I miss quality control, justice, soup, chilli, and order.

I’ve been sick with diarrhea and fever for the past 3 days. Everything is different in Benin, including illness. The diarrhea I experience here is unlike anything I knew back home. I’m talking 72 hours of yellow colored water shooting out of my ass. Yes this may be TMI and sorry if you’re eating but at least you can drive to a Wendy’s or Panera bread and get chili or soup to ease your discomfort if you so choose to do so.  At least you can run to a toilet and throw-up or shit instead of being stuck to a plastic bucket for most of the day. At least when you buy frozen chicken you know that there is a temperature that that chicken has been kept at and you don’t have to worry so much about getting salmonella poisoning from eating it. Ok, I’ll get back to my story now.

Despite being sick for most of this week I’ve been determined to get work done because most of June I was away from my village. So I went to my ONG on Monday, Health Center on Tuesday, and planned a Moringa session for Wednesday. BTW, riding a bike with diarrhea is not a good idea and that is my main form of transportation. I’ll just leave that at that. Monday morning had my weekly meeting at my ONG and stopped by my health center to inform the head that I’d like to do a session on Moringa transformation. He was all on board and said he’d inform the staff. Monday night things started going downhill and the chamber pot came out and stayed out for the remainder of that night. Broke out with a fever in the night and then Tuesday morning pulled myself out of the bed, popped two aspirin, and visited the latrine before heading off to go do some growth monitoring. I scarcely made it through that and rushed back home for the rest of the day.

I woke up 10pm Tuesday night so hungry and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I didn’t have my tools on hand. I usually have some bread or hot cereal on hand to eat when I get sick, but because market day wasn’t until Wednesday l was not prepared.   It was raining so I went to sit on my porch and enjoy one of the things that bring me a little comfort here- thunderstorms. I’m sitting on my porch trying to hide its cries with the sounds of the storm when I get a text from a village friend, my English club work partner. He was sending it to check in but since he was the only one that had that night I was honest with him (maybe not as honest as I’ve been with you all) and told him that I was sick and hadn’t eaten all day. I thought I scared him away and then 15 minutes later he called me letting me know he was on his way over. He had told his wife about my situation and she cooked me hot cereal and sent that over with some mint vodka infused with medicinal roots. This act of kindness was made even more special because of the fact that it was raining, and Beninese are known to stop everything when it rains; school, work, I mean seriously everything. So I was very grateful and he hung out with me for a good 20 minutes. He is an English teacher and speaks better English than I’ve heard come from some Americans I know and so I was able to talk to him in English about my problems. At the end of the night I went to bed relieved, full, and slightly buzzed.

My landlady woke me up Wednesday morning from a very sound sleep talking about the electric bill. Or rather I should say trying to cheat me out of my money. Normally I get my bill see the amount, we divide it between five houses and everyone pays their part. I don’t know why this morning she felt she could call me up give me a price and just expect me to pay it. No, no, no. So I drag my still very sick and tired self out of my bed to go meet her and discuss the bill and lady isn’t even at her office. I was heated. Mind you this is the same day that I’ve scheduled a training on Moringa with my health center. My plan was to stay in my bed and save up energy until I had to go and do that.  Now back to this electric bill business, this is a common problem among many volunteers. Their landlords will try and unfairly divide the bill and give their friends a small amount (sometimes nothing) and get the volunteer, who in their mind is rich, to pay the bulk of the bill. As I said, not I. I end up talking it out with my supervisor and the next day everything was settled. Later on Wednesday afternoon I show up at my health center and of course the head of the center who I spoke with Monday has not informed anyone, everyone is clueless, he himself is off travelling somewhere, and on top of that the Midwife is a bitch (this is nothing new though) and ignores me when I speak to her. After dealing with my landlady that morning I had no more energy to expend on being angry. I just chuckle, go back home and get in bed for the rest of the day.

Frustrations like that may seem small to you reading this, but these are the things that really make me miss America. In America, we have laws and regulations for how things need to work and if people do not follow these laws and regulations you can call the police or some other higher up and they will go to prison or at least get fined. Here, yeah there are laws but hardly anyone including the police follows them and those who do can be paid off so they might as well not even exist. In America time is money. If someone is late are doesn’t follow through with a task they can be held responsible, you have the right to be angry with them. Here, no one even understands why you’re angry and say things like “God doesn’t rush”. Bitch I’m not God. There are many things that happen here every day that I don’t post on this blog because I don’t want to give a tainted vision of Benin. Because I honestly do love this country and I love what it is doing for me as a person. But there are times when everything happens at once, when you miss your family and haven’t talked to your mom in 4 months, you’re sick and your comforts aren’t around, you want chicken soup but you can’t trust the chicken, you want chili and there is no Wendy’s or ground beef to be found, or when you just want things to make sense and nothing does.
 

I’m still alive and kicking…

For all the people that told me that I’d never amount to nothing, and for them tricks that always talked smack and tried to hold me back when I was just trying to get through life, and all the outcasts in the struggle. Know what I’m saying, baby, baby…

I haven’t exactly “made it” yet but I feel myself closer than I’ve ever felt before. Arriving in this country there were things I never thought I had the strength to do. Like stand before 50 plus people and speak in English and French. Break my own rules. Run 35km .Accept myself as God has made me. Open myself to help. Acknowledging my strengths, limits, faults. And so much more. I may be even closing in on choosing a career (I know let’s have a moment of silence for that one).

So reading that last passage you may think that Benin has been cake for me. I do not want to lie, because it hasn’t. It’s been hard as hell and I judge no volunteer who decides to peace out before 2 years.  But honestly, all the hardships that it offers just make it that much more meaningful. There are still moments where I wonder if I’m cut out for this, where I cry my eyes out, where I think it might be better for me to pack it all up. But I pull through and for me this is how:

1. I pray. We all have our own ways of doing this. For some it may be manifested in meditating or yoga but for me I’ve gotten through some of my toughest moments by taking a few minutes of my time and just praying and talking to Allah.

2. Thinking about the struggles I’ve experienced in my past. When I’m facing difficulties here I like to think back on times that challenged me in the past and think about how I got through them. I like to think about how they made me stronger in the end. And think about how no matter what, when I manage to get to the next day, the problems never seemed as bad as they did the day before.

3. Putting me first. I know I’m here to help the people but I can’t help anyone if I’m not OK first. So I do whatever I need to do to stay sane. Everyone may not agree with my methods. For example, I don’t like being called out of my name (refer to previous blog for more info), and no matter how much I tell people this they still continue. So my solution is that wherever I go my headphones go with me, sometimes I have them in without music. I ignore everyone that  I don’t want to talk to between my home and my destination and when I run into someone later and they’re like “oh hey I said hello to you the other day and you ignored me” I tell them I didn’t hear them. Problem solved. Peace Corps encourages integration, but I’m integrated enough and if this is what I have to do to not get frustrated every time I leave my house this is what I’ll do.

SN: Maggie is back and possibly pregnant!!!

Home is where the heart is

June has been a crazy month. . .

• ·         I participated in a cross country relay run

The so I ran/walked 35k in the Benin sun. Not easy work for a girl of my size and under the African sun but I did it for the girls and to finance gender equality projects and I don’t regret one step.

• ·         Benin received 54 new volunteers

It was really great seeing the new volunteer’s fresh off the plane in Benin. Through their questions and enthusiasm I was brought back down and forced to refocus on why it was I set out to do this journey a year ago. Welcome to Benin you all, enjoy the ride!

Words of wisdom: The hardest thing to do at times is to notice self-change. We change a little every day, and we never stop. Think about where you are now and where you were 5 years ago. Note the old you and the you today, congratulate yourself for your growth and accomplishments and set out to change your faults. 

• ·         I was chosen to be a one of the trainers for these volunteers

Training was heavy but definitely useful. I tend to get along better with people older than me than I do with people my same age.  It was definitely helpful getting a better understanding of why us people of the “millennium generation” are the way we are .

• ·         I helped redo a training manual for other health volunteers

Long and hard work but paying it forward so that the next group has it even a little easier than I have had it is always worth it.

• ·         I celebrated one year in Benin

This basically means that good food is only one year away from my grasp.

• ·         I was a counselor at a week-long girl’s camp.

Around 50 girls from the tops of their classes were chosen to spend a week in the city of Djougou, for some it was there first time ever getting a chance to leave their village. Seeing girls come in at the beginning of the week shy and closed off and leave at the end open and empowered made every second of this week worth it. Some of these girls opened up to me and it is really heartbreaking when you hear what life has thrown at them already in only 16 years of living. I felt honored to be a part of this week, sorry Camp Ramapo, but one week of Camp Success made this my best summer ever.  And I was chosen to be one of the two directors of camp next year. I said a BOOM CHICKA BOOM!

Unfortunately this all meant that I had to be MIA from my village for four weeks. Time away from village is tougher for some volunteers than others. I personally don’t like it and try to avoid it when I can. For one, when your village doesn’t see you for a month they all think you’ve gone back to America and when you show back up are all looking for “les bons choses de là-bas”, or in English, presents. Also when you’re gone for that long you feel overwhelmed with work, or at least I do. I feel like as the volunteer of my village and I owe them a certain amount of work. It’s a really weird type of guilt. The final thing that really sucks from being away from village for a long time is that if you have a pet, like my sweet ball of fur Maggie, they tend to go missing. There aren’t any places that babysit animals, hell children for that matter. If you don’t live close to any Americans you can’t just leave the animal in your house give someone a key, and expect someone to come in and feed her and for nothing to be missing when you get back. So you leave your animal outside but even if you give your neighbors food to give her while you’re gone it doesn’t guarantee that your neighbors will do that or that they won’t wonder into someone’s sauce before you get back.  So my month was productive, inspiring, and an eye-opener to too many things, but the downfall is that Maggie is goneL.