Step 2: Reintegration

I returned to my village after my five-week absence (16 days in the US, 19 days Cotonou) with the same assumption that I believe most people have a tendency to hold when they leave a place: nothing will have changed since you left.

It’s a false hope that I continued to hold on to even after having spent two weeks getting this myth busted. The city where I lived for 18 years had changed. The people with whom I had lived for 4 years had changed. I had changed.

But, in all these circumstances, the easiest changes to notice were the physical: my exit off I-70 is now one of those where you drive on the left side of the road, my roommate who was always pro-Droid now has an iPhone, I’m much darker and my hair is more blonder than when I left.

And so, when I came back to my village, those were things that I noticed first: The boutique where I buy eggs and phone credit now has a concrete front porch with latticework that I admire they were able to finish in the time I was gone. (There is less direction and scheduling in construction here than in the US.) The road in front of the market has been repaired. To accommodate an increase in students, I now teach my 6eme class under a roof of palm fronds and on a chalkboard painted on the side of one of the buildings.

It was my work partner who noticed the non-physical changes first. “You look good,” he told me when he saw me for the first time. “You look healthier.”

Whether he intended to talk about my mental health or not, he isn’t the only one who has commented on how I’m more talkative and happier and more of myself than I was the last few months I was in Benin.

So, maybe while it’s the physical things that change the easiest, it’s the other changes that mean more. Eventually, that porch will fall down. And eventually, I’ll be teaching all my classes in a classroom again (Inshallah). But hopefully, my students will remember the kind of teacher and the kind of person I was for longer.