Bush and my birthday

Bush came to Benin last Saturday for about three hours to refuel on his way to Tanzania.  For security reasons, only the PCVs who live in Cotonou were actually allowed to attend the very brief ceremony in the Cotonou airport, but I listened to a live radio broadcast of the event.  Both Bush and the President of Benin mentioned Peace Corps several times and described the work we do in-country.  Laura Bush and Condolezza Rice were also there, and the three Cotonou PCVs got to meet the whole entourage.  The meeting with the PCVs was in an emptied airport terminal whose windows had been covered with pink paper to discourage snipers.  (“But why pink?” Steve asked.)  When they were saying good-byes, the Bushes kissed briefly, and Bush asked the President of Benin, Boni Yayi, to kiss Benin’s First Lady.  Someone forgot to tell Bush that kissing people of the opposite sex in public is taboo in Benin.  Boni Yayi complied, but his wife was very embarrassed.

I’m in Cotonou right now to work on various projects and celebrate my birthday.  Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!  I’ll be heading out in a few minutes with some other PCVs to go eat burritos and ice cream.  (Yes, that’s right, northern PCVs.  Burritos with seasoned meat, tortillas, guacamole, and salsa.  And real ice cream for dessert.)

I also finished my first semester of classes and turned in my grades last week.  I was shocked by how many of my students didn’t pass, but when I wrote the grades into the master gradebook, I saw that English was often my students’ highest grade.  This week has been a break between semesters, and the second semester of the year will start on Monday, ending the last week in May. 

I’m also heading over to Paris in a few weeks.  It’ll be my first time in that city, so I’m very excited! 

I hope you all are doing well – and staying warm!  The 60-degree cold spell of harmattan is over at my post, but it’s still dry and incredibly dusty.  

Living conditions, books, and dust…

For any friend who’s considering Peace Corps and wonders about the living conditions and salary, it varies widely by region of the world, by country, by project sector, and by a volunteer’s individual post.  Peace Corps Benin pays us an extravagant $6/day, which puts me well into the upper-middle class in my village.  Volunteers in Benin also typically get very nice houses, which is definitely not the case all over the world for Peace Corps.  My house doesn’t have any running water or plumbing, but that’s typical for my post, and I know volunteers in other sectors who actually do have those amenities.  I have a house to myself in a concession shared by an extended family and some other renters connected to my secondary school, and the house itself has three rooms, cement walls, and a roof of corrugated iron sheets.  (This is in a village where many houses have one room, mud walls, and thatched roofs.)  In sum, my living conditions are almost embarrassingly nice by Beninese standards.  My living allowance has me on a budget, but not a terribly tight one.  It helps that I’m in a small village with nothing much to spend money on even if I had it.

Peace Corps’s also given me more time to read than I’ve had since junior high, even with all the work connected to teaching and secondary projects.  Here’s the book list so far – I’ve put stars next to the ones that I especially liked:

1. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
3. The Far Pavilions, by M.M. Kaye
4. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
5. *Tales from 1001 Nights, trans. N.J. Dawood
6. *Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
7. The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells
8. Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen
9. That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis
10. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
11. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
12. *Robot Dreams, by Isaac Asimov
13. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
14. *Native Son, by Richard Wright
15. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
16. *Atonement, by Ian McEwan

Training from July through September was pretty intense, so most of those books are from the last four months, when I’ve been at post.  I found most of these in the Peace Corps’ Cotonou volunteer library, which has hundreds of books left behind by volunteers who’ve served in Benin over the past forty years.  The selection is actually quite good (I never thought I’d find Peake’s 1200-page Gormenghast trilogy over here), so I’m glad I didn’t waste any of my weight allowance on luggage carting over my own books. 

I did have my parents ship over Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, which I’m copying and annotating for my students to help them practice reading English.  They love the pictures and the funny stories.

Benin’s well into the season of harmattan, when cold, dry winds sweep down from the Sahara desert region and coat everything in a layer of fine, reddish dust.  Since I don’t have any glass in my windows, keeping the house clean is a real pain.  I stack books on my desk and pick them up a few days later to find they’ve mada a silhouette of clean wood in the new blanket of dust.

The elementary school project is coming along.  I’ve come to Cotonou today to get some errands done and to work on the grant proposal for some new classrooms for the school.  Flooding during the last rainy season wiped out the small village’s partially-completed school buildings, so they’ll have to start over again at a new site further from the lake.  For now, they’re holding classes in the remains of their old buildings.