More Self Righteous 1st World Guilt

I once read a blog by a Peace Corps Volunteer that described the most heart-breaking scenario I could never dream up. In her village in rural Niger almost everyone survives during the dry season on millet. Millet has thick, long stalks with little kernels at the top that get turned into powder, which can act as a type of flour. In West Africa, women are in charge of the tilling, the planting and the harvest. Farming is women's work. Harvest and planting seasons are exceptionally brutal as these women toil in the fields for hours on end. Their skinny frames are already wracked with malnutrition and fatigue from the innumerable chores she must do to keep her household somewhat clothed and possibly fed. The saddest part, the absolute worst part, is that nursing mothers who work in the fields, work so hard they stop producing milk for their babies. And it's not like they can just give the baby to someone else as at wet nurse, because all of the women work, and sometimes they all run dry.

The blog post was about this girl who was living in this tiny rural village in Niger, who had sat up all night with a family that was very dear to her. They were waiting for their baby to die. Their son, their baby, had been taken twice that week to a doctor in a village ten kilometers away, who told the Volunteer that there was nothing to be done but to try to give the baby some formula. Formula that the family could not afford. Even if they could, he was already too sick and weak. He was going to die.

When I read that, I had only just applied to the Peace Corps. Even as an infrequent crier, I couldn't hold it together and burst into tears hunched over my computer. Absolutely not, I thought. I cannot, absolutely cannot, do that. I will not do that.

I called my boyfriend, David, and allowed him to talk me down into rationally discussing the situation. I know that children die all over the world of diseases that never plague the 1st world. I know that children die of malnutrition and dehydration everyday. Some fifty thousand a day. I was only upset because it was something I was terrified would happen to me. It never occurred to me to be afraid of crime in West Africa, as I had seen crime in the United States quite vividly for many years. But I had never seen real, abject poverty. What was scary was, I wasn't going just to visit, snap a few pictures and press some coins into the palms of beggars- I would be going there to live. To be the person who might have to try to find a doctor for that baby. To be the last vestige of hope, because I would be the American with resources and money. I couldn't imagine that burden. I still can't.

When I peeled myself off of the mattress in Djougou this morning, my only concern was finding something to eat and procuring a water bottle for the 94 kilometers home. The remnants of a great night of drinking Sodabee- palm moonshine mixed with honey and citron- pressed into the backs of my eyes and felt sour in my stomach. I had a fairly enjoyable early taxi ride home, and was looking forward to cleaning and healing myself the rest of the day. But when I arrived at my concession, I knew that bucket shower would have to wait. In front of the yurt-like buvettes sat about twenty motorcycles. There was no one minding the stand by the road. After paying the zem, I walked up cautiously to see over fifty people standing and sitting, many of them with tears in their eyes. Very few of them talking. Oh no, I thought. Oh no no no no no. Not now. Not here. The faces of the children in my concession swarmed my head as my eyes searched frantically for them. Please don't let it be Mouda, I thought. He had been sick a few weeks ago and had lost so much weight.

I could feel myself making everyone uncomfortable, not speaking, standing there with my obvious white cluelessness, carrying unwieldy shopping bags full of bread and vegetables. I knelt down next to Roukaya, the second oldest of Mama's children, and asked her what happened. She told me a child had died this morning. I sank to my knees, involuntarily. "Who? Who was it?", I asked, trying to keep the panic in my voice hidden. She told me it was the boy, one of my students, who lived behind the concession. My stomach suddenly felt as thought it weighed fifty pounds, stuffed with pure guilt and a twinge of grief. Okay, so it wasn't Mouda. It wasn't the one of the children I play with. I was disgusted and dizzy with my own relief.

The rest of the morning we sat on door steps and ledges, barely speaking. Eventually I went in to scrub the dust and moonshine grime off of my skin. When I came back out there was a large taxi parked outside of Mama's house that would serve as a hearse. They would take him to Bohicon, about three hours south of here, for the burial. A wailing like I had never heard before, something I had only read about and seen in some movies, ruptured the solemn silence, ripping through me and my heavy gut. The parents walked with their child in their arms toward the taxi. The mother wept and shrieked, heaving her body from one step to the next. She barely made it past her front yard before she just gave up and needed someone to help carry her. The other women started wailing as well, aunts and cousins of the boy wrapped in a flowered bed-sheet. They put him in the back of the van. I watched from the edge of my stoop the procession to the family's house once it drove away. I had no desire to follow. I just needed a lot of time to think.

When an old person dies in West Africa, it is not a sad affair. Most people have parties with loud music, lots of food, a funeral procession with loud singing and tambourines, and of course- dancing. There is undoubtedly an initial period of grieving, but then the preparations for these fantastic parties must be made. Funerals are expensive here too, I read recently that they rival American weddings in proportion of income spent.

When it is a child, well, there's no celebration. There are no drums or tambourines. There is just a bed-sheet and parents with empty eyes.

Children are so fragile here. They come with these open mouths and tiny limbs and great big eyes, sucking in the sweet air past their gums. As they grow they are continually deprived of the protein a young, healthy brain needs to develop properly, and never get enough vitamins. They work in the fields or in the marche or in less desirable places to help pay for their own food costs. Little fingers picking tomatoes. Girls no more than six walking up and down busy roads selling oranges from a platter on top of her tiny head. They get sick; they get sick so easily. There is no such thing as health insurance here, if you cannot pay for a doctor he will not see you. There is too much need and medicine is expensive. When they get sick there isn't much that can be done for a poor family except maybe see a traditional healer, who can make tea out of sticks, herbs and prayer.

When a child dies in the United States, we see it as a huge injustice. Even if the problem is absolutely outside of the capacities of modern medical science, like an inoperable brain tumor. We shake our fists at God and the universe, demanding to know why this happened to us. It's not that way here. Not when child mortality is so high. Your child could die, your neighbor's child could die, and likely one of them will. There is no blame, just empty resignation. When the child's mother shuffled over to me this morning, I laid my head on her hand and professed my condolences. "We can't do anything, there is nothing we can do," she said, tears in her eyes, looking past me in her grief.

The worst part is she's right, there is nothing they can do. It's not their fault they're poor and their child got sick with dysentary. It's not her fault that there are people living with inoperable brain tumors, getting heart transplants and surviving lymphoma where I come from, and her child died of dehydration.

I recognize that this is part of living in the 3rd world. And if you can't understand that the world is a horrible place, and that people are terrible to one another, then get out of hell's kitchen. Children die. Bad things happen to good people. Life isn't fair. These aren't laws of science, they're the realities of humanity. The initial guilt over my relief that the child who died was not one I knew well is superficial because that's not a choice I can make. If I could no child would die in Manigri at all. Or in Niger. Or in the United States. And especially not due to malnutrition or diarrhea. But I didn't make the world, it made me. It will be here long after I die. I'm just a visitor, taking photographs.

"Rain Falls, Angry on the Tin Roof" -- Bradley Robert Mock singing Edwin McCain

(warning: overly poetic and overall boring subject matter) 

The rain here is of a completely different caliber than the rain at home.

In upstate New York, the light, peaceful autumn rain strokes the leaves and gently cloaks the ground in mist. The weather is gray and damp; the cold taste of decay sticks to the back of your throat.

Here, the rain slams into the ground like millions of angry fists, punishing roads and roofs, turning trenches into torrents; threatening hot, dry afternoons with distant rumblings of thunder.

In New York, the rain starts slowly, sometimes as what we love to call a 'drizzle'. It builds a crescendo the same way you start a fire, feeding the ground small bits of water at a time- giving what lives below the clouds time to breathe before breaking into a full, furious downpour.

Here, there are spastic starts, stops and spurts- as if someone is sprinkling the rain to test where it will fall. And one pregnant moment later, it all comes down. Not just buckets. Not just cats, or dogs. But unfathomable fathoms of water. The thunderous rain makes me picture my house trapped under an enormous waterfall.
Like a cruel child, the force of the water dunks it under, preventing its emergence. My house, it's drowning. The rain pounds violently for only eight or ten minutes before slinking off into the distance, followed by a few more smatterings of late-coming clouds.

It is exciting, in a way, to be so captivated by an act of nature as benign as rainfall. The sound is so loud it permeates every activity. If I am teaching and a storm begins to break, I must pause my lecture- allowing my students to glance nervously out the windows, wondering if they will have to walk the many miles home in the sky's sudden tantrum. At home, the noise prevents me from doing anything at all but listen and eventually move to a window to watch the trees in my concession whip around- as I've always enjoyed doing in the States. I only write this now that the rain has stopped, and the crickets have taken up singing again.

Adam Morey once told me he loves autumn, because everyone suffers through the heat and the humidity of summer while the flowers flourish. But at least, he says, there's fall- and that's when "the plants get theirs." Here, there is no fall. There is only rain, and no rain. Flood or famine. The plants 'get there's' the same as those who depend on them. It is why deforestation is such an issue here. Tropical rainfall is so heavy and brutal that you need those trees and plants to hold the soil together or it, and all of the vital minerals in it, will be washed away in seconds.

Also, there is no way Edwin McCain ever had a tin roof. If he did he wouldn't write pop panty-droppers. He'd write wooden drums and the sound of a reedy voice in the distance, thanking god for the rain.

Regarding Slavery, Oppression, feeling good on the beach, and a little bit of Otis Redding

Before training ended, our teachers took us to Ouidah, which was the slave port in Benin for centuries.  Most people were taken from the interior of the country by the King of Abomey. The King of Ouidah would then sell the slaves on behalf of the more powerful King of Abomey in exchange for firearms, alcohol and silk.  While most of those goods made their way back to Abomey, you can imagine that no King was going to just let these treasures slip by tax-free.  In this, the King of Ouidah went from being complicit in the slave trade to also profiting.  Ouidah is mostly Fon, and the Fon like many tribes in the South of Benin, have a long history of Voodoo practices and beliefs.  Benin is, for those of you who don't know, literally the birthplace of Voodoo. It resembles very little of the pentacost drawing, pin pushing, witchdoctoring voodoo that you see in movies, but it is the origin of that interpretation.  Anyway, selling people into chattel slavery for a bunch of savage white people is definitely some bad gris-gris. One King had an enormous tree enchanted to protect himself from the spirits of the people he was sending across the ocean.  Men would circle the "Tree of Forgetfulness" nine times and women would circle it seven times, to make sure that their spirits would not remember where they came from. (Just one of many steps taken to try to force the Africans into forgetting their past.) Then there was also, I believe planted by another king, the Tree of Remembrance which would trap the spirits if they did make it back to Ouidah.  They would remember to come to that tree and therefore vindictive spirits could not haunt the King.  The interesting thing about the Tree of Remembrance is that it was basically just in a neighborhood, a neighborhood where people had lived for a very long time.  There were barefoot, mostly naked, babies running around, women crouched over their cooking stoves. I wouldn't be surprised if the children in the village tried to climb the tree once in awhile. While the impact of the slave trade absolutely effected the lives of millions across the continent, it seems as though it is a less poignant atrocity when looking at it specifically from it's point of origin.  The timelessness of suffering in Benin is not just contained in this brutal shipping of 20 million human lives, but lives on in the empty bellies of children and behind the wary eyes of women who never stepped foot inside a classroom.  I realize I am being condescending, but I do not know how else to make this point. The same way that I have nothing to do with slavery, being born in this place and time, they have nothing to do with the slave trade.  Only in so far as I was born in and lived in a country with all of the worlds' opulence that thrives on the depletion of resources in poor countries such as this one, I have everything to do with slavery. 

The inescapable plague is greed at any expense and the only antidote for our consciences seems to be rationalization.  But hey, I should not be allowed to be self-righteous.  I live in a house at least one hundred times nice than anyone else's in my village.  I have a college education, a life-time of good health, and in village I am without a doubt the wealthiest person I know.  I have a refrigerator for godsakes.  

Ouidah was interesting for me because ever since I was a young teenager in Bourdeaux, I have wanted to visit a slave port. I really wanted to internalize the narrative I knew so well.  Packed like spoons in a drawer, iron chains cutting into festering wrists, the separation of linguistic groups to prevent mutiny, the desperation and countless deaths. I thought visiting a place that has held these poor souls before they were marched to the sea would make me feel closer, or moved, by the experience.  The truth was that the people here don't see the same blockbuster gore that I have had described.  Their history is one of magical kings, betrayal, oppression and corruption.  Their stories aren't about the Portuguese's slave ships or the Dutch trade or tight packing.  They're about communities, families and tribes.  

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with the entire trip.  The mass graves were in fact quite sad.  I left a rock at the memorial that I had found at the fort where the slaves were kept, and felt sacreligious standing there in my pale feet, thousands of long ago decomposed bodies beneath them.  But that was it.  At the beach where I watched my friends play in the surf and climb on top of each other and pose for pictures, I laid back in the sand and listened to Otis Redding. 

Three thousand miles I've roamed

Just to make this dock my home 

It was impossible to picture emaciated, brutalized people marching west toward an undeniably horrifying future.  The sun was shining beautifully, and I couldn't help it, as I was trying to conjure an image of a 17th century slave ship on the horizon, I just thought, "Now that's home. That is where home is." Picturing my friends and family living their lives on that side of the world, I just smiled and leaned back to enjoy the sun.

Sitting on the dock of the bay

Watching the tide roll away 

Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time. 

"I'm full of shit, but this is ridiculous" Brandon Tolbert

This is a letter I wrote to my lovely friend Steven while I was at post. Some of the information was relevant so I thought I'd post it here.

I want you to know that I am writing this letter in my 

(steamy) hot living room, sitting on a plastic floor mat decorated with
white flowers, definitely an import from China.  In the relativey
short distance behind my house there is an Methodist Church. They have
service every night, a midde aged skinny woman named Edwige leads a
small congregation in the same songs night after night.  It sounds
exactly as you'd expect: fast, complicated drumming, call and
response, and almost three hours of repetition.  They sing in a
language that I am not familiar with, either Aja or Bariba or
something else. Anyway, It doesn't sound like Nagot, the main language in my
village. The only word I can make out is 'Allelujah'.  The
crickets are as loud here as in Upstate New York and the air smells
like wood smoke and thick grease.  My house here is roughy the same
size as my Chestnut St apartment, maybe a bit larger actually, with an outdoor latrine and a shower
that is really just a drain in a cement floor.  I have a cement house,
not mud, and a tin roof.  All in all, it's really nice. I ike my house
quite a bit. You would like it too I think.  There is a large
bookshelf full of books and many maps on the walls and sturdy handmade
wooden furniture.  At night, when it is unbearably hot, I drag a cot
into my back patio and hang a mosquito net over my clotheslines. The
stars are incredible, you can see everything. I mean everything.  Even
when the power is on you can still see the Milky Way.  In the morning,
five am, I go back inside because the mosque down the road is so close
the call to prayer could be in my living room.  Even if I was able to
magically sleep through it, the roosters outside of my house scream
from five thirty until about seven.  They are so loud. My
house sits in a concession that I would love to draw for you, but I
cannot.  It has a mud and thatch yurt-like buvette at the front of the
property that meets the main dusty washed out dirt road.  Next to the
bar is my landlady (only ever called Mama) usually cooking on her
mudstove outside something for either her patrons or eight children,
and Mama's peyote, which is like a rustic gazebo where Mama sells
candy, cookies, cigarettes, soap and whatever she happens to pick up
from venders who pass by on the road to or from marche.  Sometimes she
has vegetables.

Having a buvette in your concession is fantastic because her children
will deliver a delicious (by beninese standards, not microbrew
standards) 21 oz beers right to my couch.  Or fruit cocktail soda.
Those kids also have been helping me get my water from the well and
come in to color, play Where's Waldo, or play games on my cellphone.
It's really nice; they call out KO KO KO at the door and clap their
hands to announce that they're there, the first word out of their
mouths is always 'S'il vous plait', sometimes I wonder if that is my
name.

Next door there is a young teacher named Narcissis and a few other
teachers from my school. I like Narcissis a lot, he and I wil likely
become good friends by the time I leave here. He is new to Manigi like
me, he just graduated college and is twenty six.  He is kind to his
students and doesnt beat them. He is Fon which is the biggest
ethnicity in Benin and I think second or third in Togo and Nigeria.
In Manigri, which is about 200 km from where most of the Fon live, is
mosty Nagot with some Ani from the neighboring big town, Bassila.
There are some Bariba as well. The Bariba are kind of desert people,
they carry sheathed swords and during festivas ride horses decorated
wildly through the town.  There are not a lot of festivals though, I
am told everyday that life au village is slow and simple. I am
inclined to agree.  I find it kind of boring sometimes.  It is not
really socially acceptable for women to go to bars or really even
drink. Women here are largely un(der)educated and male/female
friendships are pretty much unheard of unless there is a more intimate
relationship underneath. I am not seeking to be or know of anything
underneath anyone.

I have a lot of new  very pretty dresses that I had made here for
little more than a few dollars a piece. You buy the fabric, called
tissue, at the marche after haggling for about ten minutes or so, then
find a tailor who will show you pictures of about fifty dresses with
scary photo shopped heads on them at weird angles. They measure you
and in two or so days you have a new dress. Tissue is really
interesting because while it resembles what we call traditional dress,
it was introduced by the Dutch during the 18th century. The fabrics
are in these really wild and loud designs. Apparenty it was a real
fight to try to get the West Africans to wear tissue because well,
it's fucking hot here. Most old paintings and drawings of that time
have the topless women and white loincloth deal going on. So the Dutch
sold it to the French who forced the Africans to cover themselves,
being catholic imperalists.  White people were, and still I think are,
squimish about naked bodies. Especially breasts. It seems as though
they got here and were like OH NO BREASTS! A NAKED WOMANS BREASTS. SO
INDECENT, SO VULGAR, SO PORNOGRAPHIC (because a naked woman equals
pornography...). The French and Portuguese also, I am told, introduced
facial scarring to separate slaves. Today just about every baby gets
facial scars, some are very discreet small horizontal lines on their
cheeks, others are really intense full over scars that make them look
like they slept on a couch cushion.  So while it began as a really
ugly and cruel symbol of oppression, it now denotes ethnic and
patrilineal pride. I think that is interesting. And sad. But mostly
interesting.

I have been eating a lot of delicious fruit lately, like bananas (much, much smaller than those Chiquita monstrocities that have wiped out real bananas in our hemisphere) and green oranges (a bit of an oxymoron, I know). I make my own bread now, it's relaxing and rewarding and tastes delicious. Every other city in the country has bread, so much bread you can't go somewhere without seeing a woman carrying easily one hundred baguettes on her head, shouting "Pain chaud! Pain chaud!" like a hawker from the crooked streets of London or something.  There are only three Africa food groups, as a matter of fact. One is protein, the other carbohydrates, and the third is listed as "other".  In this other I think is where pot de vache, literally a boiled pot of every part of the cow- including skin and intestines- remains.  The food really isn't bad though. It's just different.  It's spicy and full of carbohydrates and fat, because those are cheaply made and people here can't always eat everyday- never mind three times a day.  Some of the professors at my school complain that they don't get enough to eat, as they are supporting both their nuclear and extended families on a budget of one hundred dollars a month. And really, that is a great salary here. 

Speaking of my colleagues, I have school tomorrow from 10-12 and then later from 3-5.  12-3 is repose time, which is like a siesta.  I should really be lesson planning for tomorrow but I want to keep talking to you.  Tomorrow I will go to the marche and buy onions, garlic, yams, rice and maybe plantains.  I don't really eat meat here, it's expensive and difficult to find.  You can only buy cow-meat at the marche; goats, chickens and rabbits you have to kill and clean yourself. It is not that I am opposed to doing any such thing, but that is a lot of work when I can just eat lentils or beans.  The meat here is also a little gamey because it is all free range, so making roasts is a bit of a challenge.  Everything dries out pretty quickly.  I haven't been that impressed with the cooks in Manigri. I accidentally swallowed a goat tooth my first night here and immediately excused myself to throw it up in the bushes.  Since then I have been cooking for myself while I am not traveling.  So far, I like cooking.  I am incredibly spoiled in that I have a refrigerator, making cooking very simple.  Especially since the marche is only open once every four days, so some of my things need to keep.  Don't worry, I am taking vitamins. Don't worry your little fawn head. 

I wish you could come visit me. We would go to Penjari, a national park here, and spy on elephants and lions. We could run away and live in the baobobs with the monkeys. Oh monkeys! 

There is a small village, only about six kilometers away or so named Kikele.  It has your typical mud and thatch houses, no running water or electricity, etc.  There is a sacred forest in Kikele where these small black monkeys live.  According to tradition, there is one monkey for each person born in the village. The monkeys are like spirt animals. They come to baptisms and weddings and are very sacred to the community. Apparently these monkeys are very rare because they are only found in this sacred forest. That is not to say that at some point they were elsewhere as well, but may have been chased out or hunted or had their habitat cut down.  I think the idea of one baby monkey for each baby human is sweet. 

It is morning now and I have skipped my morning class because most students are still not showing up and I do not have the necessary supplies, such as chalk or an eraser for the blackboard.  Many of my students are still in Nigeria, working in the fields, until next week.  This is how they are able to to pay their school fees, they work in the cane or oil fields in Nigeria and save money for their families. Some kids take entire years to go work in the fields, returning to school every other year. As you can imagine, if they finish the eighth grade they are twice as old as their classmates. Some of my students are older than I am, and I teach the equivalent of 7th or 8th grade.  

I am still not wholly comfortable to be an English teacher to these kids. But I am comfortable being a role model for girls here. Girls have it tough, it's still very much a traditional society. I am told things are changing though, you know, by men. They tell me that just last year a law was passed prohibiting a man from beating his wife. I suppose that is something. The law doesn't really have much teeth if there is no one to enforce it though, and police seem to be confined to the main road (yes singular) in the country where I believe they mostly collect tolls and take bribes.  Women are absolutely seen as inferior, even though they do the majority of the work. I rarely see my girl neighbors at rest- and even less at play. They are always gathering wood, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, helping Mama with the stand or the buvette. The boys dick around all day and play soccer. And this is the natural order of things here. Female literacy in Benin is one of the lowest in the world, according to the 2006 world fact book I glanced at in the Parisian airport. School costs money and most girls are needed at home to help with the household work.  Also, when a girl is married she will not be the provider for either her family or her husband's family, so the incentive to educate her is mostly lost in that she will not have a job that requires education. She might sell tomatoes at a marche, or have a buvette like Mama, but she will not be a lawyer or a teacher. I am the only female teacher in my school, and I am an import. 

Another really interesting aspect of education here is what children are taught in their classes.  Communisim is completely wiped out of the curriculum, even though this country was communist into the 1990s, and into many of these childrens' lifetimes.  My guess is that the focus on democracy is seen as the upmost importance, as the birth rate is so high there are perpetually too many unemployed young people. As we know, unemployed young people are quite dangerous. I also wouldn't be surprised if democratic indoctrination was some part of loan conditionality for helping pay for education here. A lot of people are very suspicious of education in this country because parts of it are imported from Canada. Canada being a country full of white people, they think that perhaps those in North America just want to keep Africans dumb so they can steal their natural resources and keep them forever in debt. I usually say I wouldn't put it past those Canadians, the people in the United States ('americans' being slightly inappropriate in that sentence) have always been wary of them. This usually grants some laughter, then sighs, then shifty glances toward me. I think they think I might be a spy.

I am not a spy. Although, that is exactly what a spy would say, isn't it?