I will dream of mice tonight

I saw the black dash dart across my front wall out of the corner of my eye. I paused CJ’s press conference on the West Wing and glanced over at my cat. He was asleep on the chair next to me.

It was not my cat.

I was staring directly at the wall the second time it scampered across the room.

My cat was still asleep. So I got my neighbor.

She came with her two sons, one brandishing his dad’s plastic athletic sandal.

We searched the entire room and as one tends to do in these situations, we hoped we couldn’t find it because the mouse had already escaped the way it came in.

Her parting words were, “Well, it won’t do anything. If Dora sees it, he’ll kill it.” She had not seen the way he had batted my hand away when I woke him up earlier to try to incite him to hunt the mouse.

I stood guard for the next 10 minutes. Armed with a plastic bucket under which to trap the mouse, I used my flashlight to search my front room. A mouse did not turn up.

Almost half, if not a majority of the time, things tend to end up here not as I expected. Or I’m put in a situation that I never in my previous life thought I would willingly place myself.

When this happens, I laugh. Because if I thought too much into what I’ve given up in order to live in a house with a mouse and lazy cat on the other side of the world from the people who know me the best, I wouldn’t be able to cope.

I laugh. And then I send a text to another volunteer to see if this has happened to her yet.

I spend the majority of my days laughing and sending text messages.

Author’s note, because I know my parents will ask me about it: as I was typing this blog (and listening to a Modest Mouse-Broken Bells-Deadmau5 playlist) the mouse reappeared, and I’m pretty sure it crawled out under my front door. I’m still disappointed in Dora’s lack of enthusiasm.

There is an African child sleeping on my couch

I’ve been in my village for less than a week, so there is still a bit of shiny new toy feel with me and the kids. That I come from another country is enough reason for kids to want to follow me when I’m riding my bike, stop by to sit with me or walk home.

One girl, Kadupke, has particularly taken a fancy to me. The first time she and her half-sister stopped by my house she told me she was going to stay at my house forever (and she did try really hard to not go home for dinner). She always volunteers to walk me home and holds my hand as we walk along the dirt paths.

It is she who is sleeping on my couch now after walking me home from my host family’s house. I’m trying to nap too (it’s the hour for that here) and as long as she’s quiet, she can stay. It also helps that she’s adorable. 

Breakdown in Erevan

One of my friends asked me recently what I miss most about the US. I responded minus my friends and family, the knowledge that for whatever I want (within reason) there is a store within driving distance that under fluorescent lights, neatly placed on a metal shelf, that item will be sitting.

I visit the closest thing to that for Benin last week when, after our swear-in ceremony, we had 5 hours in Cotonou. That place is called Erevan. It is the first store that I’ve walked into in three months that had fluorescent lights. The first store I’ve visited that had metal shelves. The first store with a tile floor. And shopping carts.

There were aisles with numbers. And fruit imported from a different continent. And cookies packed in plastic containers. And scented candles. And an aisle just for pasta.

There was a clothing section. And an electronics section. And an art supply section. And a small kitchen appliances section. And hair straighteners with the correct voltage and correct plug.

After three months of believing these things didn’t exist and forgetting these things existed, I didn’t know whether to blow my entire pay check on frivolous items, curl up into a ball or find a place to hide so I would never have to leave ala the Smithsonian museum in the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

I live without a lot here, but I also live in many ways entirely different than what my perception of “living in Africa” would be like. I live in a house with a locking front and back door. I have electricity and a cellphone and relatively high-speed and relatively reliable Internet access. I know several places where I can watch satellite television in English. I know even more places where I can get an ice-cold Coke. I have experienced air conditioning at three different locations. Before I left, my western-world formed opinion of what it would mean to live in Africa included none of these items.

I’ve heard stories of volunteers who are disappointed when they get to their posts because they are not living in a hut with a pet lion (which yes, I joked about doing before I came here). They are disappointed because they feel they aren’t having the “real African experience.”

But who are we to say we know what is the real African experience? I have seen no stampedes of wildebeests; there is not an elephant graveyard next door and there are not lions that wander my village at night. But this really is my Beninese experience.

Doucement

It occurred to me last night that there has been a gaping hole in my explanation of Beninese lexicology: the word “Doucement.”

Doucement is the catch-all word of Beninese French. Translated directly into English, it means sweetly. However, there is no one English word that encompasses of its uses.

In actual usage, it my be closest to “Pardon” or “Excuse me.” For example, if you accidently bump someone on the street, “Doucement” is the polite reply. The tone varies slightly but it is difficult to tell whether a person is apologizing for putting you in a situation or blaming you for their situation. 

Loosely, but better translated, “doucement” is also like “carefully.” For example, if you want to tell your motorcycle taxi to drive slower. Usage as “careful” is also accepted. If someone is carrying something breakable or precarious, such as a full bucket of water on his or her head.

An even looser translation is doucement’s usage as “watch out.” For example, when crossing the street, say, “doucement” as a bush taxi or rogue goat runs in front of you.

My favorite is to use doucement to mean closest to “fuck-off.” In these circumstances, it is usually followed by “eh?”. This is normally spoken to you when you are the cause of some incident. For example, you run into a Maman and she drops all the pineapples she’s carrying.

And finally, doucement as the phrase you say when you don’t know what else to say. You don’t really understand what just happened, but a ruckus has occurred. Saying “doucement” will help you appear like you do actually know what you’re doing.

So, you know. Doucement friends. Doucement.

Dinner interruption

“Auntie?” says a voice from my front door.

I look up from the episode of True Blood I’m currently watching. My neighbor is peering back at me through the screen; the lower half of her face is obscured by the wooden frame.

She and her brother normally stop by before dinner. The only clue I have to how old she is is that she doesn’t understand what I’m asking when I ask her how old she is. I know that she likes dancing and playing, but what however-many-years-old don’t?

I wasn’t expecting a visit tonight. I came home late enough that the kids were already inside eating dinner and night was falling. And honestly, I was hoping to quietly sneak into my house and finish making my own dinner. 

But some things are more important than what fate awaits Bill at the vampire tribunal. “Come,” I say as I hit pause on my computer and scoop her into a hug.

There is an African man in my ceiling

I have officially moved to my village, otherwise known as the place where I will be living for the next two years. After three months of having my days planned for me almost down to the minute, myself and all my things were dropped off at my house by a taxi driver who I’m not sure knew what he was getting himself into when he signed up to move two Peace Corps volunteers, all their stuff and one puppy. No schedule. No plan.

My school year doesn’t start for another couple of weeks, so until then, my goal is to leave my house each day. Talk to neighbors. Go to the market. Take a walk.

The effort to accomplish this is why I am now standing in my front room listening to the thuds of the electrician as he crawls around, looking for the answer for why my light doesn’t light.

To get to this point was not as hard as I thought it would be. I did what has helped me the most since I’ve moved here: I asked someone.

As a general introvert and advocate for general independence, this solution did not always occur to me first, nor was it the most desirable. However, admitting that I have no idea what to do or where to start is normally the place where I have to start. 

So this morning, I locked my front door and walked to the boutique of my host family (left the house!) and asked the son if he knew of anyone. He returned ten minutes later with the electrician of the village on the back of his moto. 

Benin is the new London

There are times, many actually, when I find myself comparing this experience to the only other experience that I’ve had living abroad for an extended period of time: when I studied abroad in London for 4 months.

That I’m living in a foreign country on a work visa is really the only thing that these two experiences have in common. But for some reason, I keep returning to that period as validation that the next two years are possible. 

Those that know me know that London changed me. But to say 4 months of barhopping while occasionally working and going to class in a European country is an accurate experience of living abroad is utterly unfair.

I will still testify that was one of the best periods of my life. But now, I’m waiting for Benin to change me as London did. One cannot ride the emotional roller coaster I ride daily without one becoming a different person by the end. I’m ready for something to top London in my life.

An open letter

Dear friends,

I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. I haven’t had the time. I haven’t had the internet. I hadn’t had things to write about.

All of these things are lies.

I haven’t written simply because it’s easier not to write. I haven’t written because it’s much easier. It’s much easier to not try to digest, analyze and then convey this experience to others.

Whenever I try to write it all comes out in clichés. (I’ve found my third family here, everyday is a new adventure, for example.)

And long, convoluted sentences with high reaching concepts that would make my professors in journalism recoil at what I appear to have forgotten when it comes to writing since I’ve graduated. (Like that one.)

In three days, I will be finished with my training. Right now, it feels a lot like I’m back in at the airport in Kansas City wondering what I’ve gotten myself into for the next two years.

My friends, everything is about to change.

Again.

Content

The most surprising thing that I’ve found in Benin the past two months that I’ve lived here is happiness.

Not the happiness of the Beninise. Put on the most recent release from Akon, and they will dance circles around you.

Mine.

There are times when I am struck by overwhelming feelings of pure joy at the relatively mundane task that I am currently completing. I first discovered this phenomenon in high school. It became more frequent in college. Walking to class. Driving around Columbia. Sitting at my desk.

That I would ever experience this feeling in a developing country where peeing on the side of the road is relatively common occurrence was lost on me.

Yes, this is without a doubt the hardest thing that I have, and I’m betting, will ever do in my entire life.

But there are also those times, bursting out laughing with my brothers, dancing to Calvin Harris on the roof of a house that overlooks two teams of Beninese children playing soccer on the pitch below, listening to LCD Soundsystem while I bike to school, that I am one hundred percent sure of the decision that I’ve made for the next two years.

That my life appears to exist here, is the strangest thing to which to I’ve become accustomed. 

The first time

Their faces star at me blankly. The twenty students of my summer school class have no idea what the Yovo gesticulating wildly and speaking in English has just asked them to do.

I’m stuck.

In my head, all my students understand. All of them leave class loving English, and I have inspired them to want to learn more.

There is a lot riding on this fill-in-the-blank verb conjugation exercise.

Unfortunately, my students are lost. And I’m lost to how to help them find the answer.

I desperately glance at my colleague.

This time, I realize I have to ask for help.

He walks to the front of the room and confidently breaks down the exercise on the chalkboard for the students.

“See,” he says. “It’s not hard,” as the students fill in the first question of the activity.

Eating hamburgers in Benin

We found the sliced, processed cheese first. From there we searched for ketchup. When we heard one of our moms knew where to find ground beef, we knew we had struck a gold mine.

We gathered at Dave’s house, the stagier whose mom had found the coveted boeuf ecrase. In a fashion similar to the US, the men grilled the hamburgers over the charcoal. And then the rest of the women in Dave’s family got a kick out of making the guys prepare the rest of the dinner. We fried some igamnes slices, our Beninoise twist on the French fry. Another stagier brought four Coca Colas, the one thing we have found so far here that is almost identical to the product you can find in America. (Although high fructose corn syrup does not exist here, so the soda is still manufactured with real sugar.)

We popped open the sodas and the seven of us gathered around the table while Dave’s host family looked questioningly at the patties of meat covered with melted cheese on the tray in front of us.

For a vegetarian, I get quite a number of cravings for hamburgers. Or that could be precisely the reason why. But in Benin, eating a hamburger is more of a statement of what it possible than a defiance of the nutritional values to which I’ve attained for the past four years. If you can make a hamburger in Benin, almost anything is possible.

We spent the rest of the night wondering how long it would be until we all ended up at the medical office in Cotonou with food poisoning.

The local Starbucks

One hundred CFAs (about 20 cents) will get you a plastic cup filled with about 6 ounces of hot water mixed with Nescafe Instant Coffee and a sugar cube. I drink my latte next to a group of blue-uniformed motorcycle taxi drivers and a Maman who has spent the morning frying beignets. I talk about post visits with the other volunteers. We gossip about class. When I’m finished, I pass my cup back to the man behind the wooden booth. There are no grande non-fat white chocolate mochas, but caffeine is an international necessity. 

Fetes de igamnes

We are waiting for the king.

It is not uncommon in Benin for things to not start on time, but no one complains about sitting under a tent in the sun for two extra hours when the person you’re waiting for is the king. Although here, kings are plentiful. Tradition runs deep and the kings have continued to pas power to their heirs regardless of any lines Europeans have tried to draw.

This is my first ceremony with a king. This one reigns over Savalou, a commune in the western center of Benin. I’m glad I decided to wear one of the two dresses I have had made here. I didn’t realize beforehand that besides myself and other PCVs, the Prince of Uganda, diplomats from Morrocco and the Central African Republic, as well as kings of other communes of Benin would also be in attendance.

We are here to celebrate the igamne, a potato-like tuber that is a staple crop in this part of Benin. It is the start of this year’s harvest, thus it is necessary to offer the first igamne of the harvest to the ancestors.

Like many Beninoise ceremonies, we are going to celebrate by dancing. For the next hour and a half, drummers will tap the beat of dances. My favorite will involve a more rhythmic and artistic version of pounding of the igamne into a popular dish in the area called igamne pile.

After, the guardians will cut open the new igamne, douse it with red palm oil and place it on a platter for those who have lived and tilled this land before us.

Now, though, we stand. A procession of dancers and singers enter the courtyard in front of the palace. The king is ready.

A few first impressions

“If you could take an airplane to any country, where would you go?”

The president of the PTA in my village looks puzzled at the question I’ve posed at him across the vinyl-covered table at the buvette.

“Why would I want to leave my village?” he responds after a thoughtful moment. “It’s my village.” My American sense of globalization is lost here in Mayamon, the village where I will be living for the next two years.

The village proper is about 3,200 people, most of whom greet each other by name on the street and are able to ask specifically about each member of someone’s family.

Mayamon is the most rural community in which I have lived. My front yard is more the territory of the chickens, goats and pigs than the territory of children’s games, as it is in the US.

We have electricity, but few have running water.

We eat what is available in the fields: igames (yams) and manioc (cassava). The market every five days offers tomatoes, eggs and onions among other things. We eat a lot of the same things because that’s what available. You can’t have an enormous craving for macaroni and cheese when you’ve never eaten macaroni and cheese.

There are boutiques that sell packaged items: powdered milk, instant coffee, pasta, couscous, all of which have come from countries my neighbors will most likely never visit.

About a quarter of the people that I encounter every day speak only Ife, the local language. This drastically reduces the chance that this quarter of the population will ever travel farther than the next village.

I will rest in Mayamon for two years. And then I will hail a taxi on which I will load the contents of my house. It will drive me, first, to Cotonou, then to the airport where I will travel home by airplane, an experience that many of the people I will have lived with for the past two years will never have. Not because they can’t but because they have no desire. They were born here. They studied here. They started their families here. They started their lives here, and they will end their lives here.

Chaud

I’m hot.

I walk into the boutique nearest to my future home looking like I just took a shower.

“La glace?” Ice? The woman behind the wooden counter asks me.

I nod enthusiastically.

Now I am sitting in my future home directly in front of the breeze of the fan and am letting the ice melt in my hands. I am content for now.

Mornings in Mayamon

My favorite thing to watch in the mornings at my second host family’s house is for the grey baby goat to stick his nose tentatively through the open front door after someone has left the front gate unlatched. Sometimes the rest of him tentatively follows. His hooves clack on the concrete floor. This noise normally alerts whomever is sitting across from me that there is a four-legged visitor in the house.

After some gesticulating and yelling in Ife, the baby goat turns and scampers back out the door through which it entered. I hear the clack of the latch closing but know its only a matter of time before the goat sneaks through again. 

This conversation is always difficult for me

“C’est bon, n’est pas?” my domestique looks at me for confirmation. “I will move to America and make a lot of money as a maid. Then, I’ll come back to Benin with all my money, and I’ll buy a grand house and I’ll help my Mama, who’s sick, and I’ll put my kids in private school. C’est bon, n’est pas?”

This is not the first time I’ve had this conversation. Nor will it be the last. I come from the land where anything is possible. Here, getting to America is as simple as having the desire to go to America.

This time, I don’t want to be the person to crush her dreams. We have problems, but the problems of a developed country are quite different from those here.

I cannot be the person who has to tell her that many before and many after will want the same thing. And few will achieve this. Even in the US few will achieve it.

But for now, I will let her continue to believe that such things are possible.

I nod. “C’est bon.”

My neighbor

The wheels of the toy truck bump along the uneven dirt as he pulls the string tied to the front fender. He startles the chickens in front of his house when he runs through their roost on his stubby legs of an infant. Under his long-sleeve  purple shirt, his stomach slightly protrudes. His mom interrupts his playtime for a moment to get water from the facet. A black baby goat advances, then backs away as the child unknowingly backs into its space. He is unaware of the Yovo watching him next door.

Trip to post

I am the first Yovo off the bus. I wave goodbye to the group of PCTs and their work partners who have spent the last 5 and a half hours with me traveling north to our posts in Benin. This is only a temporary goodbye. I’ll see everyone again in 2 weeks in Porto Novo, but like the first Thanksgiving break of freshman year of college, we’re all not quite sure how it’s going to be not seeing the faces you’ve become accustomed to seeing on a daily basis.

This is my first time farther north than Porto Novo, which is to say, I haven’t seen much of Benin yet. I tried to spend the ride watching the scenery speed by outside the window, but those of you who know me know that car/bus/tube rides are like taking an Ambien for me. I was asleep except when I was woken up by the bus honking as it passed other vehicles.

The part of the countryside I did see was, minus the palm trees, like driving through the forested parts of the Midwest. The paved road was lined by “mountains” that aren’t tall enough to have snow at their peaks. They were covered in green trees and an occasional sharp cliff edge. I cannot verify that it was limestone, but from the bus, they looked a lot like the cliffs I used to climb in my neighbors’ backyards when I was little.

Turns out some things aren’t as different as we sometimes make them. 

Meet my family: Larissa

I didn’t really see my sister Larissa for the first two weeks I was here. She spent most of the days in the side salon studying French, English, math and science for her baccalaureate exam. The two-day exam marks the end of her years in high school. When she receives her grades, her papa will decide where and what she will study.

For now, she is concerned mainly with making sure her little brothers do their share of the chores around the house. She has no qualms about reporting to Maman when Leo has not swept the house yet today. With a mere glance in my direction, I remove from feet from the coffee table in the sitting room.

At a Peace Corps workshop in which she participated, she put some high school boys in their place when they tried to argue that fetching charcoal for the fire means they help make dinner at their house.

She stood tall with one hand on her hip and one hand gesticulating wildly. Her body language said more than the words she spoke.

Larissa is able to carry such an attitude as a benefit of the family in which and the place in which she was raised.

In a southern, less conservative city like Porto Novo the women have learned to speak their minds. They argue over giving change and hold tight to inflated prices at the market. They aren’t afraid to say exactly what they think of your dress. They fight hard to give their families whatever they can manage.

If this empowerment is accompanied by a little sass, I’ll take it.