CSNY

It’s October, the rains are slowing, and the school year is hopefully right around the corner. I’ve been busy the last month or so with Peace Corps training and seeing other volunteers, and also shocking my neighbors by remaining in village when school isn’t in session.

Rainy season still is here, but it is a lot less intense than it was even a few weeks ago. It used to be that every other night or so we got a good-sized dumping, enough that I almost completely stopped getting water from the well. We’re still getting some good showers, but not nearly as often. Pretty soon the rains will stop completely, and I will cry because the rainy season is so much better than the dry one.

The good news is that according to several of my areas leading farmers, this years rainy season has been a lot better than the previous couple of years. So that should mean higher crop yields, more money in the community’s pockets, and more food in their bellies. Rumors are swirling that this will be a bumper year for the yam crop.

All the second-year volunteers are now back in America (except for Geoff, go home Geoff), which means that I am officially a crotchety, cynical old-timer around here. Anyways, get ready for the meat and potatoes of my post, or should I say the sinew and yams?

Almost Cut My Hair

I’ve always been very skeptical of letting Beninese barbers touch my hair. Really, the only haircut people get here (male and female) is a buzz cut, bringing the hair right down to the scalp. I’ve been hesitant to get that, so for the last year I’ve been having other volunteers cut my hair.

Unfortunately my go to hair stylist is back in America now, so I decided to go ahead and chance it with a local barber. I’d been thinking for a while that I’d like to try shaving my hair off, and with the dry season coming up (aka the hot season), now is as good a time as any to lose some insulation.

So, last week I did it, I searched out a barber in my town and shaved it off. In my village it’s easy to find out the barbers, all you have to do is listen for the obscenely loud traditional music. Every barber in my village has a burned out speaker sitting on a chair in front of his place blasting the stuff.

I found a guy who had his shop next to a family I know in village, and decided he would be as good as any. At the time I did not know that he did not speak French, and that he was blind in one eye.

I come to his shop and take a seat on the waiting bench. In the corner I notice a pile of hair, mine would soon give the pile a little variety. I was third in line. I watch him do his work on a couple of people before me, and could tell he was quick and efficient. This man knew how to shave off hair with an electric razor. When it was my turn, there was a bit of confusion. He refused to believe that I actually wanted to take off my flowing blond locks. I assured him that I was quite serious, and that all I wanted was the one haircut that people in village get.

So I sit down in his chair, which swivels smoothly on an old car wheel, and he gets to work. You can tell his razor isn’t use to working on hair my length, but I can tell he is up to the challenge. We communicate solemnly through a series of grunts and gestures, none of this small talk that you get with an American haircut.

As my hair drops to the ground I glance out the window. It’s night and a thunderstorm passes in the distance. I realize why I never see the barbers open before 5 or so at night, it’d get too sweaty too fast. A crowd of mostly children begins to gather outside the door, watching as the white guy loses his hair.

My man starts to finish up, the main part of the cut job is finished, and all that remains is a little bit of styling. Without a word he attacks my eyebrows, giving them a nice trimming too. I came here a haircut, little did I know that I’d be getting the full treatment. After thinning out my eyebrows some, he makes a move on my moustache. I must stop him here. No, I cannot part with my stache, not yet.

After twenty minutes or so of work he’s done. I pay him and set off for home. In the coming days I would notice a sharp uptick in women complementing my good looks, and random people initiating conversations in local language. It’s clear I’ve duped them into thinking I’m on of them.

Southern Cross

In September I spent a couple of weeks in the south of Benin. The first week was at a Peace Corps training in Cotonou. We stayed at one of the ritzier hotels in Cotonou, and got to gorge ourselves on food and swimming pools.

After training I spent a couple of days visiting other volunteers in the south. I spent a few days in Bohicon, which is the biggest city in the south central part of the country. You don’t really go to Bohicon for Bohicon though, you go for Abomey.

Abomey was the capital of the Dahomey kingdom before French rule, and is a very important city in the history of the area. Today Bohicon is larger, mostly since the highway runs through Bohicon rather than Abomey, which is only a couple of kilometers to the west. This is not an accident, the French deliberately tried to downplay the importance of Abomey when first building the road.

In Abomey they have the royal palace for the Dahomey kingdom, where all the kings built their palaces and ruled and so on. Highlights from the palace include: 1. they let you touch anything and everything (including historical artifacts) 2. they have a throne that rests on skulls and 3. there are walls that are supposedly made of the blood and pulverized bones of their enemies. All in all I can strongly recommend a trip to the royal palace in Abomey.

I also had my Peace Corps mid-service medical check-up. This was my first time seeing the doctor since I moved to post, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Turns out I’m in great health. While I have parasites, they’re fairly benign. Also had my teeth cleaned, which took all of ten minutes with a power washer.

Teach Your Children

So school has not started yet. The official start date was announced last week, and the school year will, in theory, be starting this Thursday the 16^th. I sincerely doubt that my school will start the 16^th. If we’re lucky classes will start on the 20^th, but even that might be a little too ambitious.

Before classes start the school needs to be readied. In Benin, that work falls squarely on the students. So there will be plenty of weeding and landscaping work to do, and some of the temporary classrooms need to be repaired after the rains.

Usually the school year starts the first week of October, but this year the government pushed the date back a few weeks. Why? Well, last year there was a nasty teachers strike that disrupted the school year (mostly in the south), and forced the government to extend the school year to try and make up the lost time.

This year they decided to try and negotiate an agreement with the teachers union (which only represents full-time teachers, of which there are none in my area) to avoid another strike. Most everybody I’ve talked to agrees that there is little chance of labor peace between the teachers union and the government, but we’ll see.

So school should be starting up pretty soon. In Benin classes typically stay together year to year. So the students will have the exact same classmates in every course this year that they had last year, only one grade higher (except of course for the kids who failed last year, they’re held back). My director decided that this year he wants me to teach the same students that I taught last year, so the kids will all be the same, it’ll just be one grade higher this year.

We’ll see if this is good or not. It’ll be nice to know exactly what the students did and did not cover the year before, and they should all understand classroom rules and procedures for my classes. On the other hand, they all know that I’m not as severe a disciplinarian as the other teachers, so there won’t be as much of an ambiguous threat hanging over their heads.

It should be an exciting year though, I’ve already talked with the director about expanding our school garden this year and adding some stuff to our English Club (more on that in later posts hopefully), and I think with a full year there is a lot we can do with the girls sports club. So we’ll see how year two goes.

Also, new idea I want to share with the world, pancakes and fried eggs, nice and runny. Layer them up and use the yolk like you would syrup. I like it, but when it comes to cooking I can no longer tell where my standards are.