I started teaching last week – this year, I have all four 5eme classes again. Only about two-thirds of my kids showed up because I’m the only one of their teachers who’s started having class. Most of the other teachers at my school don’t have their teaching schedules yet, and there’s already talk of a strike two weeks into the school year.

Benin’s a bad place to be a thief. When I was on my way to class on Thursday morning, I saw a huge crowd of people about five hundred yards down the path from my house. As I debated whether to go and see what was going on, a rifle shot rang out, and I decided I’d be better off following the path uphill and getting to class on time. That evening, I asked an older girl in my concession, Chantal, what had happened. “They caught a thief,” she said. The night before, a man from another village had come into town and broken into the house of my tailor, who lives a few minutes away. He took the tailor’s sewing machine and motorcycle and got as far as the area around my house before my post’s night patrol – the zangbeto – caught him. The crowd that I saw that morning had come to see the thief and to beat him with sticks. “If you’d gotten a stick, you could have beaten him, too,” Chantal added casually. “And now he’s in jail, right?” I asked with my fingers crossed. I knew that more often than not, thieves in Benin are beaten to death. “He’s at the police headquarters one town over,” she replied.

That outcome for theft is VERY lenient by Beninese standards. A moment ago, I spoke to a new volunteer in my region who told me that at his post, thieves are burned alive. He discovered this when some villagers nearly burned a thief alive a short distance from his house. “Hey there – do you have a torch?” one of the mob asked him. “No – no, definitely no,” he answered.