Submerged…err I Mean Immersed

After 5 long weeks here, I thought it was time to reach out to the world before you all thought I had died. In the future I do plan on posting more often but I thought for my first few weeks here it would be best for me to limit my contact with the US in order to focus on my language studies and my integration here. The downside of this is that now after 5 weeks of ups and downs it is hard to accurately chronical my life in Benin.

A common language learning tool used by our language facilitators is to have us describe our family and our home situation, being a master of this in French (with the exception of making up family titles because I actually have no idea how any one is related here) now I will give it a shot here in English. I live in Porto Novo, the capital of Benin, but you wouldn’t know that if you came here. With the exception of the roads being a little crazy to bike on- which is more a reflection of the quality of drivers than the number of people on the road-Porto Novo is a quiet city with a lot of charm. People here are very excited about the white people in their town and greet you often, in Beninese culture it is considered rude to not greet them back, thus a short walk can in reality take forever. The children here also have a song to great the white people- or as they call us here the Yovos- “Yovo Yovo bon soir, ça vabien merci” the song mocks the only greeting the white people who come here say to the locals, and it is more or less true, although I do say bon jour in the morning to change things up a bit.

I live with a family in a modest house that does have electricity and running water as well as an indoor shower room and toilet, so in those regards I am quite privileged. I have my own room, which is a solid critter free concrete space with a mattress on the floor that I cover with a mosquito net, a plastic table and chair, a trunk for my valuables and my trusty water filter- mr. pigglesworth and lamby (yes I did bring childhood stuffed animals but you try moving to a country in Africa no one has heard of for two years) make it home, and they are the only two things in the house I can speak English to, but I haven’t gotten to the point yet where I have to speak to inanimate objects to stay sane-ish, that will probably come once I get to post.

I have a Beninese mom and dad, Lucienne and Jean and a brother Ipoli (I have no idea how to spell his name so I am going by how it sounds, which in the French language means I have almost certainly spelled it wrong). I also live with three “sisters”, Lydia, Amena and Naomie, a fourth “sister” Elodie lives with my grandmother in a different house but the two come over often, as do an abundance of aunts, uncles and cousins- none of which I can keep straight anymore and all of whom quiz me on their names- but at the moment all my mental energy is going to French vocabulary and grammar so learning names has become a task I gave up on within the first few days. In reality, none of them are actually sisters and trying to map out how they are all related has turned out to be a fruitless task with a family tree constructed that looks more like a Tim Burton creation than the kind of tree you think of when diagraming a family from the US. This is due to two cultural differences here. In Beninoise culture many times the children go to live with their aunts, so none of the girls here are actually the children of Jean and Lucienne-I actually don’t know if they have children- the children don’t always stay in the same family home either, for example all of my “sisters” have several sibling all of whom are living with other aunts and uncles.  The other thing that makes this all terribly complicated whendeciphering cousins and aunts and uncles, is that in Beninese culture it is common for men to take more than one wife. Thus families are large and determining where one family begins and another ends, especially for a westerner unaccustomed to families by this design is challenging. So I just refer to every one as an aunt, an uncle, a cousin or sister or brother without any real consideration for their actual relation because there is no way I am figuring this out.

All that being said, I have a wonderful family, I am the first Peace Corps Trainee to live with them, so I am still an exciting thing to them, and I am kind of like the household doll/pet that everyone tries to look after to ensure the white person is carefully attended for. It is sweet, and I am very appreciative for how hard they have tried to make me feel at home. I do feel like I live in a fish bowl here which can get quite tiring. Someone is always coming in my room and inspecting whatever I am doing and all of my things, including my underwear which I hang in my room for privacy, which obviously is an effort in vein, oh well. Even if I am just studying someone will inevitably stand in the doorway and watch me, I never would have imagined watching me study would be an exciting past time but it seems that to the world here, watching a white person do anything is grounds for a spectator sport, so if you plan on visiting me, be forewarned if you pick your nose, a wedgy or do anything mildly embarrassing or something completely normal to you but bizarre for people here, like peeling an orange instead of just eating it like an apple with care to avoid the skin, someone will see you, and document it and it will probably end up on the internet or in a Beninese music video.

I eat well most of the time, living in a country where avocado and mangos are indigenous has been a wonderful for me, and has resulted in the over indulgence of both. Whatever the Peace Corps warned by family about American eating habits has lead them to believe that I should be on a soda, egg, potato, and bread diet which I am ok with minus the expansion of my waist size. When I first got here I was eating lots of fruit, fish and avocado everyday- which I thought was great- but my family and my language facilitator are constantly reminding me that I eat like a baby, and thus my diet has become more and more starchy, carby and err “American” as they try to find ways to coax me to eat more. Ironically, changing my diet in this way has encouraged me to eat even less as I know most if it is doing me no good. As of late, they have also decided to start “treating” me to pork, which is usually cooked to the point that you cannot chew it (like all the meat here, in an effort to kill parasites *I think*, which amazingly they seem unable to do even as they make the food more or less inedible, thus I conclude, short of nuking the food at some point you are probably going to get a parasite, and even then, you will probably get one from your fruits and veggies which peace corps has instructed us to bleach before consuming, yum). Because the pork is cooked well done to just done, it is impossible to cut it or break it apart with your teeth, so you are expected to just plop the whole chunk of meat with all the fat, cartilage skin and hairs that were not singed off in your mouth, make an effort to chew it like a piece of gum before throwing some water back in an effort to force the chunk of pig down your throat all the while hoping you won’t choke or vomit.

Other than the “pork” and the “escargot” here there are few things I actually can complain about food wise, I love all the fish, the food here is the spiciest I have may ever had (a huge plus in my book) and they often cook with delicious dark leafy vegetables, tomatoes, onions and garlic. Unlike back home, the cooking here is also a production; you don’t use frozen food or go to the grocery store and pick out a slab of meat. Instead, youpick out which chicken you want or take a whole fish, you do all the plucking and gutting yourself and sauce is a creation you make each night not something that comes out of a jar. Even the concept of adding spice to a meal requires far more labor; you grind the garlic, onion, or hot pepper you want to add on a stone table top to make your spices. So like everything in life, there are always trade-offs and while I have had to part with some of my preferred tastes of the US,  I have also had the privilege of eating food far fresher than I could afford or chose to labor over back home.

Something I have not acquired a taste for, and am unsure if I ever will is the moonshine here, which my family and in particular my host father has a great love for- I on the other hand do not like the taste of rubbing alcohol or the prospect of going blind. However, declining the moonshine which they claim is good for your health and not insulting my family can be tricky business but I have developed an alternative strategy for avoiding consuming the drink when saying no seems to be out of the question; I accept and “drink” it, but then pretend to take a sip out of my water bottle or can of soda which I then just spit the alcohol back into. I do have to be careful with how I dispose of the alcohol after the fact because they burn trash here and they would have quite the surprise if they tried to burn my soda cans, so I usually empty them outside the grounds of my house before disposing of them. Hopefully I am never found out.

As you can probably tell as I sludge through my likes and dislikes here, I definitely oscillate between enjoying my family and feeling overwhelmed by them. It is hard after living for so living on my own, to move into a very hands on household where I am the common interest. There have been times, especially when I started out and language class was frustrating me, that my family was my haven- but as time wears on and I am becoming more equipped to handle day to day life on my own, their involvement in my daily life and input or in reality their determination of what I will do that day is starting to wear thin. I have felt especially challenged when it comes to balancing the time I spend learning French and carrying out my personal chores with the time I spend bonding with the family.  It is especially hard to balance when they so obviously display their excitement over my participation in the smallest activities like watching the TV with them or keeping them company while they cook.

All but one of my sisters is Christian- and they love to go to church- my first trip to church was a weeknight service that went on for 4 hours, the second was a Sunday service that went on for 8. As a non-religious person and a non Fon or French speaker, these events which I begrudgingly participated in were tiresome and time lost for studying French words I will actually use. Needless to say, I have done everything I can to avoid these trips but not always successfully, as I write this I am clothed in a dress with sleeves modeled after a flying squirrel with giant churches all over it in preparation for a church celebration that will go on all day. As this is day two of the celebration and I already made an appearance yesterday I am hoping that by staying posted up in my room and appearing to be busy (which really isn’t pretending, I haven’t checked email in two weeks, have exams next week and need to do laundry in preparation for leaving for site) they will let me off the hook. When I say go to church, I also think it is worth noting that my family seems to go to a special “catholic” church, because when comparing notes with other volunteers I seem to be the only one who got the special experience. Prayer is not how we think of it in the US, at this special church, it is active and loud, you shout at your demons and shake them out of you, and others help you in the process by making sure you are well shook. Being the delicate white person in the church people took care to not shake me too hard but instead gave me a good rattle to rid me of my demons. To conclude the service, you take your communion, however, it is not how I remember communion the few times I participated in church prior to coming here, instead the priest puts honey on your forehead, of course I made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting the honey was there before putting my motorcycle helmet on to get home.

When I am not “experiencing culture” with my family I am in class. The last five weeks have been intensive language instruction, which has more or less entailed me participating in language class from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday and from 8 to noon on Saturday- perhaps all this time in class best explains why I am so reluctant to give up the free time I am afforded. The French instruction, while exhausting, has been extremely effective for me and after 5 weeks I have gone from being able to say hello to having the ability to carry out basic conversations and tasks. The ongoing challenge here is that people here are not actually native French speakers, they all have a local language which is actually far more natural for them, French serves as the go between language for people who don’t speak the same local language. Thus, even when I am speaking French in a textbook fashion, there are frequent misunderstandings which make language learning an ongoing battle of learning the right kind of French.

After being here for about a month, that has felt more like a year there have been plenty of moments I have tried to remember for my blog but having been hooked up to the fire hose of culture and language my brain is a little like mush and I face the challenge of balancing painting an accurate picture of my life to boring you to death with the details. So I will conclude my life au Benin description here.

In two weeks I will be leaving for my post to do an initial assessment for two weeks. I have been posted in the far north by the border of Burkina Faso and Niger, in a city and state called Banikoara. I will have much more to report on once I visit the city but what I know so far is that it is a relatively major city that has a mix of religious backgrounds but is predominately Muslim, the local language there is Bariba and my house does have both electricity and running water as well as a security guard, so on first impressions I have little to complain about.

When I get to post I plan on getting an internet key and thus I will be able to more regularly update my blog which will allow me to keep entries short.The Peace Corps cautions us against posting blogs that come off more like war stories than of the reality of the situation. My goal here is not to glorify my experiences or to paint an only rosy picture but instead to share with you an honest assessment of my personal experience and perceptions. My “war stories” here are not intended to be a criticism of the people or culture but instead an honest description of my personal challenges in overcoming a life far different from what I am accustomed to. In truth, short of a confused stomach and exhaustion both which are expected, I am happy and healthy here. I miss you all greatly but the love and support from all of you back home have kept me going through those moments of self-doubt.