L'annee deux mille douze (was a doozy)

And for what I hope is your reading pleasure, I bring to you today a roundup of deux mille douze (2012), bullet-pointed out of sheer laziness.

• I applied to graduate school.  Allons-y toward the future.   The three schools should get back to me in early March.
• Thanks to my grad school applications, I devised a five-year plan.  It's the first time maybe ever that I actually have one and want to put it into action. 
• Accomplished: I weighed at least 500 children - both in town and in the surrounding villages, and have revitalized the growth monitoring system here in Kandi, which is to say, someone's finally doing it.  As a result, I overcame my fear of babies, finally (but I still don't want one).  I conquered the beast that is the local high school and started a weekly English club.  Shockingly, I really enjoy it.  I also organized and led a week-long girls' camp.
• Was challenged EVERY single day, mentally and physically.  I'm stronger but also more aware of my limits. 
• I became a radio star this year.  I realized the other day that the station donates what is the equivalent of $40 of radio time to me each week.  That's a pretty significant community contribution..  Although I have never received any feedback on my show, which covers health and American culture, I hope a few people learn something each week.
• FINALLY, I started dreaming in French.  I've hoped for this since my first French class in 1995.  Although I am by no means what I would consider fluent, I can hold my own in a conversation. I love the challenge.
• I read several great books, though definitely not as many as I should have; among them were Dr. Farmer's Haiti after the Earthquake (which made me want to travel there even more than before) and Paulo Coehlo's The Fifth Mountain, a novel much more spiritual than I'm used to, but then again, spiritual uplift is a good thing.
• Became (sort of) owner to a rambunctious puppy named Sasha, who along with me would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a most lovely 2013!

On guilt (sigh)

On guilt

Apologies in advance if this doesn't read totally coherently.  We're going with a "stream of consciousness" theme on the blog today.  In general, I suppose I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people in my community, or for that matter, for Benin as a country.  There's no value in that.  The majority of people I encounter have what they need to get by, and I think it's evident that most of the time (there are exceptions), I'm not living in a Save the Children commercial.  Granted, I think my perspective is a bit different based on my time in Niger; there are legitimately people starving in Niger.  Here, less so.  Or at least it's less evident   Kandi, for example, has the infrastructure to deal with malnourished children.  The resources are there, but organizing and strategizing for the optimal usage of said resources is the real issue.  The Peuhl, an ethnicity of semi-nomadic herders who absolutely fascinate me, bear the brunt of the malnourishment problem in this commune.  But why?  They have the cows who produce milk, milk that the Peuhl make into cheese.  They're not lacking in nutritional resources (and as a vegan - at least while in America - that's hard for me to say).  I think in the case of the Peuhl, it's not a lack of caring about their children, certainly, but rather a matter of knowledge.  And this, of course, is where volunteers like me come in.

Where I do not feel I fit into the picture is as a source of money.  Most of my fellow volunteers, and certainly the agency, feel the same way.  I dislike the "teach a man to fish...." analogy because it's so overused, but it's true.  We're here to help "Africa stand up," as our friends at Songhai like to say.   But standing up means taking responsibility for yourself.  My dad and I have debated whether or not it's a good thing that Peace Corps has such a long history in Niger and Benin (arriving in 1962 and 1968, respectively).  Is this breeding dependence?  Some would argue so.  On most days, I would, too.  Where things get messy is when a co-worker, someone you see and interact with daily, asks for help.  This is where I start to doubt myself.  He claims he hasn't been paid in sixteen months.  I didn't really understand his explanation as to why this was so, but I was almost immediately dismissive given that these requests inevitably arrive near holidays (first before Tabaski, and now, near New Years).  But what if his kids aren't eating?  Then again, why is he only asking me and not our other co-workers?  The Beninese have a collectivist society; if your family is struggling, you can depend on your extended family, and to some degree, your neighbors.   I don't know if this should include the "batoure" who clearly does have a lot of resources, even if I do my best to hide them.  Most volunteers I know have lent money people in their villages (neighbors and host families, for the most part).  I made a rule against this before moving to post and have only budged twice: once for my neighbor with a sick child (the equivalent of $2) and once so that the guy next door could get a  new carte d'identite (ID card); he promptly repaid it after I specified a deadline.  And so today I (nicely) refused my co-worker, citing my not being here to just dole out cash.   But I feel guilty about it, and I don't quite know why.  Part of me feels like I do at home: if I have the means, it's my moral obligation to share them.  But I also feel like I've already given up a lot just by being here.  How much is enough?  Argh.  I don't know.  I hate not knowing the answer.

The Polio Campaign

Today I earned every bit of the $6 Peace Corps pays me (after taxes, naturally) to be here.  Rotary International sponsors a door-to-door polio vaccination campaign trimesterly here in Benin.  For this December's iteration, I actually received some advance notice and thus was able to plan to participate.  I generally have nothing to do on Friday mornings, so I figured I  might as well check out a new neighborhood - in-depth! - here in Kandi.  Despite that I walk everywhere and go for runs in the mornings, there are still a few spots in this town that I haven't yet explored.  And, ever since working at my nightmare of a job that happened to be located at their world headquarters in Evanston, I've been curious about what exactly Rotary does.  Not that they ended up  having a whole lot to do with the actual vaccination part, but whatever.  They did do a good job of marketing it (including text messages from our cell phone carrier, MTN), so props to them for that.

According to the coordinating doctor, all volunteers (relais communautaires - or community health volunteers who are specially trained - and myself) were to be ready at the health center's gazebo at 5:30am.  Being Benin, we really got going around 7.  I was paired with two women I had never seen or worked with before, both of whom were too fond of gesturing to me rather than using words.  I should probably put in a disclaimer here that I hadn't eaten breakfast and was anticipating stopping for some fried dough or other such street food delicacy (ha ha, total oxymoron).  We all know how I get when I haven't eaten breakfast.  So when they meant door-to-door, they really mean door-to-door.  At each house/room, volunteers are required to ask to see any children under 5 and even if there aren't any, they must write (in chalk) a big zero and "3T," representing the third campaign of the year.  If you actually do vaccinate, you have to write on the door of the house (or the wall) what fraction of them you vaccinated.  Most were 1/1 or 2/2.  The chalking of the doors/walls seemed bizarre at first, but I guess it makes sense.  It reminded me of Hurricane Katrina.  Of course there is also the official "fiche de pointage"or the tally sheet, where the volunteer (me, in all vaccination cases - tallying is ALWAYS my job, but I'm good at it) mark the age of the kid and how many were in the household.  Luckily one of the volunteer women was from that neighborhood (Keferi), so she mostly knew which kid belonged to whom and who comprised each household.  When you have literal mazes of single room mudbrick homes, it can be a challenge to figure out who belongs to whom.

Luckily the polio vaccines are oral.  The vaccinator kept telling the kids to come get their "bonbon," and their little faces would light up only to be met by bitter disappointment moments later.  This is no bonbon in the traditional sense.  It's hard to explain to a kid that these two flavorless drops of drug might not taste like candy, but you'll thank us later when you're not dealing with paralysis.

And so we wandered around this little neighborhood for, wait for it....., SEVEN hours.  At six and half hours, I was like, "ladies, can we possibly take a five-minute break here?"  I'm pretty habituated to walking around in the sun (believe me!), but this was another thing entirely.  Mostly because, as I mentioned, I hadn't eaten breakfast (not that there were any viable options at 6am, being that the Dunkin' Donuts just went out of business) and we were inching dangerously close to the end of the food stand/shack lunch rush.  So we sat down for five minutes, and I returned a friend's call.  My two fellow volunteers stared at me intently while I spoke what they initially thought was Spanish.  They asked what other languages I speak, and I mentioned Hausa, to which one of them said, "well the sun is a lot more intense in Niger."  For once, I just kept my mouth shut., mostly out of fatigue.  Twenty minutes later we finished the last vaccine vial and headed back to the health center.  Selfishly, I decided not to go tomorrow, given that I have a 14 mile run to do on Sunday.  Not only do I think the other volunteers have this one covered, but I also just want to say "no" for once. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.

Do They Know it's Christmas?

Do they know it's Christmas?

There's something weird about eating watermelon and listening to Christmas music.  Those two things shouldn't really go together, which, incidentally, is also how I sometimes feel about my living in Benin.  In the Christmas spirit of the "Holiday Lite" aka 93.9 in Chicago, I began listening to said Christmas tunes somewhere around November 1st. I downloaded a whole collection from the workstation harddrive, and bam, instant Christmas cheer.  Surely you remember and can undoubtedly hum along with "Do They Know it's Christmas?" originally sung as some sort of aid thing in the 80s.  I don't know how the actual lyrics of the song escaped me for so long.  Have you ever listened to them closely?  Perhaps I'm super sensitive or have not yet conjured up enough holiday-induced compassion, but dang!  This may debunk "The Little Drummer Boy" as my least favorite holiday tune.  Let us deconstruct some of the phrases.

Though the songwriters claim to want to "throw our arms around the world," they seem to lack an understanding about the actual lives of the so-called "other ones."  Was the situation of most Africans that much more dire in the 80s? The "bitter sting of tears" seems a little dramatic.  I'm not seeing a whole lot of tears around here.  Even in Niger, where the food security situation was especially dire this year, no one's crying about it.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a Nigerien or Beninese cry about anything.  Africans (all 54 countries' worth) could teach Americans something about stoicism.

Possibly my least favorite line in this bush-taxi wreck of a song is "tonight thank God it's them instead of you." Isn't this slightly hypocritical after the wrapping-arms-around-the-world part?  I get the being grateful for what you have thing, but I'd be embarrassed to play this song for my English club.

And lastly, the namesake phrase, "do they know it's Christmastime at all?"  In fact, they do.  In Benin, somewhere around 50% of the population is Christian, mostly Catholic.  So yes, "they" do know.  Even in places like Niger, where nearly the entire citizenry is Muslim, there are still a lot of people listening to the BBC or Voice of America on the radio or watching France 24, where the holidays will undoubtedly be discussed.  We're not as cut off from each other as you might imagine.

So one of my Christmas wishes is that we retire this song for good.  The world needs more of this instead:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kYEK-pxs_A  Could anything be better than transforming Toto's "Africa" into part of a Christmas medley?  No, no there could not.