A Long Strange Trip

So for the last two weeks I have been away from home visiting my future post/school. The first three months or so I’ve been living in Porto-Novo for training, but for two weeks in the middle of it they send us up to our posts so we can kind of get a feel for it before actually having to live there.

It all started Sunday August 4th, when all of the people heading up towards Parakou/Kandi gathered before daybreak to catch our bus. They told us to be there at 5:45 AM sharp (aka American time), which translated into Beninese time means that our bus showed up a little after 7. Long story short, always bring a book.

For me the bus ride was 6 hours including a stop in Bohicon for food and the restroom. For six hours I sat and watched the terrible Nigerian films they decided to play for us, including one that I believe translates into English as “Murder-Laugh Part 2.” I did not need to see part one to understand the plot. African movies are an acquired taste that I have not yet acquired.

Good news is that during the bus ride back to Porto-Novo my bus just played music videos for 4 hours straight.

So anyways, I get off the bus up in the Ouéssé Commune, close to the border of the Collines and Borgou. My site is not on the main road though, so I have to take a zemi (motorcycle transport) into the bush to get to my village. There are almost no cars here or at my site, so motorcycle is really the only option.

After a little under an hour on the back of a dirt bike through rolling hills, only stopping once for a herd of cattle, we finally get to my town and I get introduced to the host family I’ll be living with during the visit. I happen to be staying with the President of the parents association at the school I’ll be teaching at, so that was nice. My room, however, doubled as the family shower, so that was less nice. Also there were bats.

Not only am I the first white person to probably ever spend more than a night or two in my village, I am also the first white person that most people have ever seen. This is also kind of weird when the kids are obsessed with touching your skin and pressing on it to make it change colors.

Most of the two weeks were spent meeting with local officials such as the two kings in the area, the mayor, the chef d’arrondissement, the gendarmes, and the police. Their advice for me was more or less to not go to Nigeria, to respect the authorities, and to not travel or be out at night (I might talk more about that in a later post, suffice to say my area has a unique security problem).

I spent a lot of time filling out Peace Corps documents, trying to learn French and the local language (Mahi), reading, and watching 24-hour news. My Porto-Novo host family doesn’t have a TV, so these two weeks were my first introduction to Beninese television. In my experience it is mostly Turkish and Indian soap operas.

The real highlight of the visit though was when they took me to this local celebration called I believe “Omanhoun.” I’m going to try to describe it, but really I think to get it you’ll have to wait until I put up some pictures, which should hopefully be this week.

So we get to this open field a little north of town, and there thousands of people gathered around in a huge circle. Within this huge circle of people are maybe 50 guys, dressed in some traditional garb, and wearing stilts. They’re walking around, dancing, and doing tricks. Several times I saw them reach out and grab low hanging power lines, I was the only one concerned about this.

Anyways, these guys were doing their thing in the circle for an hour and a half or so before they started gearing up for the grand finale. First they had a guy come out with stilts on his arms too, walking around on all fours. I was informed that this man was an elephant, and another guy chased him around the circle until he “killed” the elephant.

But the death of the elephant is not the end of the show; it’s merely an appetizer, wetting your appetite for what’s to come. Now, I asked questions about this and was never given an actual answer, but after the elephant is killed the chief of the stilt walkers comes out to the center of the circle, and a young boy (my guess is about 6 or 7 years old) scrambles up his stilt/leg and clutches on for dear life. Following this, a second young boy scrambles up the chief’s leg.

Now usually that’s it, the show’s over after the second boy goes up. But this was not an ordinary celebration, because a third boy came out and he scurried up the chief’s leg too. At this point the crowd went absolutely nuts, I like to imagine the reaction is like being at a WWF professional wrestling event and the Undertaker comes back from the dead. Nuts city.

That was the big excitement for the week, otherwise it was just work as usual. I’m going to try and put some photos up this week, but no promises.

Also I decided to start growing a moustache worst/best decision I’ve made in a while.