Harma-done

The New Year is on us, and school has started back up. Harmattan is starting to finish up now, but this year harmattan has been much stronger then last year (both colder and longer lasting). With harmattan over, the hot dry season (chaleur) will be starting up before we know it. So I’ve got 85-degree nights to look forward to.

The good news is that the public tap is finally turned on. For drinking water I typically went to the pump, but with the public tap, giving us running water from a tower in the next town over, I’ll start going there. It’s closer to my house, cleaner water (since they’ve drilled down deeper to get the water and it has been treated) and so far the wait at the tap has been less than at what it is at the pump. This is likely due to tap water being slightly more expensive.

Knocking Heads

School is back in session, and much like last year the behavior issues have increased fairly dramatically after the winter break. One of my classes in particular has become very problematic, so the other week I did something I hate, which was giving a pop quiz as a punishment (and it was filled with irregulars so no kids did well on it).

It’s unfortunate because only, say, 15-20% of the class is ruining it for everyone else, and I’ve been trying to tell the well behaved students that they need to speak up and tell the others to behave well (it goes a lot further when a peer is chastising you then when a teacher does). I’m a softy though, so I told them that I wont enter the grades from the pop quiz into the grade book if they start to behave better.

It’s become clear, however, that I will need to take a firmer hand in disciplining and attempting incentivize good behavior. The discipline side can be difficult because the dean of students/director are rarely at our school, so I can’t really threaten to send students to the office.

Aside from some behavior issues this year has been a lot easier than last year. Part of it is that I already have lesson plans made up, but a lot of it is also that I understand better now how to structure a class, and I understand which activities and concepts are easy for students and which are more difficult. Right now I’m a few weeks ahead of the other teachers in the curriculum, so I have to figure out if I want to slow down and do more review activities, or if I want to just push through the curriculum and then add some stuff onto to the end of the year, or something else.

Clement

Here is another episode of the small world variety. This weekend I’ve been staying to Parakou to catch up on some work, and last night a volunteer here invited me to come and help him at the University of Parakou with a program he runs there. Twice a week he does sessions with university students to help them with English, introduce them to American culture, and work on Business skills.

So last night I came along and joined them for their movie night. We watched Forest Gump, which is actually a pretty decent overview of American history from the second half of the 20^th century. We had a nice discussion after the film, and many of the students already had some knowledge of the events that were happening.

One of the reasons why my friend wanted me to come along, however, is because one of the students who regularly comes to the meetings, a man by the name of Clement, is from my market town. So I met with Clement, and his story is actually one of the more interesting stories I’ve come across in this country.

Clement is the youngest of 11 children, and his father dies when he was very young. In Beninese society, being the youngest child is not an advantage, and with the father out of the picture, his family did not have a lot of resources coming in. So Clement spent his younger years in Ouesse, and eventually met a Peace Corps volunteer who was working there at the time (this was about six years ago) that helped him a lot with his English (which was actually quite good).

His schooling got to the point where it was going to be difficult for him to continue because of the lack of resources in his family, so Clement, still a teenager, made the difficult decision to move to Parakou without the support of his family. In Parakou he completed his secondary schooling, working as a mason to pay the bills, and eventually got high enough marks that the government gave him a scholarship to go to University. So now he is working his way through University, without any financial support from his family of any kind (which is quite rare) and really putting in a lot of effort to improve his lot on life.

In my short time talking with him he expressed a desire to become a small business owner, because that was going to be the only way to really be able to generate income and be self-reliant. He seems highly motivated and like a good worker, which are two things that can be lacking in Benin. Opportunities exist all over this country, and for Benin to truly develop, it will take young entrepreneurs like Clement to get the ball rolling.

Cashew Season

Cashew season is upon us. Little known fact, Benin is trying to muscle it’s way into the cashew business, with the idea being that as Asian economies take off there will be more demand for cashew nuts which are used in their cooking.

Around my village there are a couple of fairy large cashew plantations, and then also random cashew trees have been planted around village. You see a lot of kids throwing rocks into the trees trying to knock down the cashew fruit and nut.

It’s interesting that they have started growing cashew trees, though, since they take a few years to start producing nuts. That means that there are a few years where people’s land is not economically productive. Also, the price of raw cashew nuts is actually fairly low, farmers are getting paid less for a kilo of cashews than they are for peanuts or corn or really most other agricultural products.

Most of the value in cashews is from the processing side of it, which for the most part Benin lacks (although there is some investment not to open up more processing facilities here). Typically what Beninese people do is sell the cashews raw/unprocessed to multi-nationals, who then export them to Southeast Asia for processing.

We are also seeing some moves to make use of the fruit, however. Malnutrition is widespread in Benin, and cashew fruits are a wasted source of vitamins. Unfortunately the fruit cannot last long off of the tree before spoiling, so if you are going to eat them you need to do it right away. There has been some effort to transform the fruit into juice, which does keep, but so far consumers haven’t taken to it.

I suppose one positive of the cashew industry here is that it provides a source of income during the dry season. For most Beninese farmers, the dry season is a fairly lean time, with most of their crops and profits coming from the selling their produce grown during the rainy season. Having a dry season crop like this does help provide some income generation, which helps them keep a regular flow of income.

Building Progress

Our school building project is humming along now. We’ve gotten all the funding together now, so
that side of it is all taken care of. The building is going up now, we have most of the walls finished, but still

]need to put on the roof, finish with the floors, and put some of the finishing touches on. I’m expecting that we’ll be all finished and ready to go by the end of February or so, meaning that we’ll be able to use the new classrooms for the second semester (which for some reason is only like three month long). Thanks a lot to everyone who has given money; it will definitely go a long way towards getting our school up and running. I’ve posted some pictures here of how the construction is going.