Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know exactly when the major aspect of my life was going to end. (Not really a job since I have yet to hold a long-term, full-time position where I make more 28 cents an hour.) Not that I have a lot of experience, but I always knew exactly when I would graduate high school and no longer live with my parents, when I would be leaving my London flat behind for the next group of students, how long I had left before I would start saying goodbye to friends from college and now, I know within a date of one month when my life in Benin will end.

The cyclical nature of this experience hit me today when I said goodbye to one of my friends who is returning to the US, but is leaving a city that will only have to wait 54 days before another volunteer arrives. When there have been Americans in a country for 45 years, and another group has just arrived, it’s hard to not imagine yourself as just a small part of the impact.

Yes, there are people who will miss me when I’m gone. Yes, there will be (semi) permanent reminders that I was once here. Yes, there are students who I hope look back one day and remember those two years that an American danced around their school. But there will be other people and other structures and other experiences that who isn’t to say will trump these two years? Is there any way that, even for just a moment, you can make time stand still before it turns madly on?

When I was 12, I spent my free time obsessing over the Lord of the Rings.

Three nights ago, I was served dinner on the street by a 13-year-old girl. She commanded the stall where she sold salad, ordering who I assumed were her younger siblings to fetch the mayonnaise she had forgotten at the house. She was the oldest person around, and I when I left at 19:15, would still be there, selling rice and cheese and salad and pate three hours later.

Two mornings ago, I watched 11 and 12-year-old girls run alongside my taxi selling peanuts and palm fruit as we slowed to pass over the speed bumps before the tollbooth. It was 11:35. I can only assume that it was the beginning of what would be a long day.

Today, I was still pondering the question that these two circumstances had planted in my head: How had these girls ended up spending their adolescence selling food for fractions of a dollar to passers-by?  

Thoughts from places: South African safari campfire

It was about three days into my vacation in South Africa that I realized how much I had needed this vacation. I was sipping red wine (from a bottle not a box) and talking to other guests at our safari lodge when I realized that this was the most comfortable I had felt in a long time.

I love Benin. I love the path that I have chosen to walk for the next 15 months. And really, I don’t want to be working anywhere else right now. But that doesn’t mean that path is easy all the time.

What I realized that night while I spoke in a language where I didn’t have to stop to think about any words before I said them, where I didn’t feel like I was a substitute for television for any kids, where I didn’t have to worry about anyone asking my for money was that I had not failed. My overwhelming need need to get out of the place that I’ve called home for the past year did not mean that I wasn’t integrated into my community, that I wasn’t good at what I’m doing, that I had chosen the wrong path.  It simply meant that I needed a break.

I realized that night that the person I was in South Africa was different than the person I had been in Benin for the last three months. And I liked the former much better. 

I realized that I had needed these 10 days off in order to allow that person to still be there when I walked off the plane in Cotonou the next Sunday.

What I've learned so far:

Walk around, leave your house, do not watch that next episode of the West Wing; Never underestimate the value of greeting someone; Start projects early, things will rarely work out as they planned; Do not try to put another food object in a plastic container after you have repeatedly put fried fish in that container; Someone will always answer your question, but you have to be willing to ask first; Determine what you think is your capacity for patience, then double it; Your attitude that day will be directly reflected in the actions of your students; Take advantage of what resources you can get your hands on; Sometimes, you just need to sit in your house, drink red wine and stalk your US friends on Facebook; Regular dreams about food are not something of which to be ashamed; Be strong; You are the teacher, and you are in charge, which means that sometimes, you have to walk out of the classroom before your students walk all over you; A song is a powerful incentive; Sweating while not moving is possible; Emails from home will always come when you need them most; It is easier to waste time on YouTube Mobile than it is to waste time on full-bandwidth YouTube due to loading/downloading.bandwidth issues; Pounded yams. Eat them; You will become accustomed to three-inch long cockroaches in your latrine faster than you would think; After about four months, you tend to forget what you don’t have; You will be surprised at the people who you miss; Some of the best things can be purchased from atop a person’s head; People’s perceptiveness will surprise you; Just dance; Tragedies in the US will still reach you even if you are six time zones away; You will learn as much, if not more than, what your students learn from you; Don’t spend so much time doubting that your colleagues will come through; Surround yourself with good people, with them you can do anything; You can do this.

Time won't let me go, part 2

One of the things that I love about my local language is the non-fixedness of its time. In French (or even English) if it was 11h00 and someone greeted you with “bon soir” (good afternoon) you would question their ability to read a clock. 

But in my local language, the greeting changes from the equivalent of good morning to good afternoon really when you feel like it. If you feel like you’ve been up and working and it feels like it’s afternoon, it’s perfectly acceptable to say good afternoon.

What I don’t love is that, recently, the change for me when it feels like good afternoon instead of good morning has been circa 10h30. 

Don't I know you?

There are many times here that I find myself comparing the friends that I have made here with the friends that I left back home, like I’m trying to directly replace people from my life in the US to the people I have in my life now.

I was thinking about this this morning as I stared at the sesame plants in front of my deserted school as I waited for my director to show. Is it because I have a tendency to surround myself with the same sort of people? Is it because there are only a finite number of characteristics for people to have so of course some of those appear in the personalities of those I knew back home and those I know now? Is it because I’m trying too hard to find things here that remind me of home?

If Madame wants some oranges...

One of my students was at my house today when I casually asked him where I could find some oranges tonight. He answered he knew a place and took off on my bicycle.

He returned ten minutes later empty handed. Then he remembered that one of their neighbors had an orange tree in their yard. He ran to their house.

He returned fifteen minutes later again empty handed. He then remembered his dad was in Savalou, a city south of our village not big enough to have hamburgers, but big enough to usually have fruit. He ran back to his house to have his mom call his dad to tell him to bring me some oranges.

When I first moved here, I basically had to relearn how to do everything. One thing that I’ve found to be pretty true here is the ability to find people who are willing to help you do something no matter the feasibility.

Which is how, at 19:33 this evening, I found myself with a bag of enough oranges for the next three days.

Time won't let me go

I regret my lack of posting in the last week, and my excuses could be listed as follows: my electricity extra unreliable, leaving little battery power for blogging; I’ve been spending a lot of time with volunteers lately, and in Cotonou, which leaves me mainly with “I love my friends” stories, which would be be true, but not really what I want this blog to be about; and I’ve been so well-integrated that I haven’t had the time to blog.

The truth, though, would be that I’ve been too tired to get all the things I need to finished before vacation, let alone find the brainpower to write words that aren’t meaningless on here every night.

If you had told me that there would be a time that I would be this stressed during my service, I wouldn’t have believed you. But not just me, every one that’s about to hit the one-year mark is suddenly realizing how much the next four months of their lives are booked. And how much this schedule is going to put us suddenly at October with less than a year left, not quite remembering how we got there.

Most of the time here, I feel like I’m living in a time warp. Time just seems to pass differently here. It once felt like it would never end. Now it feels like  it’s disappearing without my permission. 

The new group of volunteers arrive in about a week. Those first three months felt like they were the longest of my life. Now, it’s weird to think about how they will be experiencing days that feel like they last 30 hours while the rest of us run around the country trying to to snag as much time as possible. 

I’m sorry that this will be another “my students are the reason I’m here” post, but to tell you the truth, that is the most truth that I found here so far.

The cause of about 85 percent of stress from the past two months culminated today in the first day of our Cultural Days celebration at my school. I woke up today not excited for the event, but excited for it to be over.

I’ve found at most parties that I’ve been to that my interest seems to wane before most of the other attendees. Usually this has a lot to do with the amount of moonshine I’ve drank and the amount of local language is being spoken around me. I expected today to be much of the same.

In some ways I was right: the morning session started 2 hours and 12 minutes late. All of the skits were in Ife. At the end, I was ready to go home and take a nap.

In some ways I wasn’t. It’s completely different when it’s your students who are leading the parade, and it’s them you have to worry about getting hit by motorcycle, when the kid who hardly ever talks in class has the entire school laughing as soon as he walks on stage, when you’re seeing your girls in traditional clothing for the first time dancing so hard they’re sweating, when you introduce the fist pump to a crowd of your colleagues.

I’m tired and I’m sunburnt and I made a fool of myself, but I’m happy.

All that you can’t leave behind

One of my friends here, aloveaffairwiththeworld, came here with the goal of writing a book about her experience in the Peace Corps. She’s read a couple, and honestly, she thought many of them were, well, bad. The problem, she says, is that the story is too focused on the volunteer him or herself, not the story of the people or the country that the volunteer experiences.

One of our friends told her something at the beginning of our training that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. He told her that if she was able to tell the story of how this experience changed her, her transformation into an African, that would be a story worth telling.

So, almost a year in, I’ve been thinking about my own transformation into an African. As far as I can tell it is this so far: I eat later. I rarely wear pants in public. I am comfortable eating certain meals with my hands. I sometimes find it easier to just ask someone else (read a student) to so something for me than doing it myself. I have found my capacity to sit in silence and my capacity to sit and do nothing have both greatly increased. I showed up over an hour late to a party today.

Right now, it all seems pretty superficial. What I’m going to take with me after this experience, my transformation into an African, I’m pretty sure I have yet to see. What I bring back with me has yet to be decided. 

The day a parade brought me back to my house

The students of my Girls Club decided to end the year how most things in my life are ending right now: with a party. They made food. We ate their food. We listened to some people talk. We took some pictures. And we danced.

After about an hour and a half, the girls decided they had had enough. They packed up the food, put their containers on their heads and started walking toward their houses.

Then one of them started singing. And then a few joined in. And then 18 girls were walking down the streets of our village chanting and singing.

“Club des Filles!” Prisca shouted.

“La Paix!” they answered.

“Club des Filles!”

“La Paix!”

“Club des Filles!”

“La Paix!”

They continued until they reached my front door. (Which was not on the way home for any of them.) My neighbors, curious as to the source of the noise, met us and then joined in.

A large part of the party that day was for them. I wanted them to forget about the final exams they had just taken. I wanted them to learn how to execute a project from beginning to end and learn how to work with a budget. I wanted them to have a memory that would make them want to continue the club next year.

I will also say that part of the party that day was for me. Working with these girls has been the most fulfilling part of my time here so far. It’s the time that I most feel like me being here means something to someone.

Before we ate, our school director said a few words about what we had done that semester. He talked about what they had learned, and then told the girls basically that I have a little over a year left here so they better take advantage of the time that rests.

During this part, one of my girls made eye contact with me across the room. I will never forget that look. It was a look of her not wanting to me to go anywhere. That one look made me think that everything that I left behind, everything that has gone wrong here, every time that I wished I was back in the United States over the past 11 months may have not been in vain.

Give it a second or third chance

I’ve been in a frustrated-ready-to-run-away-to-the-workstation-for-three-weeks kind of mood recently (my friends on our cellphone network can attest. There have been some pretty cranky texts recently.) due to a generally inability to get things done on the first try. For the last week, I have been climbing a mountain of meetings that keep having to be rescheduled, commitments that pop up last second and minutes spent waiting for things to happen.

Most of these text messages and complaints pointed to a a specific cause of this mountain: Beninese men. I blamed the people here for not taking things seriously, for not respecting my time and wanting to get all that they could from me. 

And then today, one of colleagues made it all work out. Yes, he was late to all our meetings and rescheduled two of them, but he also made a third meeting happen that needed to and left my house at 22:00 with work still to do.

So now, as almost all my previous problems of the week are solved, I need to reevaluate my initial thesis. Turns out, sometimes you have to change things, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get done. And like in the US, those here who are ready and willing to work hard have a tendency to double book themselves.

As someone who usually opts to work with herself, the issue this week wasn’t working with Beninese men. It was the nature of having to work with other people.