Bienvenue Kalale

Be forewarned: what you are about to read may disturb, shock, and horrify you. Rest easy in the comforting knowledge that I am typing this on a computer, powered by electricity, locked away tightly and securely behind towering slabs of cement and many deadbolts and doohickeys, all while guzzling down red wine straight from the bottle (I really see no reason to dirty a perfectly clean glass when it’s just me chugging away). I’m OK - I‘m better than OK. I’m alive and well-nourished. Welcome to Kalale.

Send Me On My Way

It is a 13- hour bush taxi cab ride through brush countryside from Porto-Novo on the coastline of southern Benin to my post, Kalale. It is the eastern-most post in Peace Corps Benin and arguably the closest to Nigeria (although depending on mode of transportation taken, I can be outdone). Having grown up in eastern Pennsylvania, neighboring New Jersey, I have come to accept that it is my lot in life to be inescapably bound to small, northeastern border towns. On Monday, September 28, 2009, I bid adieu to Porto-Novo in search of a tiny town to teach in, nestled in the arid, lush savanna lands of the Borgou region. I arrived at dusk, in the wake of one of the ending rainy season’s final storms, with just enough daylight encroaching on the horizon to hurl all my earthly belongings (and I really don’t have many) through the threshold of the new living quarters that will be my personal dwelling for the next two years. The reality of that moment hit me as hard and cold as the cement walls surrounding me. It was night, I was alone, and I was in Africa - Neebo and I were home.

I woke up the next morning and immediately got busy with my housewifery. This was my first real place - all to myself and on my own - and it was going to shine like the morning sun if I had to be saturated in blood, sweat, and tears to achieve it. As I should; I, in fact, live in the ritziest concession in the entire village, so it is only right that I maintain appearances for the sake of the neighborhood. My immediate voisins are the richest man in Kalale (who flaunts his wealth with such showy items as a three-meter satellite dish and a massive, noisy generator) and the Fulani tribe chieftain. It’s good company to keep. But moving up and moving in has it drawbacks and pit falls. Let me explain.

Howdy, Neighbor!

The Village People

Life in the village will be a trial of fortitude. There are no paved roads in, around, coming to, or going out of Kalale. It’s strictly terra rouge paths snaking throughout the village. Women walk around town from dawn ‘til dusk carting wares to vend on their heads in giant plastic or wooden tubs with the poise and grace of classically trained ballerinas. I watched a local woman bend over, pick up a kicking, screaming little rug rat, beat the pulp out of him, and then thrown him descending to the ground in a pile of red dust without pouring a drop of the ten gallons of water she was negotiating atop her crown. It is just stand back in awe, because I can find ways to trip over my own two feet on flat surfaces. The Fulani tribe is one the most respected and historical of all the tribes in West Africa, and arguable the most notable in all of Benin. Kalale happens to be the Times Square of Fulani culture, and I am lucky to get to walk among these beautifully decorated, time-honored people. You can tell a Fulani the second you look at him or her; they are ostentatiously dressed in vibrant silk tunics with intricately beaded, gleaming jewelry handing from every body part exposed to sunlight, with their obsidian complexions adorned with bright tribal face paint. I always feel plain and underdressed on my walk into town when I greet a Fulani; the sad thing is - from the way they look at me - I can tell they are thinking the same thing. Many people live in mud huts with thatched roofs. Everyone here is undyingly friendly and welcoming.

If a kind word goes a long way in America, in Africa you could encircle the globe with a sincere handshake and a warm grin. Everyone is so excited to meet, entertain, and shove food into the pie hole of the new Yovo in town. The little children in town are at extremes in terms of their welcoming dispositions. Some children sit in from my house for hours, their little noses pressed up against my screen door, tediously watching me do the most boring things in the world: fed my cat, make lesson plans, or arrange my bookshelf in alphabetical order by author. Nevertheless, they sit there salivating, transfixed by my every movement, lying in wait to see what the New White Girl In Town will do next, as if I am acting out the plot to a Jean Claud Van Dam flick. The only resistance I receive is from some small children who are scared stiff of me. They catch one look at my pale skin, light brown eyes, and gently waving honey hair and run in the opposite direction screaming blooding murder like they’ve seen a ghost. It doesn’t matter how much American candy I throw in their direction as peace offerings or how many times I try to gently pat the tops of their heads; I am obvious and foreign and need to keep my witchy ways to myself.

Along with all the furniture and a wide array of cutlery, Sandy, the volunteer that I am replacing, let a laundry list of social contacts for me in village, which has made integration in-village rather easy-breezy and pleasant. My first weekend at my new crib coincided with my 23rd birthday, and I already had a soiree well-in-preparation awaiting me before I even stepped foot in Kalale. Some of my new, closest companions in Kalale. There is the kind family next door which consists of Tomas (the guy with the gluttonous satellite dish), his toddler son Felix, and his wife, who is known around town as Mama Felix. Mama Felix runs a small boutique in our concession where I can get most of my basic needs from toilet paper and batteries to macaroni. Adissa is one of the many town merchants who gets most of her sales on Market Day (Thursdays), which leaves her free most other days to gossip relentlessly about the comings and goings of everyone else in town. Souleman is another good friend. He owns a small shop on the main road that leads to my house. Souleman is a devout Muslim and is impeccably consistent with his daily prayers. One day, while chatting him up under the shade of a giant papaya tree next to his shop, he invited me to pray with him. Never one to turn her nose up at any opportunity to explore a new religious ritual, I threw on a borrowed hijab from one of the neighbors, washed up, and got down on all fours to praise Allah. It was a uniquely calming experience. So now, when our paths cross and the call to prayer beckons, I kneel with Souleman.
He gets a big kick out of it, and I get a little closer to G-d.

My Menagerie

The Tokens famously sung about the sleeping patterns of ferocious felines with their classic one-hit-wonder, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But what they neglected to include in their little ditty was the myriad of other exotic (and decidedly commonplace) animals that roam the jungle (and my concession) in search of a warm and loving place to rest their heads. Animals walk around Kalale just as freely as anything on two legs. On my daily kilometer walk to and from school, I see warthogs, rams, cows, chickens, pigs, monkeys, and penguins (Ha! No penguins - just wanted to see if you were paying attention). However, the most prolific animal frolicking the cities and villages of Benin are the goats. My concession is home to no fewer than fifteen goats and many of the are impregnated with more little goats. The goats are small in stature - no more than 36 inches in height), but what they lack in grandiosity, they make up in gumption. They are noisy little creatures, hemming and hawing all hours of the day in night, sometimes screaming as if they are in abject torture. They scare the bejesus out of Neebo on a regular basis by putting their snouts against the screen door and beckoning him to come outside and play. Once, during my post visit to Kalale, I thoughtless left my metal screen door ajar. While I was in the back master bedroom, a neighborhood goat just waltzed into my living room - without knocking, mind you - to check up on me. In spite the breaking-and-entry, most goats won’t let you within two feet of them without scurrying off the opposite direction. Yet, they are considerate. If both a goat and you want to walk down the same narrow alleyway between two mud huts and you both recognize there’s only room for one of you, the goat will politely bow out and give you the right-of-way, graciously awaiting its turn. It’s a phenomenon that I can’t quite get my head around, because I know a ton of New Yorkers that simply cannot grasp that kind of courtesy.

Maybe It’s the Third World or May It’s Just My First Time Around

Make no bones about it, I live in an African village. Even if your only knowledge of African villages is gleaned from The Lion King and late-night infomercials that desperately beg you to donate the change you find underneath your couch cushions to starving children in Africa, you can surmise the basic look and feel of Kalale. In fact, when I arrived hailing from the big city of Porto- Novo, one of the assistants to the mayor, and acculturated man, promptly greeted me with, “Bienvenue a la brosse,” which basically means “Welcome to the brush.” In all honesty, I did not arrive in Kalale sight-unseen. I came in mid-August on post visit, which was basically a humble, whirlwind tour given to me by the Censeur (vice principal) of my school. I met all the Whose Who of the village and school administration, but my French was still pretty weak, and I gathered just enough to smile and nod my way through salutary introductions. I knew what I was getting into, but only in the way a pregnant mother grasps the difficulties of raising a child. And as the famous African proverb decries: It takes a village to raise a child.

The Bare Necessities

“Forget about your worries and your strife; all you need are the bare necessities,” or at least that is what I gathered from The Jungle Book. As aforementioned, my palace consists of seven huge rooms that include an indoor and outdoor kitchen (complete with fire pit!), an open-air showering room, a courtyard, a master bedroom, and living room. It came fully-furnished and done so with excellent taste (the volunteer that I replaced was a grande dame of sorts and would tolerate nothing less). Notice that I did not mention a bathroom. I should probably take this opportunity to mention I have no running water and my electricity exists from 7:00 PM to midnight, if I’m lucky. Thomas Edison forgot Kalale on his way to making the whole world alight, therefore AC/DC electric output is hit or miss here. Not that I am not positively thrilled to have what little I have. Given the choice, I would have forgone the awe-inspiring sounds of the drip-drip of a faucet or the whirling glory that is a flushing toilet in place of power. According to Genesis, the first thing G-d said was, “Let there be light,” and he did so for good reason. Being able to type on my netbook, listen to music freshly charged from my iPod, and regenerate the ever-dying battery of my deadbeat mobile phone are small, daily miracles I would never dream of taking for granted. They are little touches of home - the First World - that make everything seem conquerable.

But the lack of running water has some serious drawbacks. Water for washing comes from a well, which basically collects undrinkable ground water and rain water. The drinkable water - pump water - must be boiled and then filtered before it can pass through my lips in order to avoid such maladies as amoebic dysentery and giardia. Because I lack power, I also have a butane-driven cook top stove, which has leant itself to some interesting culinary mishaps. I grew up with one of the flat top, ultra-modern cooking ranges and mostly ignored the numbers on the heat adjustment dial, because, well…if the water is boiling and thing seems to be heating up just fine, what else do I really need to know? Wrong, wrong, terribly wrong. Those numbers have hidden meaning - heat level! Maybe now is an apt time to mention at I live in a desert climate. The average temperature here this time of year is a toasty 110ºF which leaves you inhumanely bake in the African sun. There is no “swell” in swelter in Kalale. So, once you light the match to the butane range, things literally go up in flames. There is a dial that controls how much gas gets thrust through the tiny pipe connecting the range to the tank, but it’s looks very MacGyvered. Cement retains heat so anytime I cook, boil water to drink, or heat up leftovers, I wind up soaking wet in my own \perspiration brought on by the combined forces of arid heat and burning flames. Even some chores that are somewhat outdated and bothersome in The States become routine afternoon projects here. There are two byproducts of cooking: sustenance and dirty dishes. Washing dishes without a Maytag consists of taking two large plastic basins, filling them with pump water, and then putting powder detergent in one (the wash cycle) and a cap full of bleach in the other (the rinse cycle). Each plate, fork, ladle, mug, and glass that is used must go through this water treatment system in order to be used again in the not-so-distant future. Everything I consume has the faint aftertaste of Clorox. I guess here in Africa it’s going to be white on the outside, white on the inside. And then there is the latrine…

Queen Jean: The Latrine Queen

My most difficult transition by far in this move from Beninese metropolis to Beninese shanty town has been getting used to life without The Porcelain Throne. Admittedly, in the United States I was definitely one of those people that cherished her time with John. It is where I went to relax, catch up on my reading, to dream up my next road trip or neuroses, to get away from the Public-at-Large, and just be one with my bowel movements. Well, boy oh boy, have I kissed those leisurely moments of bathroom bliss good-bye! In order to relieve myself, I must walk around the confines of my concession to a row of outhouses lined up next to each other, jutting from the ground like headstones in a graveyard. Thankfully, I have my own private latrine so I do not have to share my end-roads with the other inhabitants of my concession. Well, my pit-o-despair is as sparse as can be expected. It is a 4”x4”cement space with a tin roof and a tin swinging-hinge door that houses a concrete, dirt-level slab with a hole in the middle that is coincidentally shaped exactly like Benin. A wooden plank with a handle covers the hole in an effort to keep other unbordered tenants (roaches, spiders, lizards, snakes) from sneaking up and biting me in the tukus as a crouch in submission. Everyday, I leave my dignity at the door as I unlock my latrine and prepare myself mentality to get down to the Dirty Work. As my dearest neighbor Ro Osborn can attest, in my former American life, I used to have a problem with clogging up toilet bowls. Well, Ro Ro, Benin has out-maneuvered my shortcomings in that arena! It sure is the pits.

Where There Is One, There Are More

My former business partner, Mike Aslett, once said, “Where there is one, there are more. If you have four, you have an army.” In it’s original context, the quote was meant as an entrepreneurial, small business rally cry against the greed of Corporate America. When you apply the same quote to household insects, it has a totally frightening connotation. It’s an African village, so it’s practically a given that the place is swarming with creepy crawlers and other critters that go bump in the night; no surprises there. What is surprising - at least to me - is how many of them are there! I feel \my little bungalow could send the Orkin Man into cardiac arrest. The army I face is banded by spiders of every shape and size: daddy-long-leggers that could put supermodels to shame in a Longest Legs competition, microscopic ones that you can confuse for dust or your own dander, and tarantulas (which are unbelievably fast little buggers). There are beetles, moths, mosquitoes, and - last but not least - cockroaches. The cockroaches are the most nerve-wracking. I realize they are relatively harmless and really can’t do too much but be persistently annoying, but they are an international sign of filth and disgust, which, in and of itself, is appalling. I actually had the gall to brag to other volunteers when they called that luckily, my house had been spared the presence of such disturbing little bastards. That was until one fateful evening I entered my outdoor shower to find a cafard the size of my index finger grinning up at me as if to say, “Need help lathering your back?”

But with personal challenges also come personal victories. I won big time at the beginning of the week in my fight against wasps. It is no secret that I am deathly afraid of anything the has a stinger and buzzes. I overreact to them so dramatically out of fear that I’ve taken to telling people that I am allergic to their sting in the hope that they will not find my cowardice so pathetic. Ergo, when a particularly pesky little wasp would stop at nothing - screen door, nor sealed window - to invade my territory, the fight was on. I encountered the interloper after I emerged from my kitchen, dripping sweat over the open flames of my stove, and immediately heard his distinctive wasp wings flapping too close for comfort. I saw him hover just below the doorframe. Reflexively, I slammed to kitchen door shut and began hyperventilating in fear. Quickly, I realized there was no where to run, no one to run to, and that I was the one running in my own house. So, I grabbed a can of insecticide that was stashed along with the household cleaning supplies, opened the door, crouched like a tigress lying in wait, and zapped that little mother-trucker right in the ass. I watched him fall to the ground in mid-air and then writhe and twitter in his last worldly moments. I am supposedly here in Africa as an operative of peace, but that particular act of violence was cathartically gratifying.

The (Ex)terminator

My greatest ally in my Campaign Against Critters is Neebo. The acquisition of this kitten has been the single best decision I have made since joining the Corps de la Paix. He is sweet, kind, playful, and adorable. He is always happy to see me when I get home, purrs peacefully in my lap while I mercilessly devour pages of books, and curls up beside my pillow as I drift in La La Land each night. Thanks in no small part to Marcheline, the daughter of my neighbor who has also found a soft spot in her heart for him, he is growing up bilingual in French and English. Yet, all that makes him is good company, not an asset to the team. What gives Neebo his MVP status is fervor for the hunt. The little guy just won’t quit when it comes to ending the lives of things creep, crawl, and cricket. I know he does it for his own amusement out of his boundless, curious kitten energy, but he is so accurate and effective that it is worthy of the utmost praise. In his most heroic feat to date, I saw my pint-size kitty tackle a gecko off my cement wall, paw it in his claws like he was flipping a pancake, go for its jugular like vampire, rip it to shreds, and swallow it in chunks. I can’t stop beaming with maternal pride. Rock on, little man. Viva le Neebo! Keep doing what you’re doing ‘cause you do it so well.

Armed and Ready For the First Day of School

October 1st marked the le reentre for Beninese students country-wide. Unlike in America, every school in Benin starts on the same day and most follow the same pattern for their first few weeks. The first days of school at CEG Kalale (which stands for Centre d’Enseignment Generale, or secondary school) were essentially marked with hours of enforced mandatory labor for all students. The students (les eleves) are responsible for maintaining the school ground, so the first days are spend weeding out the summer overgrowth in the fields and gardens surround the CEG. My main job was to sit in a lawn chair next to the Directeur (head master) and read David Sedaris, occasionally looking up to greet other teachers and administrators.

I am the only female teacher at CEG Kalale. I have been warned by other volunteers that being “one of the guys” is a type of survival skill I will have to hone and master `over the next two years in order to avoid being treated like doormat. In the spirit of togetherness, when the male administrators called me into the Directeur’s office at 8:00 AM to take shots of sodabi - the favored Breakfast of Champions among faculty. I womaned-up and down three shots in the span of an hour. Luckily, heaven protects fools and drunks, so I made it home by 10:00 AM in one piece before the midday sun could begin blaring down on me. Hopefully, that little stint earns me enough credibility to last me the rest of school year.

I officially started teaching classes the following week. My schedule is as follows: two-hour classes, two times per day, four days of the week. I teach two levels of English - sixieme (novice) and cinqueme (intermediate low). I dutifully prepared my lessons, handouts, visual aids, and homework assignments the night before my classes. What I did not prepare for was the students themselves. The boys came to school armed with machetes. I was educated in a post-Columbine/9-11 public school system with a very strict Zero Tolerance policy. I had grown accustomed to stories on the nightly news broadcast of students being expelled from their schools for bringing butter knives in their lunch kettles. So, imagine my shock and terror when 24 Beninese boys came trotting into class wielding rusty machetes as if they were pocket pencil sharpeners. I nearly fainted on my first day of school out of pure terror. I walked on eggshells throughout my entire first class, not wanting to be too intimidating or disciplinary. After class, I immediately ran to the Censeur’s office and told him about the machetes. I took all the willpower in his body to hold back the laughter that I could see rolling onto his face and out through his eyes. Here in Benin, children don’t come to school to hack each other to death. Education is not free, is not an equal opportunity employer, and is not to be taken lightly. Apparently, students come here to learn, not to sit in the corner and daydream of ways to annihilate their teachers. The machetes are used for grounds maintenance that all male students must perform as a part of their service to their community and school. My suggestion of student-spawned violence towards another student or myself was absolutely unfathomable to the Censeur, who, dumbfounded, had to beg the question, “Do students really try to kill people with pocket knives at their schools in America?” Yes, yes, Mr. Censeur, they most certainly do. Now who seems ridiculous?