Click on the picture to see it full-size.

Helping out at a computer training session:

Discussing goal-setting and decision-making with the girls:

Wearing our paper hats from the origami session:

Last week was the girls’ leadership camp in Porto Novo, the capital of Benin.  About fifty girls attended, coming from all over the southern portion of Benin.  I brought four of my 5eme students from my post, and I think they really enjoyed it.  Two of them were girls who performed very well in my English class this last year, one was a girl who didn’t perform very well but had an excellent attitude, and the fourth was a very smart girl who seemed dedicated to doing as little work as possible at school.  I hoped the camp would encourage the first two to keep working hard, and the second two to start thinking seriously about their futures.  They had sessions on study skills, managing work and family, nutrition, health and sexuality, etc….plus special trips to a museum, a non-profit farm, and the National Assembly.  I mostly ran errands and helped with the general running of the camp, though I did assist with the goal-setting workshop and taught one session on origami.  (The girls loved folding paper hats and wore them around for the rest of the day.)  The camp was funded by donors back in the U.S. - so thanks a lot! 

To celebrate the Fourth of July, the American ambassador to Benin invited everyone connected to the U.S. embassy, plus all the Peace Corps staff and volunteers, to a potluck lunch at her [enormous] house [with swimming pool!] today.  At least fifty people showed up, and we feasted on everything from salad to macaroni and cheese to hamburgers and hotdogs - very exotic foods for Benin.  I baked a cinnamon cake with chocolate frosting at post and brought it over today.  On the way back to the Peace Corps office on a motorcycle with the remains of the cake balanced on my knee, I got a lot of odd looks from Beninese people…which I think is a bit much since I regularly see Beninese people driving around on motorcycles with a goat slung over their knees and a basket of thirty chickens tied to the seat behind them.

In a matter of minutes, a plane carrying a new crop of Peace Corps trainees will arrive at the Cotonou airport.  They’ll be training for the next two months at sites in and around Porto Novo - right next door to me, in other words.  Current PCVs will be assisting with the training, but I won’t be one of them since I was in Paris during the trainers’ training session in March.  I definitely plan to show up for their Iron Chef Benin competition, though.  Since I won’t be involved in the actual training, I think I’d make a great impartial taste-tester and judge.  Those who make it to the end of the training period will swear in around the fourth of September, and their swear-in celebration will also double as Peace Corps Benin’s 40th anniversary celebration.  I won’t be able to make it since I’ll be visiting the U.S. at that time, but I’ve heard a rumor that the President of Benin might attend.  At this rate, I’ll never meet a President of anywhere!

The school year will be over for me this coming Tuesday when I hand back the last of my finals and give students their overall grades.  Originally, we were supposed to be done at the end of May, but the Beninese government pushed back the end of the school year in response to the strikes…which wasn’t much fun for teachers like me who never went on strike in the first place.  Thanks to such a late ending, the next school year probably won’t start until October.

It’s just as well that school’s ending since the rain is really picking up again.  After the sudden, strong showers, I’ve found displaced snails in my outdoor shower area and once even a small green frog plopping across my living room floor.  During an afternoon shower a few weeks ago, the rain came through the ventilation holes in my classroom and streamed down the blackboard, erasing the lesson I’d been writing.  The roar of the water on the corrugated iron roof and the darkness from all the cloudcover would’ve kept me from teaching anyway, so I just paused the lesson until the storm was over. The students, huddled in the center of the room away from the holes in the walls that serve as windows, had a great time.

In case you’re wondering, the primary school building project is still on, but I’m bogged down in budget-writing right now.  I’ll let you all know when it gets moving again.  Other, smaller current projects were a World Map last month and Camp GLOW in a week and a half.  The World Map was a painting project on the side of one of my school’s buildings.  Peace Corps will reimburse me for the supplies with a GAD Small Projects grant, and a nearby volunteer and I supplied labor.  Almost none of the students at my school own maps, and the current Beninese geography/history curriculum doesn’t require the students to look at maps of the countries they’re studying, so my students’ geography is very shaky.  We drew the map using a gridded pattern and painted it, and it turned out beautifully; I’ll post a photo here when I can.  Camp GLOW is a girls’ leadership summer camp that’ll take place soon in Porto Novo.  I’ve invited four girls from my school.

Hope your summers are going well!

So, for the past nine months or so that I’ve spent at my post, I’ve passed many afternoons sitting with my landlady and her sister in the corner of the local market where they sell sodabi.  Over behind their stalls, there’s a quiet little area of the market that I’d never visited.  All I could see of it was a pile of pottery, so I figured it was the pottery corner of the market.  Yesterday, though, I was a bit bored and wondered over, and guess what?  It’s actually the gris-gris center.  (You’ll be much more impressed when you read the next paragraph.)

Benin is famous for being the world center of Voodoo, and there’s also widespread practice of gris-gris.  Gris-gris and Voodoo are often used as synonyms by foreigners, but while Voodoo is an actual religion with a pantheon of gods, gris-gris is a more general form of animism.  A minority of the population (mostly in the South) follows Voodoo, but just about everyone believes in gris-gris regardless of whether they’re Christian, Muslim, etc.  Gris-gris includes most of the practices that Americans think of when we talk about Voodoo: spells and charms both helpful and harmful.  (Sorry, no dolls stuck with pins.)  A couple of the men selling the gris-gris objects spoke French and were happy to explain to me what the various items were for: charms against bad bosses and neighbors, luck charms, memory charms, charms to counteract sorcery being done against you, traditional medicines, and more.  The charms themselves were preserved animal skins, various jawbones, dried plants and roots, and even a few halfway-preserved birds of prey.  I thanked the sellers and promised to come back if I ever needed some supernatural help. 

This just goes to show that I can look around in Benin all I want, but most of the time, I have no idea what I’m looking at.

Speaking of traditional beliefs, someone I know at my post just recently had twins.  In this region of Africa, twins are considered a huge blessing and bring a lot of prestige to the parents.  My friend at post is very proud and told me that because his two new sons are twins, they’ll be expected to give their parents advice in important decisions, starting when they’re very young.  Traditionally, twins are believed to be very spiritually close.  If one of them dies, people say don’t say they’re deceased; they say he/she has gone to the forest to wait for his/her twin, and the surviving twin is required to carry around a small doll representing the lost twin until he/she too passes away.

After three weeks at post, I decided I wanted to see some white people, speak some English, and eat some potatoes, so I’ve come into Cotonou for a day and a half’s vacation.  I went to an ice cream parlor after dinner, so I’ve already accomplished my main goal for the weekend. 

Traveling last weekend wasn’t an option thanks to the municipal elections, held every five years in Benin, which choose the mayor and other local big-shots.  We’re still waiting to hear about the results in my area, so I don’t know yet whether the mayor I already know (and have a friendly relationship with) has been re-elected, or whether I’ll have to start all over again with a new guy.  I heard about a little bit of violence in Abhomey, but there wasn’t any trouble connected to the election in my area.  It was odd for me to hear my co-workers at the school talking seriously about the dangers of switching political parties.  If a Beninese person hears about a new political party and decides to join it, they run the risk of being left high and dry if the new party doesn’t endure.  It would be risky to be without a party, and very difficult to get accepted again into their former party.  One of the other teachers at my school told mentioned how he’d felt pressured into switching political parties a few years ago because his ballot choices were leaked at the polling station and members of the main opposing party came and threatened him for voting for his party’s candidate.

Now that I’ve gotten used to teaching, I’ve stepped my efforts to learn Gun, the local language of my post.  (Since my efforts since October have been near zero, that wasn’t too hard to do.)  One of the Beninese English teachers at my school who’s a friend of mine is tutoring me, and Peace Corps reimburses me for the lessons.  Since this teacher speaks Gun, French, and English, we can go between French and Gun for grammar and vocabulary questions and between English and Gun for questions about the cultural context.

I have several women friends at my post who speak little or no French and who think my attempts to speak Gun are about the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.  They’re very encouraging, but since Gun’s the first tonal language I’ve ever studied, I wonder a lot about how often I say what I think I’m saying.  One of my older women friends sells Sodabi, a strong local liquor, in the market, and I always stop by her stall to say hello.  Last weekend, she had me stand up and recite my few phrases in Gun to a bench-row of her clients.  (”Look what the white woman can do!”) 

My Gun lessons’ll probably have to go on hold for a little while, though, since my teacher/friend has come down with hepatitis B.  He thought it was malaria when he first started feeling ill; luckily, he went to the doctor and had a blood sample analyzed, so he was able to get a correct diagnosis after a week or so.

I’m up to thirty-four books in Benin in the past nine months.  Right now, I’m finishing up Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.  Most of the book takes place in the Congo, but around page 480, she has her main characters vacation in Benin, so I got a nice surprise when I reached that part. 

By the way, the American filmmakers have left Benin to return to the U.S. and finish up their films on child trafficking.  “Films” is plural because they’ll be producing an English-language educational film to help Americans learn more about child trafficking, plus at least one local language film to bring back and show in Benin to discourage families from trafficking their children. 

Now that the strike is over, it’s back to business as usual at my school.  Thanks to the strike, though, the students have lost almost two months off an already-short school year.  The repeated strikes, plus teacher absenteeism, plus the teachers’ frequent lack of mastery in the subject that they’re teaching means that relations between students and teachers in Benin are often very strained.  From what I’ve seen, I think this is a big contributor to the poor performance PCVs often see from their students.  Why bother working hard in school when your chances to graduate are slim no matter what you do? 

With girl students, the school situation is even worse because sexual harassment is endemic in Beninese schools.  On top of the problems that every Beninese student has to worry about, girl students are sometimes asked for “dates” by their male teachers.  If they refuse, they know there’s a good chance their grades will suffer.  This problem extends even to the primary schools.  In the north of Benin last year, a primary school principal was caught paying primary school girls to have sex with him.  This came to light when one of the girls became pregnant, tried to get an abortion, and died.  Sexual harassment is officially against the law in Benin, but in reality, there are rarely consequences for teachers who abuse their positions.  This particular primary school principal wasn’t prosecuted, simply demoted to the post of regular teacher and sent to a different primary school 5 km away.

Sexual harassment is only one special problem that girl students face.  They’re also often expected to do housework when they get home from school while their brothers are given time to study.  They may marry when they’re still in junior high.  To give you an idea of how very few Beninese girls actually graduate from high school, here are some figures I got at my Porto Novo training event a few weeks ago.  

Imagine you started with 100 randomly-chosen Beninese boys and 100 Beninese girls just beginning secondary school.  How many will eventually finish?  Note how many girls disappear after 3ème, the testing year between junior high and high school that requires a lot of time outside class to prepare for the difficult BEPC exam.

________________________________________________________

Year in school                                         Girls                                    Boys

________________________________________________________

6ème (7th grade)                                   100                                     100

5ème (8th grade)                                   86                                        95

4ème (9th grade)                                   71                                         89

3ème (10th grade)                                 54                                        82

2nde (11th grade)                                  33                                         71 

1ère (12th grade)                                   21                                         63

T (Baccalaureate prep year)                11                                          57

________________________________________________________

Actually, fewer than 11 of these imaginary girls would receive their high school degrees because the Bac exam is notoriously difficult to pass, for boys as well as girls.

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!”