My Home Sweet Home

Post visit was a welcome break from the monotony I so despise. Post visit was a chance for all volunteers to spend two weeks at their future home for the next two years. It was so great for me because it let me know that in a month I won’t be in a classroom with the comfort of other Americans or patient professors who understand my botched French but that I will actually be doing what I imagined when I imagined my life in Benin. My village of 40,000 people is about two hours away from the largest cities North (Djougo) or South (Savalou). It has a good number of boutiques where I can find cold drinks and good cookies. There is also a restaurant where I can find French fries, yay! I will be living in a concrete house with a porch right across the street from the Mayor’s office and I will be working at the health center which is oddly placed right next to the hospital. My home has electricity but no running water, but my neighbor’s children have agreed to do that for me. I will try.

Now I get to start the fun stuff, now I get to start tech training and learn how to do the job I can here to do! SO far its been great, learning how to track my projects and measure their effectiveness. I will be learning how to do baby weighing's and track the growth of children. I'll learn how to make nutritive porridge to increase weight and health, and a bunch of other things  

French

One of my goals is to be fluent in French and Arabic by the time I leave here. Now that I’m here I realize that maybe I set my expectations too high. French is so difficult and I have history with it. I took French in high school for two years and in college for two semesters. The foreign language you learn in a classroom is different from the foreign language you actually use in the field. School is good for teaching you the basics, the structure of the language. It is impossible to truly learn a language by sitting in class or sitting in front of a computer. You have to be able to talk to native tongues. You need to hear the accents. I was warned before coming to Benin that the French spoken here is ehm, special. So true.

A Day in the Life of a Trainee

7am: Wake up

7:30: Eat breakfast, head out to class

8am: French class

10am: Break

10:30am: More French

12pm-ish: Lunch (beans and rice, pasta, bread, or fried plantain)

1:30pm: Even more French, cultural class of some sort, personal study time, French game time

5:00pm: Finish! Hang with the wonderful RCH, bike for an hour, or go home for even more French

7pm-ish: Return Home (help mama cook, French review with papa, sit awkwardly while everyone talks)

8pm: Eat dinner with the family, go to the masjid

9pm: Head to my room, shower, and study more, read, watch a movie, type up a blog post, or call home

11pm: Lights out

Pass the bush and to the left

My host family placement far exceeds my expectations. I must say, I really lucked out. In fact my colleagues have deemed me one of the “haves” as opposed to the majority being the “have not’s”. But they are lucky in that they get the gritty experience now as opposed to experiencing true shock when they arrive at post. Because it is highly likely that myself and the other volunteers will be living extremely rural. “En Buisson”, or in the bush. We are only here in the lovely village of Dangbo for 3 months and then we move on to our permanent post for the next two years. So it is very likely that I won’t have all of these conveniences for very long, but I’ll enjoy them while I do.

So what is it that makes me a have? Well I have a fridge for starters. Even though it is not used nearly as much as it should be, I have a full size refrigerator. In fact I’ve never seen an egg, or milk, or any other dairy product inside of it. They mainly use it for La Beninoise (the local beer), left overs, ice, and other things that really have no need to be refrigerated, but I take full advantage of its ability to provide me with cold water on a hot day. I also have coconut and papaya trees that provide me with deliciousness every day. As for my living quarters I pretty much have my own section of the house. I have a sitting room, a bed room, and an attached shower room. I still have to use a latrine outside but I actually find the latrine to work better for me. Gravity gets to really do its thing. I have a couch, a dresser, and a bed frame. In the family room where I eat my meals my parents have a pretty decent size TV (bigger than the one I had in my dorm room) and a sound system. My house is a 5 minute bike and an 8 minute walk away from the school which is wonderful.   The biggest luxury is that I have electricity! It does cut off unexpectedly but I hear that’s because Benin is in debt to Nigeria and they keep cutting the lights out as a way to conserve. But For the most part I always have charged electronics. However Dangbo does not have a Cyber Café and I am not able to afford an internet card on my stipend. Though I may invest in one for post if I’m not near a Cyber Café there either. 

My family is composed of a mama (over 50), a papa (over 50), a brother (24), 6 sisters (19, 27, 30,?, ?, ?), and a male cousin (between 14-19) who does most of the cooking and cleaning for the family but never eats with us. I think he may be living with us to go to school. I know that happens a lot here. However big my family seems, on a daily basis I only actually see my mama, papa, cousin, and neighbors on a daily basis. My siblings are spread out around Benin and all either in school, working, or married. I can tell I have pretty good parents because all their children seem super sweet and smart. My neighbors rent the house in front of mines from my papa, and from what my brother tells me they have been living there for a long time and are now more like family than neighbors. They consist of an aunt (no older than 25), a big niece (23) who is married but whose husband is away working, their son (1yr 8mths) who cries if I come within a foot of him but will smile at me from afar, and two little sisters (8 & 12). They all come over daily and the sister’s even taught me to wash my clothes in buckets. The big sister enjoys asking me to give her my clothes but I just laugh that off. The little sisters do so much work. I enjoy talking to them because they have weaker accents and take it easy on me when I mess up. My papa is a retired primary school teacher and my mama is a vendor of fabrics, beer, and other random things. On my property I have plenty of goats, chickens, and a dog named Yoopie that is 17 years old and going blind Oh and let me not forget about the squirrels that have been hanging out in my ceiling and fight or mate every night. They are so loud! And their poop sometimes falls through the cracks of my ceiling but luckily I sleep with my handy mosquito net every night that has come to protect me from so much more than mosquitoes.

I’m very happy here despite not having internet and I’ve already gone sightseeing with my brother. I saw “Fleuve Weme” wish is apparently the second largest river in the world. Its only 20 minutes away from me! It was breathtaking! It looked like the Africa you see in the movies. Again, I think I really lucked out with my host family and placement. I only hope I’m as lucky with my permanent site. I also love that the majority of the time I feel like an only child because I am able to have a decent amount of me time which I can use for studying French or just clearing my head.

Meeting Africa

Staging in Philly was brief so I’ll skip over that, the only important thing you need to know is that my last meal was amazing. Two ladies and I went to Joes Crab Shack and I indulged in a whole pot of crab legs, lobster claws, shrimp, and clams to myself along with chips and cheesy crab dip. I ate it all. That’s what’s important.

Everything since that has been astounding to me. Just skip the things that seem stupid to you because to me it is all incredible. I have never left the US and I have never been further west than Missouri so the entire flight from JFK to Brussels and then from Brussels to Cotonou had me ooh-ing and aah-ing. I can say I was in Belgium! Only for seven hours but I was there nonetheless. I was able to snag an authentic European croissant, one plain and one chocolate. Yum. I even had my first taste of being swindled abroad. No big deal I just had a hired official tell me that the terminal I was in only took euros when they certainly took USD and exchanged my money at a pretty pricey exchange rate. It all worked out in the end I assure you.  At the Brussels airport I took a picture of the toilet paper because it was different and so was the bathroom. The bathroom doors are so cool, they were full steel doors and in order to flush the toilet you just push a big button located on the tank of the toilet. I soon learned this wasn’t a big deal because in Benin if you are blessed with an actual toilet you will have to pull a knob to flush it.  Another European delight I was privileged to witness was the architecture. Even from the airport and looking from the airplane I was able to see the beautifully built cottages and the airport itself was constructed beautifully. Picture large steel beams painted white forming an arch above your head. Move on from Belgium and take off to Africa. Most of the flight was clouds but the plane had this really neat touch screen display that I could use to track my flights progress from Belgium to Cotonou and I was lucky enough to get a window seat. So when I saw that we were flying over Africa I looked out of the window and was finally able to see the African plains! I may have even spotted a pack of zebras! j/k. Haha.

I landed in Benin around 8pm-ish local time (the whole concept of time change in itself confuses me). The airport is a different world compared to JFK. For one thing we didn’t have a port (?) to walk through. No, we pretty much just walked right off the plane onto a bus with no seats and were taken to the zoo that Cotonou calls baggage claim. After rescuing my luggage I was finally able to make it out of the airport onto another bus to our hotel (?). We ate Pizza!!! And took our Malaria prophylaxis!!!  I must salute Peace Corps here. They did amazing with taking care of our lodging for the first few nights. I feel like we stayed in 5 star resorts compared to everything else I’ve seen these past two weeks. They fed us well, and gave us so much useful (cough cough) information. I’m serious about everything but the useful information. I understand why they had to tell us things like “be safe” and “be secure”. Turn on your RADAR, blah blah blah… but it wasn’t anything my mother didn’t tell me a thousand times or that I couldn’t and didn’t read for myself in the loads of books they gave us. Idk. Maybe I just bore easy, I’m sure it was very helpful for some of the others. However, I was very happy to see that most (all but two) of the staff were Beninese. I don’t know why this surprised my white washed mind so. It was very nice meeting the intelligent, poised professionals and being welcomed to their country, by them. I also had a chance to meet the ambassador of the country who kindly invited us to use his pool every Saturday, or maybe it was Sunday? I’ll find out eventually. I doubt I’ll be doing much swimming anytime soon with all of this “useful” information I’m receiving.

Aside from being welcomed by the lovely staff here I was also welcomed by a not so pleasant host. Hello humidity! Never did I know humidity until I arrived in Benin. The heat is fine. I love the African sun kissing my skin, nothing is better. But feeling stuck to myself all the time? Not so great. Benin really is beautiful, if you just look past the trash on the street and look up at the people or even higher to the trees. Or even higher than that at night and see a sky full of more stars you ever knew existed. If you observe the colorful fabrics, the beautiful dark skin, the tall trees ripe with fresh fruit it’s quite easy to be taken aback. What does Benin smell like? Depends on where you are I’d imagine. But from where I stand the majority of the time it smells like burnt trash. It reminds me of late afternoons in Bamberg, SC when my dad would burn trash, except its all the time here. Unless it smells like fumes but then its fumes + burnt trash, smoked fish + burnt trash, whatever’s cooking + burnt trash, etc. In Cotonou (the biggest city in Benin but not the capital) you may be fooled into thinking you are not in an underdeveloped country if you take in the tall buildings and well paved roads. But drive 15 minutes from the center in any direction and you will as soon as I did be hit with the reality. I know I quickly remembered my reason for being here. Cotonou is city loud, but Port-Novo (the actual capital) is a different type of loud. Close your eyes and imagine hundreds of voices talking in at least 5 or so languages at once, screaming pigs, goats, children, and horns honking. At the resort in Port-Novo I was blessed with the familiar sounds of the Adhan and Quran being recited in the background. Of course I was too preoccupied receiving “useful” information to make it -_- … I recant… I can’t really describe the food just yet since most of that I have been eating is pretty standard, rice, chicken, salad, yogurt, even the spices are pretty norm to me coming from an Islamic background. But Stay tuned. I just moved in with my host family and I’m sure I’ll soon be eating some traditional cuisine.

From Africa

When I think of the last time I posted I feel ashamed of myself. I mean how could I lead you all on and then just leave you hanging like that? Well the blame can be equally split between the Peace Corps and Africa. Seriously though guys, my mom can attest for me, two weeks prior to my departure, la Corps de la Paix kindly blessed me with loads of paperwork including some 3 hour long test. Add that to working up until a week before I was scheduled to leave and my much needed but tiring trip to NY and well, I was very busy. But enough of that, I mean aside from you future volunteers out there who may be reading this no one really cares about the stresses behind actually getting here. You all only care about the pictures right? Ok well I will try to upload pictures but as I am writing this I am not actually connected to the internet. The one time I have actually tried connecting to the internet I paid for an hours’ worth of internet and was only granted 20 minutes of usable time because it is SOOO SLOW. What I did discover in those 20 minutes was that no one was worried enough to send an email checking to see if my plane crashed or not. But hey in case you were curious, I am GREAT! I  Aside from a slight bout with food poisoning my health has been faring well. My French is coming along and I really have just been devoting my time to becoming integrated.

 I want to do these posts a little different. I want you to experience Africa through me because I know a lot of my family has never and may never be able to come here. So what I am going to do is try to describe my experiences through all 5 senses; sight, scent, touch, sound, and taste.

I started writing this post July 1^st, continued July 12^th, posted on July 23^rd, 2013. I’m sorry. I mean what else I can really say. Oh well, here you go. Blog moi. Enjoy.

*try to excuse the poor writing, most of my blogging is done after many hours in the African sun. J