The whipping fete

Last weekend was very busy – I left post immediately after my last class on Thursday afternoon and traveled up to the northwest of Benin to see the annual whipping fete, a local celebration in that area where young men whip each other to prove their manhood. The trip was long and exhausting. I got into Cotonou on Thursday evening and traveled again on Friday from 6am until just after 6pm to get into the post of K, a fellow PCV who hosted visiting volunteers who’d come from all over the country to see the fete. (None of them, though, traveled as long or as far as I did.) We saw two separate versions of the fete, a smaller one hosted on Saturday by a village near K’s post, and a larger version on Sunday morning at K’s post itself, Badjoude.

The night before Sunday’s fete, young men psyching themselves up for the next day traveled in groups around the town, singing, dancing, and – basically – trick-or-treating. They danced their way up to the front doors of the houses and then stayed there, singing, until the inhabitants gave them candy and sent them away.

The next morning, we got up before dawn and headed over to Badjoude’s main crossroads and waited for the groups of whipping fete contestants to arrive. Practically the whole town was there with us. The contestants came a bit after dawn in groups according to the area of the town that they lived in. Each regional group was headed by a man carrying a whip, wearing an elaborate feathered headdress, and tooting ceaselessly on a small metal whistle. Each of the men with the headdresses had personalized his gear by decorating the headband just below the rows of upright feathers. I saw one guy who’d pinned a peanut M&M doll to the band. (For good luck?) All the other contestants were carrying whips and shields made of sticks with hand guards, and many were wearing women’s clothing and lingerie. (Don’t ask me why…) Drummers followed the regional groups, and all the contestants chanted chants that someone translated for me as “Today, you will see that everyone here is a true man.”

The groups from each neighborhood met at the crossroads, and the individual matches started up. Champions from each neighborhood met in closely refereed one-on-one whipping matches. Each contestant would get a chance to strike two blows with his whip at the other guy, which the opponent would try to block with the stick-shield in his left hand. The referees broke up the matches and awarded points. By the end of the day, I saw many whippers with bleeding welts on their backs and arms.

Most of the competitors were in their late teens and early twenties, though I did see some matches between boys as young as ten. They didn’t have much skill with the whips, so I don’t think much damage was done, though the audience seemed to get into those matches as much as they did the matches between the young men.

The crowd eventually made its way to a spot next to a small hill that used to be considered sacred. For the final rounds, the king and local dignitaries attended. We (the white people) were given seats of honor near the king and lots of advice on what we should photograph. After the last champions met and the whipping fete was more or less over, we followed the king back to his house, where we sat around with him under a tree for a while and drank chouk, a local beer. Some of the more enthusiastic contestants were there also and decided it would be lots of fun to give some whips to the foreigners and see if we could hit them. I declined, but some of my friends gave it a shot.

I’ll try to post some of the whipping fete photos that I took when I can, although almost none of my many pictures turned out thanks to all the chaos at the fete. Most of my photos have one or two stray elbows or heads poking into the frame.

By the way, the Beninese to a man (and woman) all enthusiastically support Obama. Most think that an American President with strong African ties will do a lot to help the continent. I had a conversation about Obama with my colleagues at school last Wednesday, and I asked them whether they didn’t think that the expectations for him would be too high if he becomes President. My worry is that there would be wild enthusiasm for him at first and then a strong backlash in opinion in Africa if it’s discovered that he won’t, in fact, go out of his way to help people here by – for example – getting rid of the subisidies for American cotton growers that keep Beninese cotton growers extremely poor. The other teachers at my school said that of course, they realized that he couldn’t do everything. “But even if he accomplishes a small portion of what we hope he will,” Theopin said, “that will still be a lot.”

Thieves beware

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.

Crouching spider, hidden lizard

Sorry for the gap in posts – I was too busy having fun in the U.S. this last month to bother updating the blog.  I left Benin in late August and traveled overland by taxi through Benin, Togo, and Ghana to Kotoka International Airport in Accra.  (That was a very exciting airport for me since Kotoka can handle more than one plane at a time.)  I boarded that evening, changed planes in Amsterdam, and got into Dallas the next afternoon.  The U.S. was fun, with a week in Norman, half a week in Boulder, another week in Chicago, and a final half-week in Norman again, doing laundry and getting ready to leave. 

I’ve heard of many volunteers having severe reverse culture shock on returning to the States, but that was really never an issue for me.  (I think I was too focused on my list of American Foods To Eat.)  My only moment was coming in at the Dallas airport, when my parents and I took the shuttle from the terminal to our parking garage with all my luggage.  My dad floored me by handing a five dollar bill to the shuttle driver.  “What’s THAT?” I asked.  “A TIP?”  That bill represented a week’s salary for most Beninese people.             

In Norman, I caught up with some old high school friends and got over jetlag.  My brother is in Boulder for school, so we went around the town a bit and drove up into the Rocky Mountains for some hiking.  In Chicago, I met up with M and we saw The Dark Knight in Imax, Amadeus from the Chicago Shakespeare Company, the Art Institute’s Benin exhibit (Benin the kingdom in Nigeria – not Benin the country), visited my old campus and my old co-workers downtown, and went to the wedding of two of his friends.  I worked hard on my American Foods To Eat list and got through all the items by the time I had to button up my Benin pants (not so easy) and head back to the Dallas airport.

Now that I’m back in Benin, everything’s about getting ready for the school year, which will start on either October 6 or October 13 – they haven’t actually decided yet.  I’m in Cotonou right now for my mid-service health exam.  I tested clean for intestinal parasites and – as far as I know – for everything else.  These last few days were also Cheesecakefest Benin in the Cotonou medical unit thanks to the Philadelphia cream cheese and graham cracker crusts I brought back from the U.S.  (Cream cheese is one of the foods you just can’t find in Benin, no matter how hard you look or how much you’re willing to pay.)  At my post, I’m only halfway done cleaning out my house after my long absence; that task will keep me busy all afternoon when I return today.  It’s hard to explain to people in the U.S. how unbelievably FILTHY a house in Benin gets after only a few weeks.  The mounds of dust everywhere all come down to the lack of glass in the windows.  The hordes of spiders and lizards that moved in while I was gone and left their waste everywhere haven’t helped, either.  Last Wednesday, I moved around the house with my broom, chasing out all the critters, knocking down all the cobwebs, and scraping the globs of lizard droppings from my walls.  Then followed dusting, moving and washing down all the heavy, solid wood furniture, and hours of sweeping. 

The end’s in site, though, and soon (tomorrow? Monday?), I’ll be able to invite my new postmate over to see where I live.  He’s not actually posted at my site, but he’s only 5 km or so away, so we should see a lot of each other over the next year.  It’ll be nice to have another English-speaker so close.  This past year, the closest volunteer to me was a forty-minute motorcycle ride away over bad roads, and I didn’t see much of her.  Until next time…

P.S.

My Gun is really coming along.  I’ve gotten to the point where I can often get the gist of overheard conversations.  Last week, I spent several hours one day sitting with a friend at her market stall.  I’d hoped to hear the great and exciting things going on at post that I’d had to miss out on before thanks to the language barrier, but that day, most of the talk I heard turned out to be along the lines of “How much are the chili peppers?” and “Do you have change for 100 francs?”  I live in hope, though…

Oro season

The Oros are out right now at my post.  Back before Benin was Benin, the Oros were a secret society of Beninese men in each village who patrolled the town at night to discourage bandits who would attack and steal by night.  Having them out meant that there was a curfew after dark for everyone not initiated into the society.  These days, there are fewer bandits and security is provided by Beninese police and soldiers, but many towns – including my post - still keep up the Oro tradition a few weeks every year.  No one outside the society knows what the Oros looks like since the tradition goes that any man who saw an Oro would be given the choice between joining the society or being killed.  Women would simply be killed.  This sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is because word is passed around town during Oro season warning everyone to stay indoors after dark.  Even for those who forget and venture outside, it would be almost impossible to accidentally run across an Oro since they make a distinctive sound to warn people that they’re coming.  Back during my training, I heard it described as a high-pitched call: “Woo woo woo woo.”  Just last night, I was sitting in my living room listening to BBC World Service around 12:30am when I heard strange sounds outside the concession gates.  I turned off the radio and listened to the Oros prowl around my neighborhood for half an hour or so.  To me, it sounded less like a human voice making the noise and more like the whistling whine of a heavy object slung in circles through the air on a leather strap.

Other occasional night-time prowlers at my post are the zangbeto.  I’ve never actually seen or heard them at my post, though I have seen them at a daytime ceremony in Porto Novo, and they are Beninese men (again) covered with a giant straw cone-shaped costume.  During ceremonies, they dance and spin around, which has given them the nickname “the dancing haystacks.”  Tradition holds that when they’re dancing, if you look under the costume, you won’t see any feet because the spinning straw is held up only by spirit.  At my post, I’ve heard that they occasionally come out at night and roam around calling out the names of people who’ve committed lesser crimes like wife-beating.  To get them to stop, the culprits have to quietly go to the homes of the zangbeto and give them a gift of money.

In other news, I’m visiting the U.S. from August 28-September 17.  Benin’s sole international airport in Cotonou receives only a few flights a day, so I found it about $2,000 cheaper to book my tickets from the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, Ghana.  I’ve already gotten my Ghana visa and will apply for a Togo transit visa tomorrow morning.  Next Tuesday, I’ll leave my post for Cotonou, and a week from today, I’ll hop in a taxi at dawn and travel overland across the width of Benin, Togo, and Ghana to catch my flight in Accra by 9:30 that night.  See you soon!

One year in Benin

This last Sunday marked one year in Benin for everyone in my training group.  Of the 59 of us who arrived in July 2007, only about 45 have made it to this point.  Fifteen of us went out for ice cream and Indian food in Cotonou last Friday.  For an enormous banana split and dinner at a formal restaurant with wine, appetizers, the whole nine yards, the bill came to 8,500cfa per person…under 20 US dollars.  (Now if I could only live in Benin on an American salary, that would be perfect…) 

When I returned to post on Saturday, I celebrated again by making chocolate and vanilla cakes to share with my neighbors.  I don’t have any oven out here, but I’ve been baking a lot recently using a Dutch oven: a large lidded pot with an empty tuna can on the bottom.  I perch my cake/bread/cookie pan on top of the tuna can and put the whole setup over a low flame on my gas stove.  It works very well, though I’d been having problems finding the right ingredients for baking.  Real butter isn’t available at my post, and the tub margarine here that Beninese people call “butter” is disastrous in baking.  It tastes like plastic and when exposed to high heat, it congeals into a sticky black mass.  For the one-year anniversary baking day, I used real butter bought in Cotonou and made caramel frosting from scratch, and the cakes were amazing.  (On less special occasions, I use vegetable oil instead of butter.)  My neighbors were VERY happy.  I’ve gotten a couple of offers to bake for payment that I’ve had to turn down since I’m prohibited from earning money as a Peace Corps volunteer.  If I have to get fired sometime, though, I’d definitely like to do it for unauthorized pastry sales. 

After a bombardment of start-of-summer Peace Corps activities, things have really quieted down.  I got so bored last week at post, I taught myself to crochet.  I bought the yarn and crochet hook from a woman in my local market.  If I had been shopping for shriveled animal parts to protect myself against sorcery, no one would’ve given me a second glance, but since I was haggling for crocheting supplies, I had an audience of at least ten curious people around me by the time I was finished.  There can’t be much variety in the crochet action in Benin since I’m still working to convince my friends at post that the round red thing I’m making is NOT a hat.  I don’t think they’ll be convinced until they see me carrying around my new crocheted satchel in a few weeks.

Pictures from Camp GLOW, June 22-28

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:

Girls’ camp, the 4th of July, new trainees…

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!

End of the school year

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!

Gris-gris and twins

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.