Not quite the cultural exchange I was looking for.

I was typing a blog post at my neighbor’s house when I stopped mid-sentence, startled and not quite sure what I had just heard.

My neighbor had been working at her sewing machine when something had gotten stuck and the machine had jammed. She called over Modeste, the teenage boy who lives with her, but isn’t her son, to help her.

Modeste fiddled around the machine for a while, unable to find the location where the problem had originated. He stepped back and crossed his arms, and then, very plainly and calmly repeated what he had heard me say the night before when I couldn’t get the hose to fit on my new gas tank. The word that he had heard me say when I ripped the valve off my bike tire. The word that he heard me say when I showed up at my house after working with my director at my school all morning only to find kids already waiting for me.

Then, he went back to checking the machine. 

I want people to dance when I die.

I decided last night that I want my funeral to be like they are here.

Here, instead of a somber, remorseful event of what the person could have been, it is a reflective celebration of what the person has done. You dance. You drink. You eat pounded yams.

When I die, I want people to know that I laughed at every chance I got, I went wherever I could go and I loved more than I thought was possible. I tried to live life as much as I could. And for that, I would regret nothing.

At my funeral, I want people to celebrate what I was able to do instead of what I didn’t.

Day 12 without electricity: Change of scenery

The past twelve days have been a learning experience for me.

(Short background: my power is connected somehow to the middle school down the street, which usually works out fine, except for when the person responsible for paying the bill each month is out of town since there are not classes right now. So when the bill doesn’t get paid their power gets cut, and my power gets cut.)

My postmate who lives without electricity never at his house has been teaching me the ways of passing the time and where to charge your computer (and how to not feel guilty about mooching off other people’s power).

And, as the saga of the electricity being cut at my house continues so has the saga of the work that I need to get done on my computer. (Volunteer Reporting File, Gen Eq committee blog, looking at pictures of my nephew being adorable), so I set out this afternoon to find a new place where I could cross some things off my to-do list and maybe squeeze in an episode of The Wire.

I found my new location, as I figured I would, at my host father’s house, but I also turned down an offer from my neighbors (who had already been far too generous with their power) and avoided the bar where I usually charged because I can’t spend all my time drinking beee while I wait for the orange light on the power cord to turn green.

We talk a lot about community integration, but I didn’t realize how integrated into my community I was until I’ve been able to have a fully charged cellphone and a laptop and a iPod for the past 12 days, even though I come home and cook by flashlight.

My new workplace has plastic lawn furniture tables and chairs, all the yams I can eat and a rotating group of about seven children who come stand behind me as I type. And, after an hour and 27 minutes, a fully charged computer. 

The same thing

Yesterday, I was in a classroom for the first time in 3 months.

I was in a classroom, and the kids were the same. They still giggled when I walked in the room, mostly because I still giggle when I walk in a classroom because, even after a year, I'm not sure of this authority that someone gave me.

Copernic was still the first to raise his hand, even though he wasn’t always ready with an answer. Severine still usually had the right answer although she wasn’t usually the first to raise her hand. Alain and Fidele still couldn’t sit together without whispering to each other and ignoring the verb conjugations I had written on the board. Felicitie still loved reading the exercises out loud to the class more than completing them. Suzane still  only gave me her attention when she felt I deserved to have her attention.

I was in the classroom for the first time in 3 months, and I realized what I had been missing for the past 3 months. 

Been there, done that.

I spent last week in one of those questionable states that lead me to continually forget that I lived in western Africa. It was Yam Fete in Savalou, and I spent the week leading my friends from up north around the annual party held to receive a blessing from the ancestors for this year’s yam harvest. (which, along with cashews, makes up most of the agricultural economy in my area)

What was weird was that I was doing this all for a second time.

Many of the days here seems to feel like they will last forever (and lead you to do things like paint your house for no apparent reason beyond the simple fact that you can), but then suddenly, you are stuck with moments when you look back at all the time that has already past and you wonder where it went.

I’ve had my second Benin Independence Day and my second Yam Fete, all of which will now be soon followed by my second swear-in ceremony, school year and spring break.

I know now which restaurants have the best yam pile, where the MTN stage will be set up during the festival (and how to win free t-shirts) and which bar has the coldest and cheapest beers.

It’s just that it only feels like yesterday I was doing this all for the first time.

Ceremonies bring out the worst in people

Last night, after the 135-minutes program to launch my Amour & Vie team, a health-education project, in the community that I had been planning for the past 44 days, after the feeling of everything that was stressing me out being drained in one minute, like letting water out from a bathtub, had passed, I was left angry.

I was pissed at the number of people who were pissed that there weren’t anymore of our matching t-shirts to give them. I was disappointed in the number of people who had thought it was appropriate to ask me for money when I asked them to help me out. I was frustrated at the number of people who has expressed their disappointment in the free snacks we had offered them.

That morning, I had been working with one of my team members, Jean, to find a place where we could plug in our speakers for the ceremony. There were several houses in the area, but each required a discussion of how much money we would give them.

“You see now, Madame,” Jean said after we had shook on a 1000 CFA deal, “you can’t do anything here without people asking for money.”

“Oh Jean,” I replied. “I saw that a long time ago.”

In which I get unreasonably angry at a four-year-old

The neighbor kids were all playing in my house. They, as usual, were managing to take everything off my shelves and to find everything that I had tried to find. (See: iPod Touch, Cocoa Puffs, back issues of Esquire) I, as usual, was trying to find my happy place, this time, with a Christopher Hitchens anthology in the corner.

I was interrupted by shrieks of laughter and Modeste (older and speaks French) asking me if I had heard what Migdel (the four-year-old in question and doesn’t speak French) had just said.

“He said, Madame,” Modeste explained to me, “that he was going to come to your house tonight because you’re his wife.”

This is the second time in two days someone less than 5 years old has called me his wife, (in French here it’s literally “his woman”) and it’s the second time that I’ve wanted to smack a kid for it.

I deal with sexual harassment on a daily basis. I’ve been proposed to at the market; I’ve had men try to pull me off my bicycle while riding and one man, who had just come back from the fields, tell me that it was now my time to get to work while gesturing to his crotch. I used to not be able to get my mail without the man who stands between me and my Crystal Light packets stroking my arm until I told him that I was married to my postmate.

What gets to me most about these interactions is the feeling that I’m a thing that someone is allowed to claim. That what I want has no relevance in these situations. That my job is to serve as the needs of someone else.

I will never be anyone’s woman in any language.

And this is why we have Camp GLOW

The taxi driver pulled the car to the right side of highway right after the checkpoint in the road, marked by a car with a police helmet on top of it and several men standing around in uniforms that make them look more important than they actually are.

The police walked to the car with the swagger of law enforcement officials. His was more accentuated than in the US, but he also carries an AK-47 as part of job.

He covertly took the 500 CFA coin out of the driver’s left hand and bent over to peer inside the open window. The volunteer sitting next to me and I directed our eyes elsewhere.

We shouldn’t have worried. It wasn’t us he was interested in. Doing a remarkable portrayal of a man in front of a meat counter choosing a cut of steak he regarded the five middle school girls we were taking back to our villages after a weeklong girls camps.

“Those are some pretty girls you have there,” he said before pivoting on his back foot and signaling to the gate operator to let us pass. 

The most meaningful compliment I've ever received

My student, Florentine, raised her hand to share what she had written during our “Black is Beautiful” session today. (Skin whiteners have a huge market in Benin, and the desire to have skin that is the color of my skin is strong. This, though, is not the post to talk about that.) The instructions for the final question on her worksheet was to write what two internal aspects of her partner’s character she admired.

She chose me.

When she was called on, she stood up strong and proud. Stronger and prouder than I remember standing when I was 15 years old. 

“I love Madame Emily’s beauty,” she says. “I love her strength. I love her bravery.”

Sometimes camps are as much for the counselors as for the campers.

In which I come to a realization during an activity meant for middle schoolers

It was the fourth day of my second camp this summer, and my friend, Kelly, was leading a session in which the girls were writing a “Where I’m from” poem. One of those poems that come with prompts to fill in the blank. One of those poems I distinctly remember filling out in third grade. 

As I sat listening to her presentation and trying to cultivate the creative thinking of the members of my team, I thought about how much my responses to those prompts have changed since the last time I filled out of of these poems. How much even my responses would be different if I had filled out one of these poems 15 months ago. 

So, I filled it out:

I come from portable hard drives, Beninoise beers and the MOOV network.

I come from orange dirt that never leaves your clothes, roads that are sometimes more dirt than road and heat waves that make you sweat when you’re sitting still.

I come from yams and moringa.

I come from morning Nescafe and omelet sandwiches and sticking out in a crowd and the Collines, the Borgou and the Attacora.

I come from a high capacity for feeling awkward and hair that everyone wants.

From “This will be the hardest thing you ever do” and “The time will fly by.”

I come from the religion of hamburgers, pizza and Velveeta cheese.

From Porto Novo and pate blanche and sauce tomate.

From landing at the Cotonou airport at 9:45 p.m., sweating while 57 people sort through their luggage, wondering what the heck you just decided to do and feet that will always be dirty.

I come from workstations, buvettes and 6-hour taxi rides.

The one night I wish it wouldn't rain.

Turns out I had some karma left. 

It gave me two Beninese assistants who were willing to work for 8 hours (with only a half-hour lunch break) to place the rectangle for the world map mural, draw the grid guides and transfer the outline of all the countries onto the map. All of which is currently in chalk.

Let’s hope I have just a little karma left to make the weather hold out so we still have chalk outlines tomorrow.

I used up all my Beninese karma today.

You have to start things early here.

I have learned that several times the hard way. In a country where boutiques don’t stay fully stocked, school directors disappear without warning for two weeks and one rainstorm can bring everything to a grinding halt, if you have the chance to get something done, take it. Do it then. There will not be a more perfect opportunity to do it. Seriously. Don’t think that you’ll just be able to do it tomorrow.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cursed myself not thinking far enough into the future. I’m pretty good at planning things out, but this is a country where it’s hard to pick up that ball again once you’ve dropped it a first time.

But despite all this, I once again found myself in a situation where I had 24 hours to complete a task that I could have been working on completing for the past two months. 

I’ve been working to try to complete a mural of a world map at my school since last April. Waiting for funds, waiting for permission from the director, waiting for me to come back from vacation led me to seriously doubt whether this was ever going to happen.

And then I came back from my girls camp in Savalou and suddenly it was happening. The director gave me the go-ahead. We found the money to cement the wall. A mason did all the work in one day. 

And then I realized yesterday that I had nothing else that we needed to finish the project. The money had been sitting in my lockbox since the end of last May. And past experiences told me that there was no way that I would be able to get everything I needed in one day. This country just doesn’t move like that.

Then today, it did move like that. Two bicycle rides to my hardware store, one motorcycle ride to Savalou to buy what I couldn’t find in my village, then two more hardware stores, a boutique and a photocopy place later, I had crossed everything off my list, and then had money to spare.

The only explanation I have is that I must have done something right somewhere sometime in the past 13 months.

One of my most successful days here so far

Three weeks ago, I started working on implementing an activity in my village called Amour & Vie. Run by a Beninese NGO partnered with the Peace Corps and other US aid groups, the program trains two peer educators and one community advisor on how to give formations on health-related topics (HIV/AIDS, malaria, water treatment, family planning, hygiene) to groups of people in our area.

The program is built to be sustainable. (If you can find the right people.) My role, even at the beginning, is minimal. It is the role of the community advisor to lead the team and find groups in the community whom they can educate. It is a program designed for me to have to say nothing.

We started working in the community two days ago. We gave pretests to gauge the level of knowledge our neighbors already have concerning these topics. My CA opened the program and then handed it over to my peer educators to help the individuals complete the tests. 

Me?

I sat there and said nothing.

The power of the third language

This country has made me paranoid.

I was walking around the market yesterday when I passed some kids looking at me and whispering to themselves. When I sit by myself at a cafeteria, I swear that every other word that the people around me say is the local term for a foreigner. Whenever my students switch to the local language in class, I assume that they are speaking in some code about what I just said.

When you spend most of your time with people who would prefer to speak the local language than French and when there are several words in that language that sound like your name and when you already know that where ever you go, you will attract the most attention, it’s hard to fight the overwhelming feeling that every one is talking about you all the time.

Although, to be fair, you should hear the things that me and my postmade know we can get away with saying in English.

Is there no place like home?

This afternoon I sat across from my friend Bacha as he explained his goals for the next five years of his life. I leaned back in my plastic chair at the bar and listened to his plan of how he was going to leave his current life behind.

He’s spent the last three years of his life as an English teacher and speaks some of the best English I found in this country from someone who doesn’t work for the US government. He wants to leave Benin for a position teaching French in an Anglophone country for the chance to perfect his English and earn more money than he believes he would be able to do in Benin. His plan involves returning to Benin only after he has his Ph D and enough money that he feels he will be able to “be of use” to his country. 

This is essentially the same plan that everyone I’ve talked to has: Get out of Benin. Go to another land (usually the US) where it seems easier to get what you want out of life.  I have yet to talk to someone who believes what they want for their future is available and attainable by staying here.

How do you convince people that, while it may be harder, the grass can be greener on this side?

Already home

For the past five years, I have not lived in the same room for more than 10 months. I’ve become accustomed to, at the beginning of each summer, packing up my possessions (after days wondering/cursing how I had managed to once again acquire more things) and moving them to a new location that would be my space until I found another another 10 months later. I loved moving. I loved the opportunity to sort through my things and rearrange them in what I perceived to be a better way than I had previously done.

Which is probably why I spent the last three days cleaning behind bookcases, moving furniture around my house and finding a new place for everything to go.  I’ll have to do the same thing again in 13 months, but then it will all have to fit in three suitcases.