Penessoulou

Hello again!

I returned from my post visit in Penessoulou last night, so I have lots of news to share about my post and about my trip. I’m trying to write some of this on the French computer at the internet café because I want to try to post some photos on Facebook while I type, so please excuse any typos!

We left for post on Wednesday morning. It takes a good day’s worth of travel to reach Penessoulou from Cotonou (if you leave by 9 a.m., you might get there by 5 p.m., depending on the road conditions and your means of transport), but on a bus the journey is not entirely unpleasant. I was fortunate to travel most of the way with two other volunteers posted nearby, and our Directors (school principals) accompanied us on the way up – so aside from the heat, lack of bathrooms, and various engine troubles en route, it was actually a pretty nice and uneventful trip :) haha.

Penessoulou itself is quite small – just a strip of low buildings lining the Goudrone (“good road”) linking Cotonou in the south with Natitingou in the north. Its permanent fixtures are a mosque, a tiny church, a small health center, the primary and secondary school complexes, and three buvettes (go figure). The CEG (College d’Enseignement Generale, equivalent of junior high in the U.S., where I will be teaching) is a little ways out of the town “center” and consists of three one-story buildings with 5-6 classrooms each, plus a small office for the Director and Censeur (Vice-Principal), a basketball court, and a soccer field, all surrounded by cornfields. There is a weekly marché in Penessoulou, but I’ll have to travel to Bassila to get most supplies and to find a post office, a bank, and an internet café.

That said, I’m really happy to be posted in a small village rather than in a big city like Cotonou or Porto Novo. The cities here are wild– crazy motorcycles cram the roadways and pollute the air, vendors line the streets hawking their wares, women in colorful tissue (fabric) stride with baskets balanced on their heads and babies strapped around their backs, and children (and animals – goats, chickens, dogs)run about as they please. People are generally very friendly and saluer people as they pass, however, we – Peace Corps volunteers – stick out like sore thumbs everywhere we go and are greeted instead with shouts of “Yovo! Yovo!” (white/foreign person in Fon), or worse, the “Yovo” song: “Yovo, yovo, bonsoir, ca va bien, merci, donnez-moi un cadeau.” The song was taught to Beninese children by the French during the colonial period in an attempt to teach them French, and, as the song suggests, if children sang it the French would give them gifts – thus it has all sorts of negative connotations, in addition to being pretty obnoxious and tiresome. I like to tell the kids singing, “Je ne suis pas Yovo, je suis Beninoise!” but I don’t think they believe me…haha.

My house is about a two-minute walk down a dirt path from the Goudrone, and is, as I had heard, quite grand for one person even by American standards – I have a salon, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a toilet and shower area (although no running water), and a porch. The house is at the moment entirely empty, so I need to get a lot of furniture (and visitors!) to fill it up (no small feat considering that a lot of things can only be bought in the south, but I shall persevere haha). I also really want to get a dog to keep me company! Most people here use dogs as protection rather than pets and as a result the dogs I’ve seen have been kind of wild rather than friendly, but my Director has a really nice dog (named Rocky haha) so I’m hoping I can convince him to help me find one like him.

Since my house is unfurnished, I stayed with my Director and his family – his wife, Catherine, and their two daughters, Grace (4) and Lydee (2), his wife’s two younger sisters, Bernadette and Ossila, and their domestique, Guira – while I visited. They were all very hospitable and friendly—Catherine is a tailor and she made me an AWESOME modele (skirt and top) in Yayi Boni (President of Benin) tissue (I don’t have pictures yet but just wait til you see it); they fed me lots (they raise turkeys and chickens in their yard – which, if you know how much I love birds, was mildly terrifying, but I mastered my fears haha); and they were really nice when I came down with a cold the second day and just needed to sleep for a while. (However, I must admit that I’m looking forward to having my own space and not feeling bad when I don’t want to eat food, be sociable, or play with screaming children - but I have to wait a bit for that!)

My Director, M. Ponou, seems great so far – excited to have me and eager to make improvements in the school and community. He considers himself a bit of an outsider in Penessoulou (he is from Porto Novo, originally), so he understands a little of what it’s like to be new and not villageois and is making a conscious effort to encourage the village to adopt me as their own, always remembering to introduce me as “notre etrangère” (our foreigner) and telling everyone we meet that I will be living in Penessoulou for two years (emphasis on two years).

It was during these many introductions that I felt for the first time confronted with the reality of my service—two years teaching English in a remote village in West Africa?! How crazy is that?! But it’s exciting, too. When M. Ponou brought me in to meet the village elders, who were at the time gathered in a one-room dwelling beside the mosque to select the next village chief, I couldn’t help but think, “How on Earth did I get here? And where else could I ever have had this experience?” It really is priceless.

Lots of love from Benin, and more news to follow…