First words

I grew up a reader. My mom would read to me every night before I went to sleep. Every summer, I participated in the summer reading program at my local library. Each week, I would go the library, load up on books and then sit on our steps, unable to make it all the way up to my room, and read. I learned at an early age how books can change who you are, what you do and what you think. 

I live now in a country where very few books exist. (The largest collection of books I’ve seen is the library at our Parakou workstation.) In my seven months in village, I have seen one child reading for pleasure.

My students don’t even have textbooks. We have 27 English books at my middle school, but until 2 weeks ago, they were locked in a closet to which I did not have a key.

Last Friday, I got the books out for the first time during my 6eme class. I had a lesson planned about vocabulary at the market and didn’t feel the need to take the time to draw tomatoes, onions and mangoes on the board. 

I don’t know how many, but I have a suspicion that for quite a few, this was the first book they had ever seen, let alone be able to touch and read. 

Within 5 minutes of passing out the books, I knew I was not going to be able to finish my lesson. My students had become absorbed by the pictures and words, and nothing I could do would pull them back out.

I looked at my phone. We had 20 minutes left. I sat down at my desk and faded into the background. There was no need to interfere.

#picky

Just ate my first mango from the tree outside my housing unit. It was followed almost immediately by the second. 

The five-year-old me who used to refuse to eat pie and would only eat whipped cream for dessert at holiday dinners would be so proud.

This feeling is even worse to experience

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a student, who had been a problem for me in class and whose honesty I questioned every time she responded to a question. That experience taught me that first impressions, even of students, are usually wrong.

Last week, I had the same experience, but in reverse.

I was walking around my 5eme class while they were taking notes when I passed Berenisse, a student who has stopped by my house pretty regularly, and I’ve gotten to know pretty well. She’s spent a significant amount of time in Cotonou, ie more than most of my students, and has the most westernized take on her life and abilities of any of the students with whom I’ve talked.

As I walked by that day, I noticed sitting on her desk a purple Sharpie that had gone missing from my house about three months ago. I had chalked it up to one of my students or the kids in the neighborhood, but would not have thought Berenisse would have been the one with whom I would find the missing marker. I interrupted her notetaking to snatch it off her desk.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“Your house,” she answered simply, offering no explanation.

“You took this without asking. Why did you do that?”

Again, she offered no explanation.

I felt a little violated. A student who I had trusted and for whom I had high hopes had felt the need to cross the line into the territory of those students who just try to use me for what they think can get out of me.

Berenisse failed to show up my Girls Club that Wednesday, and her semi-regular weekly visits have ended. This self-imposed prohibition from anything with which I am involved it what makes me saddest. That she felt that I was that upset from the situation that she needed to break all ties with me. That she felt she was no longer welcome in my life.

A Sharpie certainly isn’t worth that.

This post will get less creepy as you keep reading.

Last Friday, I stood on the soccer field at the primary school and watched the two teams of boys (I don’t think girls were explicitly excluded from the teams, but instead, had been socialized enough to not ask if they could play.) from my middle school play. In the classic example of masculinity in sports the teams were playing shirts vs. skins. 

I didn’t intentionally start doing this, but I started checking out each of the boys who was shirtless. Specifically, I was looking at their stomachs to see if there was any signs of malnutrition among them.

When the people around you commonly eat five times a day, food security isn’t always an issue that you think about. I have never seen the classic photographs of children and adults emaciated from famine play out in real life in my village. 

What we have in my village is not a problem of famine. There is plenty to eat. (Although I cannot state that this a fact for all of all of Benin. My village’s location on one of the main highways means that we have ready and regular access to a lot of things that we need.) What we have is a problem of malnutrition.

The main food group here is a mixture of flour and water (beaten to the consistency of polenta) that always comes up on the losing side in the caloric intake vs. nutritional intake battle. (As I eat M&Ms from a care package as I write this.) It will sit in a hard lump in your stomach for hours, and since you are still able to go about your work, everything seems fine.

It isn’t until you see your students run by with their shirts off and you can count the ribs next to their bloated stomachs that you realize that everything may not be, in fact, fine.

Stay inside the box

One of the first projects that I started when I first got to my village was participating in a program that paid for the school fees and school supplies for a female student at my middle school. In exchange for me buying her notebooks, pens and a French-English dictionary, if she completes a community service project, she will receive an additional stipend of school supplies for the next year.

We’re about seven weeks out from the end of the year, so my scholarship girl, Therese, and I sat in my house this afternoon planning her project. Therese is a quiet girl; she only speaks in class when she really knows the answer or when William, the boy who sits next to her, has done something to really annoy her. So, by “planning” I mean she stared at her fingernails while I probed her with “yes” or “no” questions trying to figure out what she could do.

“Like pulling teeth,” could be a cliché to describe the interaction. But about halfway through this interaction, I realized that, actually, this was probably one of the few times that an adult in her life had asked her what she wanted to do herself. One of the few times that an adult had genuinely listened to what she wanted to say and genuinely wanted to know what she wanted to do.

I’ve experienced this before. In the first meeting of my Girls Club, I asked the students what they wanted to do. They couldn’t come up with anything on their own, but wholeheartedly agreed with every suggestion that I proposed. It was like up until this point in their life, they had never been given a choice, so they weren’t how to respond when given an open-ended question.

I don’t know when creativity is beat (unfortunately usually literally) out of my students, but I’m more interested in the why. Why are my students taught not to be able to think for themselves? Why are my students taught that there is only one right answer for every question? Why are my students taught that to think outside what is expected is unacceptable?

The long and winding road

I am an aggressive bicyclist. Years of biking across a college campus of drivers late to class, pedestrians and the occasional skateboarder have made me a hostile person when you get between me and my destination when I’m on two wheels.

(There were many instances in college when I was biking to campus and felt the need to comment on the perceived stupidity of the person who just walked out in front of me, as I would have done if I was driving. The one huge difference in this situation when one is biking and one is driving is the lack of enclosed space when one is biking. ie. When you call someone an idiot/or cuss someone out on a bike, they can hear you.)

This situation has not changed since I’ve moved halfway around the world. There are fewer cars, but more chickens, goats and small children that run out into the middle of the road as one is trying to bike to work.

The thing, though, is that “road” is a very relative term here. Basically, what became the road is the path that everyone walks. (As long as you greet the family whose front yard through which you pass, you shouldn’t have a problem.) When I first moved here, I always got lost going home in the dark because I wouldn’t be able to follow the path of the “road” to my house.

Roads in American belong to the vehicles. And the more wheels you have the more you have a right to that road. Here, the roads belong to the children and the neighbors and the chickens. It is not uncommon for someone to walk down the middle of the narrow path on which I am trying to bike or for a child to be standing right around the corner of a tight turn.

The truth is, that here, it is those people that have much more of a right to the road than I do. Roads don’t lead from your house to the boutique. They lead from your house past the lemon tree under which your neighbors nap during the afternoon, with a turn at the hair dresser with a television that all the kids in the area try to watch through the window, past the woman who sells gas and only speaks to you in local language where your colleagues occasionally hang out, past the woman who sells fried tofu around 6:30 each evening to the boutique where you are greeted by name.

When you’re on the road, you’re not just trying to get from point A to point B, but to see where the journey there will take you.

She finally likes me!

I stood under the tree at the high school near my house, playing with my  phone to try to pass the time before my English department meeting would start when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man with his small child pull up on a moto. 

I walked over to Martin and greeted him and his daughter, Rolande, who, as usual, hid her face in her dad’s shirt instead of acknowledging me.

Usually, when they first encounter me without the security of a group of other kids with them, kids are scared of me. Especially babies. (In one case that I have yet to figure out, the 8-month-old son of my neighbor was not scared of me, but when I came back from my 5-day Christmas vacation cried whenever his mom tried to hand him to me.)

But, with as much time as I’ve spent with Rolande, (I was at her house for Easter, and she is a frequent attendee of our staff meetings due to the fact that both her parents work at the school.) that she is still scared of me is one of my greatest unaccomplishments here.

As usual, as I talked to her dad, Rolande ignored my presence, until she interrupted our conversation to point to her mom, a math teacher, walking across the school yard.

“You see Mom?” Martin asked. He lifted her off the moto. “If you follow Emily, she will take you to Mom.”

I held out the index finger of my right hand to her, and, to my surprise, she took my hand and led me across the courtyard.

This 10-second walk was the closest and most prolonged interaction she has ever allowed me to have.

Her mom met us near the buildings opposite of where we started. She greeted me, then motioned to her daughter.

“She accepted today?” she asked.

How foosball changed everything.

As I biked back from school tonight, I was hell bent on the intention to go home, read some Foster Wallace, eat some popcorn and finish the episode of Homeland I had started. (Not necessarily in that order.) I had already spent seven and a half hours at school, so I was feeling I had made enough of an appearance in the community for the day. (If the past few posts were not enough of an indication, I’ve been in a bit of a funk for the past few days.)

My route home leads me past a boutique where one of my best friends here has a tendency to hang out when he’s finished teaching. About four months ago, two foosball tables appeared there, making it one of the go-to destinations in my village.

As I pedaled past the small group of students who had already been released from class for the day, but had not yet decided it was time to go home standing around the tables, my friend yelled at me to come sit with him.

“I saw you were tired, so I thought that you should come hang out here for a little bit before you go home,” was his explanation as he made room for me to sit on the mat next to him. (When Martin became so perceptive, I’m not quite sure.)

“Do you know how to play?” he asked me, motioning to the foosball tables.

I nodded. “But not well." 

"Let’s play.” He stood, searched in his pocket for the 25 CFA needed to release the hard plastic balls, and took his place behind table.

One of my favorite things about Martin (and several of my other colleagues) is while he is older than me, he still has the tendency to act like a teenaged boy. “I’m going to beat you 5-0,” he said as I dropped the ball onto the table.

He did beat me (9-6). And as we walked away from the tables to let the students play, I realized that he had also given me back that feeling that had been missing for the past few days. That feeling that someone would care if I wasn’t here. That feeling that I could do this for the next 19 months. Never has a game of foosball meant so much to me.

Sometimes I wish you could fast forward your life to see how everything ends up.

A long time ago (although really only about 6 years, which, granted, is a lot when you only have 22 years of life experience), I remember feeling like anything was possible. I remember thinking, almost on a daily basis, that everything would work out as it should. That the universe would put everything in order for me even if I couldn’t at the time figure out what that order was.

What I didn’t realize then was that the universe was fucking infuriating. That there is still a chance that the universe could have a grand plan for everyone in it (call it destiny, call it god, call it what you want), but when you are in the middle of wading through the shit in between, when you are trying to figure out what it is exactly that is going on is when you start to think that everything that you thought before was utter bullshit.

I’m not sure when I started becoming jaded. (Although I’m pretty sure that I can pinpoint the person who served as the catalyst for this reaction.) There are still spurts when I feel like everything will eventually work out for what it is supposed to be, but the muck of waiting is fucking miserable.

I am content with the path that my life has taken, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t things that I wish I could have done differently. That isn’t to say that I spend some of my time questioning the things that I gave up to be here, and whether in the long run, the opportunity cost will still be worth it.

Is this what it’s all about? Do you never really know if what you’re doing is the thing that you’re meant to do? What if there isn’t one thing that you’re meant to do, but many things that would lead you to have a perfectly happy life unless you were, in fact, able to see the result of a different path chosen?

I have to believe that I will end up in the life that I want. But I also cannot be naïve enough to believe that the life in which everyone ends up is the life that they always wanted for themselves. Someone has to end up at the end wondering “what if?”

It is one of my greatest fears that sixty years from now, I will find that I have ended up in the later category. 

There are still some bumps along the way.

This post is coming after a series of encounters that, while weren’t bad, could have gone better. But I don’t want to write another “this life is hard, but I love it” posts, so we’re trying something else.

Tonight, as I stood in my kitchen, trying to forget the awkward encounters I’d had today at my school with my colleagues and my director by eating a pineapple one of my students had brought me earlier, I thought about how today seemed so weird maybe because it was coming on the end of a string of really good days. Not even just with Americans, but in village as well.

And how, my colleagues and director were probably less concerned with our interactions today than I am. In fact, they probably have much more important things to think about.

And I thought about how this day was weird, but in the end, what matters, isn’t what I did today. Or even what I will do tomorrow. But I will do over the course of two years.

#springbreak2013

I spent part of my spring break last week at my friend’s house participating in what we had christened “Second Thanksgiving.” The brainchild of too much duck and too much palm wine and too little sleep and the first time being away from family at a major holiday at Thanksgiving dinner last November, this dinner was the culmination of a revelation that with enough ingenuity (and hope) American foods can be recreated here.

So we made plans for another dinner a few months after the first where we would feast, once again, as kings and speak English and pretend that we didn’t care about what was happening back in the US.

There were chickens (4), and mashed potatoes. There was macaroni and cheese. There were green beans and rolls. There was salad and mango salsa. And there were peanut butter cookies and apple crisp and apple cake. (There was shamefully more food than we needed, but that is a different post for a different time.)

What there wasn’t was a lot of nostalgia about what we would each be doing right now if we weren’t here.

At nine months in, we are all kind of hitting our stride. The new group of volunteers will be arriving in two and a half months. I can count on my two hands the number of weeks I have left in the school year.

The hard days don’t disappear completely, but they are less frequent. And you never stop thinking about what work you have left to do here. (And you never stop sweating) But you do stop thinking less of it as a meal to recreate all that you’re missing at home and more of it as an excuse to see some good friends. 

You can take the American out of the United States, but you can't take the American work ethic out of the American.

When I first moved to my village, I enforced a strict “must leave the house at least once a day” policy. (An equally strict noWest Wing before noon policy was quickly added.) The longer I’ve lived here, the more what actually counts as leaving my house has changed. (Going to school-ok. Talking to my friends down the street-legit. Only going to the market-iffy.) 

Tonight, as I was walking home from buying fish and eggs, I realized that this was the only time that I had left my concession today. And after being away for the past five days, the situation could have been better.

The thing was, though, that I had been battling a mild fever, a sore throat and a runny nose all day. Nothing serious, but enough that when I took my usual midday nap, I ended up sleeping away the afternoon. 

But still, as I walked home feeling like someone was playing a tamtam in my head with every step, I tried to justify to myself my afternoon of doing very little. “Bien integree” (well integrated) is a term that we throw around a lot here as a goal to be achieved over the next two years. What we don’t talk about is that sometimes, there are things that you can’t control, regardless of how much American medication and technology you have on hand.

When I booted up my computer and started lunging my way into P90x later, my post mate Dave shot me an incredulous look.

“Don’t you have a fever?”

Thoughts from places: Sunday mass

I sat in mass last Sunday nervously flipping a 100 franc coin around in my hand as I watched the rows of my students and their families get up one at a time and file to the altar. Each pass was marked by the metallic clink of coins hitting coins. 

I’m never sure what to do here. Here, the collection is more obligatory than masses to which I am accustomed. Also, in all the masses at which I’ve been here, there is always a second collection after Communion. My friend Job explained to me that this one is not obligatory; only if you’ve recently been paid or come into money some other way should you give 10 percent to the church. (I was amused that the 10-percent tithing rule had made it to Benin).

As a general rule, I throw in whatever coin I have on me at the time, but it is the public nature of the interaction that always gives me pause. I tend to stand out here, so I knew people would notice when I stood, walked in front of everyone and then turned back to my place on the bench next to Job.

Here, (and I can only speak for Benin since it is the only developing nature in which I’ve spent an extended period of time, although one could assume this trait is semi-universal across cultures that have a history of being on the receiving end of colonization) having white skin is synonymous is having lots of money. I cannot fault anyone for this conclusion. I live like my neighbors only because I would like to come out of this experience even financially as when I started. I tell myself that because I live within my monthly allowance that I am experiencing life the same way (financially) that my neighbors are experiencing life.

But I’m not.

I know that if there was an emergency, I would have the funds to take care of any expenses that might entail. I know that in the two years I live here, I will have the monetary ability to do all the things that I want to do and see all the parts of the country that I want to see. I know that my salary for one is probably divided amongst an entire family for my neighbors.

As I sat in mass last Sunday, I thought about how I know how little my friends, neighbors and students live on compared to me, and yet, how much their capacity for generosity surpasses mine. Later, during the announcements that always follow Communion, my host father invited all the children of the church back to his house for food as part of the village-wide Easter celebration. My host father is a relatively wealthy member of my community (he and his children probably live at the same socio-economic class that I do here). But while I choose spend my money on Internet credit and phone credit and motorcycle taxi fare and Beninoises, he chooses to give what he can back to the community.

I always kept from flashing money in my village because I told myself it was a slippery slope down which to start, especially when I still will be living in this community for the next 19 months. But now I’m not so sure. There is always the risk of someone taking advantage of me. But there’s also always the risk of giving someone something when they could really need  it.

What the Easter bunny brought me this year:

Two days of parties, 93 minutes of mass, one friend visiting, fifteen spiced breads shaped like rabbits, six free meals, three beers, one shot of sodabe and eight and a half hours of visiting friends and neighbors.

There were also a lot of good people here already.

It was today, as I sat in Martin’s house (one of our history/geography teachers) eating the best pounded yams I’ve ever eaten in my village, as I watched Martin lift his 18-month-old daughter on his legs like I used to beg my big sister/brother/dad to do when I was little, as his wife cracked a joke that caused me to laugh out loud again, as I remembered the smile that spread across Martin’s face when he walked into his backyard to find me pounding yams, as I thought about how there was not really any other person’s house I’d rather be at at that moment, that I realized something:

I was going to miss these people when I left.

Author’s typing-this-the-day-after-it-happened note: I was walking with Pierre, the other history/geography teacher today (who is also one of my favorites. There seems to be something about history/geo teachers here) when we passed Martin’s house. There was someone sitting on the front step of his neighbor’s house that could have been him, but I knew it wasn’t him when he didn’t run over to see me after I waved. He’s that kind of person.