One thing that I don’t miss about being in high school

This afternoon, I was biking to work at one of my friend’s houses when I stopped outside the large high school by my house to buy some bananas. (One of the things that always returns with the start of the school year is the ladies selling food on the street near the school. Pro tip: some of the best food in Benin can be found in the cafeteria of the local school.)

When more students started appearing on the street, I checked my watch and cursed to myself when I saw I had happened down the street in front of the high school right when the students were getting out of class.

The students who I teach at my school are much younger than the students that attend this high school. At my school, we have what you could call the equivalent of 6-8^th grade. This high school has 6^th grade to senior year.

This fact plus a tendency for Beninese students to start school later than you would in America meant that a lot of the students who were streaming out the schoolyard across from me were teenagers. Most of whom were boys. Some of whom were less than three years younger than me.

I generally try to avoid or ignore any interactions with Beninese teenaged boys. Take teenaged boys in the US then add being raised in a misogynistic society then add an extra dose of cockiness and you would get a typical Beninese teenaged boy.

As I was paying for my bananas, one started yelling at me in English.

“Do you like the fruit?” he asked.

I ignored him.

He tried again. “White lady. Do you like the fruit?”

I still ignored him. The idea that I did not want to talk to him did not enter into his perception of this interaction.

“She must speak Spanish,” he said to his friends as they walked down the street.

Day 334:

I learn that Beninese preteens flirt with each other the same way that American preteens do. Teasing, play slapping, stealing the other’s notebooks. All of it.

It appears that puberty being unabashedly awkward is a universal truth.