The Depart

My time in Porto-Novo is drawing to a close, and starting this week my work as a “real” volunteer will start. On Sunday I will be going up to Parakou, where I will stay for a few days to make some purchases I will not be able to make in village (mostly buying a gas stove) before being shipped off to Ouéssé.

We finished up with summer school last week. Some things I’ve learned: always make sure your students are wearing shoes when you call them up to the board, that students will steal grade books (didn’t happen to me, but did happen in another class), students will say yes to any question you ask them, and shaming is an effective strategy here.

One of my favorite quotes from the week was from a student who got a 4/20 on the final test. “Teacher, teacher, this is a bad grade.” He was correct.

Much like American students Beninese kids will go to great lengths to cheat. Typically when you administer a quiz or test, you will not be giving out paper copies of the test since that is too expensive/it is kind of impractical to make copies, so you will write the test long hand on the board or on large sheets of paper, and the students will tear out a piece of paper from their notebook and write the test.

What this means is that they will sometimes press really hard when making notes so it makes an indentation, sometimes they will complain that they can’t write neatly on the desk so they need to have extra sheets of paper that conveniently have their notes on them to write on top of, and sometimes they will say they need new paper so they can flip through their notebook and lookup answers before tearing out a piece of paper.

As I was correcting final exams this week I came across a student who didn’t even try to hide the fact they were cheating, they had written the test on the back of their notes from the review session. It was all highly amusing.

Of course the other big news is that we had swearing in yesterday in Cotonou. Cotonou is the biggest city in Benin and home to the Peace Corps headquarters and US Embassy, but I really haven’t been there yet since I haven’t gotten sick.

We swore in Friday morning at the ambassador’s house. My host dad and one of my uncles came down to watch us swear in, which was really nice. The oath I had to take seemed a little silly since I am a Peace Corps volunteer, and it’s almost the same as what people who join the military take.

After the ceremony I got to explore Cotonou a little bit. I had no idea what a wondrous city it is, most of its roads are paved and they have multiple supermarkets. You may not find the brands you’re used to, but you can find most types of products in Cotonou. The downside is that the Zemi drivers are much worse, I got a lot more blatant ripping off and unrealistic prices from drivers, and one went so far as to say that since we are white we could afford it.

That’s most of the excitement for the last couple of weeks. Now that I am heading to post Internet will be much more of a luxury, so you can expect fewer blog posts. I’ll probably have about one night of Internet a month.