I’m sitting in one location for a long time surrounded by English. I’m spending the afternoon with other volunteers listening to American ‘90s music. Or I’ve spent an hour and a half at the cyber. The weather is mild. I haven’t been called Yovo in a while.
All of a sudden it hits me: I’ve forgotten I’m in Africa.
“Bonjour Maman. Un ananas s’il vous plait.”
The woman removes the yellow metal tray about 2 feet in diameter from on top of her head, and places it on the ground. She removes the machete from around her waist and, holding the pineapple by the green leaves, proceeds to peel the rind from the fruit. After, with a few quick cuts, she slices the pineapple onto a metal plate and then slides the chunks into a black plastic bag. She stabs on the pieces with a toothpick and hands me the bag. I will eat the entire pineapple by myself.
I take my usual spot on the wooden bench that doesn’t quite sit even on the sandy ground. I am joined by the three other Yovos in my French class. Each of us balance a plastic plate of rice, beans and sauce – our normal lunch here.
“Hole in the wall” would be an apt term for what has become our usual lunch spot if it had walls. The wooden structure has a back wall and a slat roof that leaks when it rains. We came here the first class and have continued to come mostly because it is close and we aren’t ripped off.
The lady nods in recognition of us now from behind the table where she serves. A metal bowl of rice is to her left covered with a cloth to keep out the flies. Next to it is a bowl of spaghetti noodles and a plastic container of powdered manioc, a root vegetable similar to a potato that adds calories more than taste. A large pot of black-eyed peas is in front of the rice. These are served with either rice or manioc and then topped with a spicy red sauce. A plastic container of fried fish is on the right. This and a hardboiled egg can be added to our rice and beans for an extra 100 CFAs. On an extra good day, there is also a cheese similar to paneer on the menu.
The lady doesn’t ever say much, but I wonder what she thought the first time a group of Yovos walked up to her and gestured wildly at the pots in front of her.
I scoop the last spoonful into my mouth and hand my plate and spoon to one of the girls who is washing dishes in a plastic tub. I pay and walk back down the stone road to class. “Until tomorrow,” I say.
In my month and some change with the Peace Corps, I’ve found that my future tends to be handed to me in the form of a plastic spiral-bound notebook.
When I first arrived in country, I was handed four of such notebooks: polices, training manual, medical manual, cookbook, eerily similarly to the manuals I’ve received at conferences in the past in the US. These however were nothing compared to the power of the manual that I received two days ago.
All the stagers were gathered under a grove of palm trees at the agricultural center where we have events that involve all 66 of us. Our training director Gisele, with the help of our program managers, was about to tell us the location in Benin where we would each be working for the next 2 years.
She called the first region of the country, her face full of excitement facing 66 faces wearing expressions of anxiety, worry and utter inability to comprehend what was happening.
Tom was the first stager called for northern Benin. He walked forward, kissed our TEFL coordinator on the cheek and then received the information packet about his site. After Tom, six more fellow TEFLers were called for the same region. I was not one of them.
My name was not called until three regions later. I was the third for the Collines, the mountain/plateau area slightly south of the center of the country.
I walked forward in the front of the group, shook my coordinator’s hand and was handed a green plastic spiral-bound notebook that contained about 20 pages of information about my city, house, community and school for the next 2 years. It meant much more than the words typed on those 20 sheets of paper.
I flipped open the first page.
Leo, Loic and I had taken our usual spots at the wooden table in the dining room that has become our designated location for nightly card games since I’ve moved in. I’m facing the window, with my back to the living room, so I am the last person to spy the Sorcerer.
Leo first spots him in the middle of a hand of “pique,” but doesn’t say anything. It is Loic who sounds the alarm.
“Ahh. Mon dieu,” he says. I sit up straight in the chair to see what he is pointing at.
On the concrete wall not quite in the corner is a three-inch long cockroach.
This is not my first encounter with a Beninoise cockroach, but it’s the first time one has dared enter into my home, a few feet from where I sleep, even closer to where I drink coffee in the morning.
“Me,” Leo says. “When I see one of those in the shower, I do not wash myself.”
We decide the cockroach must die. Although, none of us can image the endeavor that we are about to undertake.
Leo calls first for a shoe. Loic brings him a green and yellow flip flop from the back garden. I am skeptical at the strength of a flip flop against this animal, but Leo and Loic have far more experience with such wild creatures.
Leo launches his shoe. It grazes the cockroach, but it does not even move an antennae.
Leo is dumbfounded by the cockroach’s lack of fear.
“It is a sorcerer,” he declares. “That is the only explanation for why it did not move.”
Leo calls next for the insecticide. As a cautionary measure, Loic and I each climb on top of a chair. Leo has given himself as a sacrifice for this mission. He sprays the insecticide.
This time, the Sorcerer moves. It scuttles off the wall and along the floor into the living room. It squeezes into the corner in a manner so it is impossible to crush it with the shoe.
Leo tries the insecticide again. This only serves to piss off the Sorcerer. It flies into hallway and lands on the wall inches away from my open bedroom door.
Leo looks heavenward. “Why have you brought your black magic into my house, you Sorcerer?”
Eyes locked on the Sorcerer, we run into my room. Loic slams the door behind us. Leo and I try to formulate a new battle plan. We decided the best shot is the insecticide.
Leo alone will leave the room, hit the Sorcerer and then retreat as fast as possible. Then we will wait for the insecticide to work its magic.
We cautiously open the door.
The Sorcerer is staring right at us.
Leo shoots the insecticide directly at the Sorcerer then ducks back into the room under my arm. I slam the door.
We wait.
The insecticide says it works instantly, but there are not specific instructions for sorcerers.
We open the door after 5 minutes. The Sorcerer is belly up in front of my door.
The three of us collapse in a fit of giggles on the tile floor.
“Emily,” Loic calls later. “I want to show you something.” I step out of my room that still reeks a little of insecticide. He is pointing to another Benin-sized cockroach on the wall.
“Bonsoir Monsieur,” I say. I close my door to the sound of Loic cackling at my salutation. One can only deal with so many sorcerers in one night.
The first interaction I had with my fifteen-year-old brother Leo was his introduction in broken English.
“Me, I am called Leo,” he said while I sat at the wooden kitchen table eating rice with a sauce of tomatoes and onions, my first dinner at my family’s house.
I was tired. My arms hurt from carrying my 58 and 52 –pound luggage. The plus vite French with a Beninoise accent was beyond my abilities. At this point, I would take any English someone would willingly say to me.
Based on my latest language exam, I have reached a language proficiency with French that allows me to continue as a volunteer, but most of my days are still defined by the thoughts and feelings that I would be unable to convey in French.
Leo is the one person who is not American who can at least attempt to understand what I’m saying when my French fails me. (As long as I speak slowly and clearly enough in English.)
There are many times when I feel like I’m talking to myself. At night, when my French fails me more, my run-on sentences in English tend to end with the phrase “And I’m talking so fast right now I know Leo can’t understand what I’m saying.”
He replies, “Oh Emily. Your English is too fast for me.”
It is then that he understands what I’m working with everyday.
I’m in my twenty-second year, and I don’t know how to boil water.
I’m sitting on the plastic chair in my room. I am sweating profusely as I have just biked home from class. I am ridiculously thirsty - tongue turning green from dehydration thirsty – and I can’t do anything about it.
The white plastic water filter that stands about 2 ½ feet off my table is empty. I finished the last of the water in the reservoir this morning by filling my Nalgene water bottle.
To get more water is easy; there’s a spigot about 20 feet from where I am currently sitting. To get water that is potable involves heating the water to a rolling boil, sustaining the boil for 3 minutes, letting the water cool, dumping the water in my filter and then letting the water filter through for the next hour or so.
The real problem, though, is not dehydration. I don’t know how to light the charcoal needed to start the fire to boil the water.
I pride myself on being an independent person. I rarely ask people to do me favors, and I gain a certain sense of satisfaction from being able to do things by myself. But now that I’ve moved to a foreign country where I had to relearn how to brush my teeth to avoid getting sick, rarely do I get to do things without asking for help.
I am older than my siblings here, but Loic, who is 11, knows far more about this world than I do. For now, my siblings are my teachers – in French, in how to wash your clothes, in how to reset the electric circuit in your room, in where to throw your trash, in how to sweep, in who has the best avocado sandwiches, in where to buy flipflops and how much you should bargain down the price, in where to get clothes sewn, in how to respond appropriately to greetings, in how to boil water.
Gabriel is the 6-month-old son of the woman who comes over four times a week to help my Mama here prepare dinner. He spends most of his time at the house with his chest to his mom’s back, secured by a piece of cloth she ties around her chest. His brown feet stick straight out as he is momentarily suspended parallel to the ground when his mom bends over to fill a bucket with water from the tap. His mouth is open in a gurgle of happiness.
However, with one glance in my direction his expression changes to one of shock then fear. His mouth opens in a cry.
Six-month-old Gabriel cannot fathom my skin tone anymore than I can fathom why we as a humanity have always found the ability to systematically rank ourselves by race.
I am the first white person Gabriel has ever seen. I am the first white person that many of the infants I encounter have seen. I cannot tell you about the adults because all the adults I’ve encountered are socialized enough to know it’s not usually acceptable to point at a person’s arm and burst into tears.
I’ve written before about the word “Yovo,” the term the Beninoise use in general for everyone who does not have an African skin tone. There is also a song that normally accompanies me whenever I travel outside my home. It’s catchy enough that it becomes stuck in my head by the time I reach my destination.
These things don’t make me angry. They don’t even really annoy me anymore. Mainly I’ve accepted them as a side effect of the respect and deference with which I am generally treated here. At mass, people use two hands to shake my one, a sign of respect in Beninoise culture. People greet me using the formal version of verbs.
It is essentially, the opposite of what a child like Gabriel would experience if the situation were reversed. If he was the only noir in a neighborhood of blanches, history has shown his experience would be much different. For now, I will take the tears.
The important part about biking in Porto Novo is that you don’t die during all those moments in which you are positive you are going to die. Every morning except Sunday. I leave my house at 7:30 and ride for 20 minutes down a one dirt road, three turns on three paved roads and a final right turn onto another dirt road.
At college, on my commute to class, I used to see other middle class white students, professors carrying briefcases and neighbors walking their dogs. Now, I pass the woman on the corner who sells oranges every day, motorcycle taxi drivers honking at prospective pedestrian clients and children who run alongside me until their parents call after them. There is also the occasional goat and the van carrying way more people than there are seat belts.
It took me a while to become used to the nearly constant sound of horns – the language of the motorcycle drivers in Benin. A short honk is a warning that someone is passing. Longer is a taxi driver asking if you need a ride. More than two and it’s “What the hell are you doing Yovo? You just completely cut me off.”
By the time I arrive at class, sweat has collected on the back of my neck, and I’m realizing that the shower I took this morning was completely useless. After I dismount, I wipe my face with my handkerchief and lock my bike to the bike nearest to it. I know it belongs to a fellow volunteer. We’re the only ones crazy enough to try to bike in this traffic
One of the hardest things about communicating on a day-to-day basis in French is that people expect you know what you are actually saying. Not being in a classroom setting means that people aren’t prepared for the guessing game that is what is the word that you’re actually trying to say or the tense that you’re actually trying to use.
I came home one day from class to find my brother Loic outside helping his mom make dinner. Loic is 11, which normally means that we can communicate pretty well, and he also is good at explaining things multiple ways if I don’t know the words in French he used initially. I think he also enjoys that he knows more than a 22-year-old a lot of the time.
On this day, I casually asked Loic, “As-tu jouer au foot aujourd’hui?” Did you play soccer today? But what actually came out was “Vas-tu jouer au foot aujourd’hui?” Are you going to playing soccer today?
I played soccer with him in our back garden for the next hour.
Loic would like nothing more than to play soccer all day. I showed him the ball I brought the fourth day I was here, and since then, he and that blue ball have been best friends. Usually, I am woken up from my naps by the thump of Loic kicking the ball against the concrete wall that surrounds the back garden.
After it’s too dark to play outside, he is poised in front of the computer playing virtual soccer. He pauses only when it’s time for his favorite American TV show on Wednesday nights, Dirty Sexy Money.
That he has a sister from the US who has heard of Ronaldo and Messi is a point of pride for him.
Loic, at 11, is still in that age range when he can cut through tension and bad days simply by being himself. He doesn’t understand why but he comprehends that there are few things that make me laugh like when he runs down the hallway yelling that he is “the boss.”
In the past days, my family has become significantly invested in improving my comprehension of French. Loic, more than anyone else, has taken it upon himself to happily correct my every misspelling and incorrect choice of helping verb with the past participle.
He can also be easily recruited to listen to my Missouri pronunciation of French words. Once I got over the idea that a boy whose voice still hasn’t changed yet is more of a grammarian than I am currently, Loic is a great teacher.
I hear he is the boss.
Nice, white American legs are a delicacy for the mosquitoes here. I just tried counting how many bug bites I had on my right leg, and I lost count around 39.
Hello mosquito. On today’s menu we have a nice selection freshly imported from Missouri.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, scratch my legs raw for about three minutes and then go back to sleep. I pride myself on the number of mosquitoes that I can kill during French class that day.
I’ve always been one to receive more than my share of mosquito bites, but I’m starting to feel like the mosquitoes and I don’t quite have a balanced relationship.
On the plus side, I’m not concerned with the possibility that I smell bad because I am always scented with eau de bug spray.
Last night, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a serious problem. I lay on my mattress and contemplated my options. It was 3 a.m. of the first night of my homestay with a family in Porto Novo with whom I’ll be staying for the next six weeks, who had tried so hard to understand my Fran-glais when I arrived. And I had to use the bathroom.
Bad.
And the bathroom is 100 feet away out from under my mosquito net tucked under my mattress, down the hallway, out the locked back door and down the sidewalk to the last door on the right. There will be electricity. There may be soap. There will not be toilet paper.
As far I could see it, I had three options:
1. Try to go back to sleep
I would run the risk of waking up every 20 minutes for the next 4 hours only to contemplate the same dilemma. This also ran the major risk of an incident in the morning that I was well aware my French didn’t cover.
2. Try to use something in my room
During the 5 days of training we had so far, I had already heard stories of volunteers peeing in buckets or plastic bags when worse came to worst. If I encountered someone in the morning while en route to disposing of whatever I used, I would again be in a situation where my French would fail.
3. Make the journey
Yes, the most logical answer, but when you’ve been bombarded with culture shock for the past 5 days and woken up to roosters crowing at 5:20 every morning, logic sometimes fails you.
I chose option 1 for a while, only to wake up again at 4:30. I listened to the sounds of the house to see if anyone else was up. I heard the birds in the courtyard. I heard the call to prayer from the mosque down the street. I heard some roosters as well. But my house, which only 5 hours ago was filled with my family yelling French back and forth from the kitchen and their rooms, the Benin news broadcast and doors scraping on the red stone floor, was completely silent.
I lay there, and with each minute, I moved closer to choosing option 2, but not by choice. At about 5:20, I heard a door scrape. I tried to think of the French for “I have to use the bathroom” that I hoped would be enough of an explanation if I encountered anyone.
I scraped my door open, the first test. There was no one in the hallway. I clicked on my headlamp. At the end of the hallway was the major obstacle: the door latched closed across the top. The latch squeaked as soon as I tried to move the metal on metal, but I had come so far, I was not going to stop now. After was seemed like 10 minutes, with one final screech, the door was open.
Trying to live by not caring about what others think about you is, on principle, the way to do it. But when you find yourself in a country where your language is rudimentary and your knowledge of the customs is even less, it’s hard not to want to do everything just right. In the first two days at home, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t gone an hour without committing a cultural taboo. (Let’s not even mention the flashing of my knees on the moto taxi ride to school Saturday.)
But I guess I’m starting to accept that the more I think about myself as a Yovo (the Beninese word for anyone who is not African) the more I’ll stay one. I was so nervous the first night at homestay, my choice phrase was “Je ne comprends pas.” But the less that I think about the nouns, the more I can talk around the word I’ve forgotten.
By the time I was back in bed that first night, I only had 45 minutes left to sleep.
Up at 6.
Breakfast.
Orientation until 10:30.
Croissant and coffee break.
Medical orientation and typhoid shots. (Arm still hurts from the later)
Lunch.
14:30: IT training.
Diversity training until 16:30.
Coffee and croissant break.
16:50: Peer support network orientation.
18:30: Orientation ends. Proceed to the third floor balcony of our dorm at the Beninese seminary where we are staying for what is currently the best view of the city where we’re living but have only seen from a bus window at night and heard from behind a 20-foot cement wall.
My mom gives the best hugs.
I’m just sayin’.
My mom’s hugs could kick your mom’s hugs’ ass in a knock-out hug throwdown.
She’s about the same height as me so I don’t have to squat down too much when I want to bury my head in her neck like I’m four years old still. She still smells the same: Downey fabric softener, Dawn dish soap and occasionally what she’s made for dinner.
My mom has received an Academy Award, a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in hugging. But she’s too modest to put them on display. She keeps them in the laundry room next to the Shout! stain remover.
She’ll never complain that she’s in the middle of something, and she’ll happily hold you as long as you like.
She also excels at the hug-back rub-hair stroke combo. The trifecta.
I’m tellin’ you. It will get you every time.
When you travel with 66 other people, it takes an hour and a half to check in at the airport. By the time you reach the American Airlines desk, the 8 pounds that your bag is over the 50-pound limit hardly fazes the clerk. There have already been bags in front of you that have topped 70 pounds. He instead keeps his eyes focused to the computer screen and slaps a “heavy” sticker on your bag without a second thought.
There are, afterall, still 30 more of these Americans convinced they are going to Africa for the next 2 years to check in.
When you travel with 66 other people, you are always waiting in line. Security, bathrooms, boarding. There is normally 66 other people trying to do the same thing you are.
Although it doesn’t really matter if you’re late; 66 people are about two-thirds of the seats on the airplane.
Traveling with 66 other people, you are a spectacle. No matter how much you try not to be. You will take all the seats at the gate. You will take all the overhead storage. You will be the group of Americans speaking English loudly on a flight from a French-speaking country to another French-speaking country.
When you travel with 66 other people, you fast become thankful for those 66 other people. They talk you into one last American beer during a 6-hour layover. They count you three times before checking in to make sure no one has been lost between the bus stop and JFK. They yell when a red bag is left behind at the gate. They are making this up as much as you are.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when your dad’s crying.
When your dad cries, his eyes turn red behind his plastic black frame glasses. He tries to not make eye contact, so you can’t quite tell what’s happening. But when he tries to speak and his voice comes out hushed and strained, that’s when you know.
You tend to see your dad cry a lot when you’re his youngest daughter and you have a week left before you leave for Africa for the next 27 months. You sometimes notice him looking at you when you’re across the room on the couch typing an email. He’s not trying to see what you’re doing; he’s more trying to see you while you’re still there.
The morning before you leave you’ll wake up not quite sure if he walked into your room while you were still sleeping to look at you one last time before you leave or if it’s just a weird dream.
It’s harder to tell if your dad’s crying when you’re walking through airport security, trying to hide the tears building in your eyes while you remove your shoes. It’s hard to see him when your boarding group has been called and you’re standing with your back to him. It’s hardest to tell 6,301 miles away.
But it will probably end the same way. He’ll take off his glasses and wipe the corners of his eyes. He’ll take a deep breath,and then throw his arms to the side in defiance and he’ll say, “Ok. Enough of this.”
I would paint this in my room if I was this talented.
Writing doesn’t lie. If it’s not what you really want to think about, you can’t write about it.
I spent the last week in New Orleans for my last spring break as a university student. I expected good food and good drinks. What I didn’t expect was not wanting to leave the creaky, metal bunk bed in a room I shared with four people and the bathroom I shared with more at the hostel where we stayed.
Hostels are great places if they are done right. Long story short, this one was done right.
At the end of the week, a reporting project I’m working on took me to Baton Rouge. Downtown, I sat on a metal bench in that looked out over the Mississippi River trying to write about what lay in front of me. But all I could write about was what I had learned from all the people that I had met the last week:
How to travel (all you need is time, money will fall into place), how to dance to jazz (follow the rhythm), how to tell stories (do, all the time, everyone has one), how to how to miss people (don’t, you’ll see the people you need to see again).
It was then that I realized how much you can learn when you least expect it, from a place when you least expected it. I’ll remember NOLA for the beignets, river and crab cake po'boys. But I’ll remember NOLA mainly for the people that made me unable to forget the city.