"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?