Presenting the first Gouka girls soccer team

All through my elementary and middle school years, I spent two nights a week at soccer practice hating the coach that made us run passing drills and practice shooting and finally, spend the last half hour of practice divided into two teams to scrimmage each other.

I loved the game. I just hated the practice. I always wanted to be naturally good enough at a sport that I didn’t have to put the time and effort into making myself better at it.

I still love the game. There were moments during college when I begged my friends to pass a ball back and forth with me (oddly enough I was usually most successful when it was cold outside and I presented these games as “snow soccer”). Mia Hamm’s is still my go-to whenever I need a jersey number. And now, it’s me running the practices. 

On listening to Beyonce in Benin

I don’t really know why I never got into Beyonce. I know the “Single Ladies” dance, but I don’t know any woman who was born between 1980-2003 who doesn’t know the “Single Ladies” dance. I am generally aware of her presence as an artist and her as a member of what you can call a music mogul family, but the surprise drop of an album last December was not high on my list of priorities.

However, it was high on the list of priorities for one of my best friends here.

So, last week, when we acquired a copy of Beyonce, almost all the music that I listened to for the rest of week was Beyonce.

I don’t know if it was because we were in the middle of a secondary training for a community health project in which we (the Americans) had to defend the right for a woman to seek pleasure out of sex to the other participants (the Beninese men and women).

Or if it was because I’ve spent a double-digit amount of months living a country where it’s hard to still call myself a feminist and not feel like I’m lying to myself a little.

Or if it was because I wonder everyday if the girls that I teach will ever realize that they are allowed to want more from their life than what they have been told is an acceptable amount to want out of life.

Of if the songs are just really that catchy.

But last week Beyonce really seemed to know what she was talking about. 

Some people start their mornings with coffee

I woke up this morning at the normal time to which I allow myself to sleep when I don’t have to teach in the morning, around 8 a.m.

By this time, all the students are already at school, which means, for a few moments, my neighborhood is relatively quiet.

This morning, though, as I was in my kitchen heating up water for tea, I heard people outside my neighbor’s house. She’s a nice lady and makes her living usually by being a tailor. In the past few months, she’s also started selling the local moonshine out of her house. For 100 CFA, men come by, take a shot of sodabe and then ride off on their motorcycles, rarely staying more than 5 minutes. One of my favorite nighttime activities is to sit on my front porch and watch how many of the men who stop by I recognize, either as colleagues or the father of one of my students.

When I came back from vacation three days ago, a small hut with benches and tables had been erected outside her house, I guessed in an effort to expand her business, at least expand it out of her living room. And business has expanded, the area outside my front door becoming less like a front porch and more like the street outside a bar, but besides moto horns and loud voices, there haven’t been any real complaints.

And so, this morning, as I sipped my Harney & Son’s Tower of London tea, I silently toasted the men taking shots of sodabe next door at 8:30 in the morning. 

Welcome to my world

My work partner and I spent the better part of this afternoon and evening filling out his application to a leadership program in the US. He wrote all the responses; I just explained the things that got lost in cultural translation: that the month comes before the day in American dates, how to write an address when you come from a country where those don’t exist, what a “work environment” means.

For two hours, we worked until tragedy struck.

I went to click the “save and continue” button after a particularly difficult short-answer section. The internet sat for a while before the wheel in the corner of the tab on Google Chrome starting turning backward. After a few moments of me trying to remember the shortcut to screen grab on a Mac before his responses disappeared, his responses disappeared.

We sat staring at the ever-loathed “DNS look-up fail” message that is uncommon on US internet, less uncommon when you’re using a USB-key hooked to a Beninese cellphone tower.

My colleague made a high-pitched noise of exclamation.

He’d just experienced his first first-world problem. 

I salute your resolution, part 2

I was never much a resolution-maker. Until last year, I never really greeted the New Year with much more than a salute at midnight. But now, as I’m starting to find myself in real-life situations where I’m starting to become the person that I will be for a long time, the notion re-evaluating my attitude, desires and life in general each year seems less romatic and more practical. This year, I have three:

-Talk to people more, both here and abroad

-Fight for what I want

-Be angry less

Welcome back friend

Around this time last year, I remember waking up cold for the first time in Benin. There’s this time in between the mini-hot season and the in-your-face-you-will-sweat-for-the-next-three-months hot season when the wind comes from the north and it gets dusty and dry and in the evenings and mornings, cold.

We’ve been waiting for this time to come again this year, when Monday, I was teaching 6^th grade and I noticed something happening: all my students were slowly moving over to a group of tables at which no one normally sat. Every time I looked over there, another student had crept over while my back was turned and was trying to act like he’d been taking notes there the whole time.

I was walking around the room checking on my students’ progress on taking notes about the simple present tense when I realized what was going on. The sun was shining on that group of desks. And like cats, my students who had found themselves under prepared for the weather this morning in just their short sleeve uniforms were trying to find as much warmth as possible from any source possible.

The cold season has arrived.

The best intentions

My work partner came over tonight clutching this piece of paper describing a African leadership program in the United States. He wanted to know if I thought he qualified.

I read over the paper. The program seemed legit (and I had already received an email from my boss in Cotonou about the program) so he and I decided to look up the website.

I plugged in my internet key as usual, clicked the link in the email from my boss and then, we waited.

And waited.

We waited a lot. For a webpage to load that then led us to another webpage that needed to load that eventually led us to where he needed to register for the application.

I’ve encountered circumstances like this over the course of my service. Circumstances where a person or organization or program has good intentions, but doesn’t seem to completely understand their target audience.

In order to implement knowledge about nutrition, someone has to have regular access to fruits and vegetables. In order to watch a state-sponsored TV show about health, someone has to have a television. In order to apply to certain fellowships, someone has to be able to take the time to travel to Cotonou get the fellowship application.

As we sat there waiting and waiting, I thought about how my work partner was, in my opinion, a pretty good candidate for the program, but the lack of certain infrastructures in his country means that without my help and computer and internet key, it would take him a lot more work to complete his application.

I’m not saying that the program isn’t a good one. Not in the least. I’m just saying that there are plenty of African leaders who don’t have access to high speed internet.

Unexpected suprises

Last night, it poured. The kind of rain that’s so heavy it wakes you up so you run to close all the windows, but then lulls you back into sleep.

The thing is, it’s not supposed to rain this time of the year.

And the man at the post office who is a jerk isn’t supposed to stop his coworker with the key to the back room from going home early so you can get your package. And the old man who sits next to you in the taxi isn’t supposed to politely share the space with you that’s meant for one person but you’re being asked to share. And the department-wide three-hour teacher’s meeting that you got talked into going to isn’t supposed to end up giving you three hours with volunteer friends who you haven’t seen since school started and a free lunch with your administration.

I can be pretty hard on this country and these people and these circumstances in which I originally fought to be in. After 17 months, I’ve developed certain expectations. And usually those expectations are that I’m going to be let down, I’m going to have to talk to someone who I which I didn’t, I’m going to be put into a situation I wish I wasn’t.

I’ve spent so much time with these expectations that I don’t allow Benin much time to try to make it up to me. I don’t allow the people, places or circumstances to change my opinion of them. I don’t allow myself the chance to feel anything else besides anger.

It’s raining again right now.

Loyalty program

In my market, there are six women who all sell the same kind of leafy green. There are at least a dozen who sell tomatoes. The number who sell onions? Even more.

So, what makes me buy tomatoes or greens or onions or garlic from one woman and not another?

Customer loyalty.

I lecture my postmate about it all the time during our trips to the market. He prefers to buy the gumbos that look the best. I prefer to buy gumbo from the same lady that I’ve always bought gumbo from, sometimes to the detriment of their quality.

But I’ve found that the some weeks I buy bad-looking gumbo has translated into other weeks getting more good-looking gumbo than I would somewhere else for the same amount of money.

How I initially picked who would be my onion lady and my garlic lady and my tomato lady was somewhat random: their offerings looked good that first week, she was the first person to make eye contact with me, she sits next to someone else that knew my name. But now they know me. They know that I can speak the local language if I want to, but sometimes don’t. They know my postmate is not my husband, but sometimes I ask him to negotiate the price for me anyway. And above all, they know never to call me “foreigner.”

That’s just good business sense.

Mo time, different problems

I was in my kitchen this morning and realized that I forgot to refill my water filter last night so I wouldn’t have drinking water for about 20 minutes. Not a real issue, but what hit me was that in about nine months, this would no longer be a major problem in my life. Neither would three-inch long cockroaches and latrines and infant mortality and illiterate students. And I started wondering what I would be worrying about in nine months.

That the line would be too long at Starbucks for me to have time to buy a tall non-fat white mocha before I had to get to work? 

#hotseasonproblems

Watching the Bourne Identity trilogy for the first time and all I can think about is how cold it looks in Europe in winter.

A loss in the family

Last Thursday, my colleague/PC-appointed work partner/friend lost his infant son. (He was sick for about a week. The doctor prescribed him medicine, but it didn’t work. The doctor did not say what disease it was, only that it was caused by an insect.)

Last Sunday, the day here for going and sitting at people’s houses, I headed off to my friend’s to pay my respects. From before I left my house, I did not want to do it.

As I walked to his house, my steps getting smaller and smaller, I thought about how my life would be easier here if I hadn’t developed relationships like this. If I hadn’t developed a friendship where I felt like I needed to go spent an hour awkwardly sitting in a house where death had just happened.

I thought about my life when I first moved into my village. It was a life of the West Wing and counting the minutes until I go shut myself in my house once again. I thought about how I hadn’t thought that I would ever get to this point. To the point where I had friendships that meant this much to me.

I guess that’s what having friendships is about. Sometimes you have to do things. Things that are awkward. Things you don’t want to do. Things that are hard.

In the end, it was the gratitude on my friend’s face when I showed up with my bag of oranges that made it all worth it.

When a name isn’t a name

In each of my classes this year, I had my students make name tags in a sincere effort to learn all of their names. Some names here are hard. So, when I saw the name of a student in my 7^th grade class was spelled “Geoffrey,” I thought I had it in the bag.

Turns out, pronouncing his name like the American “Jeffrey” is not how you’re supposed to pronounce his name. And turns out, he doesn’t appreciate it when other students pronounce his name like the stupid American teacher does.

In class yesterday, we had a lesson for Madame. “Jay oh fray, Jay oh fray, Jay o fray,” I repeated to myself over and over again during class. Much like the sports and games vocabulary that Geoffrey had just learned.

Things that happened in/outside of/around my class in its first 20 minutes this morning:

-Ten students were late because they forget to bring water from their home to water the plants at the school. (We don’t have running water or a well, so this responsibility falls to a different class each week.)

-Five students were late because they hadn’t swept their portion of the schoolyard dirt yet.

-One student was severely punished by our director for walking through my class and then trying to get another student in trouble for calling him a “bandit” for interrupting my class.

-One student almost threw up.

#justanotherdayteachinginBenin

It keeps out late students and early teachers

My vice principal’s latest project at my school is the building of a fence around the school grounds. I wasn’t aware this was going to happen, so, like most projects here, I was made aware it was happening when it started happening.

This week they added the wooden gate that blocks the front pathway onto the grounds. As a school with a student body that has a history of being late for class, the flag ceremony and mandatory club meetings, we were a school that needed a fence. It is the job of the student leaders to open the fence at the end of each class, and then close it again when it is time for the next class to begin in order to put a physical barrier between stragglers and the class in which they are supposed to be.

There is no way to open the gate besides manually. So, once it’s closed, it stays pretty much stays closed. Unless you’re a teacher who has arrived on her bike an hour early for class in order to report student grades. Then, your bike ride as suddenly become slightly fenced out. 

A second-year Peace Corps Thanksgiving dinner, in list form

-Three fried chickens

-Three pans of stuffing

-One virtually untouched bowl of salad

-One bowl of gravy

-Three eggplants, fried and sliced

-One dozen deviled eggs

-One pan of macaroni and cheese

-One bowl of mashed potatoes

-One pan of sweet potato casserole

-Two green bean casseroles with homemade cream of mushroom soup and fried onions

-Two dozen rolls

-Two dozen chocolate chip cookies

-One pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting

-One apple pie

They’re back.

They came back differently from how they left. Where there was understandable drama and tragedy now had just become a casual encounter. I was coming back from a bike trip to Savalou, and I turned the corner into my housing unit. And there, playing in the front dirt, were the two kids who had been missing from my life for the past three weeks.

“Hi auntie,” they said. And I pedaled past them to my door.