Happy Halloween everyone! For one of the first times I am really missing not being back in Madison right now but I am celebrating Halloween with a bunch of other volunteers in a city called Parakou. I do have a costume that isn’t a costume…I don’t really know how to explain it. It is a Beninese thing.
So I have been at post for over a month now and things are going well. My counterpart at the NGO I am partnered with is backing off and giving me the freedom to do the projects that I want. He is still a little jealous when I talk about working outside of the NGO, but he is learning that I am kind of going to do what I want to do and he might as well work with me on that. I was actually approached by a student who wants to start an environmental club in a surrounding community, which is super exciting. The first meeting is Sunday, Nov 7th.
This past two weeks has been fairly busy and I have been doing all kinds of physical activity, despite the fact that it is getting hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. We are hitting 90-100 degrees everyday but on the bright side I have a killer tan. I helped a neighbor finish the walls of his house. Let me see if I can describe how this is built. First off they use red clay to build their houses. We mixed, with our feet, clay and water until it reached the proper consistency. We then balled the clay up into large but throw-able balls then we created an assembly line where we passed the clays balls eventually ending with the person standing on the partially constructed wall who used the clay to continue the wall upward.
Also, the past couple weeks 6 French, 6 Nigerians (from Niger not Nigeria), and 5 Beninese students ranging from 17-22 years old have been visiting my NGO. They are participating in two-weeks of cultural exchange and manual labor in Camate. We are building a fence so that my NGO can have a free-range chicken farm and in the traditional Beninese way we are doing so without any labor saving tools/devices. While you would use a posthole digger or an auger (what ice fishermen use to dig holes in the ice) to dig post holes, we use machetes and our hands. While you would have bought precut wood from Home Depot, a group of people goes into the woods and cuts down trees, removes the branches, and brings them to the work site. If you needed to cut the wood that you bought from Home Depot into a smaller size you would use a power saw or at least a handsaw; we use machetes (but I brought a camping saw with me, see the pic). While you would have cleared the ground using a power mover of some kind, we use machetes and hoes, which both require you to bend over. I think you get the picture. But, as I have been working wishing for modern tools and Home Depot I realized that they would never work here. All of those things save Americans time because, well time is money right, so Americans invest in labor/time saving devices. If the Beninese had more time they just wouldn’t have anything to do. The greatest commodity in Benin is time and the one thing they don’t have is money so using a machete to did a 3ft posthole is perfectly fine with them.
In the end I don’t mind so much. I think I have actually gained some weight in the form of muscle mass from this physical labor so the joke is that maybe by the end of two years I might look like the Beninese. The Beninese are ripped. The guys don’t have 6-packs because they have 8-packs. Every American woman would be jealous of the arms of the Beninese women.
Ok, the Halloween party is starting. I hope you are all doing well and hit me up with an email about what is going on in your world if you have a chance.
So I am well into my third week at village. Sorry that these have taken me so long to get up on the blog. My internet situation is a little difficult.
Everything here has been going well. My new furniture has arrived and now my house feels like a home or at least something that I could comfortably spend two years living in. Despite having little to no structure or real responsibilities I have managed to keep myself busy, for the most part. I have prepared a small garden and in the next couple of days I will plant it, but first I need to move my compost pile. I built one close to my house but my landlord doesn’t like it, so I will be moving it inside the fence next to my garden. My neighbor has a large plot of land all fenced in behind his house and he generously gave me whatever I wanted to plant a garden and put my compostable waste.
Since I am the third volunteer in this village everyone is accustomed to seeing a white person walking around. I try to get around the village once a day to say hi to people, practice my French and local language, and describe what it means to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. That is a fairly big question and difficult to describe especially since my French still needs improving, but what I say is that I am here to eventually start some projects within the community and work with the local NGO. I have also spent quite a bit of time climbing the hills that provide the scenic backdrop to my Beninese home. During the day especially it is often the only place where I can feel the wind when it is pushing 90-100 degrees everyday. I also nap, a lot. I figure it is apart of the cultural integration and since everyone takes a break between 1pm and 2pm, I might as well participate.
I am involved with a fairly active NGO, who often has tourists and projects ongoing. This is both a blessing and a curse because that means there is always something to do but the NGO will want me to be active in all of their projects thus limiting my impact in the greater community. When coming up with ideas I am trying to focus on ways to build the community up so that they can improve themselves and the environment at the same time. The NGO doesn’t always have projects that fit what the Peace Corps Volunteer is supposed to do. If there is one thing that I could do for the environment in Camate it would be to fight the erosion problem but I could not do that until I somehow found different work for many of the residents. One of the primary income generating activities here is to break rocks into small rocks, by hand, which is then sold to construction companies who use it for gravel. The rocks are removed from the hills thus augmenting the erosion problem here. For a medium-sized basin full of small rocks one receives 150 CFA, which is the equivalent of 35 cents and it probably takes one day to fill it. There is no amount of education regarding erosion, and the effects are apparent here, that would have any impact unless I somehow provided another way for the ‘rock-breakers’ to make money. I’m still working on that one.
Before I go I have to recommend a novel that has subsequently turned my life upside down. If you have not read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn than you have not lived. I’m not sure yet how to apply what I learned, but I am going to think about it, and try to incorporate it into my service here.
(Voodoo Elder paying respect to the chicken he is about to kill. The thing to his left is an example of a voodoo festish)
(All of the PCV after swearing in and that is Johnny and I with the mustaches we grew to commemorate the event)
After a week of living in Camate, I am starting to settle in. I have arranged my house to make it as ‘homey’ as possible and I have started to assimilate into the community of about 2,000 people. To do this I usually just walk around with someone asking questions, meeting people, and practicing speaking Igaasha, the local language. I am trying to meet as many people as I can and so far everyone have been nice and welcoming. My only complaint is that communication with the outside world has become more difficult. I do not get any cell phone reception within my house and there is not a cybercafé with wireless that I know of yet. My NGO has internet, but I have to use their computers with French keyboards and work around their schedule. Taken all together I much prefer Camate to Porto Novo. The air is clean, the view is beautiful, and the people are nice.
But now that I am here I am constantly thinking about what I want to do. The first three months of my service is supposed to be spent integrating into the community in order to learn what their strengths are so that I can use those to address areas of potential improvements. Unfortunately it is much easier to find the latter, but there is a women’s microfinance group here as well as a group of young men who play soccer regularly. I might be able to direct some of their energies into some other areas. Once I get started I will have to balance my time between improving the eco-tourism business at my NGO and starting projects within the community.
So, I have been holding off writing about Voodoo until I have experienced enough to have something to tell. In training Peace Corps tells us to avoid Voodoo in most circumstances, but never tell someone that you don’t believe in it. They might take that as an invitation to perform the darker side of voodoo, which as their believe system goes will have no impact on nonbelievers, but since everyone else believes in it, the rest of the community wont want to work with you at all therefore making it difficult to be a volunteer. I have seen a voodoo dance ceremony, plenty of fetishes (fetish in the context of voodoo simply means a physical voodoo representation), I have visited a sacred forest for non-voodoo believers, and witnessed a sacrifice ceremony. Voodoo is just about everywhere in Benin, especially in the south because the north has a bigger Muslim population. I was invited to the sacrifice ceremony, which happened ten steps away from my house, and I was even encouraged to take pictures and everything was explained to me in French. My neighbors have constructed a physical representation for a specific spirit who was a member of their family but was killed in some sort of accident. For special occasions, in this instance the start of school, they have a party that is not very different to a family celebration in the states. They say some prayers, have lots of conversation and laughter, and eat a lot of food. The only difference is that they kill the animals (in this case, several chickens and one small goat) and use a little bit of the blood to pay respect to the spirit. They believe that the spirit inhabits the fetish during the ceremony. Voodoo has gotten a very bad name as the small majority of its darker sides have been grossly exaggerated. While we go buy processed meat at the grocery store, they pay respect to the animals and thank them for giving their life for their sustenance. The only thing that happened that was bizarre for me is that they drip a small amount of the blood from the dying animal onto the fetish in a ritualistic manner. Everything was quite interesting and everyone was very welcoming to my presence. All was going well until we hit a small snag. The women who were making a traditional food called pate (similar to mashed potatoes) accidently used all of this red cooking oil stuff. They were supposed to save some for later in the ceremony for the guy in charge to use. He became very angry and stuff became a little crazy until they went house to house finding enough red cooking oil to finish the ceremony; I even contributed some since the previous volunteer left a small amount here. According to the ritual, if it is not done correctly (aka if this guy did not find enough red cooking oil) he will die, but alas, everyone can sleep well.
Overall life is pretty slow for me right now. I don’t exactly have a lot to do, but I keep myself busy with the other community members, even if I don’t know what they are saying. It is a bit lonely to live in a place where you marginally speak their second language (that being French), where you live far away from technology, and where you don’t exactly have a lot in common with everyone, but I could not have asked for a more welcoming community. I’m really getting sick of the bugs here though. One lesson I learned so far, which I will leave you with, is do not spray insecticide into dark areas unless you want to see what will come running out of there.
