countdown

I've been in Cotonou for the past five days, first to drop off my parents at the airport, now to do the necessary paperwork to end my Peace Corps service. The latter requires that I spend most of my time at the Peace Corps office, and since the new group of Benin trainees arrived on July 4th, they've been in and out, getting their paperwork done too.

I keep catching myself eyeing them suspiciously. One among them will replace me in Tobre, and I'm scared to death that whoever it is will not appreciate the place as it should be appreciated. A part of me wants to send whoever is placed there threatening notes on scraps of paper - "Warning! If you refuse to shake Bonay's hand and buy him rice from time to time, I'll...!" or "If you don't learn to hang out with the neighbors and eat their food, I'll...!" The problem is, I can't think of a good threat, and even if I could it probably would be impossible to carry out, since I'll be in the USA.

Most likely though, whoever ends up in Tobre for the next two years will be awesome, accomplish a ton, and be loved by all. How could they not?

Those of you in Don Pedro have probably already heard first-hand about my parent's visit. It was great. I can only imagine how nice it will be to arrive home, and have my parents know what/who I'm talking about when I mention the words "zemidjan", "marche", "tissue", "Bariki", and "Roufai". Granted they were here for two weeks, while I was here for two years, there is still a lot that they can now understand and relate to. I was also forced to notice the things that have become routine and ordinary: a herd of goats tied on top of a taxi, topless women, the chaos of Cotonou, how angry I sound when bargaining a price (I promise its all part of the game!).

I was also forced to answer questions that, after two years, I've stopped asking. "Why do farmers use handplows?"
"Why were people singing and wailing in the middle of the night?"
"What are the positive effects of Islam that I've noticed?"
But I was also forced to realize that after my short time in Benin, I've somehow learned that many questions can't be answered with words. Its only after experiencing and witnessing life here that questions get set aside, and one somehow knows that being able to explain all that is going on is an impossible goal, and perhaps an irrelevant one.

But these types of musings are probably themselves impertinent, when the best parts of my parent's visit where:
1. Catching up with my parents, and doing our best to fit two year's worth of discussions into two weeks.
2. Playing spades until the wee hours of 10 pm, with my mom winning (almost)every time.
3. The extravagant welcome that people in Tobre gave my parents. We were given three dozen eggs, a chicken, a guinea fowl, and cheese (remember too that the world is in a food crisis). My dad was given a bushbuck hide. My mom was told she could bring my neighbor's baby back to the States (although I've been told the same thing). And besides the material gifts, people were all around pleasant, or in other words, their hospitable selves.
4. Seeing my parents and neighbors all dressed in matching waterballoon fabric. Comment dit-on "priceless"?

Their visit was a perfect way to end my time in Benin.

And now, I'm preparing to end my time here as well. As Monday night and my Air France flight time approaches, I've been thinking of what it might be like when I get back to California for good. Its pretty hard to imagine. And frankly, its pretty hard to come up with a good ending for this blog. There's no way to sum things up.

Mostly I want to thank anyone who's read whatever I've written, or sent letters, or prayed, or sent packages. Please be patient with me while I readjust back to the US, struggle to explain things, or act like a know-it-all.

I'm 100% against ending like this though, on such a melodramatic note. So here's a short list of things I'm pretty sure I'll miss about Benin:
1. Kids. Especially when they yell goodmorning while they're squatting for their morning doo-doo on a trash pile.
2. Knowing that there is never, ever a limit to what can be squeezed into or onto a vehicle.
3. Bargaining prices. Not only because I like to drive a hard bargain, but also because I enjoy the hundreds of opportunities every day to interact with strangers.
4. Being able to buy a meal (albeit not so delicious) for less than 25 cents.
5. Knowing that generally, anyone I run into will be friendly.
6. Tobre.

N'kwa weru et a bien tot!

C'est fini

This week I finished at school. I gave all my students back their final tests. I showed them all their grades. I returned my copies of the teaching texts. I passed out little business cards I made to all the other teachers, since I knew they would all demand my “contact”. I even trashed the eight notebooks I had filled with two years worth of lesson plans. And that’s that. Two years of teaching done. No more standing ovations each time I step into a classroom. No more having to hold up my hand and count down from five when the students get too rowdy (I never reached one, and I still have no idea what would have happened if I had). No more getting so angry with my fellow teachers about their inappropriate (in my opinion) behavior, that all I can muster the strength to do is storm off to my house. But also no more teaching sixty kids the Hokey Pokey, or laughing when they declare, “Madame! Jou are LUCKY!”

School finished just in time, as the rains really started doing their thing last week. Since over half the classes at our school are held in corrugated tin lean-tos, rain during class means canceling class. I love the rain here. I was just thinking about how weird cold rain seems now. I’ve really gotten used to expecting a relieving downpour at the end of an especially hot day. However, the rains also mean that we are really in the month of July, which means that my time in Benin is nearing an end.

I’ve never been a big fan of closing out big experiences with a list of ways in which one has changed. If the experience was important and big enough, there’s no way to sum it up in a list, or a paragraph, or even a blog. From what I know (which granted is not too much), big things will continue to affect and change a person for many years. Therefore, I will spare us all from any sort of attempt at soul-searching. Mostly, for those of you that will see me when I come home, just be prepared to not find coherent or summarizing responses when you ask me questions. I’m still just figuring it all out.

That being said, I am looking forward to coming home and sharing my photos, my stories, etc, with anyone who will listen. (Did I mention that I’ll be back in the USA around July 20th?)

But I guess I should back up. I’m not home yet, or even extremely close: there are still around three weeks left, all of which will be spent showing Benin off to my parents. They arrive tonight. I’m not the only one excited; all of Tobre has been revving themselves up for weeks about their visit. And their visit will most likely merit its own blog post.

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.

Travels

Its been nearly four weeks since I was last in Tobré. I’m excluding the one night I spent there en route, since I was only there for about fourteen hours. Here’s why I’ve been gone so much:
1. I was a volunteer trainer for In-Service Training for first year TEFL volunteers. One thing you don’t hear about when you sign up for the Peace Corps is how you will get sucked into doing things like this.
2. I then went to a town called Nikki, which is the seat of the Bariba kingdom, for the annual Ganni ceremony. This is when all (or almost all) Bariba kings make their way to Nikki to celebrate both the birth of the prophet Mohammed, and ironically, the Bariba people’s historical defeat of Islamic proselytizers. I’ve given up trying to reconcile these opposing reasons for celebration. The celebration involves many Bariba princes prancing around on their horses.
3. After passing through Tobré for a night, I went to Park Pendjari, the one place in Benin to catch a glimpse of big African wildlife. Our group was able to see elephants, antelope, warthogs, hyenas, buffalo, and for a moment, lions. It so crazy to see these animals in the wild. I kept having to remind myself that I was not just at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. When you stop to think about it, its incredible that animals as enormous as elephants just roam around.
4. For Pendjari I had to go down to Cotonou for the annual Peace Corps All-Volunteer conference. Basically a vacation. We are put up in a three star hotel (air conditioning! hot water! delicious food! swimming pool! internet!), and spend the day talking about all things Peace Corps. The last night is a fundraiser dinner for Gender and Development efforts in Benin, more widely known as the Peace Corps prom.
5. The morning after the GAD dinner, four other volunteers and I climbed into the first of many taxis, to go to Burkina Faso and Mali. And here’s where the real stories begin…


THE TREK
One of the many benefits of being a PC volunteer is the opportunity to travel around. Since I’m a teacher, and I have to plan my schedule around classes, its been difficult at times to take advantage of this benefit. But for the break in April, four other volunteers and I went through the trouble of requesting vacation days, and headed of to see Burkina Faso and Mali.

Since a day-by-day account would end up being monotonous and lacking in direction, I’ve decided to bullet point the things that stood out the most, in no particular order:
1. Hiking in Dogon country. This is the southern-most part of Mali, where the Dogon people have been living in stone villages on top of, and next to, huge rock escarpments, for hundreds of years. The villages are all about three kilometers apart, but getting from one the next usually requires scrambling up a cliff. We spent four days trekking in Dogon country, with an incredible guide. Everything was incredibly breathtaking: waking up to see a sheer cliff, with an entire village balanced on the edge of it. Looking at how people have figured out how to survive on a giant rock, growing millet and onions in the cracks and crevices. Listening to the lilting greetings people threw at each other as they passed.

The Dogon way of life is in a precarious situation, due to many factors, including desertification (you can literally see the where the desert is creeping closer and closer), population growth, and the presence of tourists. Its overwhelming to think about how I have been able to see first-hand this dissappearing way of life.

2. Getting an idea of what medieval London might have smelled like in the mud city of Djenne. This is home to the world’s biggest mud mosque, and the city itself is made completely of mud. The toilet systems in the mud homes either empty into miniature mud septic tanks OR into the streets. Delicious. Despite the insulting smells, the city is interesting, and completely different from anything found in Benin. Upon arrival we were swarmed by teenaged boys, offering to be our guides. When we declined, one followed us, yelling in English, “This is not your country! You have to be cool here!” This however, was the most trouble we had, and generally things in Djenne are calm. Its completely Sahelian, completely Muslim. People from all over West Africa send their children to the famous Koranic schools of Djenne. Perhaps the best description of Djenne is what it is called in guidebooks: a cleaner (!), less spoiled version of Timbuktu.

3. Gliding along the Niger river in a pirogue at the port town of Mopti.

4. Figuring out ways to entertain ourselves in crammed, long, frustrating taxi rides. Some ideas: ipod speakers, befriending all the women in the car, sleeping, finding new ways to wear your bandana, buying whatever street vendors shove in the windows at check points, counting the freckles on my arm, sleeping, and sleeping.

5. Getting kicked out of a hotel because we WEREN’T prostitutes. Ha.

6. Enjoying delicious cafeteria food in Ouagadougou. Cafeterias are pan-West African eating establishments that serve a trusty menu of omelettes, Nescafe, spaghetti, tea, bread, and occasionally homemade yogurt. The yogurt in Ouaga was indescribably delicious.

7. Making unexpected friends wherever we went. Amongst them: Celeste a drunk man who helped us find a hotel, food, and water late at night. Serena, a woman selling potato salad, who insisted that we meet her entire family. Two Fula girls in the Djenne market, both named Binta, who couldn’t believe how soft our hands were. Of course, our guide in Dogon, Oumar, who swore like a sailor and kept us entertained.

8. Listening to beautiful Malian guitar music. A sweet relief compared to the Ivoiran and Congolese dance music favored in Benin.

9. Bargaining. ALL. THE. TIME. For EVERYTHING. And getting suckered into buying things I absolutely did not need.

10. Enjoying the company of the other volunteers I traveled with. We were able to enjoin the hilariously frustrating times, process what we saw, and appreciate the entire experience together.

11. Coming home to Benin, where everything is cheaper, friendlier, and more familiar.

Half Full

Sometimes, when so many discouraging, disappointing, and just plain sad things happen, we’re faced with a choice: are these the things that we’ll focus on? Are these the things that will define us?

In the month since I got back from vacation in the US, a number of sobering, and tragic, things have happened. The director (principal) of my school died, rather suddenly, leaving behind a large, young family, a school that was dependent on his authority and guidance, and many friends. In the same week, the director of a nearby primary school died, and so did a little girl that lived near me.

Meanwhile, I was not helping things by reading a very depressing book on the history of post-independence Africa, getting worked up about the primaries in the US (I'm rooting for Obama, by the way), and getting frustrated with my colleagues.

But I will let this all rest. And instead, talk about something that could have added to my layers of sadness and frustration, but in the end, was a source of encouragement.

There are four young boys who live in my compound. Three are the sons of my landlord and neighbor, Saka, who is a primary school teacher. The fourth boy, Dembo, is an orphan who, in return for a place to sleep and food, runs errands for my neighbors. This is a fairly typical arrangement.

Dembo is probably around eight or nine years old. Like any boy, he enjoys running around and throwing things. And like any boy, sometimes this means falling down, or getting hit by something. So Dembo got cut on his leg – a fairly typical thing – but, since he has no parents to notice this type of thing, didn’t wash the cut out, and spent the next couple days running and throwing and scratching the cut. By the time I finally caught sight of his boo-boo, it had morphed into, literally, a festering wound.

So I sat Dembo down, and made him wash it out with soap and water, put Neosporin on it, and bandaged it up. I shook my finger at him, telling him to stop scratching it and to go the health center the next day. He didn’t go, I’m guessing because he liked the attention so much that he figured I would clean out the wound the next day too. And I did. And the next and the next.

He did eventually go to the health center, and they told him, “We don’t wash cuts here.” What???

For about a week, Dembo and I sat down to dress his wound. Of course, I had no idea, really what I was doing. I figured I knew enough to clean it out, to use my filtered water, and to keep it covered. Slowly it started to look less pussy, but still I fumed over the health center’s response: what if he got a staff infection? Gangrene? I checked his forehead often for a fever.

Something, however, that I didn’t count on, was the crowd that we attracted every night with our cleaning ritual. The three other boys, plus some extra ones from nearby, would gather to watch. And I figured this could be a good lesson on hygiene for all of us.
“Now, do I just throw these dirty bandages out in the field?” I’d ask.
“NOOOO!!! Put it in your latrine!” the boys would yell.
“And now that I’m finished, should I just go eat?”
“NOOO!!! Go wash your hands?”
“Ok, what with?”
“With soap, Guannigui!”
When Dembo didn’t want to wear a bandage, because it got hot, I explained that if he sat under a tree all day then I would leave out the bandage. But, since I knew he would keep on running around and throwing stuff, we needed to cover it up. “Is the bandage dirty at the end of each day?” Yes, it is, he nodded. “Well, all that dirt on the outside of the bandage would end up inside the cut if it wasn’t covered.” Yuck! All the boys made disgusted faces.

I had to leave last weekend to go do some work in another town, and I worried that by the time I got back, Dembo’s leg would be back to where we started. But when I arrived three days later, his leg was looking pretty good. I found out that my crowd of boys had taken over the cleaning responsibility, and had cleaned out the wound every night, covering it in shea butter (their own idea) to keep the dirt out.

I praised those boys up and down. I was so proud of them. I was reminded all over again that you just never know when a small victory will pop up. And that in a world where defeat seems to dance wildly and audaciously and ridiculously all over, sometimes I just have to choose to look past it to the small graces that quietly keep working, smoothing ruts and healing wounds.

Bon Arrivee

After three wonderful, relaxing weeks at home in the U.S., I’m now back in Benin. I’m stuck in the capital for an extra day, and have been wandering about, jet-lagged and slightly disoriented.

I don’t think the disorientation is culture shock, after so many days in the lap of luxury in California. I think it really is from jet-lag and plain old just being tired. Actually, it’s a little weird how not weird it is to be back.

Mostly Benin is just how I left it, apart from a few minor, yet exciting changes I’ve noticed in the last 24 hours:
1. There’s a new flavor of Fanta in Benin! Fanta Fiesta – strawberry flavored.
2. Some of the horrendously pot-holed roads in Cotonou have been repaved. Bravo to the Cotonou mayor.
….
….

And that’s about it. The weather is a little cooler too, which is a relief. I’ve been struck all over again by how beautiful people here are. Physically, I mean. While they do sport some crazy outfits (even boarding our plane in Paris I noticed a number of men wearing tight pants and pointy shoes), people here are strikingly beautiful. Luckily with my American haircut and new t-shirts from Target, I don’t look so shabby myself.

Benin is still Benin. I’ve already taken crazy zemidjans (taxi motos) around Cotonou, had several conversations about development and politics with fellow PCVs, and tomorrow will get a 50 cent pedicure. The only thing that might take me a few days to re-adjust to is the food. Somehow greasy omelets and Nescafe aren’t as exciting after my mom’s cooking. Well, that and of course, missing my friends and family.

Tomorrow I will make my way up North, with my two overweight pieces of luggage in tow. I should soon sit down to make a list of all the things I have to do now that I’m back – grade tests, set up the optometrist’s visit to Tobre, start looking into a library project, etc. I also never had a chance to sit down and make some New Year’s resolutions while home, but there will certainly be time to do that when I get back into the rhythm of life in Tobre. I got the sense while home that a lot of people are disillusioned with New Year’s Resolutions, but I always seem to relish a chance to make new goals. Then again, I may just like making lists.

Probably those of you who make resolutions have already done so, but here are a few things I’d like to encourage people to do.
1. Keep yourself informed. Everyone’s life is busy, but it is a privilege and a real luxury to have a myriad of news sources at your fingertips. Caring about certain issues and places (like Africa) doesn’t necessarily mean writing a check to a charity, but may mean educating yourself on such topics. Maybe fifteen minutes a day for news? Just a thought.
2. Enjoy the little things. This is, as my youngest sister would say, CLICHÉ! But relish your cup of coffee. Pet your dogs. Not everyone can do these things.
3. Continue to keep myself, and other volunteers you know, in your prayers. Cynicism, intestinal parasites, and just plain laziness are always lurking around, and I’d like to avoid these things as much as possible.

Hopefully my three requests aren’t too pushy or preachy. Mostly I’d like to say, Happy New Years! And I’ll see you in nine months.

Ho Ho Ho!

The extremes that one experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer are sometimes so ridiculous as to be hilarious. Case in point: the journey I must take in order to go home for Christmas.

This trip begins with me getting my house ready for a three week absence. Cover my clothes rack so that my clothes won’t be caked with red dust when I get back, empty my water filter so it won’t start growing interesting algae, firmly close my latrine door so that the gnats that insist on communing there won’t decide to expand their colony into my house, and make sure I’ve turned off the gas for my little stove. I handed a spare key over to my neighbors so they can deposit the load of laundry I left them to wash. And once this is all done, the neighbor boys grabbed my bags (one of which is bigger than they are) to set them on the side of the road. Then I found a shady spot, one that is still in clear view of the road, to flag down the next taxi that comes my way.

Luckily this time I only had to sit for an hour, and not the usual three. What was once a green car came rattling around the corner. “Start waving!” I yelled to my entourage of eight and ten year old boys. The oldest one looked at me skeptically and said “THAT car, Guannigui?” You know your standards have reached an all time low when the village boy is even skeptical of your ride. He had a point you know. The car had been welded together more times than scrap metal in a high school shop class. But the car was going my way, and there’s no way I was going to pass that up.

It pulled over to pick me up. At the wheel was a chauffer I’ve ridden with before. Plenty of times, actually. I like him; he has a funny scratchy voice and always talks about when we’re getting married. We both know it’s a joke, which is a relief. But the joke has big enough strokes of wishful thinking in it for me to get the seat of honor in the taxi – the front seat. This is fine with me. The front seat means less dust, and less being crammed between two mothers with babies, a skinny Fulani herder, and the 14 year-old driver-in-training. After dropping off some women at a village on the way, the driver tells me that they jokingly accused him of giving me the front seat only because I’m white. “But what they don’t know,” he told me with a conspiratorial wink, “Is that you’re my wife. And the wife of the chauffeur always gets the front seat.” That’s right, buddy.

But not even this privileged position can make the trip any faster. From Tobre to Parakou should take two and half hours actually took five. This is due to multiple stops to drop people off, pick people up, argue the price, detour to a village to drop off boxes of tomato paste and soap, and the state of the roads. If I hadn’t been picked up by my husband, I probably would have been in the back seat. This means that once we hit the paved road, I look like four hours after smearing cheap self-tanning lotion all over my face. That is to say, orangish, with special emphasis on the creases around my nose.

Once we arrived at the paved road, I switched to a nicer car (by nicer we mean it has a tape deck, but the bass in the speakers went out in 1991, but this doesn’t stop us from playing the twangy guitar music at top volume). At this point it had already been three hours since I left Tobre. I was a little hungry. So I bought a paté, a piece of fried dough with a drop of sardine oil in the middle, for ten cents. Delicious.

One of the most important things to remember on bush taxi trips is that no matter what – no matter how many times the bald tires pop, no matter how many goats are tied on the roof rack, no matter how squished you are – you always get there eventually. This trip was no exception, and at 1:30 we rolled into Parakou. Which is where I am now.

I’m anticipating the next leg of my trip: a bus ride to Cotonou. This trip usually takes seven hours. The bus stops once along the way… in theory. One should expect a tire to blow or the engine to overheat. And also for the women on the bus to force the driver to pull over so they can all go pee on the side of the road. The one official stop is in a southern town, Bohicon. This place is the definition of chaos. All the bus lines stop in a certain bus park. A first-timer might look at the dirt lot filled with buses and wonder how our bus will ever find a place to squeeze in. But it does. And as soon as the bus stops, the hordes of vendors swarm the thing so that getting off is the most overwhelming part of your day. Oranges, soap, ambiguous cuts of meat, packs of Kleenex, plastic bags of water – all placed strategically to catch your attention (translation: shoved into your face). It helps to know ahead of time what you want to get off to buy, otherwise you might get so disoriented that when its time to continue on you miss the bus. I always head straight towards the ladies selling little orange soy crackers. If the season is right, then I go to the women selling pineapple and have them cut me up a little one. We joke about the price, me insisting that it costs 20 cents and them insisting that it costs 30. This place is really a experience during the rainy season. The dirt becomes a swamp, a quagmire, and there’s really no point in hoping to keep your feet clean. It’ll wash off at some point.

If I’m really lucky, the bus I take will have a TV in front. Three possible things can be shown: 1. A Celine Dion music video on loop, 2. A Cote d’Ivoirian music video on loop, or 3. A Cote d’Ivoirian sitcom on loop.

Back onto the bus for another couple of hours, where upon arrival I’ll find a green-shirted taxi-moto driver (a zemidjan), haggle the price, and take off for the cheap hotel we volunteers always stay at. A couple minutes of weaving in and out of the crazy Cotonou traffic and we’re there.

Now. Lets compare this with the transport that I’ll take to get from Cotonou, to Charles de Gualle airport in Paris, to San Francisco International. I will never complain about the leg room in coach again. An entire seat to myself! No squeezing five people in a space meant for three! “Free” meals! Champagne! I’m assuming there will be no flat tires or engine trouble (lets cross our fingers). A movie screen placed strategically to catch my attention (translation: on the back of the seat in front of me, right in front of my face). There will be people talking to be sure, but in hushed tones. If a baby cries, everyone will roll their mind’s eye. The only music to be heard is in the background of the In Case of Emergency video, or in the headphones that you can choose to wear. Upon arrival, the airport will be clean. The personnel will be helpful, if not especially friendly. If I’m hungry while I wait for the next flight, I’ll probably go buy a croissant, which if my memory doesn’t fail me, costs about four dollars. The bathrooms will have toilets (gnat free!), running water, soap, AND paper towels.

I’d like to take a moment to be true to my liberal arts education. The vast differences between the two sides of my trip (in Benin and leaving Benin), should not be compared in order to decide which way is better. Both have their charm. There’s something to be said about sitting on a stranger’s lap, squeezed into a taxi, smelling the body smells of the fifteen other people and five animals that share the vehicle with you. But, there is also something to be said for flush toilets, magazine stands, and a food tray that folds down. There’s something so fascinating about people’s love for Celine Dion, and music video technology in general. There’s also something fascinating about watching a newly released movie (one that isn’t pirated by Nigerians), and the technology that allows me to choose between ten of them. Don’t you think so?

Also, I think it’s worth saying that I’m really looking forward to the meal they’ll serve me on the plane. Not for the quaintness value, which is usually why I look forward to it, but I’m actually looking forward to the taste and nutritional value.

Merry Christmas everybody!