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The week before I left Benin for Paris, all the TEFL volunteers in their first year had a weeklong In-Service Training (IST) event in Porto Novo. We had sessions on finding secondary projects to work with in our spare time and on teaching techniques. For the last several days of the conference, one Beninese English teacher from each of our schools joined us. All the PCVs presented a session on using visual aids in the classroom, which Beninese teachers don’t usually do. I brought a stick-figure drawing that I’d used to start a discussion of leisure activities to the presentation and later taught a few interested Beninese teachers how to make basic drawings on brown paper that we can tape up on the blackboard to give the students something colorful to look at.
Immediately after getting back into Cotonou from Paris, I headed over to the swankiest (= it has hot water!) hotel in the country for the annual All Volunteer Conference (ALLVOL). This conference addressed general issues that apply to volunteers from all sectors. We finished up around noon today, and this evening, we’re having the annual Gender and Development (GAD) dinner. The GAD fund is a pool of money that PCVs draw on throughout the year to pay for small projects that aren’t worth the pile of paperwork that other ways of finding funds usually entail. (One example could be paying the taxi fees and lodging for a health worker to come and talk to a group of students about AIDS.) The fund is monitored by a senior PCV who reviews the short and simple applications and disperses the money.
The money is raised each year by the GAD dinner and auction. Both Beninese and Americans buy dinner tickets and donate items for the auction that happens right before the dinner, and the profits from this evening go toward the next year of GAD projects. There was also a date auction last night, with all profits going to this same fund.
Never mind about the catching up on blogging. As it turned out, there was a lot to do in Paris, so I’ll just have to make this a short note before I head out to the airport to catch my return flight to Benin.
Paris lived up to the hype – the city’s beautiful, the food’s amazing, and the things to see are actually worth seeing. M. and I went to the Louvre, the Museum of the Institute of the Arab World, the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the Bastille Opera, the Place de la Concorde, the Arc du Triomphe, and even the Eiffel Tower, though we didn’t make it up to the top because it was icy cold and raining when we got over there. At the cemetery, we joined the crowds of fans who’d come to pay their respects to Chopin, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Moliere, and others. Oscar Wilde’s monument is covered with dozens of lipstick kisses. Chopin had a bigger pile of flower offerings than Jim Morrison. At the opera, we saw a performance of poems written by an Iraqi woman more than a thousand years ago that a musician has recently set to music.
We actually spent a lot of time just walking around. After several months in Benin, my overall impression of Paris was that the city is just swimming in money. Everything’s very shiny.
I only got to meet one rude French person, and she was rude by refusing to talk to me, so that didn’t help my French skills any. Since I was here for a week, I think that makes Paris’ score better than New York City’s.
I flew into Paris yesterday for a weeklong vacation. It’s my first time in the city, so I’m especially excited to be here. I’ve been trying out my French on the natives, but it’s harder than I thought it’d be since the first time there’s a difficulty in the conversation, the French person I’m talking to just switches over to English. What happened to all the rude French people who refuse to speak English? Where can I find them?
It’s colder than I was expecting, so I plan to run over to Tati (the French Filene’s Basement) later today and pick up a pair of gloves, a hat, and maybe a sweater.
I’ll be in Paris through the evening of March 27, and since there’s high speed internet in my hotel, I’m going to try and catch up on blogging – so stay tuned.
Back in Benin, the rainy season has rolled around again. I saw some spectacular lightning as I was walking home from school the other day. “Wow – that looks dangerous,” I said to my landlady’s youngest daughter, who was walking with me. “Oh, don’t worry,” she replied, “lightning only strikes bad people who plot against their neighbors.” Since I’m not Beninese, I figured the Voodoo god of lightning and thunder might make an exception for me, so I hurried home anyway. I’ve taught my students to sing “Rain, rain, go away,” and I figure the next song on the list will be “Singing in the rain.”
…Speaking of which, the Beninese English teachers at my school hardly know any English children’s songs, so they’ve asked me to teach them some to pass on to their students. We spent a good portion of our last department meeting singing and dancing to “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes” and the “Hokey pokey.”
I was a tourist in Benin yesterday for almost the first time in a while when I went to the Cotonou Artisans’ Center to buy Beninese souvenirs to give to M. when I see him in Paris. Despite Benin’s boring lack of war and other crises over the past 15 years, tourism is really minimal in this country. Most out-of-country visitors are French, though there’s a decent number of Germans, Spaniards, Americans, and Brits. There’s also a small but growing group of Japanese volunteers in the southern part of the country. The Lebanese have a strong presence in business in Cotonou, the commercial capital, where they own many of the supermarkets and restaurants.
For that reason, when you come to Benin, you really don’t see the concessions to tourists that you find in – say – Burkina Faso. Only a handful of places in Benin that I know of sell West African artwork to well-off Beninese and foreign visitors, and the Artisans’ Center is the biggest and most touristy of those.
Everything there is also wildly overpriced. After every bargaining session that I had yesterday afternoon, the seller invariably pulled me into their little stall and said in a pained whisper that I needed to keep quiet about the price he/she had given me – otherwise they’d be put out of business. I’m sure they still overcharged me, though.
The art at the Center came from all over West Africa, with wood carvings, cloth wall hangings, brass sculptures, silver jewelry, worked leather, and even small statuettes carved from wild boar tusks. They’re mostly well-made, but the designs are generally copied over and over again, so if you want to find a unique piece, you’re in for a long search. In that sense then, the art is tailored for a touristy audience, but it was still funny for me to see how they’re a long way from completely adapting to the expectations of foreign visitors. Alongside the traditional-looking masks and leather bags, you can find small wood carvings of Beninese people reading books, riding on motorcycles, and even using computers. Near the middle of my trip, I even ran across a painted statuette of a white tourist in a safari hat with a camera around his neck.
After the trip to the art market, I hit up a used-clothing market to buy a few items for my trip to winter-weather Paris. The used-clothing markets in Benin are called “dead yovo markets” by the PCVs since it seems like every piece of clothing ever donated to Goodwill in the U.S. ends up over here. Yesterday, I saw a used bridal gown hanging next to a canary-yellow t-shirt with a picture of David Hasselhoff running out of the waves and a caption that said “If it’s not the Hoff….it’s the Scoff!”
