Climbs

This is not the first time you’ve climbed this hill. You downshift into the next lowest gear and confidently stand up on your pedals in order to find that one last burst of effort that will get you to the top.

You think for a second about the first time you did this. You thought that it was death incarnate. Your host father passed you in a truck and gave you a thumbs up out the window. You wondered why he didn’t stop and offer to help given your distress was so obviously displayed across your face.

The first time you did it in 1-1. This time, you do it in 2-6.

This time, it’s just another hill on your bike ride to Savalou. You mount it and continue on. Turns out, the past 20 months have made you stronger. 

Sharing the road

I’m on my bicycle on a hunt for ice this morning when, as I’m turning onto the main road, I have to wait for one those times when there are motorcycles driving three across and coming down the street in rapid succession to pass. In a few minutes I’m able to keep moving and I pass another motorcycle whose driver doesn’t seem to know where he wants to go. I realize the driver is wearing one of the t-shirts students at my school wear for gym class and it suddenly seems to make so much more sense to me.

There are very few driving laws here. At least, there are very few driving laws that are followed or enforced. What strikes (ie scares) me the most is the seeming lack of a minimum driving age for motorcycles. (For cars, which are much more rare here, you have to pass a driver’s ed class and have a license to drive) I’ve seen plenty of my late-teenaged students driving, but I’ve also seen  students in my 6eme class who I know to by 12 years old driving motos around the village.

Kids learn how to drive from their parents, brothers or their friends. Parents don’t argue because, frankly, the earlier someone learns how to drive, the earlier that person can run errands for the parent.

More than on the highway, being on the roads in village is sometimes like playing a real life game of Mario Kart. Rocks. Twisting turns. Goats. Pigs. Chickens. And 12-year-olds driving too fast.

Everyday is a new adventure for a bicyclist.

It’s that time of year again

It is with my up-most disappointment and disagreement that I have to report that, once again, we are in the midst of a strike of permanent teachers over salary disputes and an overly violent reaction to a protest by the ministry of education that has lasted so long there are talks of canceling the school year meaning every student will restart the same grade next year in an education system that is fast showing me that the most important thing is not our students, but our pockets. 

It's back

The electricity did not come back quietly. Since last Sunday, waiting for repairs to be made on two broken lines had everyone in our state constantly on the edge of the relief of having electricity back, and with it, the ability to get some work done.

So, when, in the middle of the market, it suddenly reappeared after days of speculation, suddenly, the town came back alive. The ironworkers were out soldering. The bars were blasting music. My neighbors were watching television as I ran around in a frenzy trying to plug everything in.

Suddenly, we were back in business.

When the electricity went out again six hours later, it left much quieter. 

The new normal

When my English club stood up to close this week’s meeting by singing “Hello, Goodbye,” I thought about how we would look to an outsider:

Me, in front of 19 middle school-aged Beninese students, wearing pants in traditional fabric, plus my bright yellow dry-fit shirt from last year’s half marathon. My postmate’s dog is at my feet. He has just spent the better part of the meeting doing laps around the classroom with his tongue hanging out and scaring every student he approached. My postmate was in the back, dirty from that day’s bike rides and had just finished a conversation with a French teacher about how we elect presidents in the US.

I thought about my role in this ragtag group signing the Beatles and wondered when exactly this had become normal to me.

Hold tough

In my second year at my school, the most controversial thing I’ve proposed since starting continues to be my girls club. What other teacher and students say, though, doesn’t stop me. What I fear is that it will stop the girls.

I’ve started to dread 4 p.m. on Wednesdays, an hour after we start our meetings. All of the 5eme students show up around that time for their PE class, the teacher of which tends to be especially not understanding about the point of a girls club. During weeks when we’re having discussions, it means that I have to chase some students away from eavesdropping. During weeks when the girls play soccer, it means fielding constant demands from boys to let them play, a gathering of hecklers on the sidelines and the occasional degrading comment from the professor himself.

This week, the girls were in the second half of their scrimmage when the PE teacher called for the 5eme students to assemble under the cashew trees. He told them to line up and start running the perimeter of the field where the girls were playing. The game was soon interrupted by 86 5eme students walking two-by-two through the middle of the game to the other side of the field.

I was pissed at this interruption, but didn’t feel like starting an argument. All the girls got out of the way, except one.

Esther, who was goaltending on the far side planting herself in the middle of the goal and forced the two lines to fork around all four feet of her.

When another student caught me laughing at the situation, I’m pretty sure he thought I was laughing at the absurdness of Esther’s actions. I wasn’t.

I was laughing with joy to watch her stand her ground.

Recovery

We live in a world where, sometimes, bad things happen. Whether they happen to us or happen to someone we know or happen to someone we don’t know, you can follow the chain (like a deranged version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon) person to person until you find someone to whom something bad has happened. Sometimes, actually let’s say most of the time, bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them. Because, really, who can say who does deserve pain and misery and fear?

So, when you see these bad things happen or these bad things are happening what do you do next? How do you move from the moment in which these things happened to the moment when you recover from these things? Is it ever, in the name of recovery, acceptable to promise things you know that you, in your capacity as a human being, are incapable of insuring?

Can you say this will never happen again?

This, I believe, is where many people turn to religion. Here, in an idea from Robert Krulwich, is where, above all else, you recover by finding hope.

This hope that there is some reason beyond our ability to understand that these things had to happen. Here, you have to hope that this God (or whatever you believe) has a plan or a future or a really, really good reason why.

Because, if not, all those bad things would just happen for the sake of happening. All the suffering and pain and fear would just be in this world for the sake of being in this world. Waiting to attack anyone.

How do you find the reason in the unreasonable?

According to Krulwich it is this belief that we must find in the recovery. In hope, we find reason in the unreasonable. 

Mango rains

The clouds roll in just before sunset. They come from the east, so it’s not always clear whether the sky is getting darker because of an impending storm or because it’s time for the sky to grow darker. Ominous and looming and every other cliché that has been used to describe weather events before they break.

You are an outsider. Unlike the Midwest where you grew up, the air does not become thick beforehand. You have lost the ability to smell a storm coming. You take your cues from those around you.

People start to get anxious. Almost all work is done outside. The only place to effectively hide from the storm is inside. Mamas wash out the bowls in which they mixed beignet batter earlier. Fires are doused.

Then, the wind picks up. It skims the dry dirt outside and in a furious blast, sends it through the windows being hurriedly closed. It leaves a fine coating, almost snow-like, on anything and everything in your front room.

The cat meows. He’s heard the thunder.

The rain starts slow. Uncommitted. Questioning how much it wants to leave behind. This is, after all, the dry season.

At last, the lightning. The lightning will stay the longest. Passing from cloud to cloud but also violent strikes. There’s no electricity and the flashes are too quick to read by.

Listen. The deafening rain on the metal roof. The thunder louder than motorcycle engines that has scared the animals into silence. Listen. This storm that has calmed the village.

It passes.

On watching Planet Earth with my girls club

It took me 20 minutes in to realize that, as we were watching the “Shallow Waters” segment in a place that is 7 hours from the ocean, there were not words for any of the plants, animals or things that they were seeing in the language that they speak at the house and that many of the people in our village only speak.

It took me 35 minutes in to realize that, due to a lack of textbooks and posters and pictures, this was the first time that many of these girls were seeing any of the animals that they had talked about in their biology class last year.

It took me the whole 43 minutes to convince myself that they believed this was all real.

Gratitude, part 2

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude. About how someone shows that they are thankful your presence, in the community, at school, in general. About how when your work and your life are one in the same, appreciation for both, at all times, is hard to come by. Especially when you’re one of those people who needs (but is aware of this as a problem she is trying work on) to find validation from others in order to define her experience, work, life as worthwhile.

And so, she’s been searching for ways that show that her presence, the past 19 months of her life have been meaningful. She is starting small: she notes when she helps her neighbor with his English homework, she notices when her colleagues tell her that they’re not ready for her leave, she counts the number of girls who continue to come to and find interest in her girls club.

And so, when her program director comes on her biannual site visit and talks to her school director about working with volunteers and how much they have to offer the community and he willingly agrees and shares stories about what he notices and appreciates that she has done and does do at school, it sort of feels like it has all come full circle.

Slumber party

It was late Saturday night. Not after midnight, but when you’ve spent the day at a workshop with 28 secondary-school-aged girls, any time after 8 p.m. seems late. My night, though, was just beginning.

I was at this workshop to help out one of my friends who is in charge of one of our GenEq programs that gives scholarships for female students selected and mentored by volunteers across the country. That night, she and I would be supervising the girls until the next morning, meaning I would be sleeping on a mat on the floor, but also, that I would not be sleeping until these girls were sleeping. And, right now, as I waited for her to finish up some work in another classroom, the girls were not interested in sleeping.

I turned on some music to try to make the time pass faster. When a popular song in Benin came on, I noticed a few of them starting to dance.

I turned the volume up and a few more of them started to dance.

I took the speakers outside and a group followed me.

When my friend showed up 20 minutes late, she found me and a group of five girls outside the classroom where they would be sleeping, dancing away the fatigue.

Mind the gap

This morning, I stood up in front of 53 parents and explained, for some three years into their child’s education at the secondary level, how we calculate grades. This was the first time being at our school for a handful of parents. One said she didn’t know her son was failing his classes last year until he brought home his report card in June.

When I was in school, there were open houses and parent-teacher conferences and calls home when someone was in danger of failing a class.

Here it’s hard for me to understand the gap between the house and the school. My parents were involved. More so than most. And I know that. But it was their nagging (as I thought of it at the time) about my schoolwork and consistent involvement in my education that cultivated the work ethic I have today.

But I don’t blame them. I don’t blame my students’ parents for their children’s performance at school. It’s not that they didn’t want to be involved with their child’s education. It’s that they didn’t know they were supposed to be involved with their child’s education.

New running shoes before and after ten days of training on Beninese dirt roads.

I have this student, part 3

I do not remember the last time Sabine spoke in class. She’s one of the youngest and smallest in my 5eme class and tends to stick with the people she knows. I accidentally make her cry once last year when a rearrangement of her 6eme class put her in the back where she couldn’t see the board and I couldn’t see her. 

But, on the soccer field, she comes alive.

Wherever the ball is, she isn’t far off.  When there’s a skirmish, she’s in the middle of it. She’s responsible for two of the four goals that have ever been scored during our scrimmages.

Turns out, to get her to talk, all you have to do is put a soccer ball at her feet. 

Blame

Three weeks ago, a significant sum of my health project’s money walked out of my house. Six days ago, a key to my house went missing.

I grew up with two older siblings. And I went through my fair share of accusing people who weren’t people of things that I had, in fact, messed up or lost myself. It took many years for me to realize that someone else probably didn’t care to wear that brown t-shirt I couldn’t find or moved my cellphone to the place where I now couldn’t find it or had used the part of my eye shadow that appeared to missing.

Here, though, there are so many people that move in and out of my house or are just in such close proximity to me at all times that another person borrowing my shirt or moving my cellphone or walking out of my house with my extra house key is a distinct possibility.

At least, that’s what I told myself when I accused my neighbor’s kids of taking the later.

They were not amused. (I overheard them talking about me that night) It seemed that it only took one incident (losing my money) to me to revert back to how I used to act when I was younger and still found it easier to blame others rather than myself when things went wrong here. And things go wrong here a lot: people disappear right when I need their signature on a form, the electricity goes out when I need to make photocopies for my class, I fall and scuff up my knee when I’m already late for class. And unfortunately, recently, I’ve been reverting back to blaming the health center director, the people at the electric company and the uneven road when, really, the problems sometimes lie within myself.

I found the key at the bottom of my bag two days ago.

Please don't blame me for having to do my job

Today, after too many months of letting them slip in (and the vice principal having already talked to me about allowing student in after the bells rings instead of sending them to his office) I kicked out about 15 students from my class who tried to come in 15 minutes after I was supposed to start.

This is my 8^th grade class, and I can tell you the name of almost kid in this class. This is their second year with me, and yes, maybe occasionally I think of them more of my friends than my subordinates. And yes, maybe, I’m not always as harsh on them as I should be. And yes, I’m also their homeroom teacher so it’s in my best interest that I keep them happy. And yes, so maybe I was extra goofy for the rest of the class period.

Two years in, I still want them all to like me.

The hunt

This afternoon, for the first time in three months, my neighbor’s kids were in my house. Almost immediately, Mariana sat herself down on the concrete floor in front of my bookcase and pulled out the first pamphlet she found. It seemed that her desire to go through anything and everything that was in my house had not diminished in the past three months.

I half watched her and half read my Bill Bryson collection from my couch on the other side of the room. She moved meticulously through the bottom shelf. Working from left to right, she pulled each book off the shelf, flipped through it (I assume looking for pictures)  and then haphazardly threw it to side when she was finished. I cringed at every plop of a book on the floor, thinking only of how I would have to pick them all up again when she left.

As I watched her slowly displace everything on the bookcase, I thought about what I used to do when I was her age. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered doing exactly what Mariana was doing when I was younger. Whenever there was a large stack or shelf of items that were in front of me that appeared to have not been gone through in a while, I took it upon myself to go through the papers, one by one. I don’t know if I was searching for a treasure map, some family secrets or just a piece of paper on which I could color, but I remember thinking there had to be something good in there, if I just looked hard enough.

I guess it’s different, now, when its my treasure maps and my secrets that someone else if going through.