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.