Filling in the gaps

Leaving the cybercafé a few weeks ago, I could think of nothing but all that I had left unsaid in my last post. How could I have neglected to mention anything about the crazy man who brought me weekly cadeaux of piment and ignames, or the little boys using my neighbor’s porch as a Slip ‘n Slide every time it rains…? In this post, I will attempt to touch upon a few of the topics I have forgotten in the past few entries, as well as to catch you up to speed on what’s been happening since my last post. It is a daunting task, but I shall do my best!

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CEG Penessoulou

School has begun at last, and I am happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed my first week of teaching. It was exciting to finally meet my students, and they were (I think) equally excited to find me at the front of their classroom. I am now greeted everywhere I go by khaki-clad youngsters who bow and say, “Good afternoon, Teacher!” And it feels as though the townspeople at last understand the purpose of my sojourn in Penessoulou: I am no longer the bumbling foreigner who wanders aimlessly about mispronouncing Anii greetings, but am instead the new English teacher, still foreign and a bit confused, but with an assigned role to play in the community. I belong.

I teach four classes – two 6ème and two 5ème (the first two levels at the Collège). My schedule could not be better: I teach Monday-Wednesday from 8-12 and Thursday from 10-12 and 3-5, followed by an English department meeting from 5-7. Director Ponou followed the Peace Corps’ requests for first-year teachers’ emploi du temps to the letter, giving me only two class levels to prepare and the long weekend free for traveling. He also very considerately (and probably intelligently) scheduled me for mostly morning classes so that I won’t have to brave the midday heat. (The other English teacher was not so lucky: he has to teach all four levels and has morning and afternoon classes. I do not envy him!)

In my 6ème class, we started with the very basics: greetings and introductions, the ABC’s, counting from 1-20. A few of the students know some English already, but for the most part they are a blank slate. It’s a fun class because you can sing songs, play games, and read poems, and since most Beninese teachers don’t teach classes that way, the kids are thrilled.

In 5ème, I decided to begin with a get-to-know-you exercise before starting in on the year’s curriculum as a way to learn about the kids and to see how much English they already know. Their responses were promising – they made plenty of errors, to be sure, but they did demonstrate that they can understand basic instructions and express themselves in simple English. I was, on the whole, very impressed, and I’m excited to work with them. It’s going to be a good year!

Food and Water

As I mentioned in my last post, I have ventured a bit into the realms of Beninese and American cuisine au village, but it has been slow-going. I am very fortunate that my neighbors and my director’s wife have undertaken to feed me, and that I have discovered a few trustworthy street vendors on the road to the Collège. (My most recent discovery, thanks to PCVL Jim’s visit this week, is a roadside café that serves omelettes – and, thus, sells eggs! – and sweet bread every morning. Needless to say, I am now a regular customer!) I have also received numerous offerings of food – entire trays of piment and piles of ignames – from a well-meaning old man who is not quite right in the head but who speaks some English, mixed with Anii and other unintelligible utterances. As he is obviously very poor himself, I was feeling very guilty about accepting his gifts because he wouldn’t accept any payment, but fortunately he let me pay him on the day of the fête to end Ramadan, so I no longer feel quite so bad.

In terms of ingredients for doing my own cooking, it can be a little difficult to find many foods in Penessoulou itself. For fruits and vegetables, I can pretty much count on being able to get tomatoes and onions at a moment’s notice (girls walk around with trays of them poised on their heads), but for all other produce I rely on the weekly marchés, and even then it is usually slim-picking. Bananas and oranges are in abundance, but greens are rare, and fruits like mangoes and pineapples that were plentiful in the south are not found in the north. Meat and dairy are similarly hard to come by; and while I can find cheese (wagasi, produced by the nomadic Peule who come in from the fields to the marchés in the early morning) pretty regularly, I very rarely eat meat.

That said, I’m not missing American foods nearly as much as I thought that I would. Yes, I would love a cheeseburger and a vanilla milkshake, but I’m not really craving anything specific. More than anything, I miss the variety of American food. My diet here is largely composed of starches: yams, rice, and pasta, especially. And although I have always had a tendency to eat too many carbohydrates (cereal and sugar cookies were staples in my American diet), I usually ate them with, rather than in lieu of, foods from other food groups. Eating igname pilée every day, while filling, is not always satisfying.

As for my water situation, at present I pull my water from a well directly outside my house. It’s a bit of a pain, especially because I have not yet mastered the carrying-a-bucket-on-my-head trick, and I slosh water all over the place when I haul the water awkwardly on my side, but you do get used to it after a while.

However, the water level in my nearest well has already dropped noticeably with the diminishing rains, and soon I will be forced to use a pump a bit farther away near the Goudrone or up at the CEG. I’m a bit conflicted about hiring someone to do this chore for me – Isn’t the Peace Corps meant to be a character-building experience? And won’t I be propagating the image of the rich/lazy/incapable/insert-stereotype-here American? – but I think I will find it necessary once water isn’t easily accessible. Hopefully I will be able to find a student who needs help paying for school fees or something so that I can at least feel like my paresse is contributing to a good cause. In the meantime, I’ll keep filling my bucket!

Health

Until last week, I marveled at how healthy I had been since I arrived in Benin. With the exception of the occasional bad meal, everything was smooth sailing. But then I got my first taste of illness in Africa in the form of a 24-hour trip to the latrine and a 104-degree fever. Fortunately, I was staying with Jessica (a fellow PCV) in Bassila at the time for a teacher’s formation, and though it was, I suppose, a bit awkward to be running back and forth to someone else’s latrine, it was comforting to be with someone who could watch over me and ask about my symptoms in English. My sickness also gave us an excuse to stay in the following day and indulge ourselves with an afternoon of watching Anne of Green Gables on Jessica’s computer…it was delightful! And though I’m not yet entirely back to “normal,” I’m feeling better and on the road to recovery. What an adventure!

Communication

As some of you already know, the newly-constructed MTN tower in Penessoulou became operational at the end of my second week here, so thankfully I no longer have to stand by the side of the goudrone to find cell phone service. Keepcalling.com makes it relatively inexpensive to call here from the U.S., or so I’m told, and as a result I’ve been fortunate to have fairly frequent communication with quite a few of you! This has, of course, made my first few weeks infinitely less scary, isolating, and lonely. And although I’m sure that there is something to be said for the more traditional, sans cell phone Peace Corps experience, I, for one, am quite grateful for the connection.

Internet, however, is a different story. The nearest cybercafé is in Bassila, 28k from Penessoulou, and is relatively expensive on a Peace Corps budget. I’ve been going once every few weeks, but I will continue to go as often now that school has begun. At first, it was a little strange not to check my Gmail/Facebook/New York Times homepage multiple times per day (or, really, to be connected nonstop), but now I’m pretty used to it. Using the internet here even stresses me out a little because the connection is slow and I can’t respond to emails, load pictures or post on my blog quickly, and as a result constantly feel like I’m wasting time or falling behind. (This does not mean that you shouldn’t email me – I love getting emails! – but please don’t be alarmed/offended/annoyed if it takes me a little while to get back to you!)

Sending and receiving mail has been one of the more frustrating aspects of life in Benin. Now that I am at post, my mail is delivered from the Peace Corps office in Cotonou to the work station in Natitingou once monthly. It is nice that they have this service, but it means that if something arrives in Cotonou the day after the shuttle departs then I won’t get it for another month at least (probably longer since I don’t get to the workstation very often). Additionally, while I have received lots of letters and postcards (thanks, guys!) and a couple of small packages in envelopes, I have only received one box package in the three months that I’ve been here (much to the dismay of my mom, who has sent four or five). It’s nearly impossible to track where the packages are, but I have convinced myself that they are all sitting somewhere, together and unharmed, but entirely forgotten due to someone’s oversight…and I am, of course, very annoyed at this anonymous person! Haha. And, from what I have heard, the letters that I posted about six weeks ago from Porto Novo have not yet arrived in the U.S., so I think that I may abandon the Beninese postal service entirely and go back to sending my letters through the Peace Corps mail drop (whereby PCVs going back to the U.S. mail others’ pre-stamped letters while they are at home). I love mail, but it’s not an easy thing here!!

Transportation in Benin: At Your Own Risk

I talked a little bit last time about the string of strange (for the U.S., not for Benin) incidents my taxis encountered en route to Natitingou a couple of weeks ago, but said nothing about the vehicles, which are themselves quite remarkable. Benin is where cars come to die; or, more precisely, where cars already declared dead in some other part of the world are resuscitated (over their vehement objections) and re-drafted into service. Invariably, the speedometer, odometer, and gas gauge no longer function; one or both of the headlights is out; the rearview mirror hangs by a thread; and ignition is manual (i.e. the car must be pushed to start). I hesitate to imagine what Jim Farrell would say if he saw these cars on the road – never mind what he would say if he knew I was riding in them!

As if these maladies were not enough, these poor, dilapidated vehicles are then overburdened nearly to the point of collapse with passengers and freight. Par example, my taxi to Bassila last week was an ordinary five-passenger station wagon that had been converted to a nine-passenger vehicle by the addition of an extra seat in the back – but we squeezed fifteen people (four in front, six in the middle, and five in back), plus carried luggage piled four feet deep atop the car. My taxi home from Bassila transported ten passengers, their bags, and a giant drum of petrol within and three large sacks of coal and one more passenger strapped to the top. The words “death trap” came to mind at several points in the journey, not least when our wheel nearly came off as we barreled up a hill. Our driver pulled the rear bumper off the car while trying to repair said wheel and then narrowly escaped being crushed when the jack collapsed under the car’s immense weight. Needless to say, I was very thankful to make it home in one piece that night!

On top of all this, there are no real rules of the road (or, if there are, no one pays much attention to them). Moto drivers, especially, are guilty of daredevil tactics, but most drivers treat speed limits as optional and passing as obligatory. There is also no guarantee that if an accident were to happen (which, considering all of the above, seems quite likely) one would reach any sort of emergency care in a timely fashion. I am told that there are ambulances in the big cities, but I have yet to see one even though I have seen several accidents. For the most part, crash victims rely on the kindness of passers-by to transport them to the nearest doctor. This strategy is, of course, neither reliable nor efficient, and is rendered even less effective by a hospital policy that holds would-be good Samaritans liable for an injured person’s medical expenses if he or she is unable to pay and unaccompanied by a responsible party. The volunteers from Bassila and I witnessed the backwardness of this principle firsthand on our way to Natitingou when our driver refused to transport an accident victim to Djougou because no one at the scene would accompany him to the hospital.

(Just to allay any fears out there, in the case of an emergency, I am pretty certain that I would be rushed to the nearest medical facility. I carry identification with emergency care information – in French and English – at all times, and, as a white foreigner, I am sure that anyone who saw me injured on the side of a road would assume I could pay for my hospital bills – it would probably be the one time I would be thankful to be stereotyped as a rich American! Nevertheless, the situation here is disturbing and alarming.)

Weather

In my first few weeks at post, I could nearly set my watch by the afternoon rain shower: it came, fast and furious, each day at about 3 p.m., cooling the air and replenishing the wells. Since I didn’t have to work or leave my house, this was my favorite time of day. I could sit on my porch, usually joined by six or seven neighborhood kids, watching the braver boys using my neighbor’s terrace as a Slip ‘n Slide (when her back was turned) and enjoying the fraicheur. It was a bit magical.

Now, the rains come less frequently and nearly always at night, usually preceded by heat lightning and a cut in the power. The wells are drying up and the days are getting hotter, no doubt foreshadowing the chaleur to come. I can’t complain yet, but I am seriously contemplating buying a fan today in anticipation!

House

My house is beginning to resemble a real home with the arrival of a bed, table and chairs, and even curtains. I have placed an order for an armoire and a bookshelf, and I hope to get furniture for my kitchen soon as well. It is coming along slowly but surely!

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I think that’s about all I can say for now. If you’ve read through all this, bon travail! I hope this lengthy entry gives you a better idea of what my life is like here and how things are going. As Mama Schurgin said to me in her letter, “It sounds like an almost indescribable experience!” – and, in many respects it is…but I’ll keep trying to describe it just the same!

Hope all is well in the States, and lots of love to you all!