I Need to Stop Teaching Students “I Love Lucy” Quotes

School is starting to get in the swing of things and things seem to be settling down. I think we’ve seen our last rain in village until April, so that’s a bummer. On the other hand harmattan is starting up, so the mornings can be kind of chilly.

It’s peanut harvesting season. As I walk to and from school I can see yards filled with peanuts lying out in the sun after harvesting. This also means that I’ve been getting gifted more peanuts than usual. If you’ve never tasted fresh from the ground peanuts, then you don’t know what you’re missing.

Notes from the Trenches

We’ve had three full weeks of school, and starting this week we actually had all of our classes (well, mostly). Since we are four classrooms short to start the year they’ve built some temporary classrooms, bought some cheap chalkboards, and figured out a rotation that let’s us have all of our classes.

One of temporary classrooms

So far there isn’t too much to report in the classroom. We’ve spent the first couple of weeks mostly doing review since absolutely none of my students did anything English related during the summer. That’s been a little slow going, but we’re starting now to actually get into the curriculum.

We had our class elections the other week. I supervised one of them, and let’s just say there was not exactly a civic outpouring. Each class elects one boy and one girl as “responsables.” That means that they are mostly in charge of attendance and being an intermediary between the administration and that classes students. No one wants this job.

So we started class, I announced that we would be doing elections, and I opened the floor for nominations. Every candidate attempted to decline his or her nomination. Since they had to elect someone, I decided that they would not be allowed to refuse their nominations.

Following every nominations I invited them to give speeches supporting their candidacy. Every speech was some variation of “I do not want this job, do not vote for me.” I thought it was a questionable campaign tactic (it would have been far more effective to make unpopular campaign promises I think), but hey, I wasn’t running their campaigns.

After we counted all the votes (only having to have one re-vote due to their being more ballots than enrolled students) the winning boy proceeded to cry at his desk for the rest of class. Since then he’s come around some.

Dining Out

In the US dining out seems like such a regular thing. Don’t want to cook dinner? Go grab a quick bite to eat somewhere. In Benin it’s a different story, and one that varies between the cities like Cotonou and Parakou, and the brousse.

In Cotonou, Porto-Novo, and somewhat in Parakou, you have dining establishments with the kitchen out back and someone to take your order, but they still aren’t all that common, and the average Beninese person never really goes to them. They have them though, and some of them are very nice.

It’s more common, however, to find someone who has set up shop on the side of the street with a charcoal stove, where you order whatever they happened to have cook that day, sit down right there, and eat it.

In village and even my market town the concept of a restaurant really hasn’t made it. There isn’t anywhere with anything approaching a kitchen. I’ve also noticed that the few places that do sell food only do lunches, never dinners. All the food is prepared in the open air on charcoal or wood stoves. The other thing I’ve noticed is that in village, the food operation is distinct from the drinks operation. As in, the person preparing the food isn’t really related in anyway to the person selling drinks.

What this means is that the bars in village typically have one (and sometimes two) people who have set up shop close enough nearby to sell food to the patrons. So when I go to get food somewhere, I’m dealing with two different people the entire time (they’re always women too), and at the end there are two checks to settle. Also, for some reason that’s lost on me, a lot of the women who sell the drinks (called tantis here, and I believe they’re called beer wenches in Germany) are from Togo. Somehow the Togolese were able to corner that market here.

Burn, Bury, or What?

When I first got to village I asked myself what am I supposed to do with all my trash? Waste disposal isn’t really a thing here; people typically throw their trash on the ground wherever they happen to be standing. Later, usually the next morning, families will have their kids sweep everything out, collecting the trash which then gets piled somewhere or burned. Doesn’t matter if you’re in a city or village or something in between, if you’re going to go looking for a trashcan, you’re going to be disappointed.

So for me, what I typically do is collect my trash in old plastic bags (which are given out like candy), and then have it periodically burned off. This works fine for the most part, and a lot of my trash is organic material (egg shells, garlic skins, etc.) so that generally get’s picked off by goats before burning time.

Another thing to note, however, is that things get reused. A lot. Things that we throw out in America without thinking about it get another life cycle here. Kids will make toys out of spare bits and pieces, old cans get turned into containers, and so on.

On the other hand, there is no way to dispose of anything toxic. Batteries, for instance, can’t be taken somewhere to get processed safely. There is a solution for that, too, however. The other week some of the neighbor kids came over and asked for all of my used batteries. I had a bunch of dead batteries. So I figured sure, if they can use them for something then go ahead. They then took those dead batteries and turned them into handmade flashlights.

Of course they were very weak flashlights, but they were flashlights nonetheless. They made them with LEDs, so my guess is that the LED draws so little power from the battery that even though those batteries are for my purposes dead, unable to power up a radio or alarm clock, they can power a cheap, lo-fi flashlight.

One great thing about Beninese people is that they can turn what looks like nothing into something. They are very resourceful, they have to be.

Project Update

Insert building here

My girls from Camp GLOW. Currently without a classroom.

Our classroom project has been progressing nicely. As I mentioned, we don’t have enough classrooms this year, so I’m working on a project to build four new classrooms. These classrooms will be the first actual classrooms at our school, meaning that they’ll have walls and paint and the whole she-bang. The local community is going to be paying for most of it, and a few weeks ago the parents association put up some money to purchase cement so they could start digging and putting in the foundations.

The mason and his team have been at the school most days for the last couple of weeks starting to get to work. While the community is going to be paying for most of it, they don’t have the resources to pay for all of it. I’m trying to fundraise the rest of the money, and we’ve made some good progress on that. We still haven’t found all the money though, so if you’re interested in helping out, we’d certainly appreciate it.

Group of parents helping with classroom project

Also here’s a picture of me without hair.

Me shaved