A week in

(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.