Quelques Photos

Well, I'm back in America, safe and sound. The last few days in Benin were a crazy whirlwind. A trip to Ouidah with three kiddos from the Orphelinat, a going away party at the Orphelinat itself, a quick stop in Porto Novo and then my last day divided between Ganvie, a stilt village, and Cotonou, the horribly moto-clogged unofficial capital of Benin. Unfortunately, I got my wisdom teeth out on Monday so I still haven't gotten to taste the glories of American pizza, but that will come in a few days when my ability to chew returns.

These pictures will be woefully insufficient for explaining the past few months, but until I get the real ones printed, the following five or six will have to do...

La famille! From the left- Modeste (aka Momo), about to be 13; Cynthia Carolyn (Caro 2 or Petite Caro), age 8; Me, age 21; and Olivier, age 14.

On the road between the fields and Huedogli itself, the village I where I lived when I wasn't in Lokossa. This woman is carrying fire wood for cookin'. For me, the end of a long day harvesting and peeling manioc root to make gari, manioc flour.

Les enfants de L'Orphelinat La Providence. From left: JC 2, Geoffroy, Obin, Marcellin, Nicolas, Robert 2, Bertrand, and Anicet, rocking out to what foot leaders know as "a jellyfish, a jellyfish" (a distant cousin of the kids song, "i like to eat eat eat apples and bananas"). The kids perform when visitors come, and some French folks had arrived that day, so I got to sneak in some photos while they did their thang.

A vrai "tata somba"- one of the incredible castellated mud houses built by the Betamaribe in the northwest of Benin, specifically in Boukoumbe.

On the road to Ouidah, the founding city of vodoun (and its descendents, namely voodoo) and a major shipping point in the slave-trade era. If you can imagine 16 people in a 7-seater 1980s era SUV, well, that was that. Celestin in my lap, Anicet in Nicolas's.

Last day in Lokossa. Caro 2, Mama-Olivier, Mama-Charlotte, and Carmel escort me to the paved road to catch a taxi for Porto Novo. This is the main road in town (the market is just to the right of us). Note my massive 55 pound hiking pack that Mama-Charlotte insisted on carrying.
I think this post will take 40 minutes to upload if I add any more, but there are about 2000 *(i've narrowed it down to 250 good ones) that i'd love to show you all, so when I see you in the future...

E yi zan de!! See you soon!

when i go travelin' in the north country, fair

just spent 5 days in northern benin. i brought marcellin, a 16 yr old, the oldest at the orphanage, as i was worried that solo travel might not work as well here. wonderful would be a weird word to use, but it was fascinating and definitely a CLASSIC african travel adventure, including all the family favorites...

working backwards:
-this afternoon, 9 people and 2 goats stuffed in a compact 5-seater station wagon with a sum total of 0 working doors, when 1 back tire EXPLODED;
-this morning, a tour of the ancient city of abomey with a elephantitis-afflicted vodoun priest (i am not making this shit up);
-yesterday, we were en route southward from natitingou when the bus came to a halt -- in response to the local government's unfulfilled promise to pave a local road, an entire arrondissement (large town) had blocked the road with logs and tires and was holding a political protest rally. we were held up in penessoulou for about 2.5 hours, but coincidentally, the pick-up truck next to us was driven by one of the many (4) guatemalans in benin, so i had a lovely opportunity to make a new friend and practice my spanish;
-the day before yesterday, hours upon hours on a motorcycle through the real-deal-rainy-season rain out to boukoumbe, home of the betamaribe people, who live in incredible houses called tata sombas, castellated mud homes, built so that the animals and animist idols (sculptures imbued with vodoun-esque power) live on the first floor, and the people live in pits dug into the roof. we were accompanied by a slightly irritating, chatty guide named georges, who has nothing to qualify him as a guide other than a friend with a motorcycle which he borrows to take us around to sorghum beer houses at 10am and to ditch us at roadside buvettes (little tin-shack restaurants) for hours as he visits friends in the neighborhood;
-and the day before that, a visit to some beautiful waterfalls and to pop in and say hi to the regional King, who sits on a throne but is otherwise, as far as i can tell, just another old guy who speaks a dialect of Bariba even our local guide doesn't understand.

So goes travel in Benin.

the outlook

i've been here for 5 weeks already, meaning there are only 3 to go! tomorrow evening, like i said, i'm going back to huedogli with cath-enon ('eno' (to my ear 'enu') is the aja word for mother, and here, you call all the adults mom/dad of the firstborn child, making my parents mamacallie and papacallie (or, caleno and caleda)- parental units, be prepared for your new names upon my arrival.) and will stay there for 2 days, long enough to speak some yoruba, work on my aja, and see the village again with fresh eyes. then, back to lokossa for a day or two.

after that, i'm going to take two of the kids up to abomey with me to see the palace of the kings of dahomey, where apparently there'll be a whole lot of skulls and bones and cool old historical stuff from the kingdom of dahomey. after that, i'm headed north with the oldest kid from the orphelinat, marcellin, to see the tata sombas (incredible fortress houses where the betamaribe/somba people live), pendjari national park (elephantsssssss) and life in muslim country, which will be either a four or five day trip.

then, August 1 is independence day, and coincidentally, the president decided that the huge national fete will be in lokossa, so we'll be partying it up around here, and i'll probably be forced to take multiple shots of sodabe (think of the crappiest vodka ever and multiply the intensity by 20. it's horrible and people sometimes offer it to you right when you arrive at their maison. my eyes water for about 10 minutes after every shot. aii..), then, i'm planning on taking 2-3 kids to ouidah, which was the focal point in this area for the slave trade, and also the birthplace of vodoun (voodoo). then, i head to porto novo (yoruba country! and the official capital, though cotonou is far bigger and busier) to see the sights and have an official french language examination with the peace corps language instructor so that i leave with a certificate of fluency (or, more likely, a certificate of dubious fluency), spend my last day in ganvie, a stilt village near cotonou, and fly the looong journey home (coincidentally on the same flight with a peace corps guy i met a few weeks ago). time flies!

lamely copied from an email to my roomie

the latest from lokossa:

a friend at the orphelinat did my hair yesterday and i look HEINOUS (think about the ugliest white person you ever saw back from vacation in the caribbean with braided hair, then multiply the ugly by 12. it's really quite unfortunate. combined with my current skin condition (acne levels have returned to peak adolescent pimple quotients as a combined result of daily oily-food intake, climate, and different water composition?), i am really not looking my best. oy.) buuut, because my friend did it for me and not just a woman at the hair salon, i have to leave it in and walk the streets in all my ugliness for a few days in order not to insult! luckily, i think i'm going to visit huedogli again (the village where kantos is from) tomorrow evening, and as soon as my ass squeezes into the taxi, i'm gonna wash these braids right out of my hair! i look like a white lil bow wow when he first made it big with snoop dogg. if that reference means anything to you, you'll understand the gravity of the situation.

on a more serious note, things are going well here. sometimes i feel like i'm not doing very serious work because i spend so much time at the orphelinat, and it's hard to be very efficient around there. every morning, i waste nearly 40 minutes just trying to get started with 'class', which is sometimes english, sometimes other things. today it was history, geography, political science... and then somehow turned into a class on dinosaurs and evolutionary biology. the ed system here spends so much time teaching french that kids are in their late teens before they learn the most basic scientific concepts. likewise with history.

(INTERJECTION- the guy next to me is sending emails on o-love.org... i swear, the vast majority of men at the cyber use the internet solely for sending messages via these romance search things. i shamelessly spy on everyone around me in the name of social science and this is what i see. anyway...)

so today, we did the history of the world wars and the holocaust abridged, as a tangential explanation for why i wrote Israel/Palestine on a world map i had drawn on the blackboard, instead of Israel. oy. but it takes almost 15 minutes, just to get everyone settled with their notebooks, and then there is the perpetual 'bic' (pen) shortage. likewise with the partner reading program-- where are the books? ask mama. mama says ask louis. louis ignores me, then, when i ask again, goes outside to talk to the random taxi driver outside the gate, as if my question has absolutely no urgency whatsoever. so i ask marcellin. he says the kids tear up the books so they're in michel's room. where is michel? michel is in cotonou. where are the books? ask mama. the cycle starts again. so passes my morning.

still, the time manages to be really fulfilling, mainly because it's only been in the past week or so that i've started to fully understand how the orphelinat works, and i am certain that is thanks to the obscene amount of time i spend there. in leon, i just showed up for my class in the afternoons, hung around to do a bit of homework help afterwards, and took off. it was an important first experience, but i don't know that i made any real lasting contribution. but now, having spent days upon days from dawn till dusk at the orphelinat, i am starting to get beyond my initial ideas about what the orphelinat needs, and developing a deeper sense for what goes on there and what needs to change, which is exactly what i set out to do.

one example, unfortunately, is the example of a man i really can't stand. his name is louis, and he is, i just found out, the son of the directrice, marie claude, who is a beautiful, gentle, old, old woman that everyone (myself included) just calls mama. he has absolutely no business at the orphelinat, but lives there out of convenience or something (honestly, i still haven't figured out why the fuck he lives there when he hates kids so damn much, but it's a priority of mine to have him displaced as soon as possible. ughh).

he just walks around completely morose all the time, setting an awful example by having exactly zero patience with the kiddos, snapping at them for no good reason (for example, i teach the kids how to use the computer which used to sit untouched inside mama's room since she has know idea how it works; well, i've been teaching all the kids starting in the equivalent of 4th grade, but since he assumed that only the kids in secondary school would do the class, i came back from the bathroom to find him shouting his ass off at one of my kids and kicking him out of the room! i have also seen him beating the kids with a chicotte (aka wooden stick) multiple times, one of which my eyes started welling up, and i took a walk outside the orphelinat to cool down, i was so pissed off.

anyway, all of this is to say that there is a personnel program at the orphanage. louis and michel (a man- the secretary of the orphanage and a senior staff member at the NGO; he is a major religious fanatic (some kind of pentecostal tribe of judah thing) but a nice guy and he is, at least, good with the kids) are the only literate ones (there are at least 5 women there all the time (in roles that remain a mystery, mainly because there are no reasons... they are just there), none of whom made it past 3rd grade)-- how are they supposed to help kids with school work?! so when i get frustrated about time wasted or feel guilty about how much time i just spend goofing around with a bunch of beninese pre-teens, i try to remind myself that many of the things i'll be fundraising for would have never occurred to me if i hadn't been around 'la maison' so much.

why i will raise my children a la africaine

i've been posting all my bits of dismay, so i want to talk a bit about the ideas i plan to take with me when i leave here. i really believe that we have a lot to learn from the beninese, who, in material comparison, cannot even imagine the lives we live in the US-- the kids were all amused when i said that we use a machine to wash clothes, so when i said that we also use a machine to do our dishes, i had teenagers literally shrieking with laughter.

as a result of both culture and material circumstances, kids are so much more competent with basic household tasks than any children i've encountered elsewhere, and i think this gives them a great sense of fulfillment. the kids at the orphelinat and in the quartier where i live all have a lot of fun and play games and sing songs like any other kids. but they also do their own laundry, fetch their own water, cook their own food, annnnd, to top it off, do anything, any errand that an adult asks of them. i am now rereading The Poisonwood Bible (which is an incredible experience as a reader, being in west africa and reading this beautiful, incredibly vivid book about the fictional experience of a family of american women in africa) and in it, barbara kingsolver makes some comment about how there are only two age categories here-- babies who don't yet walk and need to be carried, and everyone else, who walk on their own feet, literally and metaphorically. such a perfect way to explain it. you see toddlers here carrying babies on their backs and 8 year olds teaching 3 year olds to do things. the kids at the orphelinat have been chopping down enormous trees across the main road, sawing the logs, and carting the wood back to the orphanage every day for a week and a half, wearing flip flops all the while (i admit, this part of it pains me to watch)- work that, in the states, we hire out to 30 yr old men in timberland boots and hard plastic helmets.

i am convinced that this is the foundation of their general work ethic- you don't have to tell kids here to do their homework because they already understand the concept of effort and result. where in the US, the idea of work is so abstract for young kids- do a good job on your spelling words so that you can go to a good college- here, everyone understands why you have to hunker down and do your work. if you don't do a good job washing your clothes, you alone bear the consequences, even if you're only 6 years old. and it seems that this gives kids a much deeper rooted sense of self-confidence and a very different kind of maturity.

though there are some kinds of coddling i think parents could stand to incorporate into their modus operandi (namely the purchase of basic medical supplies and a few pairs of socks for when kids have massively infected cuts on their feet and continue to walk barefoot or flip-flopped over the chicken-shit covered ground), i am really impressed with the beninese parenting process overall.

the great mamiweta debate

it has been a week of serious meetings and debates- namely between me and the preteen boy contingent at l'orphelinat. it all started when a group of kids came home with their report cards for the year (which rank every class by student, so kids here know EXACTLY where they stand) and 'les grands' (the older boys) started telling me how boys work harder than girls and are smarter than girls, etc etc. Of course this launched a massive debate/history-sociology class with me on one side of the table and 10-15 boys on the other, trying to engage in civil (read: extremely heated) discussion while testing the extreme limits of my french abilities. the boys all obviously get their ideas straight from what they see at the orphanage. it's not terribly uncommon to fail a year of school and repeat, but most kids at the orphelinat do work hard and do extremely well- a whole bunch of the kids are first, second, third in their classes of 50-60 some-odd students. and of 25 boys, only 2, both little kids, will repeat. but of 13 girls, 6 failed the past year, leaving (according to our calculations at the girl power meeting this morning) an appalling 40 percent difference in failure rate. and leaving me with not much concrete evidence for the intellectual equality of males and females.

this debate failure reallllly undermined my authority when the subject turned to .... mermaids. which basically EVERYONE here believes to exist. the local word is mamiweta, which actually derives from local languages, though it looks like it comes from mommy-water (see the french wikipedia on mermaids (sirenes) for details). i have actually spent hours in the past week debating the existence of mamiweta. the trouble is, everyone here has an uncle or a grandma who saw one for his or herself, and all the beninese adults defend (i might add, with a bit of condescension) the kids' claims. we finally went to the internet cafe to do some research and i think i convinced one of the kids, but the rest are thoroughly resolved to keep on believin'.

during the course of the debate, i accidentally pulled a grinch and destroyed santa claus (papa noel in french) by making a comparison to 'another mythical creature that children believe in but adults know to be imaginary', but luckily, since nobody believes me about the mermaids, i don't think i've succeeded in destroying christmas either.

Docteur Carolyn, Medicine Woman

I have been playing doctor around the neighborhood, which is pretty fun but also really disturbing. Even well off families like that of my host, Kantos, seem to lack basic knowledge about first aid. It amazes me that anyone makes it past age 5 around here, because no one cleans open wounds, let alone covering them! Last week, Cynthia, Kantos's 8 year old daughter, got a massive cut on her ankle (evil cat!) and was limping around the compound and missed school as a result of the cut, and still no one cleaned it! When I got home from the orphanage for lunch and saw that she was missing school because of a cut (can you imagine what your parents would say if you wanted to miss a day of third grade because of a boo boo? yeah right), i got my med kit out and went to work on her. When I finished gauzing her up, her older brother showed me a gash on his foot, so I cleaned and band-aided that. Then I jokingly pronounced, 'Who else has a malady to show the doctor?' and the kids all pushed forward this little girl named Alvalo, who had fallen two weeks before and still had 2 huge open wounds on her legs, clearly infected!! Finally, after that, my work was done, though I have been constantly rebandaging since then and explaining what I'm doing to the mothers (as everyone comes to watch and laugh at me whenever I do anything, especially laundry, which is for some reason particularly amusing) so they can use it in the future (lord only knows if any of them will).

It's all a matter of this massive cultural gap on the issue of hygiene and cleanliness, one that I find very hard to think through without a western superiority complex. Animals are everywhere, especially goats and chickens; and their shit is everywhere; and little barefoot kids are everywhere too. You do the math. It totally freaks me out. People sweep their homes and yards daily, but I don't understand why no one puts the goats in a fence or the chickens in a coop. I suppose I should just ask someone. Similarly, you eat with your hands (though when I'm at the orphelinat, I'm always given a fork), so people just pour some water over their right hand and then dig in. I just turn a blind eye most of the time, even to my own hygiene, and try to roll with all the punches. Still, it hasn't escaped my notice that people seem to be sick a lot! All of Kantos's kids have been sick with a bad cough and fever since I've been here, and they continue to carry the baby twins around even as they wheeze! And poor baby Radovan, one of the twins-- he had an awful cough and fever, and his mom kept on carrying him on her back into the kitchen, a little wooden hut with an open cookfire inside; so there he was, cough cough coughing (at only 8 months old), and breathing in a shit ton of smoke!! Alas, I'm not afraid to tell the kids what's up when it comes to health stuff, but I still feel inappropriate, condescending, telling someone 15 years my senior, who has already raised 3 kids, what to do with her infants.

With all of this, I try to remind myself that there are millions of things that we do that are entirely non-sensical, or at least ridiculous. The time I told the kids at the orphelinat about dish washers and they laughed hysterically comes to mind. 'Not only have we invented a machine to do our laundry for us but a machine to wash our plates too!!? What do Americans actually DO? No wonder Americans are all fat!'