WAWA: West Africa Wins Again & Other Tales From Benin

Dear Everyone: Please forgive me for not writing; it has been months since my last entry. Needless to say, my life is a roller coaster, pulsating from day-to-day, moment-to-moment, with such grapping holes in reason and rationality that I almost feel as if I am emotionally canyon-jumping. It’s been a wild ride, and I will use this time and space to fill you in on as many details as possible. Enjoy the ride.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Yovo: A Host Family’s Guide to Maintaining the Life of an American

On July 27th, I arrived in Porto Novo, the capital of Benin. It is the site for our first two months of training, called le stage, before we are sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers at the end of September. Three days before my arrival, our trainers handed each of us volunteers a picture of our Beninoise host families. As my fellow stagiaires and I passed around our pictures, gawking and analyzing them like they were baseball trading cards, many could not help but comment as I shared mine: “Wow, you get to live with Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, and Iman.” C’est vrai. Inarguably, my host family is beyond gorgeous, each girl more pretty than the next. I have come to live with the Akande family and nothing in my life has been the same (or boring!) since I walked through the threshold.

Where to start? I guess I’ll just start naming names. I have a Mama and a Papa. They are charming folks, quick to laugh and hug - especially Mama, who is a big fan of bear hugs, a trait I usually admire with exception to the mornings when she comes at me open-armed and bare-breasted. Papa is unusually tall for a Beninois man (people here are slightly shorter than average from a lifetime of unbalanced eating and malnutrition), easily towering over me at a lean 6’2”. He is a former Nigerian insurance salesman who moved to Benin to fulfill his calling as an Evangelical minister. We have some pretty interesting conversations about religious beliefs and G-d part in assisting husbands in the sexual gratification of their wives. He considers himself a an “African Hebrew” as his father was a non-practicing Ethiopian Jew. He is undyingly supportive and intrigued by my Judaism (who would have thought?!). Mama is seamstress who works in Lagos, Nigeria, which is a 3-hour commute from our home in Porto Novo (and that is 3 hours ONE WAY). Thanks to her amazing handiwork, I have some of the most admired tissue dresses (tissue is what they call the extremely durable, breathable cotton fabric here used to make clothing) among all the female stagiaires. I live in a very progressive, dare I say Western, host family. Mama is the breadwinner of the tribe, and Papa spends the majority of his days at our house waxing philosophic and making sure that I am well-fed, well-dressed, well-entertained - all in a timely fashion.

I have three host sisters and two host brothers. My sisters are Dihana, Johannes, and Josette (but everyone calls her Teni). They are all long, lean, tall, and breathtakingly beautiful. When I first arrived, they all scampered to unpack my bags, dying to see en vogue American fashion. It was like ripping presents out of the paws of tiny children on Christmas morning to see the grave disappointment on their faces when they open my bags to discover nothing hip, hot, or high-heeled. Johannes has a 8 month-old baby boy, my baby brother Merveil. From the moment I laid eyes on the tiny tot, it was if the entire core of my being made a complete shift and rotated to concentrate single-mindedly on him. He is the sweetest, happiest, most adorable child I have ever seen in my entire life and is a sheer joy to be around. He is generally content, making him incredibly easy to live with. Shockingly, there are a myriad of cheerful benefits to living with a baby - the constant cuteness, the loving cooing sounds, and the most jubilant giggle that was ever uttered from a human mouth. Last, but hardly least, is my favorite family member: my little brother, Joseph (who also affectionately goes by Bo Bo, which means only son in Yoruba). Oh, the infinite joys and guffaws brought on by little brothers. He is the most fun to play with (we spend many moon-drenched nights on the front porch of the house pretending to kick, torment, and annihilate each other). My brother’s hobbies and further definite the extreme absurdity of African life. We play football (“soccer” does not exist outside of the U.S.A.) with a deflated, dilapidated ball that honestly looks like it has been through a war. But when it rains, we go inside and play original Nintendo Mario Brothers. He greets me everyday with the warmest “Bon Arrive” that I hear all day. Heaven help me if I come home with something in desperate need of a good tinkering. In a way that often reminds me of father, as soon as I something as mundane and commonplace as, “Bo Bo, you think you could take a look at this?“ the object is snatched from my grasp and returned only when the problem has been tidily fixed. Nonetheless, Joseph is a 13 year-old boy, so the ridiculous stunts he pulls in an effort to amuse the live-in white girl are ridiculous. The latest and most notable was his recent adventures in arson. I should have know when he asked, “Shalla (my Yoruba name, meaning the light-shiner) can I have your matches?” that whatever he was contriving would not end well. My darling, African little brother proceeded to gargle a swing of kerosene, light the match, and blow fire. He effectively singed his upper and lower lips and spent a good deal of time afterward spurning the voodoo gri gri demons for his suffering. I will get to the voodoo…give me a second.

The Voodoo That You Do

One of the most alluring tourist traps in all of Benin is the voodoo sites peppered through the country. Benin is the historical birthplace of the voudon religion, or what we call in the Americas, “voodoo.” Hollywood and Saturday morning cartoons popularized the voodoo doll, a miniature effigy used to torture the person from whose likeness it is devised. As you can image, that is only one, quirky aspect this much patronized religion. Although few people actually practice voudon as their primary religion (Christianity and Islam are much more prevalent and germane), the culture of voodoo is still apart of almost every Beninese person’s life. The beliefs are taken extremely seriously. I will further explain using examples.

The Gri Gri’s Gonna Get Ya
According to voudon belief, the gri gri is the demon spirit that floats among us, facilitating every negative things that happens in our life. For instance, I got my pick-pocketed less than a kilometer from my house. Who was at fault? The gri gri. I got two separate staph infections within 8 weeks of each other. What did I do wrong? Nothing - it was the gri gri. But the gri gri is not just a god of small things. If you’re a farmer and your crops did not come up this year, it had absolutely no bearing on your seed selection, lack of crop rotation patterns, or tilling cycles. The gri gri just decided to hate on your sorry butt. Although this Hakuna Matata attitude towards life may seem a bit spiritually freeing if not completely irresponsible, it does cause serious development and educational problems. How do you try to help that farmer grow better crops if he honestly believes his poor harvest is of no fault of his own and cannot be remedied using new techniques, but is simply a gri gri issues - something the medicine man can fix? As I previously mentioned, there is no waste management system here in Benin. Anywhere you walk is also a perfectly acceptable place to jettison your junk. So, when I recently got my 5-inch hair cut outside under the shade a nice tree, I didn’t think twice about leaving my dearly departed locks where they fell (they are biodegradable). However, my Beninese training facilitators had other ideas. I was told that I had to pick up every lock of hair on the ground, put in securely in a plastic bag, and take it home for safekeeping. The reason: if I just leave my strands lying there, they can easily be picked up by someone who could conjure the gri gri and curse me. It took no less than an hour to get enough off the ground to satiate my facilitators.

Needling Haystacks
Voodoo, like many world religions, is very patriarchal. Men rule; women get fooled. One of the most interesting examples of this is the Zambetto. The Zambetto is the vodoun high priest that is so holy and sacred that he must be covered from public view at all times. So, in order to do that and keep preaching to the populous, he hides himself in a thatched costume that resembles a walking haystack. Male voodoo practitioners follow around the Zambetto clanging chimes and beating tom tom drums to keep the gri gri away. All is fair game during daylight hours - you can consult the Zambetto for advice, rekindle conversations with dead relatives, take pictures (for a free, of course). However, at twilight, the rules of the game change drastically. Once dark looms over the city, women can do longer set eyes on the Zambetto, even in his haystack form. If you do, his male followers will hunt you down and kill you. It’s that clear-cut and simple.
I always wondered what Peace Corps Washington would tell my family if the Zambetto clan wiped me out. I’d imagine the letter would read something like this: Mr. and Mrs. Chiesi, we regret to inform you that your daughter is no longer a living, breathing member of our global society. Her early termination occurred at approximately 19:00 hours West Africa Meridian Time. Your daughter saw a walking haystack and was promptly butchered into tiny pieces by a group of local Voodoo men. We extend our sincerest sympathies and condolences to your family for your loss.

Exorcise It
Here’s a good gri gri story compliments of my dear friend Mark. Mark has not been the healthiest stagiaire during our months of training. More than once, Mark has taken the “African Gamble” and lost. (The African Gamble is the nickname for the gastro-intestinal complications brought on by the extreme differences in water purity, bacteria, and food quality in Africa. Complications include shitty farts, - sharts, if you will - diarrhea, and excessive gas. It’s considered a gamble because sometimes, when a the need to let one rip comes upon a person, and he or she decides to let one out into the fresh air, he or she ends up with a pair of soiled shorts. That’s the African answer to high stakes.) Back to Mark: After one particularly debilitating bout of tummy trouble, Mark found himself writhing on the cement floor of his host family’s house, gripping his stomach in the throws of botulism, and screaming in pain. Bewildered and unsure of what to do, his Beninese host family circled around him, clamoring in local African tribal language on how to proceed. What they decided on was a voodoo exorcism. So, eight family members put Mark on a moldy mattress in the middle of the living room, blasted tribal chanting music from boom boxes circa 1990, cried out tribal language anti-curses at the top of their lungs, and threw buckets of water over his feverish body. Mark attested that after several hours of vomiting, intense abdominal discomfort, and being covered in a murky combination of sweat and pump water, he was cured.

Theory of Relativity

Einstein had some great theories, but the one that resonates most with me is relativity. Everything is relative. Here in Benin, my sense of clean, normal, and edible have shifted so profoundly that it is only fair that I share that shift with you.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
Since I’ve been in Africa, I have honestly lost touch with what something clean smells like. After the first two weeks, all the smells started to blend together, and now there is just one hovering scent that smells vaguely of wet sawdust (not all together the worst scent one could inhale). As I have previously mentioned, there is no concept of waste management here, so you just through your trash where you stand; everyone else does the same thing. To sum it up, Porto-Novo essentially resembles a tropical French colonial locale that is been ravaged by red dust storms, shaken by earthquakes until the roads are cracked and torn, and then monsooned upon for months by a maelstrom of debris and refuse. Sounds like a real tourist attraction, eh? Running water is difficult to come across, even in the capital city of Porto-Novo. So, I depend most on anti-bacterial hand sanitizer to clean my hands. What I settle for his dirt-smudged hands that smell like Pinesol. That to me, is the scent of clean. I write with these hands, greet with these hands, and most disturbingly eat with these hands. The shower that I wash myself in daily is deplorable. In my former American life, I have outright refused to even urinate in I-95 truck stops that look like rooms in the Ritz Carlton compared to my African bathroom. Essentially the bathroom is a dungy cement room in the center of the house with a large cutout window that scenically overlooks . . .the living room. Privacy is a joke. A flimsy piece of cloth covers the window, but much to my surprise, that cloth becomes transparent when you turn on the light in the bathroom. The bathroom also has a sink with a faucet, but no running water. Actually, the sink drain doesn’t even lead to anywhere. The first time I spit down the sink, my spit promptly landed on my big toe two seconds after it left my mouth. There is a showerhead in the bathroom, but it’s just a sadistic tease; it’s been broken since the third day I arrived. The water that comes out of the pump in the wall makes me itch for a half hour after each bucket shower I take. A bucker shower, for those of you who maybe scratching your heads at my terminology, is exactly what it sounds like. You fill a plastic bucket with water and then you a smaller plastic bowl to throw water over your body parts after you’ve lathered up. Many times, I lift the lid of the toilet seat to find a little cockroach chillin’ and grillin’ in the bowl. Again, just for emphasis, everyday, I shower in that room. Cleanliness is relative.

The Norm
Mama Africa is the homeland of humanity. Being the epicenter of human life spurs some very interesting cultural differences. Here are brief descriptions of some typical Beninese comings and goings.

The most common mode of mass transport here is the zemidjan, a Vespa-like device with the kind of agility necessary for navigating the dense traffic. Catching a zem is only half the battle; once you’re on, you must hang on for dear life. Because they are open and relatively unprotected, when it rains, you get rained on. I’ve seen a woman, in a fit of rage, slap her zem driver with the dead chicken she was carrying (fresh from the market, no doubt), without remorse. Benin is a Child Protective Services nightmare. There are no such things as car seats in Benin. Infant children scoot around town lassoed to their mothers’ backs papoose-style, secured by nothing more than deftly wrapped fabric. God bless Africa.

Although it constantly vacillates, Benin is between the ninth and twelfth poorest country on the planet. For all intents and purposes, I am living in the ghetto of the world. Poverty is normal and the discrepancy between the haves and have nots is enormous. However, there is virtually no homelessness here. If you have no where to go and nothing to eat, the overwhelming sense of community and hospitality that is innately a part of Africa culture ensure that you will be fed and taken in. I am endlessly impressed how a country with so little has virtually eliminated a devastating American problem by simply showing compassion.

I had my parents send me an alarm clock in my first care package from The States, but it seems obsolete and utterly unnecessary here in Benin. My housing has ensured that I will be alive, awake, alert by 5:00 AM every morning without fail. My host family keeps a small rooster in the backyard. His main job is to act as the family’s garbage disposal, but he also moonlights as my own personal early-morning hell. The rooster hates me. I know this. There is no other way to explain his behavior. \Before the sunrise, prompted by the muffled cries of neighboring roosters, the rooster positions himself directly beneath my bedroom window, leaving merely a brittle pane of glass between my REM-cycle and his boisterous crowing. He lets loose and doesn’t stop for until I finally surrender to his siren calls and get out of bed - groggy and irritable. I packed earplugs and the rooster alone would be tolerable. What I did not anticipate was Ramadan. I live approximately 500 feet away from one of the most beautiful mosques in all of Porto-Novo. It is truly a sight to behold, a marvel of architectural integrity. For the majority of September, the Muslims partook in their yearly observance of the fasting month, also known as Ramadan. According to Islamic Law, good Muslims must pray five times per day. To ensure the prayers occur in a timely fashion, the mosques blast the prayers on loudspeakers for everyone is the vicinity to hear, a practice aptly called the call to prayer. So, every morning, almost in perfect synchronization with the rooster, a large, booming voice chanting in Arabic bursts into my room and floods my ear canal. At the end of Ramadan, the praying became more frequent and more intense. Instead of the same booming, chanting voice morning after morning, new voice appeared on the loudspeaker at all hours of the night. On one of final days on Ramadan, they had what I liked to call Open Mic Night at the Mosque, and it seemed as if every single Muslim in Porto-Novo lined up to take his or her turn praising Allah as loud as they could for as long as they could. Merci a Allah for creating earplugs!

To Eat, Or Not To Eat? That Is The Question . . .
When a culture is disenfranchised by generations of terrible bouts of starvation, you can hardly expect culinary excellent. After all, how can you develop or hone an artistic representation through food when your raw materials are in short supply? In Africa, the general rule is quantity over quality. The best place to take in the Beninese cuisine, however, is by hitting pavement and diving fork-first into street food. Over the past two months, I have definitely extended my palate. In short, here is the good, the bad, and the ugly. Bon appetit!

The Good
It is my belief that every culture enjoys frying things in oil. The type of oil is different, the carbohydrate that often gets dunked headlong to the boiling oil varies from region to region, but the facts are the facts, and everybody loves it. Benin is no exception. One of the best things you can possibly eat from the streets of Benin are bignes. Essentially, the are tiny little dough balls, approximately the size of doughnut holes, that are fried in peanut oil and covered in raw sugar. Bless the Tanti that came up with that creation. What is basically tastes like is a delicious, warm, doughy, straight from the county fair FUNNEL CAKE - in a bit-size ball. At the equivalent of nickel a pop, they are the perfect afternoon snack. Another fried joy is breadfruit chips. You can get them from a little woman a block away from my school, and the filled the void in my gut left by the absence of Pringles. Piment (said pea-mon) is a spicy tomato sauce incorporated into most Africa meals. I love my piment hot and heavy and just plainly drizzled over some jasmine rice. Another of my new diet staples is the avocado sandwich. Picture this: a crispy, fresh French baguette sliced down the center and the lusciously coated with chunky guacamole. Yum Yum Yum! I wash down my food with Beninoise beer (it’s light and airy like a Corona) or grapefruit soda.

The Bad
Never, under any circumstances, allow okra sauce to slip through your lips. It’s not worth the trauma that will triumphantly follow that trip down Taste Bud Lane. Essentially, corn meal is mashed up into a dough-type consistency and served in a warm ball in the center of a plate. It essentially has no taste and serves is only purpose during the meal by being dunked into the okra sauce. Okra sauce is disgusting. Let me tell you why. It has the consistency of snot. The comparison is unavoidable, especially as it slithers down your esophagus. It is gooey and warm and tastes like gym sock that’s been shoved into the dark corners of a locker to rot away. Eating that crap is intolerable cruelty. I also not attempt pate blanche. It is made by fermenting rice cereal for weeks in a plastic bag with vinegar. I don’t even have to tell you about the taste; it’s worse than you can even conjure from the preparation description. The bean mush here is OK. In fact, on some days and being served by the right vender, it’s a tasty treat. But never, under any circumstances, accept bean mush offered to you in a tiny black plastic bag. That means it’s been sitting around all afternoon, baking in the hot Africa sun and allowing flies to fertilize your lunch with larva.

The Ugly
In Africa, I am a vegetarian. In the past two months I have tasted far too many pieces of degenerate meat to really feel comfortable allowing animal flesh into my body. I see the goats and the chickens I’m about to eat. They eat African garbage off the street. Garbage is not enough nourishment to make anything large, juicy, and plump, so the pieces of meat that sit on top of my rice and couscous look like they were stripped from the body of an anorexic Olsen twin. It’s criminal to eat something to absolutely helplessly frail; it is also probably unhealthy. I normally love fish, but when it is served to you with the head, tail, and scales still on, it’s difficult to dive in. But my adventures in appetite are not limited to solid food. My most harrowing triumph thus far has liquor. Sodabi is African moonshine, and it’s made from fermented palm oil. I took shots of it from a human skull. What can I say? I’m sure trying to integrate.

Summer School

My job in the Peace Corps is to teach English to secondary students in an African Village. Over the past months, I’ve had model lessons and taught hundreds of different students how to count, how to get directions, how to tell him, and how to use the present continuous tense. It’s the most interesting, rewarding, fun job in the Peace Corps. I feel really positive about what I will be during. Knowing English in West Africa is a valuable life skill. If you know English, you can get jobs and attend schools in neighboring English-speaking countries like Ghana and Nigeria that have better job markets, pay scales, and universities. Being an English teacher in the Peace Corps is great, because I can see the influence I’m making on a community on a daily basis. I may not start a new business or build a dam, start a saving and loan company, or erect a library. Those are grand slams, way out of the ballpark, far beyond my minor league abilities. But I am the Joe DiMaggio of the Peace Corps. When they tally up the stats, I know my RBIs are high. I love hearing my student excited wave at me at scream, “Madame Loren Lee! Good morning!” in their cute little West African accents. Once, while teaching the body parts, I taught my students the song, “The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone.” After class, later that afternoon, a saw a group of my students walking to the market, and they rushed me and started chanting the song. It was a great moment. It makes all the hours of lesson planning and classroom preparation so worth it.

Please Raise Your Right Hand and Repeat After Me

On Friday, September 25, 2009 I was officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I passed my French proficiency exam, I taught five weeks of model school, I had more culture classes than I can handle. It was televised on the national cable channel and the United States ambassador read us our pledge in first in English and then in French. It was one of the greatest moments of my life thus far, and I am very proud to serve. Tomorrow, I leave for Kalale, my post. I live in a massive (for Africa) cement box with seven room including an indoor and outdoor kitchen, a courtyard, two bedroom, and an spacious living room. It is completely furnished, because I am replacing a previous volunteer. I am four hours from Parakou (the closest city that is Googlable). It is as east as you can go without smashing into Nigeria. It is a great little village with beautiful tribal clans (the Fulani), a river filled with sacred crocodiles (that you can swim with!), and an annual lion chase. It am ready to leave my host family and Porto-Novo, although I will miss them, and start life in Africa on my own. I am bringing a little companion with my. I recently bought a kitten named Neebo. Kalale or bust!

I miss you all. Thank you for your emails and packages. Please keep in touch. Sorry it took me so long to update my blog.