Tonight I learned drinking cold water is bad for you (false) and sometimes you make sacrifices (true)

You know those times when you do something just because your friend asked you to? When you don’t really want to go to the grocery store or sit through a documentary or attend a 2 and ½ hour workshop in French on what foods and plants are healthy to eat but you do because your friend wants you to?

My colleague at work invited me to the latter a couple days ago. I forgot about it until he stopped by my class yesterday to announce the event to my students. Today, my students reminded me about it again, and, since the person who asked me is important to me and I still have another 22 months in the same village, I lured my postmate with a promise of peanut butter cookies to come with me so I would have another American with which to talk.

You could argue there is a fine line between being true to yourself and being a good friend. I didn’t really want to go to the presentation, but to be fair, usually, what I really want to do here involves air conditioning, ice cream and Netflix. So, almost not possible.

Right now, my job here really, even more than teaching middle school students English, is to become part of a community. To build relationships with people who have lived their lives very differently than mine, and to learn from that exchange.

So, for now, if that means sitting in a hot church until 10:40 at night listening to a lecture that is sometimes both bizarre and false, that is what I’ll be doing.

Madam’s house

When I first see the four boys cautiously approaching my house, it takes me a moment to realize that these are my students. I do not recognize them without their khaki school uniforms.

It is common for students to visit their teachers. Many times to bring gifts or establish a relationship that will result in better grades at the end of the year. What they don’t know is that they entertain me as much as they are entertained by asking me about everything I’ve brought with me from America.

One enters my house carrying a stuffed bear that is as big as my neighbor who peeks his head in later to see what all the commotion is about. They ask me questions about the photos I have on my walls. They are mesmerized by my map of Benin and that the people who made the map know where their village is to include it. As almost all the kids who have stopped by my house have, the boys too find the yoga ball that another volunteer left in my house and the pack of 50 Crayola markers (more markers than they have ever seen in their life) that are on my shelf.

They stay for an hour and a half. At 3, they leave to go back to school. I wonder whom of their classmates they will tell of the wonders that await at Madam’s house and when the four will show up next. 

Burning your trash is harder than is looks.

One of the things that struck me when I first moved here was the trash. There is a lot of it. And there is no centralized pick-up here, which means, there is no ability to put a plastic bag on the front curb and not worry about it. You cannot forget that it was you, yourself, who just is responsible for the contents of that black drawstring sack.

It doesn’t work like that here. The closest you can get to being irresponsible for what you accumulate is throwing it over a back wall and hoping that no one yells at you in a local language after you hear the thud of the bag hitting the dirt. (This was my philosophy for a while. I wasn’t even sure what was behind my house. Turns out, there is a lot of trash.)

A couple weeks ago, I was not going to be that neighbor anymore. Everyday, I pass small piles of smoking trash on the side of the road, so I figured that I would be able to pull that off as well.

Like many things here, on first try, I was not so good at it. I imagine this would surprise the members of my family who witnessed my early pyromaniac tendencies (see: burnt spot in our basement carpet). I spent my afternoon in my back patio, trying to sustain a small fire that was in danger of going out due to the amount of sweat I was dripping on it.

About an hour, my trash bucket was empty. However, I now suppress the urge to cringe every time that I create a new piece of trash.

I would bike 35 kilometers.

“Come! Eat with us,” says the family sitting in a circle in their front yard eating lunch as I bike past them. I am sweaty and out of breath. Eating is not what I want to do right now. If they had a cold beer, that may be a different story.

Up ahead, I glimpse the orange of my postmate’s backpack before he pedals around the next turn. The distance between us grew significantly on the last hill we climbed.

We are headed 35 kilometers north on the main road to visit another volunteer in Bante. The decision to bike can be accounted for by two things: wanting to save money on the taxi ride (him) and a lifetime of asking why would you ride there when you can bike there (me).

I spend a lot of my time in my village. And I feel like that is where I should be spending the majority of my time.

But there is something to be said about biking 35 km north to a city where no one knows you, where you can drink a beer without wondering if your students are going to see you, where you can speak English at the speed with which a native speaker talks without having to take slang into account and where you know you’ll be spending the afternoon with the six people who are fast becoming the six people in a foreign country who know you the best.

Also, we had plans to climb a mountain that afternoon.

How I became a big sister

I have a neighbor. He’s one of those kids who seems to show up at my house whenever I want some time to myself. ie right after I get home from teaching and the only two things that are on my mind are making lunch and watching the next episode of the West Wing.

He’s one of those kids that makes it his mission to get into everything. I once chased him around our compound on a mission to get back the purple Sharpie with which he had started doodling on every surface that he could find. I’m still finding purple swiggles in new places. 

He also never wants to leave. When I tell him “bye” in Ife and try to gently guide him out of my house, he crosses his arms, shakes his head and says, “NO!" 

But somehow, he’s been growing on me for the past week. He runs to me when he sees me walking down the street, yelling "Auntie!” as I approach. He loves my plastic sunglasses. They’re a pair of those ridiculous plastic ones with the neon-colored sides that recently have made a comeback as promotional swag at any event. They are far too big for his face, and he unfailingly wears them upside down. 

I never had the chance to be a big sister. I’m by far the youngest in my family and spent my childhood being tortured (but also looked after) instead of being the torturer. Now that I have become the big sister in two other families, I have gotten to teach my younger brother how to ride a bike, use a younger sibling as an excuse not to pay attention in church and have someone think you’re the coolest person they know simply because you are their big sister.

Plus, if I get sick of it, I can always go back to pretending locking my door, closing my curtains and pretending like I’m not home.

P.S. Special mention to my older siblings. You cannot be replaced. I may be playing grown-up now but you will still always be the only people who get to roll me up in a Jane Fonda exercise mat.

How I found out who won the American presidential election

“Ok. At CEG Mayamon, who will write the test for 5eme?” asks the coordinator of the English department.

We are sitting in our weekly meeting. Since all the other English teachers teach at other middle schools in the area (It’s only me and one other each at my middle school), we all go to the biggest middle school in the area each Wednesday for the department meeting.

It is the day after the US presidential election. Yesterday, I discussed the election with one other person, but since I have neither satellite TV nor was awake after the polls closed, it is 11 a.m. November 7th, and I still do not know the outcome.

Because I’m an ocean and six time zones away, sometimes it seems like what happens in the United States isn’t really happening. When I come home in 23 months, I expect everything will exactly how I left it.

Of course, this is not true. I’ve started a list of things that will be different when I come home. On it so far  is: I will be an aunt, my sister will be married and live in a different state, Snooki will be a mom (I learned that one already happened a month after the fact,) But really, I can’t even begin to predict how much things will be different.

I told the coordinator of the department that I would be writing the exam.

“Oh, by the way, congratulations,” he said. “Barack Obama is your next president.”

“Really?” I say. “I didn’t know.”

I made a girl cry yesterday.

My classes are taking quizzes this week, and in my first, after several warnings, one student continued to occasionally say things to her neighbor. So, I took her quiz away from her.

“Madame! Madame!” several students said to me a few minutes later. “She’s started crying.”

I looked over at the student whose quiz I had just marked as a zero. Her head was on her desk, and her shoulders were shaking, as though she was breathing deeply, or crying.

I’m still trying to find my footing as a teacher. And no amount of training can prepare you for goats wandering by your classroom; boys who ask you to go to the bathroom, then look like they are going to pee their pants when you deny them; and the feeling of making a student cry.

I like to believe in the good in people, to the point where it is sometimes a fault. Like when I let those two boys leave together in what seemed like a dire situation to use the bathroom, only to have them disappear from class for 10 minutes. And I don’t want to fail my students. And I don’t yet believe that there are those students who are beyond help.

It’s a hard line to walk being a teacher my students respect, but also ending class by singing “Skidamarinky Dinky Dink.”

I offered the student a make-up quiz for after class Friday.

I’ll leave it up to after Friday to see if I regret that decision. 

What I owe to the Academy

I had a dream about my high school the other night.

I was back in my plaid skirt and embroidered white polo, (my high school was Catholic, all-girls and uniform-wearing) and I was sitting in my newspaper advisor’s room in the black leather chair that always sat in the corner between the dry erase board and the wooden bookcase. I was talking to my high school friends about high school things: where we were going that weekend, the football game at the all boy’s high school. 

In terms of a malaria medication induced dream, it was pretty tame. 

What it did do, when I woke up under my mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside, was get me thinking about what had brought me to a place where I was waking up under a mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside.

I did not have the normal high school experience. I was awkward. There are many parts that I wish I could go back and do-over. I choose to believe that those two things are normal feelings for people after graduating high school.

But there are also things that happened to me in high school that made me the person that I am today: I learned how much I had been given; I became obsessed with Woodward and Bernstein; I drank my first drops from the fountain of feminism and my first cup of coffee; I was shown the power of words; I was first challenged to re-evaluate the person I was becoming; I had teachers who showed me the kind of person that I wanted to become.

I choose to believe those things changed me for the better.

I’ve always understood my high school experience was different than most. It wasn’t until college that I began to appreciate what those differences meant. I’ve thanked the Academy many times in college application essays, in final speeches at banquets and in my head. What surprises me is, almost 5 years out, for how much I still I have to thank the Academy.

There are so many places, people and experiences that brought me here, but I know that path started with a plaid uniform and an embroidered white polo.

Water, water everywhere, part 2

I stuck my head outside my door. I figured in the middle of the daily siesta would be my best chance. My best chance for no one to see me. My best chance for no one to watch as the stranger struggles to carry water from the well.

I had watched the women do it many times. And I gathered water, and carried it back on my head, once, but the pump is further from the well, and I felt like making as little of a spectacle of myself as possible that afternoon.

I crossed the two doorways to the well, grabbed the green rope and pulled up my first bucket. After three and a half, most of the second bucket ended up on me and the ground, my basin was full. I tried to lift it onto my head, but my arms, already weak from pulling up the water, couldn’t do it.

I struggled to put the basin back down into the top of the well. I shook my arms out and conceded to carry the water back American-style, which meant it took me longer and I ended up more damp than when the mamas who live in the concession when they carry their water back.

As you may have noticed, water is a big issue for me here. But it isn’t just for me. For my entire village, how and where they get water is a huge issue.

Most of my village gets its water from pumps. I don’t know anyone who has running water in his or her house. Until a couple years ago, there was only one pump to serve the entire village of 3,200 people. There are now four, and housing groups, like mine, have a well inside walls. It isn’t as clean as pump water, but for dishes and laundry, it does the trick.

Most of the time, it’s just inconvenient to get water. It’s hot; water is heavy and every basin you think will be the last just manages to come up short.

When it turns from inconvenient to a problem is during the hot season; the season that we’re coming up on next.

I’ve heard stories of what it was like before the other pumps were built. Women would walk for kilometers to find a pump that wasn’t empty. The price at the pumps would shoot up from 25 Francs (what it is now) to 250. People would wait at the pump for hours for their turn to get water.

I never realized how much of a commodity water was until I moved here. That morning, when I had run out of water, I dreaded the sweat-drenched afternoon of slowly refilling the storage container in the my kitchen.

But there is no other option. Either carry water back or don’t wash my dishes. Either get the upper-body workout of the week or don’t take a shower. Either have my neighbors look at me questioningly or don’t have clean clothes.

I only made it three trips back and forth before my neighbor took the basin out of my hands and finished the job for me.

The afternoon I napped under a tree

I wandered over to my host family’s house at about 10:45. As part of my first three months at post, I have to write a report about my community, and I had some questions to ask my papa.

The electricity had been out since about 9 that morning, but I wasn’t concerned. After the last time, I started making an effort to always have my computer battery charged just in case it went out when I needed to do work, or wanted to watch episode of the West Wing while I ate lunch. 

He answered my questions as we sat out under the tree in his front yard, a place that consistently seems to be the coolest place in the village. (I mean in terms of temperature, although it could be argued under the tree was also where anyone who was anyone in the village spent time.)

When we were finished, I packed up my stuff. I told him I was going to go take a nap at my house.

“It will be hot in the house,” he said. “Not cool, like it is here, under the tree.”

That’s ok I told him. I’ll use my fan.

“Do you have electricity?” was his response. I shrugged my shoulders.

We checked. The village was still powerless.

“Guess I better stay under this tree then,” I said.

And so me, the kids, the goats and my papa passed the afternoon napping in white plastic chairs, our legs stretched out on the wooden bench in front of us, under the shade of the tree in his front yard. 

The papaya

Job appeared at my door in the afternoon last Thursday exactly as he had promised that morning at school. In his hand was a large plastic bag, a ubiquitous item in Beninese culture.

“I brought you that papaya.” He handed me the plastic bag. I was expecting several papayas, having lived most of my previous life in Missouri, a place not really known for its large quantity of papayas. Grabbing the item inside by the stem, it was revealed that Job had not brought me several, but one papaya. One papaya the size of a medium pumpkin.

In front of my middle school are fields of beans and manioc, a couple mango trees and some papaya trees. After piecing together several conversations at the school, one of which involved him protesting the sacrifice of his beans for a soccer field, I learned that Job is responsible for many of these plants. 

He and I have joked about me working in the fields with him and me making dinner with the produce he would give me after the harvest. One conversation focused specifically on mangoes and papayas. This was about a week before he showed up at my house with a fruit bigger than my head.

I took the papaya; my arms strained under its weight. He left me with instructions to wait a few days before cutting it open. Then to refrigerate what I couldn’t eat right away.

He said this last part with a completely straight face.

It’s hot here. And there are few solaces. I have spent hours trying to map the location of all the fridges in my village. And added the names of those people to the list of those whom I need to make a particularly good effort to talk to on the street.

“Job,” I said, “I don’t have a refrigerator." 

"Oh, I do,” he responded. “Just bring it over after you open it, and I’ll keep it for you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, mentally adding another point to the map in my head as he left.

Two years is both a long time and no time at all

Before I came here, I never imagined myself living here. I figured I would be able to pass the 27 months some way, but in many ways, I only had to get through the 27 months before I would return to the life that I left behind in the United States.

Maybe it’s because it’s the first place that I’ve moved in my pseudo-adult life, but part of this has always felt impermanent. I know that it is, but the knowledge of my impending plane ticket to the US caused me to fail to see how long two years is. I felt like I would just float in here and then float out after 27 months.

Which is why it’s weird that I’m starting to find my life here. I have students who greet me by name outside of school. I have neighbors who look for me running down the street; they don’t understand why I run for fun, but they know that I will be passing their house every other day. At the market, I have a bread lady, a tomato lady and a plastic bucket lady. And most of all, I’m starting to make friends.

When I was in Porto Novo during training, I once said to someone that I wasn’t sure how to build relationships with people in French. She responded that she imagined it was the same as in English.

What I was thinking about was that I would be with people from a different language and culture, I didn’t know how I would ever be able to communicate my real self to the people around me. I looked at other volunteers around me and marveled when they talked about the friends they had in village. I didn’t understand how they did it.

Things started to shift for me when I stopped thinking about this experience as a two-year trip and more as the next two years of my life. The more I am here, the more I comprehend just exactly it means to be doing this for the next two years. And the more I am able to comprehend how I will be doing this. 

Last Saturday marked the longest that I have ever not lived in Missouri. I just realized that benchmark is something that I will probably continue to pass again and again. 

How my English class was thwarted by goats

“Madame. Please, Madame,” says Florent, one of my students, interrupting my lesson on the months of the year.

“Madame. The goats.” He gestures to the fields beyond the school building where the teachers are growing mangoes, papayas, manioc and beans, the latter a particular favorite of the gangs of goats that wander around the village.

The animals here are not kept in pens, but rather allowed to walk freely around from yard to yard, eating what they can find. Along with children, I have to watch for goats, chickens and pigs wandering into my house without knocking first. I once chased a chicken around my front room for 5 minutes while trying to direct it back out my front door.

Several students follow Florent’s lead. “Me too Madame! The goats!”

Now the attention of almost all is directed toward the animals in the field. I nod my permission, and the three boys, grabbing rocks from outside the classroom, run toward the herd, jumping over the taller plants.

The rest of the class cheers as the goats scamper back toward the primary school on the other side of the trees. My serious teacher façade is broken when one of boys grabs a stick and wildly chases after a particularly stubborn mutton.

The boys return to the class a few moments later, sweating and out of breath, but the beans, at least for now, have been saved.

“Can we continue now?” I ask, trying not to smile. 

The secret life of teachers

You know how when you were in elementary school you were sort of convinced that your teachers all lived at school and if you would run into them outside of the walls of the building where you learned arithmetic and said the Pledge of Allegiance every Monday, there was always that moment of “does-not-compute”?

It’s totally different from the other side.

I love it when my kids recognize me in public. And I call them “my kids.” But I’ve also recently become more aware how even when I’m out in the community, I’m working. Whenever I hear one of my students yell “Madame Emily!” I quickly evaluate if they’ve caught me in any potentially compromising positions. 

Usually, when I’m at school, I feel like a teacher. But there are also those times when I still feel a little like I’m faking it. Like my kids are going to figure out that I don’t really know what I’m doing. When my one class of students learned how to ask what people’s ages are, I told them I was 30. Twenty-two runs too big of a risk that some of my students are older than me.

Usually, in times like these, I like to threaten giving them a pop quiz. Just so they remember who’s in charge. 

My day without electricity

First, I wasn’t concerned. There had been a big storm the night before – big enough that I expected the electricity to go out.

When I came back from my teachers’ meeting at noon and still didn’t have power, that’s when I started getting concerned. I got even more concerned when I heard the theme of the TV news coming from my neighbor’s house. She had power, and I didn’t. My alarm was raised even more when I realized I only had enough battery on my computer to watch a 19-minute episode of How I Met Your Mother as opposed to a 43-minute West Wing, my usual lunchtime distraction.

By 3 p.m., I was getting pissy. Not having electricity here is still like not having electricity in the United States – you irrationally forget everything that you know how to do that doesn’t involve power.

I sat dumfounded until another English teacher invited me to the bar. It had electricity, but drinking water-downed Beninese beer is not necessarily an activity that requires power.

I got home an hour and a half later and 45 minutes after the sun went down. To my disappointment, my lights had not magically been restored. I am writing this by the light of my headlamp. I long for my fan, but alas, waving my hand in front of my face will have to suffice.

My town has electricity mainly because of its proximity to one of the main highways in Benin. I by no means live like the majority of volunteers here. My postmate lives like this every day. And with less whiny blog posts.

Sometimes I receive responses to text messages days later because the person I texted does not have power, and thus, cannot recharge their cellphone on a regular basis. I have become accustomed to this, and I know that my village is one of the lucky ones. It’s hard to remember this when all you want to do is pass the evening on the Internet. It’s much easier, when able, to revert back to the same things that I used to complain about when I lived in the US.

I hope that, like on Christmas morning, I will awaken tomorrow with the greatest gift of all – the power to charge my laptop.

It’s a weird feeling having first world issues in Benin. 

All the noise, noise, noise, noise

It is rarely quiet here.

Right now, my neighbor across our courtyard is singing so loudly it sounds like she’s sitting next to me. I can also hear babies and goats crying at the house behind my back wall. There is the quick beep of a motorcycle horn as the driver signals around a sharp turn. The thud of the wooden mallet on the wooden pedestal while people make pounded yams lulls me to sleep every night. Roosters crow whenever they want, not just when the sun comes up. The sweeping outside starts as the sun comes up.

There is always some rhythmic drumming being broadcast over some speakers somewhere.

I know when my neighbor is making dinner because I can hear the clack of the metal bowls hitting the concrete floor from my back garden.

I know when the middle school has let out for lunch because there are suddenly a lot more whiny voices coming from the direction of the road in front of my house.

I know when the power is out because it is the only time that I can hear the trucks and taxis on the paved road a kilometer away from my house.

When is there the least amount of noise?  

12-3 p.m., the generally understood time when you’re supposed to take a nap.

Why these two may be two of my favorite students

“Students at attention.

Students at ease.

Students at attention.”

Florent pauses. He is standing in front of all his classmates at the weekly Monday morning flag ceremony, and after having vied to be the one who calls out the command for the two-person color guard in khaki school uniforms, he has forgotten what to say next.

One hundred and eighty one students, plus four teachers are waiting.

Florent looks quickly to the left and to the right, then at his feet as he waits for the words to come to him. He knows the longer he stands there the less likely this lapse in memory will go unnoticed, or unridiculed. The next glace is across the schoolyard.

In the front row of the class of 5eme, Andre is trying to catch his eye. He is slowly mouthing the words for the next command.

Florent gets the message.

“Attention for the raising of the colors,” he says, and the flag ceremony continues.