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:
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.
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.
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:
“ 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.”
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.
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:
“Dione! Dione! Bon soir!”
“ça va, bien? Merci!”
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.
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