All’s Well that Ends Well

A little bit of tidbits to report since I last wrote. The week before last I was back in Porto-Novo for another round of training, which was nice because I got to have running water and air conditioning again.

Another nice part of being back in Porto-Novo was being able to visit with my host family again. It was a little over five months since I had seen them, but they had just as many young kids as I remember.

It was nice though since my French has improved to the point where I could actually talk to my host dad/aunts/uncles about stuff that was more substantive than what food is good and how about this heat.

First off, coming out of a village everyone was real interested to hear what life was like at post. What do people eat? What do they do? What are the roads like? Do people speak French? And so on and so on. I was a celebrity again, Marco Polo returning from his travels to strange lands abroad.

Other highlights include a child pooping into a bucket less than five feet away from me less than 10 minutes after arriving (this is how I knew I was home), and being fed good, hot meals. They even had potatoes (apparently my host dad has a hook up from Nigeria). Seriously though, potatoes are an exciting thing to eat now.

And during the dry season, like right now, food in general starts to become thin pickings. You can always find rice, beans, pasta, yams, or any other lovely starch. Fruits and vegetables? Not so much. The other week the only vegetables I could find in my market town were onions and okra.

Apparently during the dry season they, of course, aren’t growing any vegetables in Benin, so they have to import most of it. I was told they import it from Niger, but I’m not sure that passes my sniff test.

Oh Well

The bad news was, of course, when I got back to village. Which is not to say that I don’t like village life, in fact I was mostly thankful to be out of Porto-Novo since it is so humid and hectic there. Village life is slow and relaxing.

No, the bad news when I got back to village was that the well in my concession has officially gone dry, there is no more water left. I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked, I was told months ago that this might happen. Still, not having water sucks.

What this means is that I now have to rely exclusively on pump water for everything. The pump is about a 15 minute walk from my house, so not too far. But when you have to do it everyday it gets old fast. Also it always takes forever once you get there.

I live in a village of somewhere between four and five thousand people. We have two pumps for the whole village. The line to get water can be terrible. I get some priority being a male, white, and a teacher, but still trips to the pump take at least an hour. And while I can carry around 25 liters of water, I use more than that on average every day, this means that I either I need to find help getting my water, or I will be making on average more than one trip a day to the pump.

Now you’re probably sitting there saying, hey idiot, why not just pay someone to go to the pump for you? Well, turns out I don’t have to, or at least that’s what people claim. As a teacher I’m allowed to just tell my students to do it for me, and apparently they have to do it. Or so I’ve been told.

Here’s the problem with this in my experience: my students are like 12. It’s not that they can’t do it, they certainly have the ability. It’s that 12 year olds aren’t the most reliable group, and when it comes to having water I would like to have sense of reliability. As in I would like to have a degree of confidence that I will have water.

For example, one of my students said he (I make a point of making boy students help me with stuff rather than female students) was going to be at my house at 8 AM yesterday to help with water. Now, I’m not a morning person but for this I would make sure I would be up earlyish on a Saturday. Several other students were non-committal as far as time, but also claimed they would come to help during the morning.

Absolutely no one showed up. Later when I was getting lunch I asked some other students if they could stop by later to help, they enthusiastically said yes. No one showed up.

So I had to dust off one of my standard tricks here. You see, when there is something I can’t do by myself, I just act like a lost puppy until someone helps me. So I went to the pump with my two large containers. As soon as I got there they were all very surprised that I was alone (I’ve been told that for me to carry my own water like that is very embarrassing here, to which I respond, embarrassing for whom? I certainly have no shame with carrying water).

So two 25-liter containers get filled and I start slowly making the trip back. About a minute later an older student who goes to another school took one of them off my hands. Maybe thirty seconds after that another teacher on a motorcycle offered to take the other one back to my house for me.

Now, the other question you may be asking is why did the well go dry? It’s not a normal thing in Benin for wells to go dry and for the water situation to be less secure like this, although I do know of other volunteers in similar or worse situations. It is, however, very common in my village for wells to go dry.

For starters, it’s the dry hot season or chaleur. There hasn’t been any moisture or rain for a while now. During the dry “cold” season, or harmattan, the winds are coming out of the north, so there are a lot of sand and particles from the Sahel and the Sahara in the sky, this blocks some of the suns rays and makes not quite as hot.

The winds, however, have started to shift. Eventually, during the rainy season, the winds will be coming out of the south, carrying moisture from the Gulf of Guinea up and bringing the rains. This hasn’t happened yet, so the skies are clear, the sun is strong, and there is very little humidity. You’ll have to look elsewhere for more information on the climate, because I didn’t take that many meteorology courses in college (I took zero. If I reran my life I think I might’ve tried to become meteorologist though, Paul Douglas eat your heart out).

So right now it is hot most of the time, and there is no rain to replenish the well. This isn’t really the problem in my community though, since this same thing is happening all over the country, and most other places the wells don’t go dry.

No, the problem in my community is that the village is built on lodes of granite, so all of the wells are rather shallow. I was talking with some neighbors about it since for a while we were talking about putting in a well at the school (there is currently no source of water at the school), and wells are very expensive here.

Apparently what happens is you go out and hire someone to dig the well, they start, hit the granite, continue trying to go through the granite for a little while, and then get fed up and quit. Then you have to find someone else to try and continue. It drags on and winds up being costly.

This is a long, round about way of saying that I hope the rainy season starts soon, and I feel like I’m getting a taste for what it feels like to live somewhere without a strong, consistent water supply (it sucks), although it could be worse.

Project Updates

Not a whole lot else to report. Our girls sports club is continuing and spurts, typically on Wednesdays we get a good showing but hardly anyone shows up for Saturday practices. This is because they are either working in the fields or, more dishearteningly, their parents won’t let them come since they think sports are just for boys.

The hope is that with time we’ll get the club to grow, especially once we get volleyball up and running. There is an intense novelty factor around volleyball since no one here has ever played it, so I think that will help pick up numbers.

Next weekend I’m planning on buying up some sports equipment for our club, which should help. I’ll also be getting seeds for our garden (although I’ve told the school I won’t actually give them any seeds until they build a fence for the garden).

Our English club at the school is also starting to settle in nicely. I started teaching them about poetry last session, so we learned what a rhyme is and what alliteration is and whatnot.

When I was in college I studies abroad in Denmark, and my host mom there was actually a schoolteacher, so we are trying to set up a letter exchange with our students. There are a lot of opportunities to do letter exchanges with US students, which is more in line with Peace Corps goals, but I’m sort of hesitant to do it mostly do to my students level.

This is either the first or second year of studying English for my students; there level is understandably very low. Any letters they get from American students, who are surrounded by English everyday, will be far too difficult for most of them to read. Furthermore, any letter they write for American students would probably not be very fulfilling for American students to read, it would be a couple of simple sentences without much information or insight.

My thought is that if they are doing it with other students who are learning English as a second language, and who are similarly just starting, they will be on more of an even footing. So we’ll see how that turns out.

Side note, whenever I don’t feel like telling someone I’m an American here I usually tell them I’m Danish. Probably 75-80 percent of people here have never heard of Denmark, so that usually ends the conversation. Another 10-15 percent have maybe heard of it, are aware of its existence, but could not tell you where it is or anything about Denmark. It’s convenient trick for when I know a person’s next question after “where are you from” is going to be “will you help me move to America.”