If I wasn’t here, I would probably be thinking about what my life would be like if I was here

I recently told my roommates from college that sometimes I think there is an alternate universe where I’m still working at my old job, I still live with the same people and I still wake up on Sunday afternoons, get into my car and buy Hy-Vee Chinese food.

There’s a relatively bad Gwyneth Paltrow with exactly this premise. I don’t remember exactly what causes it (I think it involves missing a subway train), but part way through the movie, the plot line for Paltrow’s character diverges and the viewer follows both.

Watching this movie did not spark this train of thought but in times like this, after I have made what will be a significant decision in my life, I always think about the what I would be doing or who I would be if I had chosen another option. I think about the different versions of me that could have existed, but now, exist nowhere.

I guess what I’m getting at is yes, my life could have gone differently. I could be sitting in an air-conditioned room streaming Netflix, but that version of me doesn’t get to exist yet. It’s not so much that I chose one version  of myself over another, but that I haven’t chosen to be that person yet.

Later, the option may present itself, or it may not. But there will also be other versions of myself that I haven’t met yet.

We wait for the rain.

I teach in a classroom with two walls and two walls that come up to my waist. I teach in a classroom made of grey cement bricks. I teach in a classroom where wind and dust blow in while I’m teaching. I teach in a classroom that isn’t quite inside and isn’t quite outside.

I teach in a classroom with a metal roof. I teach in a classroom where my voice is accompanied by the sound of lizards scampering across the roof and anything that lands on the roof echoes.

When it is pouring rain, like this morning, I do not teach.

What’s mine is yours

“Bonsoir Madame,” answers a teenage male voice I recognize as Dkupe’s brother, Kiki.

“Bonsoir Kiki,” I say. “I’m looking for Dkupe. Is she around?”

“No she’s not. Do you need something?”

I relay the reason I’m calling, that I need water, and Kiki promises to give Dkupe the message.

This is the second time I have called the phone number that Dkupe gave me as her phone number, and it is the second time someone other than Dkupe has answered her phone.

The first time it was her friend Paula who had borrowed Dkupe’s phone because her own wasn’t charged. I imagine the reason Kiki had the phone this time was simply because he needed the phone at the time.

After 22 years in an individualistic society, being dropped into a collectivist society takes some time with which to become comfortable. Especially, when I was younger, the biggest fights I ever had with my sister were over one of us having taken something that other had a perceived notion belonged to her.

The idea that I would refuse to let someone use something they need that I have that I’m not using doesn’t exist. So far I’ve lent out a bandana, my motorcycle helmet and my bicycle. I will draw the line at certain things, but so far no one has asked for my computer.

What I’ve asked for the most is information about things so I don’t look like a foreigner flailing in a new culture. It’s been pretty mutually beneficial so far. 

On reading about genocide while living in Africa

“ ‘Humanity’s struggle is to conquer nature,’ the pygmy said fondly. ‘It is the only hope. It is the only way for peace and reconciliation – all humanity one against nature.’

He sat back in his chair, with his arms crossed over his chest, and went silent. After a while, I said, ‘But humanity is part of nature, too.’

‘Exactly,’ the pygmy said. ‘That is exactly the problem.’ ”

Philip Gourevitch

Today I finished reading We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with out families, Philip Gourevitch’s journalist account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath.

The point of the book is not to blame western nations. To blame western nations for failing to recognize genocide while it was happening. To blame western nations for dividing the people of Rwanda into the groups that one of whom would systematically annihilate another 60 years later.

The book is an exploration of how we define ourselves. Of how we continue to systematically divide ourselves, not because it is natural, but because we have been taught that it is our nature. Of why we are our own worst enemies.

Since living here, I have had Africans tell me Africans are so much less intelligent than the rest of the world. I’ve had Africans tell me Africans are not hard workers. I’ve had Africans tell me Africans will never be as advanced as the rest of the world.

I refuse to believe this. I refuse to believe in the dark continent of Joseph Conrad. I refuse to believe that one’s identity as an African, better yet, Beninese, defines their capacity for intelligence or content of character, as opposed to the context into which they have been involuntarily thrust.

I think a lot about how my life would be different right now if I had been born here instead of the US. If my identity was Beninese instead of American. However, my identity as American here means something completely different than when I lived in the US. I guess what I’m really working toward is the creation of my identity as part of humanity.

This kid is smarter than I gave him credit for

“Ok class,” I said with 5 minutes left last Friday. “Do you want to sing?”

“Yes!” my sixieme students yelled back at me. The ages of my students in this class range from 11-17. This is their first time being exposed to English, and I had recently taught them how to say “My name is.”

“Alright class. I will sing. You will listen.” I then launched into a badly remixed version of Eminem’s “My name is,” a song that with complete lyrics would be entirely inappropriate for a classroom of 11-17 year olds. However, sticking to just the chorus is passable as practice of the English language. I snapped my fingers. “My name is.” Another snap. “My name is.” Snap. “My name is.” Snap. “Madame Emily.”

The class erupted in laughter. “Teacher me! Teacher me!” My students said furiously waving their hands in the air. I called on a couple to sing before I got to John.

He stood and snapped his fingers. “My name is.” Snap. “My name is” Snap. “My name is.” Snap. “Eminem.”

John totally caught me.

In which I celebrate a month at post by making a chocolate cake with chocolate icing

For as long as I have been able to remember his birthdays, my dad has eaten my mom’s chocolate cake with chocolate icing for his birthday cake. There may been a few years where there was a blackberry pie thrown in, but really, he’s always been about the chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It’s safe to say that I’ve eaten this chocolate cake with chocolate icing at least once a year for the past 22 years.

At the beginning of August, my mom sent me an email. In it she talked about my dad’s recent birthday, and thus, she talked about cake she made him for his birthday, chocolate with chocolate icing.

Since then I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head.

After I received that email, I checked the recipe I had on my computer. I had seen all the ingredients for the cake and icing since I had moved to Benin, minus powdered sugar and cocoa powder, but I had heard whisperings these things were available in Cotonou.

The day of our swear-in ceremony in Cotonou, we had 4 hours afterward to shop in the supermarkets in the city. Other volunteers set out into the city with dreams of Snickers bars and Parmesan cheese. I had my heart set on cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

My mission was accomplished 3000 CFA (about two days pay at the time) later.

Since then I have guarded the ingredients for the chocolate cake with chocolate icing, until today, my one-month anniversary of being at post, the date which I told myself would be an appropriate date to make the chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

I started out the day not so hot. Two minutes before my first class started, I realized I had left my chalk at home. My first class was the class in which I had given them a pop quiz the previous class period because they wouldn’t stop talking.

But nothing could stop me this morning. For today was the day I was going to eat chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

I started making the cake after lunch. Four hours later, I had one cooked layer, one burned layer and a small bowl of the chocolate icing.

After icing the unburnt layer, I sat down to eat my chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

After the third bite, I realized it would take me days to eat it all myself.

It didn’t quite taste the same as when my mom made it. Could have been that it wasn’t cool. Could have been that I only had margarine and not butter. It tasted like a chocolate with chocolate icing, but not the chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

It also could have been that it wasn’t so much the cake all those times I had eaten it before, but that it the first time I was eating the cake not with my family. It could have been that sometimes, it’s not so much the cake that makes the different, but who you’re eating it with.

I put my fork down and covered the cake with another plate. I walked outside carrying the cake and knocked on my neighbor’s door.

“I just made this American cake, and it’s too much for me,” I said. “Do you want to taste it?”

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. 

Secret handshake

“Ahh Emily!” Job, a French teacher at my school says as I walk into the boutique near my house. He holds his hand out to me. As we let go, he snaps my middle finger with his thumb, as I snap his middle finger with my thumb.

I’ve seen this handshake numerous times. We used to practice is amongst ourselves during training. Generally, it’s used amongst male friends to greet each other. As a female and still a relative outsider, I have rarely been offered this handshake since I moved to village.

The great thing about this handshake is that the ability to complete it is entirely dependent on both parties mutually acknowledging your relationship or else one of you ends up awkwardly stroking the end of the other’s fingers. (Which is actually dangerously close to a handshake that signifies something else.)

I have been searching for this handshake amongst my staff, of whom I am the only woman; it is the first sign that I have been accepted into this boys club.

In the boutique, Job and I execute it perfectly. The crisp snap echoes in my head as I walk back to my house.

Community visit

I nervously drum my fingers on my colleague’s wooden kitchen table. As we talk about teaching in Benin, I talk to my hands; he runs the key to his motorcycle along a crack in the table.

It’s slightly awkward.

I’m at his house to collect some information about tests and assignments for the upcoming school year. Cultural norms in these situations dictate that I spend a little time here talking to him. Cultural norms also dictate that silence is not awkward, which works for me in many circumstances.

It also makes it a little hard to find an appropriate time to leave. Normally, I would just leave when the conversation trails off. But here, it’s perfectly fine to sit a little longer than an awkward pause to see if you think of anything else to say. But if you don’t think of anything else to say, that’s fine too. It may be more than slightly awkward, but I sit there for a little while longer before I reach for my backpack.

I believe I’ve just figured out how to determine whether I’ve been in the community enough that day:

Have I felt awkward today?

Sit tight

We’re ready to go.

After 45 minutes waiting at the taxi stand in Parakou for other passengers, three and a half hours of sitting 8 people in a station wagon on a paved road that has seen limited maintenance, an hour and 15 minutes of sitting at the Dassa taxi stand, Dave and I are ready to start the last leg of our trip home from a weekend at the office in Parakou.

Our driver, however, is not ready to leave.

Currently, he is surrounded by a ring of people as he and a motorcycle taxi driver are wrestling in the red dirt of the taxi station. There is a festival of traditional wrestling at a village near ours next weekend; we assume this late afternoon scuffle is practice for that, but after traveling with goats eating your shoelaces, passing trucks carrying at least 30 people and loading enough baggage on the roof of the car so it is now twice as tall, this is just another voyage in Benin.

After he puts his shirt back on and drinks some water out of the metal bowl handed to him by a child on the sidelines of the match, he signals to us it’s time to leave.

The difference a tone makes

In my local language, Ife, the only different between the word for “field” and the word for “my genitals hurt” is whether the listener perceives that you have raised the tone at the end or maintained the tone of the last vowel.

My postmate, Dave, who works with the environment and farmers in the area, usually switches to French at this point in introductory conversations in order to avoid accidently sharing too much information too soon. 

Mutiny

My teachers meeting was scheduled for 5 p.m. I, operating on my American need to be places when people expect me to be there and my American need to make a good impression, was there at 4:55 p.m.

Five minutes later I was joined by my colleagues, and we sat in the open-air classroom chatting while we waited for the rest of the staff.

Fifteen minutes later, when no one else had shown, we called our director. He was coming, he said, but had just left Savalou, a city 25 km south.

During my training, I had been warned repeatedly about Benin-time, and had experienced it several time. We would start French class at 8:20 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. My colleagues tell me “a toute a l'heure”, which means basically “see you soon”, and they come to my house an hour and a half later. 

Time is much more fluid here. You eat when you’re hungry. You sleep when you’re tired. You get there when you get there.

At 6:10 p.m., though, we started getting antsy. There were now eight of us. We all looked up as a moto approached the school, then went back to our conversation when we saw it was two more teachers. 

“This is 5 p.m. for you?” Martin yelled as the two approached, a sentiment we were all feeling that we really wanted to say to the director, but cultural standards of respect would never allow. 

After sitting for 5 minutes without any sign of the director, the two new arrivals addressed me after some grumbling in Ife. 

“We’re going to leave, right?" 

I nodded. "If we were in the US, I would have left 45 minutes ago.”

We were saying our goodbyes when we heard the sound of a moto approaching. I recognized the director as soon as he rounded the corner. 

We started the meeting at 6:23 p.m.

Failure to communicate

I’m sitting in silence.

“Est-ce que…” I say to begin a question, then allow my sentence to trail off when I realize I didn’t find the words in French for which I was searching.

“Oui?” the librarian sitting across from me pushes for me to finish my thought. But I’m at my third day in of getting up at 6 a.m. to go to work at a new job where it is fast becoming apparent is a job for which no amount of training could have completely prepared me. 

In general, I don’t say a lot in English-speaking countries. Even less when I’m tired. Currently, I’m exhausted and generally find myself in situations with people who only know how to say “Good morning” in English.

I spend a lot of my days with the thoughts in my head that I have forgotten how to communicate.

I don’t think what I would say is anything particularly spectacular or earth-shattering, but I would like to reclaim the ability to not look a spacey American who hardly ever understands what’s going on or has anything to say.

I might be glad I can’t understand what they’re saying about me.

Mid-morning study session

I’m sitting in the shade of the school building reading when I see the group of four students who have wandered over from the primary school at the other end of the meandering dirt path that runs north from my middle school. They are standing around the corner of the building where they think I can’t see them watching me. One steps closer cautiously. She momentarily makes eye contact with me then runs back to her friends giggling nervously. I return to the page of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families I was reading.

Word has gotten around there’s a Yovo at CEG Mayamon. 

First day of class

I did not teach today. The only English I spoke were the random words the kids wanted translated from French after they found out I was an English teacher.

Here, where classrooms only have two walls and a roof, where buildings are surrounded by forest, manioc fields and grasses taller than me, where the line between school yard and bush is a little fuzzy, the first day of school is spent tearing out the grasses and plants that reclaimed the land over the summer break.

Instead of notebooks and pens, the students came to school today with reed brooms and hoes with knotty wooden handles. For seven hours, not including the three-hour lunch break, the students ripped weeds from the ground, swept the plants into a pile and then carried the debris to the edge of the forest behind the school. This was not without many reprimands from the teachers and the headmaster for trying to sneak breaks in the shade of the school building.

This was my 18^th first day of school. It was my first first day of school that involved machetes.  

Fever pitch

Motorcycles line both sides of the main road outside the soccer field, also the only paved road that runs through this side of the country. There is a group of rowdy, and I can tell by their breath, semi-inebriated men outside the front gate. I push my way through with my host father, and we search for an opening in the crowd to stand.

The soccer team from Bante wears blue. The team from Gouka, my home team, wears orange. The players are all wearing knee-high socks; not all of them are wearing shin guards.

There are no lines drawn to mark the edge of the field. The perimeter is determined by the spectators sitting in the grass who will jump up when the players get too close.

The goal posts are wooden and don’t sit quite straight. When an overenthusiastic player sends a shot soaring over them, we wait while someone hunts in the bush on the edge of the field for the ball.

During the first half, there is one red card, one offsides call and many fouls. 

At halftime, supporters form a clump five-people deep around their respective teams while kids take to the field to kick around their own makeshift soccer balls during the 15-minute break.

The second half begins with a referee’s whistle, but it takes 5 minutes for the people to clear the field and the players to take their positions.

A woman passes selling oranges, bags of water and sodabe, a liquor made from palm that, if not distilled correctly, can cause blindness.

The call of a second red card causes a roar from the sidelines. The spectators, almost all male, cheer for their teams the same way they bargain for taxi prices and discuss the weather: with wild gesticulations, looks of utter disgust on their faces and words I don’t understand in Ife in a raised voice. There is little French spoken here.

This is not a European match. This is African football.

First job

“I’m looking for the library,” I asked the second person who had acknowledged me on the campus of the middle school near my house. The first had not understood my French with an American accent. The second person had understood that I was an outsider looking for a way in.

“It’s over here,” and began walking with me toward a building on the campus that was starting to spark the memory of when I was here the first time in August.

My escort introduced himself as the director of the middle school. To my credit, this was not the middle school at which I will be teaching English starting on Monday. Two previous Peace Corps volunteers had worked at this middle school; the latest had started a library there last year and had asked me as a favor to watch over it a little during my service.

“But the librarian has come yet,” the director said. “It’s locked.”

“Ahh, but I have the key,” I said.

With the help of the director, I opened the red metal door.

The library was filthy. Three months of summer vacation had not been kind to the room. There were spider webs strung between the chair legs and mouse droppings on the floor. Dirt covered the tops of the tables, and there was a small puddle in one corner that I preferred to not imagine what it could be.

I was happy to be there.

The night I ate three dinners

The first was at my tailor’s. I was there to try on the skirt she made for me, and while we were waiting for her daughter to come back with buttons, a plate of fried yams appeared in front of me. At 5:45 and with the Benin culture of eating dinner when the work gets down and dinner gets made, usually between 8-9 p.m., this was intended as a snack. I ate a few, hoping to pass this off as part of my dinner.

However, the first taste of fried food in a week only served to make me want more fried food. I biked home with the intention of making a pit stop at the Mama who sometimes sell fried yam puffs by the taxi stand. Five minutes later, I was in possession of 200 CFAs less but significantly more fried food than I was before. At my house, I dumped the contents of the black plastic sachet onto a plate and prepared to eat the second half of my dinner in the company of the next episode of the West Wing.

You may have noticed that I’ve been watching a lot of West Wing recently. I would say that is a correct assessment. The past three days, I’ve allowed myself to slide into a little hermit-like existence. I still leave my house once a day, but I have lost a little the effort to become part of this community. For the past three days, I’ve allowed myself to fall a little into the belief that I can spend the majority of the next two years watching the West Wing in my house, as long as I make an appearance outside it once during the day.

The past three days wouldn’t have been wasted if nothing had happened during those three days. But things did happen when I wanted them not to, as kicks in the ass usually do.

The father of my village host family came back about five days ago. He had been traveling in order to bring home his brother who had fallen gravely ill in Contonou.

This I knew. I spent the first two days that he was home at his house.

But in the three days that I had decided I wanted to pretend like I wasn’t part of a collective society, the brother died. Because I didn’t really talk to anyone for three days, I didn’t know until three days after the fact when my colleague knocked on my door in the middle of my episode of the West Wing to see if I had stopped by to give my condolences yet.

I hadn’t.

“I’ve been trying to call you the past three days,” my host father told me as we were sitting outside his house with his family. I honestly hadn’t received the call, which is not unusual, but I also cursed myself for not having stopped by the past three days.

After 10 minutes, my colleague said to my host father in Ife that we were leaving. When my host father responded in Ife, my colleague turned to me and said to me in English that my host father was asking me to stay to eat dinner with them.

I nodded.

I wanted to stay, but also a little as my penance for the past three days, a half hour later, I sat with my host father and ate my third dinner, and third helping of yams, of the evening.

Please someone ship me a pepperoni pizza

Or some crab rangoon. Or some ice cold milk. Or some Cheez-its. Or some chocolate chip cookies. Or a cinnamon roll. Or Diet Coke. Or a non-fat white chocolate mocha. Or some maple syrup. Or iceberg lettuce. Or dill pickles.

I dream a lot about food. This morning I woke up with a serious craving for biscuits with hot melted butter. Once, myself and another volunteer spent a half hour trying to list all the varieties of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

I have been a (most of the time) vegetarian for over 4 years. I’ve learned to deal with food cravings and the self-control needed to resist them.

There are plenty of foods here that I do like. I will never forget the first time I had a craving for pate, a staple here that really is just boiled flour and water. And many foods that are better here than in the United States. (See: pineapple).

But here, the ability to recreate American food is the ability to find something familiar after spending the day waiting to see if your neighbor will help you fetch water from the well or trying to find someone who will replace your lock.

I will never again underestimate the comforting power of Dijon mustard or Velveeta macaroni and cheese. 

Favorite things about Benin 1

I’ve always been a night person. I grew up in a neighborhood without streetlights, so when I was little, I used to sit on the balcony off our office to look at the stars. When I was older, I used to sit there when I need to think and didn’t want people to be able to find me.

There are no streetlights or porch lights or lights bright enough to illuminate the dark corners of a room here. This means when I walk down the road to buy cellphone credit after dark, I have to bring a flashlight. It also means when I’m out on my back patio, I see more stars than I ever did in Missouri.

I’m not sure if there are more stars than mosquitoes out there at night. But I am sure that it seems like a waste to work so hard to outshine them.