September Post

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote, but that is mostly because nothing has been happening. During the summer life slows down quite a bit in village, and not a lot of excitement is to be had. Mostly this is because people clear out during the summer months.

Since summer is also the rainy season, and my village is over 90 percent farmers, a lot of people go out to the fields to work during the summer (planting/clearing/etc.) and don’t come home at all. They take their meals in the fields, they sleep in the fields, they do everything out there, maybe coming back to go to church on Sundays.

So that is what most people in village are doing. Then there are the non-farmers, for example the other teachers at my school. Since most people who aren’t farmers have some level of education, meaning they have spent time in a city and have gotten a taste for city life, they don’t want to stay in village if they don’t have to. I’d say over 90 percent of the teachers from my school are spending their summer either in Parakou or Cotonou. Similarly, my friend Sylvester (an ex-gym teacher who lost his job due to not having a college degree) has spent the summer in Bohicon (a city in the central part of Benin, it’ll show up again later in this post) at a training of some sort. The details have been sketchy, but last time I talked to him it sounded like it’s mostly about gaining business skills (he’s planning on expanding his cafeteria when he gets back).

Lately we’ve been having some really good rainstorms. Real dumpers. Best part of a big rain shower, means I get to take a real rain shower. Also I have enough water to rinse out my clothes really well after washing. Also it’s easy to get water from the well. Unfortunately getting water from the pump is still a pain, since in the summer all the villagers use rainwater for everything (including drinking/cooking). Since I don’t want to use water that’s run off the roof of my house for drinking, I still have a need to go to the pump. However, since the villagers aren’t using the pumps, they decide to lock them up, and the guy with the key is usually working in the fields.

Trip from Hell

I recently made the trip up to my village from Cotonou, so coming up north from the south. Usually when I travel I’m just going to Parakou, which is a couple of hours north of me. It’s a fairly simple and painless taxi ride. The trip to Cotonou, however, is a different animal.

So travel in Benin is either by motorcycle (short distances or rural areas), taxi (more medium length travel), or by bus (long distance). While I can travel to Cotonou by taxi, sitting all day in a Toyota hatchback from the 1980’s with 11 of my new best friends really doesn’t sound appealing. Buses are the way to go.

So buses in Benin run north south, either going on the eastern route from Cotonou to Malanville on the Niger border, or one the western route from Cotonou to Natitingou. They use the same until they get to the city of Dassa, where the road splits in two, one going east and the west. Buses leave at either 7AM or noon.

In theory the trip between Cotonou in Parakou should only take like six or seven hours, but the road is in such terrible shape that the main highway between Cotonou and Bohicon is closed to busses, so they have to go a roundabout way that adds a couple of hours to the trip. For a while the busses were going over something that claimed to be an “experimental bridge” outside of Porto-Novo, but they have also decided to stop going on that route, which again added about another hour to the trip.

Of course there are many different companies that do these routes, some nicer than others. When going to Cotonou I usually can’t be picky so I get stuck with a cheap bus line (this is because I have to hail down a bus on the side of the road rather than buy a ticket ahead of time at the point of departure, the nicer lines tend to be fuller and don’t stop).

Recently I was making the trip from Cotonou north to village. So I went ahead and bought a ticket for the 7AM bus on one of the nicer lines, the one with air conditioned buses, that plays American movies, and with a firm one person to every seat, one seat to every person policy.

We pull out of Cotonou and everything is going well enough. I’m seated next to a wealthy guy, who tells me that the United States is the patron of the world (in a good way) and that the world needs more of America telling it what to do. He was nice, we exchanged emails and I’ve never heard from him since.

So we pull into Bohicon at about 11:30 or so in the morning. This is where buses usually stop so people can grab something to eat. I grab an avocado sandwich, and we pull out of Bohicon a little after noon. It should only take another 6 hours or so to get to Parakou.

I’m not going all the way to Parakou though, I get off about two hours south of Parakou in a sleepy town on the highway, where I grab a motorcycle driver and have him drive me 45 minutes or so into the bush to my village.

Anyways, so we pull out of Bohicon and continue going north. This is where things go downhill. We pull over at about one with some kind of engine problem. This is not uncommon since no one in this country has heard of maintenance, so they play whack-a-mole and fix problems as they come up. They are very good at it.

This problem, however, would not be easy to fix. Something with the transmission, I admittedly wasn’t paying that close of attention. So we’re sitting there, rain clouds start to come rolling in, and I’m starting to get nervous. You know those 45 minutes or so in between the highway and my village? Absolutely not safe to be on near or after dark, for example that was where bandits captured the President’s convoy a few years ago.

It starts to become clear that the engine was not going to be a quick fix, and eventually the bus company decides to send a bus down from Parakou. Of course if I wait for this bus, it will be dark by the time we get to where I need to get dumped on the side of the road.

I now have two options, either wait it out and take the bus all the way to Parakou, then head back to village the next day, or try and see if I can get a taxi to stop and take me north to where to where I catch a motorcycle. I decide to try and get a taxi, which is made more difficult by the fact that is now raining. After a half an hour or so I’m able to get one to stop, and now we’re on our way.

It’s two thirty or so now, and if everything goes right I should get to where I catch my motorcycle by 5 or so, which works. So we’re heading north, making good time since a lot of cars cleared off the road for the rain. We make it through Glazoue when something terrible happens. Pot hole, flat tire.

We pull over, and the driver digs through to find his spare. We get it on and start on when we start to head a noise from the tire we just replaced. Something isn’t right, there’s a bit of a wobble, something’s off. The driver gets out to check, and comes back declaring that the problem is simple; he doesn’t have all the parts for the spare tire. We ease our way into the next town, and he searches for the last part he needs. Luckily he finds it, and we continue north.

I get dumped out to find a motorcycle at about 5:30. The sun sets at about 7 or so, giving us just enough time to get back to my village.

Graduation Party?

Standardized tests are really important in Benin. For example, you wouldn’t say that you have a high school diploma; you would say that you passed the bac. (the test they give at the end of secondary school). In Benin whenever you pass from one school to another, for instance from primary school to middle school, or from middle school to high school, you have to pass a standardized test. The test is all that really matters, you could get A’s in every class, but if you don’t pass the test then you’re going to be repeating a year.

All these tests are given on a specific day across the whole country at the end of the year. If you’re sick, tough luck. If it is raining really hard and you show up late, well better luck next year. Kids typically spends weeks, if not months, only preparing for these tests.

This year they pushed the test date back a couple of weeks because of the teachers strike, and the results just got released a couple of weeks ago. The big news is that one of the girls who lives next door passed the bac. (basically means she got her high school diploma) and now can go on to University.

To celebrate this and all the other kids moving up a grade, the extended family threw a sort of graduation party last week at our concession. To emphasize how big of a deal this was to everybody, this is the first time they’ve thrown any kind of party in our concession. It was a nice time and all the kids got to come back from the fields for a day and drink sodas. I had a bunch of cardboard airplanes (those things where you punch out all the pieces and then put them together to make a jet), and handed them out to the kids. It was a nice reminder of how kids here need directions very specifically spelled out for them, but a couple of them were able to figure it out and teach the others.

A few days after that, as I was coming back from the market, my neighbor who passed her bac. came over to ask me what I thought she should study at University. Growing up I’d always been told to study whatever interests you, and so that is what I was trying to tell her, but it became clear that there was something a cultural divide there.

Beninese students like to be told what to do. Exactly what to do. The education system here does not do a good enough job teaching students to be reflective, and to think be able to think critically. So when I asked her what she was interested in, she kind of froze up and said she liked everything equally (which I highly doubt).

I don’t know if it’s because she had never really thought about it, or if it was because she is a girl (female students here tend to be a lot more self-conscious then their male counterparts, probably in part because the culture hasn’t traditionally valued female education) and therefore didn’t really feel comfortable talking about it. We left the conversation with me saying that if she doesn’t know what to do, she should try to take a couple of courses in different subjects to get a better idea of what interested her, and that a person can be successful no matter what they study so long as they work hard and take advantage of their opportunities.

E-no-la

It seems that lately the media has been doing a good job reducing a continent three times the size of Europe and with over a billion people to a disease in one corner of it (call it Africa is a country syndrome). While the Ebola outbreak is definitely serious, and something to be aware of, it’s nothing to get hysterical about (unless you live in Sierra Leone, Guinea, or Liberia. Then by all means). Fortunately for me there are four national borders between Benin and those countries, and Nigeria appears to have been able to get the situation under control rather quickly.

I don’t know the numbers, but I would bet good money that more people die of malaria in a week than have ever died of Ebola in the history of mankind. Point being, there are many diseases out there, and as long as you take some simple precautions you’re going to be fine.

To date there have been no recorded cases of Ebola in Benin, and there have been near constant announcements on the radio and television informing people about it. Admittedly the response was a little disheartening at first, but I think the government has been doing a pretty good job lately informing people. They’re preaching a simple message (don’t eat bush meat, don’t touch sick people, if you’re sick go to a health center) and doing it in the local languages so everyone can understand.