Cotton and Cotton Men

L'Harmattan (When it's dry, dusty, and cold in Benin)

Happy holidays from Benin! I am currently at the fourth PC workstation in Benin, and I must say that this northerly post is by far the coziest and most tight-knit. I spent Thanksgiving here as well, when fifteen PCVs descended upon it to celebrate Thanksgiving Benin style, which meant without a turkey because live turkeys are simply too much of a boisterous travel companion. Well, I’ll clarify that that is the case for the uninitiated PCV. Beninese people have a wonderful knack for live animal transportation and appear unfazed by the prospect of a few goats on the roof or chickens in the lap.

Back in village, the dry season (i.e. – it hasn’t rained a single drop for two months and a half) has ironically brought with it the gardening season. Small(er) scale gardening clustered about the disparate water sources (a river and a pump) replaces large scale agriculture, less feasible during the dry, dusty season the north experiences.  Everyone in village is busy harvesting their crops, lighting fire to their fields, and, for some, getting ready to plant their gardens. Thus, village has become a ghost town during the day as people head to the fields to pick cotton, the largest contributor to GDP in Benin and a topic which is on the tip of everyone’s tongue throughout my town. If the road is not bustling with Mac sized trucks bearing tons of cotton heading across the Atlantic, it is literally littered with hundreds of cotton balls. With the harvesting of the cotton crop, people are beginning to have a little more time to shift their efforts towards clearing out their communal gardens.

Thus, this newfound activity also means I get to see a little bit of the work that the gardening cooperative of my village does and the challenges they face. Drama surrounds, in particular, the group’s pump because it was poorly placed and constructed. This means that if there is water in it, during the mornings it is only on a first come first serve basis. However, the other groups I work with face different challenges. I bike to at least one of my five villages a day, all the while praying that I might meet someone who could at least pretend to know French. Generally, I bike into village amidst swarms of children (and the occasional adult) who are screaming “BATURE!”. Luckily, I am usually able to escape these gaggles due to the speed my bike lends me, often only to have them catch up as I stop to ask someone where the president of the gardening group is. On these days, I thank God for my trusty 21-speed, silver Trek mountain bike J . When I find her and a French speaker, either an impromptu meeting with the entire group forms or we wander over to look at the status of the garden and chat about what’s going on. Now that my first three months of “integration period” at post are over, I can actually begin my primary and secondary projects, meaning I can hopefully be a little more useful to the women and hold meanings to give them technical advice. 

I have several other secondary project ideas that I hope to begin in the next few months, including:

• Accounting for illiterates in my groupements (“is growing those cabbages really getting you any money?”)

• Moringa tree plantation (reforestation and excellent for nutrition!)

• Fruit and vegetable drying (the availability of fruits and vegetables during certain parts of the year is a huge problem in northern Benin)

• Demonstration garden plot

• Middle school garden

• Panel of professional women for Women’s Day

• Mango grafting

• Mud stove construction (to save firewood and money)

• World map at the high school! (people here often have very little knowledge of geography)

• Seed bank (seeds are difficult to get in my village and expensive – we’ll see what we can conserve and trade…)

Anyways, I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday season and best wishes from Benin! Keep in touch.

Five Signs your friendly PCV might be craving some variety in their diet:

1. Eating whole, raw tomatoes as if they were apples (when in the States, tomatoes were only appropriate in the condiment “ketchup”) 
2. Impulse purchasing of guavas by the gross – “How much do all of the guavas on your head cost?!”
3. Calling your friend to tell him that you found canned peas (canned peas!) in an up(per)-scale shop in the town north of you.
4. When 90% of your texts to your post-mate concern food.
5. When you look forward to the 120 degree hot season because it means mangoes.

Life as a Professional Dancer

As of tomorrow I’ve been in village for a month and a half. Vrai village life, no strings attached. Finally, villagers are beginning to know my name, relationships are being built, I’m finding work to do, and, thank God, my local shop owner knows that I eat about seven guinea fowl eggs a week. Although I still suffer from a lot of critters in my house – lizards, mice, cockroaches, and ginormous spiders – I have become horrifyingly used to our uneasy cohabitation. Furthermore, I have finally transitioned from “Bature” (white person) to “Anna” in village and just about everyone knows who I am and greets me on my daily village wanderings. Thus, these past few weeks in particular have been particularly successful. 

Immersing myself into the local secondary school has produced some of the most drastic effects. I greeted the director of the high school/middle school and informed him that I wanted to start an environmental club at the high school, a venture which I hope to begin next week. Rallying interest and participation will definitely be the biggest challenge due to the busy lives the students lead, with girls (my secret target audience) particularly occupied with duties at home. Last week I went around to all of the high school/middle school classes, introduced myself, and advertised my club. It is the first club to exist in the school, so I’m forging new ground and I’ll see what happens at the first meeting next week!

Besides planning out my environmental club, taking Bariba class, and doing my greeting rounds, my life has been absolutely consumed with meetings for my gardening cooperatives. In each village surrounding Kerou, a group of gardening women has taken form so that they can better address technical or marketing challenges. My job is to provide further expertise when it comes to both of these aspects. Thus, every day I visit two or three villages (24 in total!) to introduce myself to the gardening groups while my supervisor informs them of new legislation regarding “groupement” formation.  Thus, one visit looks like this:

1.    I begin the day by riding my bike from my village to Kerou, where the commune seat and my boss’s office is – 7 miles. 
2.     Arrive at the office at 8:30, like he said. But in Benin, “8:30” really means at least 9:15. Wait outside the office and chat with small children. Hey, they speak French.
3. I hop onto the back of my supervisor’s motorcycle and we are off to the first village, usually about 20 minutes away through beautiful Beninese countryside.
4. We arrive at the village to find the groupement waiting for us under a tree. We join them and take attendance, noting the presence of the officers (often including a designated singer), and have everyone sign next to their name. In 99% of the cases, the women can’t read or write, so thumbprints take the place of signatures.
5.  My supervisor speaks for about 45 minutes about the legislation, entirely in Bariba. The he turns to me. “Do you have anything you would like to add, Anna?” I give him a blank stare.
6. I settle on simply introducing myself (for now, still in French) and my supervisor translates everything into Bariba. The women clap at the end and then, as is customary, the singer does her thing and I am asked to dance for the group. You can only imagine what this must look like – twenty five women singing and clapping in a circle while I do my Beninese style white-girl dance in the center. Actually, please don’t imagine it. At least for now, I am providing these poverty stricken, malnourished women with entertainment.
7. They present me with a gift – inevitably yams. When you get three five-pound yams per village, the weight on the back of the motorcycle for the ride back gets a little unwieldy, not to mention the difficulties one person has in consuming that many yams. The evidence: 

8.       I thank them profusely, hop onto the moto with yams in hand, and head to the next village.

Thus, life in a nutshell. Hopefully by the next time I can write (Thanksgiving), things will have taken a little more shape. Until then, hope all is well and keep in touch :).

(Learning) How to Live in Village

Our long awaited move to post, the “Grand Trainee-Volunteer Migration”, happened three weeks ago yesterday, perhaps resembling college-move in day on a grand scale. Just replace your chauffeuring and teary parents with a cantankerous taxi driver, friendly welcoming upper-classmen with a gaggle of village children, and your dorm room with a village house inhabited by more insect species than exist in North America, and you have the basic idea.  This merely illustrates the average PC Benin Volunteer’s experience. My own was a little more rocky and perhaps a bit more bug-ridden.

My adventures began immediately upon my arrival at post. There, I learned that my proprietress had mysteriously lost the keys to my house. Yes, this was one challenge I hadn't planned on facing, and therefore, had no idea about what to do. I brilliantly faced this problem by blankly staring at my house for twenty minutes surrounded by all of my belongings and the aforementioned gaggle of children. In turn, the proprietress spent that amount of time staring at me, and staring was about all we could do given the language barrier. When it was clear I wasn’t about to immediately herald the next taxi bound for the airport, the proprietress decided to allow me to stay in a different room next door, where the gaggle and I dragged my mattress and things. I ended up staying in this small, poorly lit, chamber for four days as the proprietress “looked” for my keys, after which I decided to approach a locksmith about the situation. This issue, compounded by the fact that my latrine still was not built, there were no screens on my windows (I would regret this later), and that I did not have any furniture made these initial few weeks a little uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, I have had the chance to meet some amazing people within my community and get a greater understanding of where I might fit into this village’s picture. I've been working on becoming acquainted with any structures existing in my village and the local leaders. Just figuring out where to get water is a week long project. Integrating and discovering are the goals of the first three months at post. Therefore, my days generally follow very similar patterns consisting of local language lessons, hunting down the elusive fresh fruit or vegetable, taking the most beautiful bike rides, and, most time-consuming of all, greeting everyone in village. I have made it a priority to take a walk through village every day and say hello to the people I pass. This is particularly challenging given that I must do this in Bariba. Nor is it polite to simply say “hello”: Their household, work, health, children, husband, sleep the night before, second cousin twice removed, must all be inquired about in turn. It’s a slow process, to say the least.

Luckily, I got a bit of the malaria to make things a little more exciting. Having malaria is an uncomfortable experience I've found, particularly when you inhabit the boonies of Benin and need to take a two day journey to the PC healthcenter in the capital. I quickly consulted my doctor and decided I had to go to the Peace Corps health station last Wednesday after I woke up with a 104 degree fever. The driver I asked to bring me to Nati didn't quite understand the gravity of the situation, which I only realized once he came over to my concession and told me we had to go look for parts for the moto we would be riding, and parts are never easy to find in a Beninese village. Therefore, I ended up stumbling through the village, halfheartedly performing my obligatory greetings and attracting a lot of attention. I'm not quite sure I was looking my best. However, you will be glad to know that it all paid off and the moto was fixed :)

However, the first leg of the journey to Natitingou is quite rural, and I found my feverish self on the back of a motorcycle driven by a one-armed man. For five hours. Wildly clutching my 2 hastily packed bags (you always need a bike tire pump, right?) as we maneuvered through the rural back roads of Benin. The second day of malaria journeying was little better. I was on a bus for 16 hours straight, producing more sweat than I ever thought humanly possible, and placed next to screaming newborn child. The woman next to me kept giving me the stink-eye and shifting further away, while one man took my near-to-tears, pallid patheticness as a classic case of home-sickness. No good, but at least he gave me a very uplifting talk about the values of family and friends.

However, sickness does mean a hot shower, electricity, and seeing friends for a few nights :).

 Hope all is well in the states, I miss you all immensely, and keep in touch!

Love from Benin,

Anna

A Day in the Life

A day in the life of one PCV’s training:

6 AM - Wake up to:

a.       A rooster

b.      The morning call to prayer

c.       Small children crying

d.      Your neighbor’s operatic singing, heralding the new morning

Although none of the other options are out of the question, option “D” usually applies to me as might be guessed from the specificity. Observe that “alarm clock” is conspicuously missing from the list.

7 AM – Eat breakfast (omelet and instant coffee) while studying French.

7:45 – Ride bicycle to class with friendly neighbor- co-volunteer.

8 – 12:30 AM -  French class. Organized based upon comprehension level and composed of no more than 4 trainees. Try to tell jokes in French to Beninese teachers, only to be met by blank stares and long explanations for why what you are saying is not reasonable. 

Example: When talking about the freedom Beninese people have in taking livestock and domesticated animals on public transportation, one trainee suggests that perhaps a camel might also be usefully transported in a taxi. (Attempts at jokes are often this pathetic when crossing language divides.). Language trainer, frowning, says, “No, that’s impossible”, and quickly tries to draw attention away from the apparent stupidity of the trainee. Move on.

12:30 – 1:30 – Lunch! Mad rush to the local, trusted rice-and-beans lady. Sum total for lunch = $0.60.

1:30 - 2:30 – Technical Session. May include: building more efficient mud-stoves (reduce wood consumption); gardening techniques; information session on moringa trees; teaching a sixth grade class about deforestation; bicycle maintenance; natural insecticides.

3-4:30  - Visit a local village and teach the gardeners how to make a compost pile. Imagine a group of over-zealous and excitable trainees talking to a group of rural farmers in painful French. Now, remember that none of the villagers speak French, but are receiving the information through a translator.  Successfully compose organic matter into a pile to make “compost”. 

4:30 – Ride bicycle back home to a chorus of “Yovo!”. Yovo is the “mzungu”, or “white-person” call of Benin. Here, it is even accompanied by a song which seems to be taught to all young children. Dodge motorcycles en route. 

4:45 – Study French or read. 

6:30 – Hang out with my host sister while she makes dinner.

8:30 – Eat dinner while watching “El Diablo”, the most popular soap-opera on television. It is a rejected Spanish show dubbed into French which takes place in New York City. As might be guessed, it’s my life in America in a nutshell.

9:00 – Play cards or mancala with my little brother and our neighbor. Lose miserably every time. 

10 - Read and sleep. 

Repeat the following day.

New Address!

Quick note: because I will be moving to post in less than two weeks, I have updated my mailing address! Rather than sending any letters or packages to the Cotonou office and having it wait there for what could be months, please send them along to my workstation in Natitingou. Check out the address to the left!

Travelling with Chickens

Finally, we trainees have seen a little bit of Benin. Yes, perhaps our lives as volunteers might consist of something more than marathon language classes and awkward homestay family encounters: We just returned from visiting our posts. For five days, the trainees were set loose upon the country to see their villages, meet their counterparts, and get a taste of what their lives might be like as volunteers. This was certainly a refreshing break and a wonderful opportunity to see a very different part of the country for me, as the north, I found, is a totally different world than the south.

My post is one of the most remote volunteer sites, which means, unfortunately, that it takes almost two days to get there from PC headquarters in Cotonou. This is particularly impressive when you remember that Benin is only about the size of Pennsylvania. Additionally, transportation is not always (read: never) comfortable in Benin. I had to take three different taxis during the second day of my journey and there were never any fewer than seven additional people carefully arranged in the cab with me. Imagine riding for five hours in a seven-seater station wagon with twelve (twelve!!) other people and a chicken, and you might have an inkling of what traveling in Benin might entail. This doesn’t even include the man who had to ride on top of the station wagon.

Luckily, the north is absolutely beautiful during this part of the year. The rolling green hills of cotton and corn, dotted with huge trees such as the baobab, are certainly enough to draw your attention away from the discomforts of an overcrowded bush taxi. As an Environmental Action volunteer in my village, I am lucky enough to be working (often outside!) in this beautiful area with local gardening groups, promoting sustainable gardening techniques and trying to help them increase their profits. Cashews and shea in particular have a lot of potential to be an excellent source of income, while the moringa tree and environmental education classes may improve food security in the area. Indeed, the differences in income levels and education between my village and Porto-Novo are breathtaking: only a few people in my village have electricity and no one has running water. Additionally, the poverty level means that finding people who are educated enough to understand or speak French will be quite a challenge. 

Anyways, this does give me an excellent activity for my first three months of post: learn Bariba! Until then though, we still have two weeks left to pack in as much French as possible and prepare for our departures. In my case, I have also been poring through my Beninese cookbook and dreaming of conquering the kitchen at post. How many ways can one use rice and beans.

Also, I should add that I am currently distracted by the lizards which always seem to lurk in this gazebo. Half of the time when writing these posts, I am cowering over my computer, ready at any point to fend off any lizards which may leap upon me. This is a real possibility. And these are no small lizards.

I'll leave you with that :)