 5-10 minute sessions.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770500542323627184.post-76974948700573972682010-07-31T05:05:00.000-07:002010-07-31T05:06:04.836-07:00Bouvette?!? Oui!Since the first 9 weeks of Peace Corps life are intense training, they bring in intense trainers who are current volunteers to help! Luckily, these people understand what we are going through and know just the thing to make us feel better: a few beers and lots of complaining. After training today (Tuesday July 27) we walked down the street to a local bouvette (read: shady roadside bar) and actually got to hang out and distress a little bit together. Our days basically consist of intense language and technical training and then sleep so it was a needed relief. It may have been the deux grand Beninoise talking but I really do love most of the people in my staging group for one reason or another. It’s actually kind of surprising how many different types of people and personalities are in our group. I was really worried before I came here that I wouldn’t be able to find people that I could connect with and I’m not really worried about that anymore, which is nice.<br /> After a few hours at the bouvette I figured I should head home since it was getting dark and I cannot even express how many times we have been told not to go out at night. I discovered very quickly that a little alcohol can take you a long way in breaking language barriers. I had to take a Zemidjan home. Zemidjans are these motor bike taxis here that drive real fast and are pretty cheap. You have to “discuter” or argue for a price with them though and that it quite difficult with a limited French vocabulary. But, non, with a few beers, I am almost fluent! I held up my hand, hailed a Zem, and convinced him that he indeed wanted to take me to the school by my house for 200 CFA even though he suggested 300. I also was able to ride a Zem for the first time without being scared shitless. I was so calm on this Zem ride that I even had a moment of deep thought in which I considered how surreal it was that I was riding on the back of a Zemidjan in Africa going home to a family of Beninoise Muslims who spoke Hausa as a first language. After I got off the Zem I had to walk a few blocks to my house. Conveniently, the group of Mamas who I chat with on the road were out so I could try out this new and improved me on them. It was a success! Then I went home and chatted up my family like never before. My sisters appeared to love me more than ever and my mama was glad I was using more French. <br />This amazing evening came to a skidding halt when my dinner was plopped down in front of me. It was pâte. Pâte (pronounced “pot” ….cue jokes) has become the bane of my existence here in Benin. It is a pasty corn meal business that has the consistency of disgustingly dense mashed potatoes. I have not yet come to love or even like it. I have eaten it twice and gagged like 20 times in the mix. It doesn’t help that it is typically eaten with an accompanying sauce that is slimy and stringy and looks like boogers. I will have you know that in the space of several weeks I have become dramatically less picky about what I eat, but pâte has not made it off my hit list yet. What?! A plate of spaghetti noodles with mayonnaise on top? Wait? Is that a plate full of super spicy whole fish (eyes included)? I’m down. I have managed to convince myself that the mayo spaghetti is just like a casserole that my family makes at home. I even play a little game with myself where I see if I can make myself like something by making pleased noises as I am eating it. That doesn’t work. Saying “yum” and “mmmmm” while eating something you detest just serves to make you bitter and to convince the people around you that you do like the food and that they should make it more often. One thing I do love here is the chicken, the avocado sandwiches, and the bread. I love the fresh made bread they make here. It is delicious. There is a lady that sells avocado sandwiches from a stand near my school and they are delicious. I don’t even like avocados and I am sold. The chicken here is probably the best chicken I have eaten in a while. It is so tasty. My family often gives it to me with a plate of rice and red sauce that they make that is made out of onions and tomatoes and spicyness.<br />Note: In addition to the cocktail of shots I am receiving I am also eating about 3 oranges a day, so if you have fears about me going pirate and acquiring scurvy you can rest easy. I may be at a high risk for various parasites and “monsters inside me”, but my teeth shouldn’t be rotting out due to a lack of vitamin C.<br />Second note: After dinner I had a talk with my maman in which she gave me a curfew (8 o’clock) and told me not to come home drunk. I wasn’t sure if she added the “drunk” part because 1) the volunteer they had last year was maybe a drunk, maybe they think all Americans are drunks, or perhaps because she smelled alcohol on my breath and assumed I was drunk and that’s why I was so chatty. Either way it was super awkward and I never want to do it again.Dione!http://www.blogger.com/profile/03357717802094621182noreply@blogger.com0