Thoughts from places: Lessons in a Beninoise backyard

In the evenings, after I’ve spent a couple hours in my house by myself, I usually feel the need to leave. I usually end up wandering over to the side of the village where I lived for two weeks in August, where there are more people I feel less awkward with when we’re sitting in silence.

Last night, I wandered over to Paula’s house, a girl who has known the previous two volunteers here and doesn’t mind me sitting with her while she works. From her yard, you can see the mountains to the south and you can catch as much of the wind as is blowing that day. Not a bad place to pass a few hours.

Last night, as I watched Paula make dinner for her family in the open air, I thought about how much the education we’d received differed and thus, how much our concepts of what it was important to know would differ.

I, after my 17 years of formal education, can write you a paragraph free of passive voice, can solve for “x” in an algebraic equation and can tell you about the sociological theories of neo-Marxism. Paula was educated in how to wash clothes by hand, how to carry water in a basin on her head and how to build a fire without lighter fluid.

Our educations were different because what we needed to know was different. The contexts of our lives were different. I have lived the majority of my life with a machine to wash my clothes, water that pours from a faucet and a stove that heats up after I rotate a nozzle.

But now, it seems that we’ve switched places. She is trying to complete high school, while I have been buying purified water for the past two days because my basin is empty and I don’t have the resources to fetch it from the pump myself.

It seems as though as long as I keep putting myself in new situations, my education will never really stop.