Kudo Xwe

It’s burning season in the Collines. Every year, once the dry season has started, people burn all the grasses and low-lying shrubs. So the sky fills with smoke, there is burning ash all over the place, and it is means it’s time to hunker down because the dry-hot season is coming sooner than you know.

The swirling clouds of ash also are sign that building season is upon us. Most construction happens during the dry season since it’s harder to make cement when the monsoons come. The dry heat helps the cement bricks solidify. The last week or so I’ve noticed a lot of new houses/buildings going up, including a new building right next door to my house.

It’s also holiday season right now, so people are in a festive mood. Christmas and new years are two of the largest holidays in Benin. Also big is Independence Day, which is August 1^st. While people do party during the holidays, it isn’t really an organized thing. It’s a lot of people kind of casually dropping in on neighbors and family and hanging around for a little bit before moving on to someone else.

For Christmas I went to the President of the parents’ association’s house for a while, and then came back and celebrated with my neighbors. I gave out beanie babies to some of the kids in the neighborhood, which went a lot better than I thought since I didn’t have enough to give everyone a beanie baby (very few tears, none of them real).

While I was with my neighbor, who is a fairly important figure in the village, we started talking about the development in the village over the last year. I’ve often heard that development is like watching your fingernails growing. It’s happening, you can see some of the results, but you don’t really notice it while it’s going on. I told him I was kind of surprised about how much change I’ve seen in the year since I’ve been here, with the school growing, a running water system starting to get put into the village (which they turned on last week), a bunch of new businesses opening up, a new police station finishing up in the market town, an expansion of the market, and a bunch of other stuff that I’m not remembering right now. He said that it was because people here aren’t afraid to work, with the undercurrent of our conversation being that people in other parts of the country are lazy.

Site Development

As a volunteer you occasionally get people coming up to you and saying that they would like to have a volunteer in their school/health center/NGO. The last few weeks I’ve been helping a few schools that are applying for volunteers. My old school director is now working in the next village into the bush, so I sat down with him to help him fill out the forms a few weeks ago.

Then, last week I met up with the director of another school about 20km away to talk about getting a volunteer and helping him with the forms. We met up in our market town at the nicest pounded yam restaurant there is, and while we were there yet another school director (this time at a new school that just started in the market town) came up to talk to us and ask how he can get a volunteer. So just today I sat down with him to talk about requesting a volunteer. It’s interesting to talk with people requesting volunteers because it gives you a sense of how they view the work I’m doing in the community.

Soccer

Our girls’ soccer team is going strong now that we have gotten into the swing of things. We meet for three hours on Wednesday afternoons, which works for most of the girls. In theory Wednesday afternoons are supposed to be free for all students in Benin, but since we don’t have enough classrooms to hold all classes during regularly scheduled times some teachers have moved their classes to Wednesday afternoons.

Still, we’ve been getting 30-50 girls to come out, which is a great turn out since we’ve typically been able to run two different games at the same time. We spend the first hour in a classroom doing a session on some other topic, for instance last week we did a session on peer pressure. We’re planning on talking about issues that affect young girls at the school and in the village.

We’d like to do a second session every week as well. We started doing an hour-long session on Friday evening when a lot of the girls are free, but the class schedule has made that difficult. We’ve talked about doing a session on Saturday, either the morning or evening. Last year we did practice on Saturday evenings, but had trouble-getting girls to show up since a lot of them had choir at church or work around the house they were supposed to do. Some have been saying that Saturday morning would work better, so we may try that.

I’ve seen a lot of progress so far this year though. The girls definitely seem to be improving their soccer skills; they’ve started to understand the positions and the need to stay in their positions. Conditioning is a work in progress, but getting better. We’ve been able to work up to two 30-minute halves with minimal substitutions.

Building Project

Our classroom building is going up, slowly but surely. The mason and his crew have been at the school everyday working on it, and at this point the walls are probably 80 percent finished. There still is a lot of work to do though with the roof, and the floors, and with putting the finishes on it, so it’ll probably be a couple months still before they’re all finished.

The local community has finished almost all of their fundraising, which is great. In Benin it can be difficult sometimes to raise money locally, since cash flow tends to be pretty low at all times, but the parents association has been really good about getting the community to do their part.

The last few weeks I’ve had to have a few words with the mason as far as work place safety goes. Benin is a place were regulations don’t go, so I talked to him about not leaving nails lying on the ground, having the team wear close toed shoes (which is a losing battle), and making sure that students aren’t hanging around the worksite (and especially that they stop inviting kids into the worksite for any reason).

All in all it’s been going well though. So far things have been running very smooth, and without any problems, so we hope that will continue. With that I’ll leave you, kudo xwe and happy holidays everyone!

PS: My pick for the next West Africa story that’ll appear in American news, fallout from Nigeria’s presidential election in a couple of months. Falling oil prices should make that a fun one.