While in Cotonou, I spent one night chilling with some other
volunteers and another guy who is doing his Fulbright here in Benin. His boss
conveniently has a house in Fidrose beach, which is slightly west of Cotonou,
maybe a 15 zem outside the city. It’s a nice, three-story house, that is rented
for about what one would pay to rent a one-bedroom apartment in New York or
D.C. And it’s only a block away from the beach. The best part is that there are
no hurricanes to worry about here! Unfortunately, the beaches here aren’t
terribly friendly, and in fact can be super dangerous with their very strong
undertow. I guess you can’t have everything. But one day I want a beach house.
In Africa or the Caribbean, or somewhere. Oh dreaming…
So I finally escaped Cotonou the 20th of July. My
doctor said that I can continue with the exercises on my own. Although, knowing
the level of pain these induce, and my lack of self-motivation, I can only
assume this will not work out as well as he expects. Although, I do have the
threat from my doctor that if things don’t improve by the time I come back in
September for a check-up, I will be forced to stay in Cotonou longer.
I really admire anyone having to do physical therapy. All I
did was tear a little ligament (I mean, we think that’s what it was). And it
HURTS. I have gotten to the point where I can bend my fingers back most of the
way, but it’s still really hard to close them to the front.
I kind of feel weak, though. People here persevere through
so much. One day, my doctor and I were just making conversation, and he
mentions that he was amazed by Bariba women (he actually worked in Kérou years
ago, but left because he wanted to be a specialist, and there’s no demand for
those in villages). When they are having a baby, they don’t even make a sound.
NOT A SOUND. They just pop out that baby, then take a moto home. And it’s not
just Beninese people that say it—volunteers here have witnessed it too. Of course,
the next day, when we are sitting doing exercises on my hand, he pushed it far
enough that I started crying from the pain. Which I think freaked him out (“I
made a girl cry! What do I do now!?!?!?). Come on, Shannon, FIGHT THROUGH THE
PAIN LIKE A GOOD BENINESE WOMAN.
On a related note, I recently read an article that featured
a hospital in eastern or southern Africa (I forget where exactly) that has
started charging women for every scream they make. WHAT!? Just another reminder
of how blessed I am to have that American birth certificate. Lord knows that
whenever I am ready to have kids, they will absolutely be born in the US. And I
will use and epidural. End of discussion!
Speaking of, my neighbors actually had a baby soon after I
got back. I get up to go to my meeting at 7:30 in the morning, and the mom is
standing at the doorway, with people coming to visit. She has just arrived
home, and tells me she had the baby around midnight. AND SHE’S ALREADY LEFT THE
HOSPITAL. She’s standing there, looking very tired and worn out, and all I can
think is, “Please, someone, let this poor woman lie down!”
The baby didn’t have a name yet when I asked, so the dad
actually comes over and asks me to help him pick a name. He says very
specifically he doesn’t want something at all typical for Benin. So I looked up
names that were at the top of the US naming charts for the past year. One of
the finalists was Gavin, which is of course the modern form of the name Gawain,
as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a middle-English story once translated
by J.R.R. Tolkien). On a whim, I wrote down the name Orlando, as in Orlando
Bloom, who played Legolas in The Lord of the Rings, and the love of my life
when I was 13 or so years old. And. That. Is. The. Name. They. Chose. I should never,
ever, ever be given this kind of power. Although, perhaps now that I have
gotten my tribute-naming out of the way (Orlando for LotR, and Luna for Harry
Potter), I can move on and my kids will have a chance of having normal,
acceptable names. And I defend my decision, Orlando is a nice name, and the kid
won’t ever have to know where it came from. I mean, seeing as people in Kérou
have only now gotten around to watching 80s Kung-Fu movies, it will be a while
before LotR makes it here.
Monday, 5 August 2013
Today I was a twenty-minute walk from home, sitting at a
bar, chilling, reading, and occasionally talking to people I knew who came
through. Then I looked up at the sky, and saw the Eastern sky grow dark, and a
bunch of clouds rolling in. “Oh no!” I thought. So quickly I got up, paid my
tab and rushed out the door, and headed home. I was walking quickly, and got to
fifteen minutes away, and it starts sprinkling. Ten minutes away, and the skies
simply opened up. I most likely let out a string of curse words that would
shock my grandmothers and make my mom roll her eyes and say sternly, “Shannon,
STOP using that language!” However, it turned out that cursing the skies was
completely unnecessary, because a few minutes later, this old man ran up with a
huge plaid umbrella and handed it to me. So I was able to walk the whole rest
of the way home without getting soaked! How very nice of him. Some days I
really do love this little village.
Friday, 23 August 2013
So I’ve been pretty unmotivated to write my blog
lately. Mostly it is because I’ve
actually been super-busy, and when I do get a free moment, I like to do other
things. Like read English books and French books (while expanding my French
vocabulary). I’ve also started studying Spanish, because I’ve decided that I am
never actually coming home. Once I’m done with my time here in Benin, I want to
get a Fulbright to go to the Dominican Republic. And if that doesn’t work, I
want to just move to Puerto Rico. Because I can.
[Then that plan of course alternates with wanting a real job
so I can live in a nice place that actually freaking has a dishwasher and
laundry machine. Then other days I want to be a inner-city school teacher,
because it’s always something I’ve been passionate about, and I just rewatched
an episode of The Wire.]
My new best friend is Excel. I’m using it for all kinds of
calculations, as well as putting together booklets for my savings and loans
group.
Projects are starting to role along pretty well. My new
Savings and Loans group is up and running. We’ve started collecting money and
writing down all the by-laws. I want to have a very disciplined group,
especially in light of the original Savings and Loans group (Ben Club) in
Kérou. I spent four hours today trying to figure out why they are off by 2,200F
(about $4.40). I finally found 2,000 of it, but I still can’t find the other
200. Oh well.
But with this new group I am insisting that they count the
money every single meeting. One person complained that it was too much, but I
explained that with the book I designed, it should take all of 30 seconds at
the end of a meeting. And if there is a problem, then you know it happened
recently, not two months ago! Plus I have this suspicion that someone embezzled
some money in the first group, since a few months ago about $160 went missing.
And I double-checked the math, everything. But when I talked to some of the
artisans, no one really wanted to go down that path of searching it out. They
just kind of accepted the loss. Since then, however, I’ve been checking things
more often, and the money seems to be sticking around better. It could also
just be that people didn’t write down everything. Like there was one time that
an individual artisan had paid for some new booklets for the group to get printed.
He paid out of his pocket, and instead reimbursing him, they just credited that
amount to his weekly membership fees. But this never made it into the
accounting book that I made, until I happened to catch this by chance. It’s
things like that.
Another thing that has me spending a lot of time in Excel is
working with this guy I met who wants to start a restaurant here in Kérou. He
currently works as the chef for the Hotel (I guess you can call it that?) in
Kérou, but wants to break out on his own. So I’ve been talking to him about all
of the start-up costs, and whether it will truly be profitable, etc. We finally
concluded that to start he needs over 1 million CFA (about $2,000). He can get
a loan, but for that he needs to have 20% of the amount he wants to borrow
already in the bank. And he has nowhere NEAR that kind of money. It’s only the
equivalent of $400. But compare that to the less $800 per YEAR that teachers
here make. Or that minimum wage is $30 per month. So yeah. Now that he’s
realized the investment, our next meeting will be discussing where he can start
cutting back. For example, instead of the concrete sitting areas
(gazebo-shaped) he wants to make, he can make straw gazebos like a bar I saw in
another town. Maybe not get the generator immediately, but definitely by the
time Chaleur rolls around. Because if people know you always have cold beers
when it’s 120 degrees outside…they will come!!!!
I spent time running around Kérou researching the irrigation
project I want to do. I’m kind-of (and by kind-of I mean completely) running
blind here. I went to a solder to ask if he could make the watering-head thing
for the hoses (what are those called in English again?), and then asked him
about the price of metal piping to go along the length of the field, and how
much it would cost for him to come and solder everything together. Then a few
days later, I met with a guy who works for SONEB, which is basically the
national water-supply company. He tells me I’m crazy for thinking I would use
metal pipes, and of course we would be using PBC plastic pipes. So, just
typical time-wasting for me. He gave me an estimate a few days later of what
this project will cost (not including the hoses and watering-head things). I
was blown away, not because the supplies will cost about $1,200, but then he
turns around and asks for $1,000 for himself, as main d’œuvre fees. Now in the
States that’s reasonable, probably even low. But don’t forget here, TIME IS NOT
MONEY; it’s not valued as much. For example, the solder I talked to had put his
price of coming to the field and physically soldering together 200 meters of
pipe at $120. Even Hubert said the price was high, and that everyone knows that
as a rule of thumb, fees for work are usually calculated to be at 1/3 of the
price of supplies. So tomorrow we will be going back to talk to the guy. I made
some changes to the design that he made that I think will help reduce some of
the cost of supplies. Then, of course, we will talk about reducing his fee. By
a lot. And Hubert mentioned that if he doesn’t go for it, we can always ask
someone in Nati. I hope it doesn’t come to that, because I am already starting
to stress over how much time this is taking before I can even submit the grant.
Then it still takes time for things to be processed, for me to get the money,
etc, etc. I want to finish this up quickly, before the dry season, so the women
can actually use it.
Additionally, once it’s done I want to apply for another
grant for the chicken-raising I’ve been talking about doing. I have to complete
the first one before starting the second one. Now, it actually works out, since
I want to have to first one done by the beginning of the dry season or shortly
thereafter. But to reduce costs, we’ve decided to build the chicken coop with mud
bricks instead of cement, and then only cover them with a layer of cement to
protect the structure from the elements. And mud bricks can’t be made until
some time into the dry season, when the rivers start to disappear, leaving
behind….wait for it…MUD!!!
I am really excited for both of these projects. They really
seem what people here want. I remembered from the very first day that I met the
Fétékou women that they told me how hard their work in the garden was. Hubert
commented to me that he did not realize how hard the women’s work was. Maybe
they didn’t mention it to him. I wish I could be getting more input from them
on what they want, and how to design it, but I don’t even know if they would
know what they need. So I’m basing it off the one system I saw visiting another
post, and hopefully it works!
Sunday, 25 August 2013
I swear, there are so many days that I feel like I am living
in redneck territory, here in Benin. Maria joked that it was “Benin’s Dakota.” I
mean, life here does primarily revolve around agriculture, so it makes sense.
And the climate is absolutely horrendous, alternating between absurdly cold
(for Africa), and unbearably hot. I mean the redneck thing in the stereotypes,
and in both the good and bad ways. Good, because people are super-nice and
friendly. Like the guy who gave me his umbrella. Or the vet who has promised to
drive all the way to Natitangou, just to get rabies vaccinations for Maria’s
and my cats. Life is slower, more relaxed. But sometimes—maybe a lot of the
time—people are so backwards. I think about Appalachia country, where people
are so very poor and don’t have access to education as much. It’s the same
here, like Pierre who had to walk miles to get to school. There is such a
conservative mindset, ESPECIALLY when it comes to women. “Women’s place is the
home.” End of discussion. [Oh, and men only make up only 30% of the whole
population of Benin, so that’s why the HAVE to be polygamous. You know, to
satisfy all those women! How chivalrous of them! And yes that is a “fact” I
have heard multiple times from different people]
The most recent example was this (albeit VERY DRUNK) guy
yesterday, who harassed Maria and I at the buvette.
Drunk guy: “Excuse me. WHAT do you think about women who
wear their hair like white people?”
Me: “What?”
Drunk guy: “In weaves. Women who wear weaves.”
Me: “Well…”
Drunk guy: “Well, I think it’s terrible. I DO NOT allow my
wife to wear a weave, like those other wannabe white-women floosies.” [Okay,
I’m not sure if “floosie” is a word in French, but if it were, he would have
definitely used it here.]
Me (tipsy and enraged): “Who are you to tell your
wife what she can and cannot do?”
Other men in the bar: “Duh, we always tell our wives what to
do. Maybe where you come from, women do what they want, but not here!”
Then the drunk guy
starts talking about his plethora of wives, the first two of which left him for
some unknown reason (probably because he was an asshole, and I suspect he beat
them)
Me: “Well, why do you shave your head? Are you embarrassed
by your African hair?”
Drunk guy: “I shave my head because my father always shaved
his head. I’m a traditionalist!”
Me: “Well I’m here to make change. So we will never agree,
so maybe you should just leave me alone”
The guy at this point gets up, walks over to Maria, and
demands that she answer his questions. She tries to shrug him off, by saying
that neither of them will change the other’s mind, so why is he even trying to
discuss these things? Then he storms around the bar, yelling about how he hates
white people, and he hates development, and why can’t all the white people just
go away and stop ruining his country? Then he comes back to Maria and I, and
starts talking about how he’s been in prison. And suddenly, I had this
flashback to a camping trip with my family, where we ended up in a
Deliverance-themed park, next to a group of very drunk people, who were
throwing whole pellets of wood on a fire, and yelling about their own prison
experiences.
Because think about it. Replace “white people” with any
non-WASP racial or ethnic group in the states (i.e. black people, Irish people,
Asian people, Mexicans, etc). And suddenly you have a typical American racists
talking about how blacks or whoever are just stirring up trouble, and trying to
ruin America for the “Real Americans”.
But as each one of you are aware, not every person in
America—even in rural America—is a racist and/or chauvinistic prick. I just
have to remember that whenever someone here makes me mad. I want to yell at
them, tell them their wrong, but obviously that will do as much good as yelling
at a brick wall. I need to just stop and think about how my aunt—who is one of
the most absolutely wonderful people in the world—is proud of her West Virginia
heritage, and is probably offended by some of my previous paragraphs. Or one of
my good friends from school grew up in Kansas, likes country music (horrors),
and yet fit right in with our mix-match of international friends.
There are plenty of people here that are dedicated to improving
their lives and ideas. For example, I have a friend named Louise, who is 14.
Her father insists that she and all her sisters go to school—something that
doesn’t always happen here. He isn’t trying to marry her off quickly, and in
fact discourages her from needing suitors or whatever.
And there are definitely people who are willing to listen
and change. Also yesterday, I had a conversation on two separate occasions with
people about calling me “batoori”. I told them that I didn’t like being called
Batoori, and they responded. “But you are. You are white.” I then asked them
that if they came to the States if they would like it if everyone ran up to
them, pointed, and yelled, “Black Person! Black Person!” They thought about it
and said, “You know what, you are right. I would hate that.” So I told them my
name, and to call me that instead if they saw me again.
I really should stop being argumentative with drunk men. Not
only are they drunk and therefore less reasonable, but here they also have more
of an issue with being corrected by women, and feel the need to “man-splain”
their point. [I HAVE A PENIS! ERGO, I AM RIGHT!] I think, though, this country
could have some good brought to it by women who actually stand up to men.
Another volunteer was recounting a story where on a taxi, a man demanded that
this other girl give him one of her cookies, and she agreed, probably because
she felt she could not say no. Then the guy asked the volunteer, and when she
refused he tried to grab for them. This erupted into a whole debacle. And in
the courting rituals, some men seem to be under the impression that “no” means
“try harder”, and “never call me again” means “call me 5 times a day, even at 3
in the morning, until I break down and give in.” [true story, except for the
giving-in part]
It seems really hard to find the balance, though. How much
am I hear to spread ideas and practices, and how much am I hear to learn about
and accept different points of view? I certainly don’t want to adopt that
paternalistic attitude of “helping the poor, backwards Africans.” But should I
try to encourage people to view “time is money”, or should I accept their more
laid-back regimens? Should I tell them that women or equal, or allow that here,
it’s the man’s job to care for the family?
Because not everything is black and white. For example, many
of us are horrified by the idea of women wearing hijabs. “SO OPPRESSIVE!” we
say. However, there are arab feminists who differ, and say that maybe western
women are the ones that are actually oppressed. For women who wear hijabs,
their body is their own. They can walk down the street, and people can’t see
all of their forms, their skin, etc. They have to judge them by their speech
and actions, not if they have a sexy body. Meanwhile, western women are forced
everyday to look perfect: to wear makeup, have their hair styled, wear exactly
the right clothes, be exactly the right shape. Their bodies belong to the
world, to constantly be judged
So for me, it’s more about creating an environment where each
and every person makes their own choices and their own destiny. I want to focus
less on yelling at asshole men, and more about empowering women to take
control. Or not, if they choose to let a man take care of them instead. Less on
lecturing people on business, and more on giving them multiple ideas for
success, from which they can choose. Less on getting angry at racists, and more
on just discussing things with people, so they can see my point of view, and
tell me about theirs. I guess those are the goals! It’s really hard to have the
patience, but we’ll see.
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Just as an update on my projects: So I had Hubert call in
another person involved with irrigation. This guy is from Natitangou, but
someone with whom Hubert has worked before. He came to Kérou, saw the site, and
then talked with us about what we wanted to do. Then he gave us his estimate.
The PVC equipment will cost around $800, vs. the $1200 the original guy was
asking. Then, this guy ONLY ASKED FOR $200 DOLLARS for his “technical
services”. I was so overjoyed. There are some added expensive, for example I
will be paying a little over $100 for his travel and lodging, plus I have to
pay for the transport of materials. But still, it works out to be considerably
cheaper than the guy from Kérou. AND, I even doubled the amount of hoses in the
garden—so that more women can work at once. It’s so much better. I feel awesome
that I’m not being taken advantage of, and so HAHA to the greedy man, GUESS YOU’RE
NOT GETTING EVEN ONE FRANC, JERK! Now I’ve submitted everything to Peace Corps,
and just have to wait around for it to all get approved. Yay, progress!
And finally, some pictures for your enjoyment:
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| Luna, sleeping in the sun |
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| Luna, trying to make a friend |
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| Me, with various "artisans", aka the mechanics, solders, masons I always talk about. These are the more prominent leaders |
