Valhalla I’m Coming

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks here. Work is picking up, we are almost at the end of the first semester (the first semester runs from October through February, the second March until sometime in May, don’t ask why the semesters are so unbalanced).

Also, for a dry season it hasn’t been all that dry. We’ve had a fair number of rainy evenings, and the heat has been far from unbearable. What is this poppycock? I didn’t sign up for some tropical vacay spot, I signed up for an equatorial, sweat your hair off wasteland, where people lay on cement floors all day praying for a breeze. Anyways, here are some highlights from the last month or so.

SPORTS!

Big news, my tenure as a girls soccer/handball/volleyball coach has officially started. Although without the volleyball. Much of my prep work consisted of deciding what music I want us to enter to and what our nickname will be (right now I’m leaning towards Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song and calling ourselves the Vikings).

My first observation is that the guy I found to do this with me is very good at it, which in turn is good for us since I am not very good at it. Our first practice we did some introductory stuff, then had the stretch/warmup and play some 7 on 7 soccer scrimmages so we can see their level (their level is very low, but they have stopped using their hands so that is good).

Our second meeting I was unfortunately left in charge, so we warmed up, did a soccer scrimmage, and then did a handball scrimmage (it’s cool, I studied abroad in Denmark during the handball world championships, the Danes go nuts for handball). Handball was also a struggle at times so after the scrimmage we got in a circle and just threw the ball around for a while. Then we practiced running and dribbling with the ball.

At this point my coaching technique involves pulling some activity out of my ass, and if nothing can be found then telling them to run laps around the field until I can think of something for us to do. This is admittedly not the greatest technique, but hopefully it should leave them conditioned.

So far we have gotten a very warm reception though, which is great. We’re having a lot of girls turn out, and hopefully we’ll be able to keep it up. This is the first time in the commune (kind of like a county here) that any type of sports thing has been geared specifically towards girls, and with a little luck and work I think we might be able to get some of the other schools close by to start something similar.

The biggest difficulty so far has been our lack of equipment. We haven’t even started with volleyball yet since there isn’t a net or volleyball, and our handball equipment isn’t much better. For soccer we have been borrowing a soccer ball and just using that. One soccer ball means a lot of scrimmages and not a lot of drills.

For handball, we actually do have a handball court at the school, of course built on a dirt clearing. But we don’t have a handball so we had to use a soccer as our hand ball (a poor substitute). Hopefully we’ll be able to get some equipment soon.

The second biggest challenge is the boys. There have been a number of boys that come and just watch the practice, and then they’ll wander out on the field, or if the ball goes out of bounds they’ll play with it a little before giving it back. All very aggravating, but it’s been better since I chased one of them off with a stick.

Shortwaves, Big Fun

The big addition to the house has been a shortwave radio, which has filled my once listless evenings with the sounds of distant lands. It’s great, every night I can settle down after work and listen to the BBC’s World Service (Broadcasting fresh out of Ascension Island), getting my daily dose of world news.

For a while I was feeling some pangs of anxiety about having absolutely no idea what was happening more than a couple kilometers from my house (and I still have no idea about what is happening in Benin, I found out last week that there is some major strike going on that is shutting part of the country down, but in village nobody gives a rip).

Now, however, I can get the BBC on a reasonably clean and static free signal (fun fact, if you turn your TV or radio to a station/frequency that doesn’t exist and only get static, about one percent of that static is actually background radiation left over from the big bang). What they and all other major broadcasters do is either build or lease time from an antenna somewhere in Africa, and then broadcast in shortwave frequency which can get a good part of the continent cleanly.

I mostly listen to the BBC, every night at 7 they have “Have Your Say” which is usually a fairly informative and interesting broadcast. I loved their piece on teaching the holocaust in schools, I also like every time they cover anything with American football and ask random people in London for their opinions.

I can also pick up some Japanese and Chinese programs, I can fairly regularly get the German’s BBC (Deutsche-Welle) out of Rwanda, they have a lot of English programs too. I’ve gotten Radio France out of South Africa too.

The American broadcasts on Voice of America are something of a mixed bag. The news is the news of course, not a ton you can do to really differentiate yourself with that, but Voice of America actually plays a lot of music, something the BBC doesn’t do at all.

So Wednesday night at ten, for instance, is when Voice of America plays classic rock. They don’t just play any classic rock though, that would be too easy, they only play long ballads. I haven’t heard what qualifies for a long song, but it definitely more than five minutes. All I know is that I stopped listening to In-a-Gadda-da-Vida somewhere during the 13 minute drum solo. Voice of America also plays soul music on Tuesdays, and the other nights I haven’t figured out.

If J.Crew Did an Africa Catalog

That was the comment from another volunteer today on my clothing, that I would fit right in on the pages of J. Crew. Over the last weeks I’ve had a similar feeling, and can confidently say that if you are looking for trends in male fashion, then it is time you get a ticket for West Africa.

Spoiler alert, we took a wrong turn after the 80’s, we zigged when we should of zagged. The problem was that fashion didn’t go big enough with pastel colors.

Last night I realized that for laundry this week I will have no American clothes to wash this week, I have worn tissue all week. There are a number of reasons for this, the biggest probably being that with my weight loss American clothes don’t, but my tailor made bomba with an orange zig-zag running through it definitely does.

I have solved my tailor issues in village too, which is good news. Turns out my landlord/neighbor’s uncle is a tailor in the town over, does real nice work and is good and fast about it. Which is good news because I’ve been waiting for a pair of pants from my old tailor for two months now. For the record, one week is considered a long time to have to wait for anything here.

So, the key to fashion is, I believe, pairing up solid color pants (Lime Green, Forest Green, Purple, Yellow, my next move will be into the blues I think) with a tissu top. I tend to prefer more abstract patterns, although I like a good Guinea Fowl pattern as much as the next guy.

I’m not sure that I have given a good description of how clothes shopping works, so here goes something. There are a few ways of going about it, sometimes you can just go to the tailor and they’ll have some tissu (cloth) there for you to pick out and then you go on your way. This is not how I do it, it robs the process of a lot of magic.

I like to go to the market on the big market day (Thursday) and scope out all the tissu venders. There are probably 7 or 8 guys who just sell cloth in their stalls at the marche, so you can browse around a bit for the best pattern. This way you can see if some of the more muslim prints strike your fancy (there are specific kinds of fabric that people from different groups tend to wear) or if you want to go with sunrise print over there.

So I make my choice and buy some fabric. Typically it is two meters for a shirt, and two meters for pants, so if you’re going for the whole thing, a full outfit, it’s four meters. Then you take the tissu to the tailor, and decide what you want. Here is where you make the short vs. long sleeves decision, and say how many pockets you want, and all those other whistles.

If you’re doing a traditional outfit, then you can decide now if you want to get broderie. Broderie is some ornamentation they put on the sleeves and around the neck, it’s very shiny and of course very formal.

This is a brief overview of how the process goes.

When Did You Become a Robocop?

If I were to describe my approach to classroom discipline since Christmas, I would say that I have become Robocop. Permission to leave class denied. Student, return to your place immediately or face the consequences. Student, report to the corner.

My go to technique is to make the kids go stand in the corner for the rest of the class. If this doesn’t work I make them get on their knees in front of the class. After this I just send them to the dean.

One time I made a student stand next to the flagpole in the sun.

On Language

One thing I’ve learned a lot about in village is how important language is. Nothing makes people happier than when I say anything in their local language. Strangely I don’t get the same excitement when people speak English.

Anyways, for the longest time I was confused as to what language we spoke, and even if it was a language. For the record, I’m still not sure. In village they speak Mahi, which is either a separate language or a dialect of Fon, which happens to be the largest language in the country.

Local language is, however, necessary in village. Nobody actually speaks French, they just now a little bit that gets them by. Everybody’s first language is Mahi, and that is for the most part all they will speak all day.

I’m starting to learn a little bit more, and can have maybe minute long conversations with people, and can make some simple requests, but my vocab and understanding of the language is wholly lacking. Oh, and also the language has historically been a spoken language and almost nobody actually knows how to write anything in it.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Bad news on the puppy front. So, I get a knock on my door, it’s Sunday night around nine o’clock, and it is one of the neighbor kids with a puppy for me. I asked for a puppy, so altogether this can’t be considered too bizarre of an event.

They grab the little guy by the scruff of the neck and thrust him into my arms. “It’s a girl,” I’m told, triumphantly. Wait, what.

Long story short, I asked for a boy puppy (because I don’t want any baby puppies of my own), but for some reason they were convinced I wanted a girl. After I day or so I realized that this was not going to be a good idea, so I sent her back to the fields, but that whole process took about a week since they don’t go to the fields everyday, or at what I consider to be convenient times.

Now, part of me thinks that originally when they said that there were three boy and three girl puppies what they meant was that there was only girl puppies and they hoped I wouldn’t notice.

Anyways, I’ve been told that the next time there is a puppy birth in the fields I’ll get top consideration. What I’ve learned about dogs is that they will not pee in the cardboard box they sleep in, that puppies love akassa, and that puppies cry most of the time. Will give the puppy experiment another go soon then.

That’s what I got, I’ll try to update more frequently in the future.