This weekend marks the first of the two half-marathons that I will be running this year in Benin (the second is a fundraiser for our Gender and Equality programs) and the second time that I will be running this particular half-marathon.
I used to hate running in Benin. The combination of my skin tone and the doxycycline I take for malaria means that I hardly ever come back without a slight red tinge to my face and upper chest, despite how much sunscreen I coat myself with beforehand. Not to mention that Benin, in general, is a hot country. Afterward, until I take a shower, I leave a slight wet mark on any surface I touch in my house. But mainly, it’s the direction I run itself.
When I started running, I chose to run down the path that seemed the most logical to me: the red dirt road that passes directly in front of my house and winds its way into the bush. It’s actually a terrible path (it’s uphill on the way back, has little shade and gets a little washed out in parts), but once I started, I kept running it despite its major flaw of passing in front of the 2000-student high school down the street from me.
Imagine the crowds that form on the street in front of the school. Imagine teachers coming in and out of the campus on their motorcycles. Imagine 2000 high school students watching you and yelling at you as you run by. I learned quickly how to plan my runs so that I would never be near the high school while the students were changing classes.
The thing is, that recently, I’ve started not to care whether the students see me or not. Maybe it’s that my music is loud enough now that I can’t hear them. Maybe it’s that I’m running with my friend’s GPS so I know that I’m passing them at 10 kilometers per hour (about a 10-minute mile), which, for me, is not a speed at which I scoff. Maybe it’s that I’ve finally accepted that teenagers are teenagers anywhere and that (like when I was a teenager) their bark is always worse than their bite.
I’m not proud to admit that I’m intimidated by Beninese teenagers (especially the male senior year students, who are really only a couple years younger than me, if that). In some ways, this country has made me stronger and less timid than I was before I got here. In some ways, this country has made me weaker and more timid than I was before I got here. Where that will leave me in 8 months, I’m not sure.
I am sure, though, that I will be trying to outrun it.