A few first impressions

“If you could take an airplane to any country, where would you go?”

The president of the PTA in my village looks puzzled at the question I’ve posed at him across the vinyl-covered table at the buvette.

“Why would I want to leave my village?” he responds after a thoughtful moment. “It’s my village.” My American sense of globalization is lost here in Mayamon, the village where I will be living for the next two years.

The village proper is about 3,200 people, most of whom greet each other by name on the street and are able to ask specifically about each member of someone’s family.

Mayamon is the most rural community in which I have lived. My front yard is more the territory of the chickens, goats and pigs than the territory of children’s games, as it is in the US.

We have electricity, but few have running water.

We eat what is available in the fields: igames (yams) and manioc (cassava). The market every five days offers tomatoes, eggs and onions among other things. We eat a lot of the same things because that’s what available. You can’t have an enormous craving for macaroni and cheese when you’ve never eaten macaroni and cheese.

There are boutiques that sell packaged items: powdered milk, instant coffee, pasta, couscous, all of which have come from countries my neighbors will most likely never visit.

About a quarter of the people that I encounter every day speak only Ife, the local language. This drastically reduces the chance that this quarter of the population will ever travel farther than the next village.

I will rest in Mayamon for two years. And then I will hail a taxi on which I will load the contents of my house. It will drive me, first, to Cotonou, then to the airport where I will travel home by airplane, an experience that many of the people I will have lived with for the past two years will never have. Not because they can’t but because they have no desire. They were born here. They studied here. They started their families here. They started their lives here, and they will end their lives here.