Water, water, NOT everywhere

In the past year and a half, Africa has humbled me many times over. Sometimes it’s in a small way, like being gifted with a perfect sunset on my walk home or watching one of the handicapped clients at the social services expertly crank their wheelchair/cart contraptions through potholes, gravel, and sand. Sometimes Africa says to me, “Hey, you lucked out with this Peace Corps thing. Enjoy it while lasts, and keep your eyes open.” And sometimes Africa says to me, “Girl, reality check. You‘re getting too comfortable; allow me to throw you a curveball.”
That happened last week when the well in my yard finally dried out. We’re in the midst of dry season here in Kandi. It has precipitated exactly once since mid-October. Except for that one evening late last month, we’ve had nothing but blazingly blue, cloudless days. This has not done wonders for the easily accessible water supply, obviously. One of the husbands in my compound (there are three other families), mentioned to me that I should start using the pump “around the corner,” because the little water left in the well is pretty dirty (true statement). So last week after buying an old 25 liter plastic container (with its former cooking oil glory extremely hard to remove) I had my eleven year old “petite”/neighbor girl Sonia show me exactly where to find said pump/robinet. “Around the corner” really meant a tenth to a quarter of a mile from our compound. It’s really just a faucet at what appears to just be some enterprising soul‘s home; we waited patiently for the bidon to fill up. Then Sonia asks me to help her pick it up, at which point she gets all 25 liters on her head, and proceeds to carry it home for me. Now, this is a totally normal thing for African girls and women. Their necks become accustomed to heavy loads very early on. I’ve seen women carrying around towers of terra cotta pots four feet tall, piles of wood for cooking fires, and pots and pans full of hot food, often while carrying a baby on their backs or while on the back of a motorcycle. (The latter is an amazing site.)

Sonia and I trudged home with her cousin tagging along. In a trash heap, he found a doll missing her appendages and created an amusing dialogue. “Sonia, ou sont mes jambes? Ou sont mes bras? J‘ai faim.” (Sonia, where are my legs? Where are my arms? I’m hungry!) When we got back to the concession, I assured Sonia this was the one and only time she’d have to do this for me. Once Sonia left me with the bidon, I decided to try carrying it around my house. It’s virtually impossible to lift beyond the level of your knees. Even women here need another person to get whatever they’re carrying positioned on their heads. I propped the bidon halfway on a tabletop and attempted to crouch under it. Even then I knew I was toying with the impossible. Since I enjoy having an intact spinal cord, I decided I’d better try with a half-full bidon instead. I did manage to tote it around for a minute or so, although certainly not comfortably. Naturally I set out for the pump again later that afternoon.

The first thing the woman said when I returned was, “where’s the girl?” I replied that since I really want to learn to do this myself, I left her at home and that I’d eventually figure out how to carry the water on my head, “like an African woman!” “African women suffer,” she said. I decided perhaps I’d just try to carry it instead, as least to start. I also assumed that I could carry the bidon with one or both arms all the way back. I lugged the thing just beyond her yard and out of her sight. Then I dropped the thing and thought I actually might cry because, among other things, my dress was completely soaked through in sweat.

It didn’t take long for a few kids to start snickering, providing ample motivation to get moving. Approximately twenty steps later, I petered out again, and a random pre-teen boy started to take the bidon from me. I thanked him but told him to drop it. I wanted to learn how to do this myself. He was befuddled but eventually left me alone. This exact sequence of events occurred two more times before I made it home fifteen minutes later. I nearly started crying again thinking that I have at least three more months of this ahead of me. As I waited for my arm to regain feeling, I remembered an article in the Peace Corps magazine from a year or so ago. The author of the editorial argued that maybe it’s NOT the best use of a volunteer’s time to do their own laundry and to haul water. Perhaps, he said, that time is better spent on projects. Plus hiring people boosts the local economy, if only a little. I think now, I have to agree with that. But maybe it’s just laziness.

I recounted the story later that night via text message to my friend Nina. Knowing she hauls water from the neighborhood pump in her town, I asked her how she manages it (thinking, however arrogantly, that I’m certainly stronger than she is). “Um, I strap it to my bike?” Of course. Common sense beats brute (or not so brute, as it may be) strength any day.

The few things I miss

Alright, now that I’m back in the blogging game, y’all will have to let me know what kinds of topics you’d like me to cover. Sometimes I find it a little difficult to come up with subjects because for better or for worse, a lot that I would have found fascinating/alarming/quaint a year ago has become normal or even vaguely hackneyed. It’s a curious feeling to talk to my parents each week and sometimes feel I have nothing to really say. Just the same old, same old: waking up to an obnoxious rooster or the call to prayer, dodging motorcycles at the market, asking the same kid to call me “madam” instead of “batoure,” going on a usually fruitless search for care packages or letters at the post office, and kids waving to me when they should be focusing on other tasks (use your imagination). Despite some of these things forming my new normal, my amazing friend Kimie often poses the very valid question, “what are our lives here?” It’s hard to put succinctly, but I’ll try: frenzied, stressful, sweaty, beautiful.

In truth, 85% of the time, our lives are pretty darn good. Although Peace Corps supposedly pays us only enough to live at the same level as our work partners, most of us make more, and most of us have a surplus at the end of the month. We make somewhere around $8/day; our rent’s paid, and we have free healthcare. In reality, most of us can fund vacations (within West Africa at least) on our living allowance if we are conscientious savers. My biggest extravagances are canned diet soda, which runs about the equivalent of a dollar, and paying someone to do my laundry (about two dollars a week).

We’ve just hit the eight-months-in-country mark. (Seventeen and a half more to go!) I realized the other day when my friend Matt offered, as a thank you, to make me anything I wanted for dinner, that pretty much everything I miss from home is of the intangible variety. (I suppose I wouldn’t consider myself a foodie, so that helps. I can find all of my favorite foods here in Benin.) Anyway, Matt’s making waffles because it reminds me of Sunday mornings with my mom and dad, waiting for our truly ancient and potentially flammable waffle maker to serve us up some empty carbs. It’s not the waffles I miss, of course. So allow me to get this out of my system so I can move on.
Things I miss from amerique/la-bas:
1. Not having to worry about having enough small change. It can be incredibly hard to break bills here, even the one milles (the equivalent of $2). I have three vendors I visit almost daily: Baguette Guy, Rice and Beans Maman, and the Tofu Wives. They would rather let me pay “on credit” if I don’t have exact change. They know I’ll come back the next day and will pay then.
2. Silence. There’s just never not something noisy going on, screaming infants in particular.
3. Schedules, particularly with public transport. Imagine what would happen if the L didn’t leave until people were shoved into every square inch of each car. Ha ha ha. I’m pretty sure people would riot and Rahm Emmanuel would not get re-elected. Side note: yesterday in my taxi, four adults, including the driver, sat in the front row of a sedan the size of a Honda Civic. It’s normal.
4. Clean air. Burning tires has been a thing in my neighborhood lately.
5. Anonymity. I still kinda don’t feel bad for celebrities because they’re getting paid significantly better than I am, but I guess we both asked for this.

Okay, I feel better now. Funny random story: apparently one of the embassy employees had to leave the country quite suddenly (personal reasons?), so the contents of her pantry were divided among the four PC workstations. I walked into mine the other day to discover about twenty rolls of paper towels, Febreze, eight cans of canned chicken, a can of clams, beets, plastic cups from Costco, and, my favorite, a sack of flour from Target. Huh? Clearly one of the best benefits of working for the embassy is the free shipping of food/random supplies from America, but flour? Last time I checked, you can get kilos of it in the market. And yeah, it’s little bit of jealousy speaking, but why get paper towels when you surely had household help? The mind, it boggles.

Stay tuned, s‘il vous plait.

Hey there! Je suis encore ici!

Hey everybody (or all two of you who read this). I've thought about reviving the blog for some time, now that I'm well-established in Benin, and inchallah/God-willing, we will not be evacuated anytime soon!

To catch you up on the last fourteen months of my life:
1. Peace Corps Niger was suspended in January 2011, and I was reassigned to Benin, starting in July 2011. I have essentially started over, so instead of finishing July 2012, I will close my service in July 2013.
2. I had the great fortune of changing sectors: I'm now a rural community health volunteer; my primary assignment is with the Centre de Promotion Sociale (social services center) in Kandi, a large-ish town in northern Benin. I do lots of work with my neighborhood health center and with the regional hospital.

I'll keep you posted on projects and life au Benin. Hugs from Africa!
--Erin