Happy Tofurkey Day from Benin

Here in Kandi, my fellow PCVs and I are preparing our Thanksgiving spread a day late.  I'm in a reflective mood, so here are some of the things for which I am especially grateful this year:
1. The baby goats roaming freely all over Kandi, and especially the ones that wander into my concession, making their ridiculous goat noises and bouncing all over the place.
2. That harmattan, with its cooler days and chilly nights, is right around the corner.  Finally, some good sleeping weather.
3. To have two work partners, Bio and Diallo, who care and are there for me.  Until recently, I doubted I'd ever feel like I had Beninese friends,  but upon returning from vacation, I realized how much I had missed them.
4. To have stayed free of illness during my service thus far.  It's a minor miracle.
5. For the first time, being proud to be an American, despite our country's varied faults.  And on that vein, that as a female, I was born in a country that values education and equality for women.
6. My parents, who call me faithfully each Saturday and who are ever supportive.
7. Feeling that I am exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing.
8. BBC's Pride and Prejudice and Modern Family, my most reliable pick-me-ups after a tough day.
9. November/December's watermelon season
10. The novels of Harlan Coben, my guilty pleasure reads.
11. My fellow Alibori volunteers, especially Nina.  We are out here beyond the middle of nowhere, and we know we can depend on each other.
12. To have daily access to the luxuries of electricity, the internet, and an oscillating fan.
13. My Niger-now-Benin stagemates Mary and Kimie.  I definitely could not do this without them.
14. That I can get freshly made tofu every day if I want it.
15. For the food stand lady by the post office, who has my plate ready by the time I am seated on the bench.
15. That I'm still here after sixteen months but also that I'm starting to make plans for life post-Peace Corps.

Oh, public school. You can be a cruel, cruel beast.

Very rarely I have a day which causes me to think, "if submitting my resignation to Peace Corps didn't involve a 10-hour bus ride to the capital, I would quit right now."   Today was, as one of the musical-loves-of-my-life James Taylor would say, "a day that you can't explain."  It started off well with a trip to the health center, where all the nurses and nurses' aides were gearing up to go out "en brousse" (to the bush) for the annual, nationwide meningitis vaccination campaign.  I decided to follow the team led by the new head nurse, Brice.  Our territory was EPP (Ecole Primaire Publique - Public Primary School) Gansosso, where all my neighbor kids go to school.  I have only ever spent time in high schools here, so seeing where the younger kids (supposedly) learn was a little shocking.  The class sizes of fifty students typically found at the high school level could be considered a luxury.  I spent about two and half hours in a classroom of five and six year olds and one teacher.  Guess how many of them there were - I dare you.  One hundred and three.  In one classroom. So that alone was discouraging, but then we started the vaccination paperwork (no parental consent involved, apparently).  Each child received a little yellow card filled out by both Brice and myself.  An alarming number of the children didn't know their last names or their ages.  It's funny the first time a kid of about six claims to be twenty, but after that you start to wonder how they're ever going to learn in this environment. If your child has a learning disability, you might as well just pull him out of school.
Now, there's many things I like about Benin, but sadly today involved two things I really cannot stand: corporal punishment and what often seems like a total lack of compassion.  You can imagine if there are 103 children in one room, someone's likely not behaving.  As such, the schoolmaster is constantly ready with a rubber whip in hand.  Or, as he did today, he might just tell a kid to beat the offender for him (a cop out if I ever saw one).  Witnessing the latter proved to be my breaking point.  Whether or not I should have done this, I don't know, but I told the teacher to come outside with me and explained that while I'm in the classroom, he's not going to hit the kids.  Either that, or he takes them outside because it's violence, and I don't want to see it.  I probably was really out of line, but I've tried for a year and a half to understand the concept behind teaching with intimidation, and just......no.  The teacher/headmaster guy wasn't super offended, I don't think, and was kind of like, "Whatever.  She's here for two hours.  I suppose we'll oblige her."  What I see as a lack of compassion came into play once the nurses began vaccinating.  Public service announcement to the team of nurses today: some kids are afraid of needles.  It's okay.  It doesn't mean they're weak and deserved to be ridiculed or, worse yet, slapped.  I don't even like most kids, but I also don't think they deserve public shaming for something they can't really control..  I've witnessed thousands of babies receive their shots here in Benin; I guarantee vaccinations are not given with the gentleness American parents would expect for their children.

Following all this was a trip to the high school to pick up some paperwork.  I try to avoid that area when school lets out because it's also next to two primary schools.  This translates to hundreds of kids spotting me and screaming, "batoure" (white person).  If you've read this blog, or I've talked to you at all about being here, you know how much I hate being called this.  I know it's not usually meant maliciously, but seriously kids.  If I tell you DAILY to call me "madam" instead of "batoure," you could maybe oblige me once in the twenty-seven months I'm here.  I'll say it again, I know it's not  meant meanly, but imagine if every single time you left your house, the neighborhood kids screamed "white person" at you.  It can be maddening.  I've tried every single approach that have worked for other volunteers, but I'm beginning to think that people just don't care enough to change.  Womp womp.

On the way home I spotted in bushes a dog sitting perfectly still with a frighteningly solid stare at something  in front of him and......what looked like slobber on his mouth.  I really, really hope we don't have a rabid dog in the neighborhood.   Maybe he was just pondering what to have for dinner.  But rest assured that in any case, I've received all the rabies pre-exposure vaccinations, GENTLY given by our Peace Corps Medical Officer.

Tomorrow's a new day, thank God.

Back at post!

Hello again! I'm back in Kandi after a little vacation to America - the land not of milk and honey, but in my case, tortilla chips and brownies. Before I get to today's topic, I'll sum up the return trip. In Paris, I had a ridiculously long layover of six hours, in which I would have liked to have slept (and even found a lounging chaise, if you will, on which to do so), but alas, could not fall asleep. I spent approximately $30 on a Coke Zero, a large Evian, and a (really) delicious airport pasta salad. Paris, even your airport alone tempted me to stay. Someday I will venture outside your doors and get to see the actual city. I don't know what it is about Air France, but it's just better. I felt right at home finding my seat on the Paris to Cotonou flight: some Beninese guy was sitting in my seat and I was like, um, excuse me sir, I have that seat. "No you don't," he said, "I specifically reserved this seat on the internet." "Okay, well you can see 18D is right here on my boarding pass, and I know it's slightly weird that it goes 18E and then 18D, but 18D is definitely the aisle." He huffed and puffed enough to make me calmly concede to sit in the middle, but then I pointed up to where the seats were clearly labeled, and said, "tu vois?" and the three men behind us started laughing enough to make him move. Were they laughing with me or at me? I will never know. And then like so often happens in (or on the way to) Benin, I felt like a jerk, even though I was right.


Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac in Cotonou (which for some reason always feel more dignified than using a jetway, probably because I pretend I'm the President leaving Air Force One), I thought about a book I read before Peace Corps, the annoyingly named Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. It's a memoir which, if I recall correctly, takes place in what is today's Zimbabwe. The author talks about returning home and how, even if she hadn't known where her plane had landed, she would be able to recognize Africa by smell alone. So I took a few sniffs to see if this were really the case, and no, it just smelled like an airport. Still, I decided, West Africa must have its own variety of smells that are slowly inching their way into my memory. And that turned out to be true, just not to be found in Cotonou. On the bus ride back to post, I knew we were close to Kandi when I started to smell whatever herb (perhaps mint or sage, although I once tasted it and couldn't tell) makes the whole town smell clean and crisp when the wind blows right. When it doesn't, it brings one of my least favorite smells ever: goat being cooked. (I wasn't too torn up about missing Tabaski this year). The mustard cakes that are added to sauce (mustard in the form of patties that look like cow poop, in other words) have a similar nauseating effect. Perfume selection in Benin, I would have to guess, is not terribly varied, so every time I smell my host mom Juditha's perfume, I assume she's right behind me. This happens at least twice a week. Also, I've never figured out if it's cologne or what, but there is a very particularly strong (cologne?) that our Peace Corps Niger assistant, Boubacar, used to wear that's both nostril curling and not entirely unpleasant. Whenever I catch a whiff of it (usually at the market), I always get to wondering if that's some sort of El-Hadji (a Muslim man who, like Boubacar, has been to Mecca) trademark.

I don't know who to ask, but it seems like it's going down as one of my Great Unanswered Questions, just like "who sells those gorgeous silver rings with the Arabic phrases? I want one!"

Because I'm pretty sold on the idea of aromatherapy (is anyone not?), I had brought five or six of my favorite Way Out Wax candles to Benin last summer. Best thing I packed, for sure. They certainly help make my concrete oven/prison cell of a house more like home. Perfume was this trip's most valuable player occupant of my suitcase. It will remind me of home and that before too long, the (relatively minor, comparatively speaking) hardships of sweat, constant grime, and feet that would make a pedicurist scream will be things I laugh about at dinner parties. So I'm going to try to continue to enjoy my time au Benin, but from now on, I'm going to smell better doing it.