Pardon my terrible format and lack of pictures! I can't really convey the condition of the internet here accurately enough for you to understand how hard it is just to post something once. Loading pictures? I've found one connection even capable. So, thank you for your patience.
Bouncing down a bright red dirt road, each bump in the road sends me bouncing up slightly off the seat as I peer over my Beninese colleague’s shoulder. Trees, crops and livestock bl
ur past in a lush green savanah-esque landscape right at the peak of its rain
y season. To my left from a perch in a baobab tree a flock of bright red
birds fly alongside me, observing me passively for a moment before darting off toward the low mountains a few kilometers to the west over the border in Togo (view to the left).
I am visiting my post and it is everything that I asked for. Far in the north nestled in the Atacora mountains, I will be working in Manta--a small village of a few thousand with no electricity or running water-- situated close to the border with Togo and Burkina Faso. Descending out of the mountains on a motorcycle, the wide savanah-like paysage at the sunset made my heart skip a beat because it's everything I think I want. I say think, because everything at this point is truly just speculation but I am really happy with where I will be posted as of now. It’s beautiful, rural, French-speaking and has lots of community development side projects I can get my h
ands in. But, only time will tell what it will actually be like.
My trip began with the shock that in the tremendously humid environment all my clothing
, bags and shoes I hadn't touched since I came to Benin were covered in mold. The zipper to my
backpack, had literally become molded stuck. It took quite an effort and an alcohol s
olution to dislodge it. I left the capital city a few days ago after staying the night in a pretty wretched hotel with bugs in two out of the three beds my colleagues and I were staying in.
Also notable at the hotel was an alligator in the hotel kept in an empty fountain (see picture). The sign essentially says in the alligator's voice that he's been here since 1967 and you can feed him if you want. We spent our evening in the big city searching for
a pizza which heard could be found there, on
ly to find the frozen variety. Better than nothing!
The next morning, after about 11 hours and 5 truck accidents later, I
arrived in the main northern city of Nattitangou. I rode with the Director (principle) of my school, who got off the bus, stepped in the local school and came out with cowboy boots, tight jeans and a winter coat--
surprising given it was about 85
degrees outside. I followed him around the city buying fish, building materials, bread, boxes of foodstuff, more and more all the while doing my best to make conversation in French and wondering how in the hell we were going to fit it all on the one motorcycle we would be riding another two hours to our village. Alas, sure enough, with two bags on m
y back, one bag in each hand, and two bags on the front of my director on the moto, we mounted up and headed out on the rough dirt roads as I tried desperately to avoid falling off the back with every bump in the road.
As I said the region I am in is mountainous, but they are very low mountains by our standards. The region speaks an amalgamation of languages but no single language predominates as in the south. As a result, French is actually more widely spoken in the north as it is the one common language everyone is familiar with. The local language I will learn in my village is called Ditamari, which, lucky for me is a tonal language! How many tones? I have no idea, because I've
never met anyone outside my village who speaks it. The region is famous for the traditional houses called "ta-tas" (no joke) that look like mud castles with straw roofed turrets. Also in the region is one of the only nomadic ethnic groups left in Benin. They raise cattle which means that beef is unusually cheap in the region. There is a distinct rainy season where the landscape is lush and green and a dry season which is hot as hell and turns the landscape brown.
The differences between the family gender role and dynamics of my post's host family and my work counterpart's family could not be more pronounced. I will live next to my host family. My host father is a math teacher at my school and is quiet as quiet can be. I arrived and exchanged pleasantries with him and his wife for about 15 minutes and after that I could not get him to engage in conversation for the life of me. The wife, is also traditional so she doesn’t really speak to me unless she is spoken to. I went through every sentence I know how to construct in French only to be met by low grunts, and one word answers. My host father's wife spends most of the time outside of the house cooking, cleaning or doing something domestic, while my dad sits on the couch and sleeps. The children have so much less energy here than they do in the south. I am not sure if it is circumstantial, cultural, malnutrition or another reason, but the kids seem as lethargic as their dad. Everyone eats with their hands here, but years of work and calluses have built up their ability to withstand scalding hot temperatures to the point that they dip their hands readily in to a bowl of pate (mealy paste-like food made from a local flour) that I would consider just under the boiling point. By the time the food is cool enough for me to touch, I was being stared at by a silent host father with an empty plate.
In contrast, my counterpart is as flamboyant as a 1930s gangster. At our first meeting, he arrived wearing a red satin shirt underneath a slim vest, with a newsboy cap, nice slacks and shiny polished white dress shoes. He is incredibly gregarious and his wife is the only university educated woman in the village. They cook together (rare in Benin) and eat together as a family (rarer still). Normally the man will eat by himself. I met with local elected officials, the chef of the village and the president of the parents association and managed to stumble through some conversations about community priorities, etc. The local French accent can be pretty hard to understand at times, but it has a nice kind of sing-song quality to it.
Some other notable highlights included having a converstation with a man wearing an Osama Bin Laden tshirt, a man proposing that I have sex with his sister (with his sister sitting next to him) and driving down a highway more akin to a lunar landscape than a road. My time on the computer is running low so this post will have to end. I apologize for the infrequency of my posts but finding an internet connection that can even upload an image is really really difficult!
Until next time.
The grand Voodoo temple in Porto-Novo
