Manual Labor and hey, Happy Halloween

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.