The daughter of a woman who cooked for Lou and I when I was visiting Tchaada. They have to put on lots of powder to counter the heat and moisture, and I caught her expression right after her "dusting."
Ivy's birthday/ Rich's housewarming party in Ketou, in the plateau region. I played "Happy Birthday" to Ivy on the amazingly fabulous hot-pink recorder from Lyndi. Woo!
Scott, in the Iowa City shirt he got when we were t-shirt shopping in Cotonou.
Twins!!!!!
UPDATE! After one month in nutritional recuperation in Game, Sunday is doing much better. He had gained weight, and as you can see his muscles are starting to develop. He smiled and clapped right after I snapped this photo.
A one-room thatch primary school in Sakete where our NGO is hoping to build a more solid structure with a grant from the American ambassador.
Me with several AFAP employees in a Cacao grove owned by the Chief of the Arrondissement of Aguidi.
Marc combing my hair in my livingroom.
A family home in the village of Bembe. All the houses are built on stilts because of the water level near the river durign rainy season. This village is near mine and is within walking distance. It's beautiful!
The things that are difficult about maintaining this blog are a) conjuring the self-importance necessary to believe that my ramblings actually matter to people other than me and b) the limited medium of digital photographs and words. I want so badly for you to be able to smell the tropical and sometimes exhaust-clogged air, see the round, dewey greenness of the bulbous papayas, hear the bouncy intonations of the various local languages, taste the spicy couscous and fresh hibiscus juice… I could continue to add up the sensations for you but it wouldn’t amount to the feeling of being here. I can’t give you the first impressions, the fears, the miniscule day-to-day triumphs, firsthand. I’m not even sure if you’d want them. I’m not always sure I do.
There is nothing I can say or do to change the fact that you are going to interpret from an American perspective all of the information that I present. This is limiting only if you want to be Beninese- not really a problem. Enojy the pics, read this if you want… take it at face value. The balance gets trickier once you live here. After six and a half months (yes, I want credit for that half month, damnit!), I’m finding that Peace Corps Volunteers are faced with a fundamental problem of perspective, and it’s not something they warn us about during stage.
Here it is: I said before that having American filters is a problem only if you want to be Beninese. I live in Benin. I work for a program that pushes integration- hard. I am supposed to want to be as Beninese as possible. If If a PCV isn’t “bien integre,” they are missing what is essentially the main point of Peace Corps: we are cultural ambassadors, here to teach and learn from Host Country Nationals (HCNs in PC terms) within the context of the HC culture. In our excitement, as we learn local languages and dress in Nigerian cotton modeles and learn to cook akassa with sauce des legumes, we are filled with pride at our successful integration into Beninese culture. Can you feel the approaching “but”?
BUT: a) we’ll never really be integrated because we’re white and American and b) being really, truly, fully integrated would mean almost necessarily that one would lose his American filters. I’ve stopped noticing a lot of everyday things that are just “wrong,” in American context. They begin to fade, as the background noise of life tends to do no matter where one is. In order to be successful in a place entirely unlike your own, you have to do a serious amount of adapting, and in the process you lose some of who you were. This happens when you realize you don’t have the emotional energy to continue regarding things as “wrong” or “bad,” because the thought of having to do so a) usually obliges one to act, and one can’t act on everything one regards as “bad” or “wrong” in a place that’s entirely new, and b) makes 26 months seems like an impossibly long period of time.
So, you start regarding things as “different” instead of “bad.” That’s good. That’s much easier. That’s what they teach us in elementary school: different does not equal bad. So you let go of a lot of that moral judgment as you spend time in your new country and realize that the current micro-systems are more or less working for people and that they are more or less resistant to change. But noticing things that are different takes a lot of energy, too. This is one reason why people are so exhausted after a long vacation: taking it all in is fun and refreshing, but the process of mentally filing every new stimulus, worldly though it may make you, is tedious and exhausting. A person must either assimilate or wear herself out.
PCVs assimilate. Peace Corps selects us based largely on their determination of our ability to do this upon arrival in the Host Country (HC) and once here, we are bombarded by trainers telling us to integrate, integrate, integrate! As if we had any other choice. But here’s the catch: as your American filters begin to fade and are automatically replaced with Beninese filters, it becomes harder and harder to effect change. It’s easy to have high hopes and ambitions upon arrival, only to have them quickly dashed by the sight of people sleeping the afternoons away, owning domestiques and swindling their NGOs. You assimilate to these things, too, after all your questions are answered “That’s Benin,” or “That’s just the way it is.” It is natural for us to want to be like those around us; we’re social animals. Monkey see, monkey do.
So you do what you can to jive with the environment and your neighbors, passing the days and finding your routine until it becomes the new norm. Then you occasionally look in the mirror to see a card-carrying PETA member who barely bats an eye at the fifteen pigs strapped to the top of the bus or the dozens of chickens with their feet tied together; a bleeding-heart liberal Michael Moore-loving self-proclaimed environmentalist who wants nothing more than to live in a ludicrously climate-controlled house, label herself a moderate (gasp!) and wave her American flag cause that’s right, America IS the best damn country in the world and I have the PROOF; a rural community health volunteer who’s charged with nutritionally recuperating malnourished children but suspects that homo sapiens owe the planet their own voluntary extinction in exchange for the chance we blew.
It’s times like this I ask myself how far I am willing to go. How much of me will I be able to get back? How much am I sacrificing by staying here? Is it my job to create the desire for change? For whom, exactly, is “the greater good?” Am I actually hurting more than helping?
I do know one thing: my ability to make a difference here will come from my will to retain as much of my American perspective as possible while managing to fit in well enough to get some work done. There’s a fine line between integrating into a society and actively rejecting the parts of it you find “different” or “wrong.” This line is called “awareness” and it must be maintained if one is to have a successful experience here. Failing to integrate sufficiently will result in a lack of understanding and you will not be trusted or valued. Total integration will result in immersion to the point of failing to recognize your special status as someone with the organizational tools to improve the quality of life for HCNs. Learning to walk the line is my primary personal goal for successful service here. Knowing exactly where and when to draw the line, however, remains to be seen.
This awareness of awareness, then, leaves me with the option to either a) proceed forward with caution and try to maintain my original ambition and motives for being here while integrating sufficiently to function in Beninese society or b) forget about this blog entry, drink a beer with friends and surrender myself to the Now.
. . .b).
A mother in Hondji feeding her two year old boy the soy and moringa sauce we taught her to prepare. We are tracking his health and are soon going to open another nutritional recuperation center in Hondji, near where I live.
I took this pic in my house. We were burning coals for the hooka and they looked pretty, and then I heard about the winter storms there so this pic is for you, Iowa.
Angele and I in the tissue I got us. We are going to wear it to Azolwisse on Valentine's Day.
Erika, Hannah, Kim, Me, Doug, Jennifer and Laura at Hotel Capitale during stage. I promise, you guys... I work too, I just don't take as many pictures of it.
Sometimes, when we all get together, photo shoots happen. I am rather fond of this one of Jeff and Jackie.
The hospital in Tchaada where Lou works. This is the inpatient room, which is quite nice by Beninese standards. The matresses are intact and there are even mostuito nets!
A desk in the hallway with health cards, which are individuals' health files. Each baby gets one when they are born and nurses and sage-femmes use them to keep track of immunizations, clinic visits, etc.
This is the birthing room. The blue handles are for the women to hold on to and the table is where the baby is cleaned afterward. Part of our job is to facilitate the commencement of nursing, something that is rarely done immediately after birthing in Benin.
