"How the other half lives"

Is a stupid and ridiculous phrase used by people who have lived most of their life with the ability to attain what it is they have wanted. (I was one of them) Most notably because it’s not half the people in the world who live without the privilege, it’s the majority. 

The group of volunteers will arrive in country in less than a month (Which also means that the second-years with whom I’m already serving will start leaving in two months. Luckily, in a weird twist of fate/cash in of all the karma I have ever accumulated, two of my best friends both won at the third-year lottery and I get them 7k and 50k away from for another year. So it’s a lot less bittersweet than it could be.) and like we were doing a year ago, are sending frantic questions at us daily: what to pack, what they’ll be eating, what to expect.

It’s that last one that is the most difficult to answer. There is nothing that I could have done in the month before I left to better prepare myself for this experience. Strip down every luxury that you have in your life (grocery stores, reliable transport, running water, reliable and regulated electricity, road that get you directly where you want to go, the ability to purchase exactly what you want at that moment if you have access to a means of transportation) and maybe you could start there.

This is not a post to complain about what I don’t have. It’s a post to reflect on how much I didn’t understand how much life is different outside the United States.

In high school, I participated in this leadership/diversity program where my mind was first rocked by the idea that I had peers who had not grown up with 50 books in their house.

This is so much farther beyond that.

Not what they want to hear

The most controversial project that I’ve started here so far has been my Girls Club. At eleven weeks in, the boys still ask me when I’m going to start my Boys Club when I show up at school at 17:00. The controversy only worsened this week when the t-shirts I ordered for the club arrived. The question changed from when the Boys Club would start to when I would be making them t-shirts. 

In the US, my usual response to questions such as those would be that the entire rest of the country is a Boys Club, every other month is White History Month and the Men’s Center is the entire rest of campus. Those responses don’t really translate here.

My general observation about men here, both my students and those older, is that they are not used to hearing the word, “No.” No you cannot join my club. No you cannot play with my iPod. No you cannot take my bicycle. Chauvinism is not just an underlying part of the culture. Chauvinism is the culture.

When I started the club, I was tentative. I could feel myself bending under the incessant questioning, by students and other teachers. But then the girls took hold of the club. It became their place. Their one place where they held dominion. The one place where they could say no boys allowed.

Confidence is most of it

My colleague and I are in my 6eme class trying to get 52 students to understand the concept of adverbs of frequency. We are trying to get them to use them in a sentence. There is a list of them on the board. (rarely, sometimes, never, always, often) What they can’t seem to grasp is that they need to include one of those six magical words in order for their sentences to be correct.

“I sometimes eat pounded yams,” my colleague says.

“I always ride my bicycle to school,” I say.

“I always walk to school,” Leon offers.

“John usually sleeps in class,” Rodrigue says. 

“Landry never does his homework,” Alexandre adds.

They seem to be getting the hang of it.

The next student I call on is Marcos, a shy boy who seems younger than most of my other students. 

He stands up proudly, arms straight, hands at his sides. 

“Marcos is a student!” he yells, so sure of his answer that I also want it to be right. 

The domestication of wild plants and the truths of life

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which means my thoughts have been even more on development recently. But not on work that I am doing, but what laid the foundation thousands of the years ago that I am here and my neighbors are not in the United States.

(If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. It takes some concentration, but its scope is outstanding. That I am reading this book now had a direct effect on my appreciation of it. The question posed in the prologue is a question that I hear everyday: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”)

In Chapter 14, Diamond lays out a nice chart mapping the evolution of societies from bands to states. What struck me when I was reading it was how much the society in which I am currently living lands in characteristics that pertain to all four of the categories of societies he outlines.

Certainly, my village is part of the country of Benin. It relies on a central government to partition resources and enforce laws. But there are many times when if there is a choice between choosing the modern or traditional methods of an action, we go traditional. For example, there is no courthouse in my village. If there is a disagreement between citizens, they visit the King for a resolution. The government has no need to be informed of such things.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, as much as G,G,&S is the most successful explanation of worldwide human development of which I know, it also fails in some senses. It would be impossible to be able to tell all the truths of life and development around the world.

In some way, what I’m trying to do with this blog is tell the truths of life in Benin. (The judgment of my success or failure is up to you.) But even after I will live here for almost 27 months, this is an unattainable goal. I cannot know all the truths of Benin. Even Dave, who lives 5k away from me, is having a difference volunteer experience than I am. His truths of life in Benin are different than mine.

So, I guess that the only thing that you can do is try to find your truths. And realize how those truths will shape the person that you become. 

An excerpt from my 5eme students' final quiz of the year:

Put the verbs in the indicated tense and form.

1. You (to watch) the film. Future tense with will, affirmative

2. Bart (to have) a cow, man. Future tense with going, negative

3. Vinny (to get) his drink on tonight. Future tense with will, affirmative

4. She (to buy) a stairway to heaven. Future tense with going, affirmative

5. Frodo (to destroy) the one ring. Future tense with going, interrogative.

Like Mary Poppins' bag

Sometimes when I have students (and several adults that I know) at my house, it seems like they think that I have a magical, endless supply of things. The thought of the consequences of what would happen if they broke my iPod doesn’t cross their mind because I can just buy another one. They can continuously ask me for stickers because I must have a sticker Mama at the market who keeps me in supply. 

What they don’t realize is if I really had access to magical things fairy, I would have passed its contact information along to them a long time ago.

Favorite things about Benin 3:

I was coasting down the other side of the hill I just climbed when I looked down at my front bicycle tire. That I could push it in to the point where I could touch the rim was not a good sign. 

I could no longer see Kristin, the volunteer with whom I was biking the 50k to Dassa, so I started walking. 

The first village I came across was 3k down the highway. I stopped two men who had just left the fields.

“Do you know a mechanic?” I asked.

“Yes. He is over there,” the man said, pointing in the general direction of the village, a classic example of Beninese directions.

Nothing in the direction he motioned looked like a place where I could get my tire fixed, so I kept walking, chalking up the interaction to a failure to understand my accent. 

Thirty feet later, another man comes running up from the village to me. He was the mechanic. So, I followed him back to his shop. And I made faces at the group of kids that steadily grew as word spread there was a Yovo in town while he patched my tire. And I thought about how much I love that I live in a place where I’m never more than walking distance from someone who can help me along my route.

The strange dichotomy that is development

Things that I’ve noticed that seem to imply that sometimes, the priorities in development in my village need to reevaluated:

-Almost everyone I know has a cellphone. No one I know has running water.

-My neighbors have satellite television, but also feel that it is sanitary to shit on the side of the road.

-We have cars, but feel the need to put at least seven people in them at one time.

-People have built libraries and computer labs and health centers, but never bothered to educate the population that washing your hands involves more than just pouring water over them.

Now, I understand that I’m approaching this situation with the biased lens of my westernized experience, but as much as we’ve talked about needs v. wants and sustainability and creating projects that are not your projects, but community projects, it seems to me that something was off in the past.

And there is a lot that needs to be done. (Again looking at my situation from my westernized perspective) So the question does have to be where do you start? Is anything better than nothing?

Summer project #1

Like all good teachers, I’m looking forward to three months of no lesson planning, no quizzes to grade and having my voice a majority of the time due to a significant decrease in the time it is raised.

I’ll be filling most of my time with my students at various camps. (two for female empowerment and one English spelling bee where my students will be competing against students of other Peace Corps volunteers.) The one that I’m most excited for, and the one that I feel can influence the most amount of change, and the one that I feel is most necessary in this community, is Camp GLOW Parakou, a weeklong camp for girls where we try to share as much knowledge as possible to help these girls live successfully. (Malaria, nutrition, relationship advice, sexual health and images of beauty are all things about which we will be talking.)

Camp GLOW, like all the projects in which I’ll be participating this summer, is volunteer run, which means we have come to the unfortunate part of my job where I have to solicit funds from my friends and family because the $3 I’m paid a day doesn’t really allow for big things to happen. (And unfortunately, I already know this is not the last time I will need to do this.)

And unfortunately, unless the project is fully funded from people like you, it will not happen. My sincerest gratitude for anything that you are able to give.

Link and official project description are below. 

Camp GLOW

Since 2004, Peace Corps Volunteers from Northeastern Benin have coordinated with local organizations to run a girls’ empowerment camp in the capital of the local region. This year Peace Corps and the University of Parakou, the prestigious local university, will invite 50 girls from villages in the regions to participate in this opportunity. In addition, 6 girls from Camp G.L.O.W. 2012 have been invited back as junior counselors to help with the camp this year. Six model women will be selected from the communities to accompany the girls. These women, called ‘tutrices’, will act as a role models, facilitators, and chaperones for the duration of the camp and ultimately as a more permanent resource for the community. Throughout the week, the participants will be led through sessions on how to bring their new skills and the ideals of Camp G.L.O.W. back to their villages, specifically to other girls of the same age group. Each day is filled with sessions on leading a healthy lifestyle, the rights of women and children, health education, nutritional gardening, goal setting, and effective study skills. All of the sessions are to be co-led by tutrices and their Peace Corps volunteer. By targeting girls of this age, the ultimate goal is to motivate them to continue their education and develop the skills necessary to grow into successful, confident, multi-talented women in a developing country.

My ten days without a computer

Two Tuesdays ago (The French have a word for this situation, but we don’t in English. One of the few things that I found my maternal language is lacking.), my house was flooded (I unwisely didn’t close my windows during a storm, thinking having access to the cold air was more important than keeping water out of my house.) and my Mac charger that has been on the fritz for a while decided sitting in a pool of water for an hour was the last straw and called it quits. (Hence the flood of blog posts last weekend when another volunteer whose Mac has been broken since as August let me borrow her charger.)

Between then and now, there were many times when I didn’t know what to do with myself. I read four books. I went to sleep at 20:30. I spent some time staring at the wall, finding patterns.

But I also got more sleep than I had in weeks. My head was clearer than its been in weeks. I spent less time in my house than I had in weeks.

There are times when I legitimately need a computer to get work done here. But there are also many times that I use it mainly as a crutch to pass the time. (When I first got home this Sunday, I had to resist the urge to sit and watch all the episodes of Homeland left in this season.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though I live in country where almost none of my neighbors pass hours reading Reddit or stalking people on Facebook, it’s hard to imagine my life not being able to do it. I use the phrase “you don’t know that you’re living in the dark if you’ve only ever lived during the night” to describe my experience here a lot. This may be one of the first times that I’ve thought I’m on the wrong side of that experience. 

Just because I'm older than you doesn't mean I know how to handle life any better than you do.

It was a small Girls Club meeting today. It was Beninese Labor Day, which meant classes were cancelled, which meant most of my girls were more concerned with eating fried foods than what was going on at school.

After quickly discussing t-shirts and a potential fundraiser, we were finished.

“Will you buy us some beignets?” Florentine asked as I was getting ready to leave. Florentine is one of my 5eme students. She is smart, confident, strong-willed and independent. In short, she is who I wished I had been when I was 16.

I did a quick calculation. There were seven of them. Buying them all beignets would cost me 200 CFA (about 40 cents). I nodded, and we headed toward the Mama who sells beignets in the afternoon.

In my daily life, I miss a lot of things. Not just because of the cultural differences, but because the majority of the interactions happening around me are in a language I don’t understand.

On the way to beignets, I had one of these major miscommunications that ended in me thinking my girls were laughing at something that happened to me. I left them to their beignets and biked home. (Which in retrospect seems like a huge overreaction, especially when I learned my girls had been laughing at a situation that didn’t involve me that I didn’t pick up on because it was in local language. You know what they say about the vision of hindsight.)

About a hour later, I had a knock at my door. It was Florentine.

“Madam,” she said. “What happened? Why did you leave us like that?”

It was then that I realized my 16-year-old student is, in some ways, more mature than I am. 

There is a fine line between helping and being taken advantage of.

I’ve been trying to walk that line for the past 10 months. And this afternoon, as I had another high school student ask me to help/do (there is a fine line there as well) their homework, I began to reevaluate my position on that line.

It was true that I do now how to do what he needed to do. It was true that I was going to make him look up all the words in the dictionary himself. It was true that I really had nothing better to do. 

But my instinct had been to say whatever I needed to get this kid to leave me alone. It could have been because I was concerned about what would happen if this got back to his teacher. It could have been because of several circumstances where people have told me I need to be more assertive. It could have been because I really just wanted to take a nap.

People know that I am here for them, but how much is too much? Is there such a thing as too much when I come where I come from?

I ended up helping him and reevaluating my previous position on helping students who weren’t my students.

I couldn’t help wondering if being a little taken advantage of was a little part of my job.

How I became part of an African band.

My Friday afternoons have now been taken by practice for the Cultural Days, a two-day half dance party and half track and field game. As this is my first time, I tend to float back and worth between sessions. 

Yesterday, when I arrived at school, my director looked straight at me.

“You,” he said pointing. “Today, you will dance.”

I followed him to the classroom where the students doing traditional dance  were practicing. 

I walked in, sat down and was handed an African maraca.