pour penser
In the days I got back to Tobré after being gone for five weeks, my attitude stank. It was hot. I was tired. Everyone thought I had gone back to the U.S. Looming ahead of me was another month of teaching. Did I mention that it was hot? But I did the things I needed to do: I got up, showered off the layer of sweat I’d built up in the night, ate some millet porridge, headed off to school, taught, lesson-planned, showered two more times, boiled my drinking water. I even managed to admire my neighbors’ newborn baby boy.
But even while I was doing these things, some ugly little guy in the back of my head kept screaming at me, “THREE more months?! Boooring!” And in the middle of this incredulous ranting and raving, my neighbor Nasser asked me what time I would be home. The king was going to send something over. So I said the time I’d be around, and was grudgingly there at the appointed time.
What was sent was a delegation of three village elders, toting two chickens and a bag of guinea fowl eggs. The king had sent them to come, to greet me on his part, and to pass on some of his words. His words were (roughly translated from Bariba to French and now to English): We have not forgotten you. To the person that does good, we do good, and we don’t forget them. Even though I haven’t come myself, I would like to thank you again for teaching our children, for helping our women. We know you’ll be replaced by another volunteer, but even after you’ve been replaced twenty times, we’ll remember you. Because you were the first. To the person who does bad, we also do bad; to the person who does good, we will also do good.
I felt like such a brat.
While I don’t necessarily want the theme of this post to be another story of how underneath it all, there’s always something to remind you of the good (though I believe that), I do want to point out the continued generosity and undeserved care that I receive from my community here. P.S. The chickens and eggs were delicious.
On a different note, I had another slap-in-the-face moment in the past few weeks:
I was walking back from class (in the heat), accompanied by one of my students.
“I want to bring my father’s identity card to show you,” he told me, “He lived in Nigeria for some years and the papers are in English.”
“Oh, okay. Did your dad work there?”
“No no, he was a farmer. He died a while ago.”
And slap!
The light-bulb moment was not realizing exactly why he wanted to show me his dad’s Nigerian immigration papers. I still haven’t exactly figured that out, but I’ve relegated it to the pile of things that I just won’t ever understand. What struck me was actually something much simpler that that – his dad was a farmer. In Benin. In West Africa. Can you imagine being the son of a West African farmer?
One of the things that most Peace Corps volunteers in Benin figure out pretty quickly is that so much of what moved us to join the Peace Corps in the first place – people living without access to clean water, children without clothes, people in mud huts – is actually (don’t hate me for saying it!) not that bad. There is plenty of suffering here, but so much of what we as Americans assume equals suffering, in fact, does not. War? Yes. Living without electricity? No.
Figuring this out doesn’t take long once you’re here. The danger though, is to think that after two years, we have it all figured out. The danger is to go home thinking yadayadayada, just because they don’t have a TV doesn’t mean they need one. The real thing to avoid is thinking that just because I’ve lived in these circumstances for 24 months, that I have some sort of understanding of what life is like for my students, for my neighbors, or even for Africans in general.
So while my student didn’t tell me anything exceptionally shocking that day, I was suddenly reminded all over again that I, with my college education and American passport and couple thousand dollars in the bank, have pretty much no idea of what it would be like to actually be the child of a poor, Beninese farmer. I’m not even close to knowing. For all I know, it could be really, really great! Or, as I’m more apt to believe, it’s not. My capacity for empathy will always, always be limited.
The challenge now is know what to do with this realization. Do I just stop trying? Do I pretend to know? Do I tell myself that, well, at least I know a little bit more about this than most Americans, and hey, I gave it my best shot? I’m not anywhere near an answer. But I have an inkling, which tells me that maybe what I can do is to act on what I do know, and to act in the areas where I know I might have some influence. I know that policy affects lives. I know that while I might not understand what it feels like wake up every single day of my life on a plastic mat on the ground of my family’s mud house and then spend all day planting yams, I do understand (or at least have the opportunity to understand) something about politics, economics, and some history. I (think I) understand how to read statistics. I can type. I can use the internet. I can apply to graduate school.
None of this brings me any closer to getting inside the minds of my students, but its what I can do, and maybe some day I can do it all really well. And maybe my doing these things well can somehow, someday, help to empower my student to tell his story.
But even while I was doing these things, some ugly little guy in the back of my head kept screaming at me, “THREE more months?! Boooring!” And in the middle of this incredulous ranting and raving, my neighbor Nasser asked me what time I would be home. The king was going to send something over. So I said the time I’d be around, and was grudgingly there at the appointed time.
What was sent was a delegation of three village elders, toting two chickens and a bag of guinea fowl eggs. The king had sent them to come, to greet me on his part, and to pass on some of his words. His words were (roughly translated from Bariba to French and now to English): We have not forgotten you. To the person that does good, we do good, and we don’t forget them. Even though I haven’t come myself, I would like to thank you again for teaching our children, for helping our women. We know you’ll be replaced by another volunteer, but even after you’ve been replaced twenty times, we’ll remember you. Because you were the first. To the person who does bad, we also do bad; to the person who does good, we will also do good.
I felt like such a brat.
While I don’t necessarily want the theme of this post to be another story of how underneath it all, there’s always something to remind you of the good (though I believe that), I do want to point out the continued generosity and undeserved care that I receive from my community here. P.S. The chickens and eggs were delicious.
On a different note, I had another slap-in-the-face moment in the past few weeks:
I was walking back from class (in the heat), accompanied by one of my students.
“I want to bring my father’s identity card to show you,” he told me, “He lived in Nigeria for some years and the papers are in English.”
“Oh, okay. Did your dad work there?”
“No no, he was a farmer. He died a while ago.”
And slap!
The light-bulb moment was not realizing exactly why he wanted to show me his dad’s Nigerian immigration papers. I still haven’t exactly figured that out, but I’ve relegated it to the pile of things that I just won’t ever understand. What struck me was actually something much simpler that that – his dad was a farmer. In Benin. In West Africa. Can you imagine being the son of a West African farmer?
One of the things that most Peace Corps volunteers in Benin figure out pretty quickly is that so much of what moved us to join the Peace Corps in the first place – people living without access to clean water, children without clothes, people in mud huts – is actually (don’t hate me for saying it!) not that bad. There is plenty of suffering here, but so much of what we as Americans assume equals suffering, in fact, does not. War? Yes. Living without electricity? No.
Figuring this out doesn’t take long once you’re here. The danger though, is to think that after two years, we have it all figured out. The danger is to go home thinking yadayadayada, just because they don’t have a TV doesn’t mean they need one. The real thing to avoid is thinking that just because I’ve lived in these circumstances for 24 months, that I have some sort of understanding of what life is like for my students, for my neighbors, or even for Africans in general.
So while my student didn’t tell me anything exceptionally shocking that day, I was suddenly reminded all over again that I, with my college education and American passport and couple thousand dollars in the bank, have pretty much no idea of what it would be like to actually be the child of a poor, Beninese farmer. I’m not even close to knowing. For all I know, it could be really, really great! Or, as I’m more apt to believe, it’s not. My capacity for empathy will always, always be limited.
The challenge now is know what to do with this realization. Do I just stop trying? Do I pretend to know? Do I tell myself that, well, at least I know a little bit more about this than most Americans, and hey, I gave it my best shot? I’m not anywhere near an answer. But I have an inkling, which tells me that maybe what I can do is to act on what I do know, and to act in the areas where I know I might have some influence. I know that policy affects lives. I know that while I might not understand what it feels like wake up every single day of my life on a plastic mat on the ground of my family’s mud house and then spend all day planting yams, I do understand (or at least have the opportunity to understand) something about politics, economics, and some history. I (think I) understand how to read statistics. I can type. I can use the internet. I can apply to graduate school.
None of this brings me any closer to getting inside the minds of my students, but its what I can do, and maybe some day I can do it all really well. And maybe my doing these things well can somehow, someday, help to empower my student to tell his story.
posted by betsie at 3:49 AM
2 comments
