Consider the Mango

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for Benin. Last weekend they held elections for the national parliament, which at least in my part of the country were peaceful and orderly.

Campaigning was interesting to watch, it’s all confined to a two week period before the election, and as far as I can tell campaigning mostly consists of roving bands of youth going around town beating on drums, banging on cowbells, and chanting for their candidates. They will do this up until 10:30 or 11 at night.

My landlord is a candidate for the local elections later this month, so the area around my house was frequently visited by roving bands in support of his party.

In Benin students have to take national standardized tests to pass from one level of schooling to another (elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, high school to university). Three weeks ago my school had a practice test for our students who will be taking the test to move from middle to high school this summer. Out of about 80 students, 8 of them passed the practice test. This was considerably better than our neighboring school, which had 12 of about 400 pass.

Consider the Mango

Mango season is upon us. I can’t walk more than twenty feet without tripping over a mango in some type of decay. I’ve noticed two ways of getting mangos. First, and this is the technique I’ve noticed girls using more frequently, is to take a long stick, go to a mango tree, gently have the stick come into contact under the mango, once placed under the mango give it a quick upward motion to dislodge it from the tree. Young boys, on the other hand, will take a long stick and violently swing at a tree until mangos fall out. At this point its unclear which method is more effective.

Some of the neighbor kids learned that I do in fact eat mangos, so they’ve started bringing some to me. The problem with this is that I typically want to eat like one mango, and then I’m done, but they will bring me like 10 mangoes at a time. It can be a little bit of a struggle to get through all of them. Of course that is how they eat mangoes though, they just start eating them until they can’t fit another bite in their stomach.

This gorge yourself attitude to mangos makes a lot of sense when you think about it though. They have no refrigeration, and even places in village that do have refrigerators wouldn’t waste space saving fruits, so there is no real hope to save mangos for later. You eat them now or they’ll go bad/get infested.

Final 14

The girls’ soccer tournament is two weeks away, so this last week we made our final cuts to get down to 14 girls. I was a little worried that some of the girls who didn’t get chosen would throw temper tantrums and whatnot, but it actually went really well and they all accepted it.

For the last two weeks or so I’ve been telling them that practices would basically be in try-out mode, so the girls needed to show up to all of them (or have a really good excuse) if they wanted to make the team.

We had to make one last minute change since one of the girls got in serious trouble with her parents (she told her mom that she was going to a friend’s house to do schoolwork, hours later her mom went to the friend’s house to call her home and she never showed up there). Because of that her mom didn’t let her come to practice, and since she was already more of a borderline addition I didn’t have much of a problem leaving her off the team.

So, we’ve got our team set now, and everything should be ready. As a final tune up we’re going to schedule a game against some of the younger boys at the CEG this next week. Conditioning remains an uphill battle, so it’ll be interesting to see how they do playing 4 matches over two days.

Finishing Moves

Construction on the classroom is still coming along. A lot of progress has been made, the roof is on the building, and the building itself is completely finished. For the most part what’s left is just finishing it and making it look nice. They’ve started putting in the doors and windows, but we hit a little bit of a snag there (the metalworker who is making them didn’t pay his electricity bill).

Otherwise most of what’s left is plastering the outside walls, and painting it all. If materials all show up on time it could probably be all done in a week, but I’d guess there’s still a couple of weeks left.