Ouedeme-Pedah (wed a may pay duh)

As I write my grandparents are throwing my cousin and her fiancé a surprise party. Really sad I’m not there. There will obviously be events and occurrences I miss out on in the next two years, but their wedding is the only one I’m really bummed on. (And the New Moon premiere, of course.) So instead I’m listening to Clair de Lune and having a glass of horrible wine out of a soy milk-/Trader Joe’s soup-like container, and, on top of that, awkwardly hiding it from my host family. I’m afraid they would shun me if they knew I was having a glass (more like a plastic water bottle cut jaggedly in half) of wine, seeing as A, they are not drinkers (refer to my previous posts on their uber-religiousness), and B, I haven’t observed much of a casual, one-can-do-it-alone drinking culture that I associate with wine. So I hide it in my room, like I’m in high school (not that I ever did that, Mom and Dad), even though I am a whole 22 years old and have been of legal drinking age for approximately (exactly) one year and three weeks, which, by the way, makes me the youngest person in my PC class, and a BAMF.

Back to relevant things. This week we had a break from the six-days-a-week class schedule to visit a current volunteer for a few days, see how they live, what projects they’re doing, what their houses are like, and whatnot. I went with 5 other volunteers to a city called Oudeme-Pedah. The ride in and of itself was interesting. There are three types of taxis here: motos, which carry anywhere from one to four adults, many more if there are children, and any amount of baggage that can be held; the 6-person taxi, which is a regular 5 seater car, like the U.S., except that they put 6 people in, not including the driver, and remove the seatbelts, and the gauges don’t work (gas, oil, etc.) which adds to the comfort level; then there is the 9 seater taxi (think bush taxi or tuk tuk) which does not seat any number comfortably and has a wide open back so that it may require an intense tournament of rock-paper-scissors to determine the two individuals who will sit on the seats closest to the road. I sat in between the driver and the tallest guy on the 3 ½ hour ride there, so basically on the emergency brake. And of course all taxis are stick shifts, which compounded the awkwardness.

I lucked out on my visit. Oudeme-Pedah is one of the most beautiful places in Benin and the volunteer we visited happened to have an amazing apartment occupying the second story of the mayor/chief’s house. It was the only second story building in the area (not so safe to do multiple stories with mud bricks), so we had an amazing view of the lake and row upon row of mud houses and tin roofs. This area reminds me a lot of Laos and southern China, some of my favorite places in the world. The weather was perfect and there was a cool breeze all week. Not to mention stunning sunsets and the reflection of the sky in the water’s varying shades of blue and grey and other sappy poetic aspects I’ll leave to my journal.

The lake is beautiful from a distance but horribly dirty up close. Pollution and erosion have seriously dwindled the supply of fish though there are still many fishermen out there in canoes with nets every morning bringing in what they can. The area is very into local religion (voodoo, though its not what you think voodoo is, with the dolls and whatnot). There was drumming and dancing around fires much of the time, including the entire night. They had some pretty efficient shift-changing going on, ensuring that I did not sleep more than one straight hour. One aspect of voodoo is this haystack creature (zambedo) that comes out at night. He’s somewhat of a watchman as I understand, keeper of the night kinda thing. If women see him when he’s out at night it is said that they die soon after, so I think it’s a way of keeping your women in the house. Even though I knows that’s ridiculous, it’s a safe bet to just stay inside and close the blinds to save yourself from the temptation of looking and the scorn of locals. Sometimes he comes out during the day for no other reason than that he’s bored or, most recently, some foreigner is in town and paid to see a “voodoo ceremony.” Some of the voodoo priests/priestesses are distinguishable by white robes. I even saw a few small children, as young as two, in white robes, destined to be priestesses. I’m not sure how they determine that a child will go into that practice but it is certainly determined without consulting them. Some had scarring around their faces and necks also to indicate some sort of local religion importance. The scarring is sometimes hard to look at for us who aren’t used to it. It’s hard for me to see a toddler with scars to indicate familial ties or religious affiliation since they must be cut at a very young age, but for them it is much more akin to circumcision. The child may have no decision, but it is a necessary procedure and better to be done very young. Scarring takes all shapes and patterns; it can be a plus sign on each cheek, twenty tiny vertical lines below the hairline, really anything you can imagine.

Most everything else I have to say will probably continue to confirm your expectations of an African village. Tons of kids were roaming the dirt roads since school is not in session, giving us an audience everywhere we went. Its okay for kids to be naked til a much later age than is appropriate in the U.S., 8 or 10 years old it seems. Most kids were decently fed though all were thin by our standards and some had inflated stomachs like you’ve probably seen on commercials about sponsoring a malnourished child in Africa, characteristic of protein deficiency I think. We spent a lot of time around one such little girl, Dodo, who was three years old but looked and had the mental capacity of a child around 18 months. It was sad to think about how much energy and intelligence my friend Monica’s three-year-old Joseph has in comparison to Dodo. It’s going to be extremely hard once I move to my village and see and play with kids like her on a regular basis. I don’t know how it cannot be personal.

We did a lot of relaxing, napping, reading (I’m on Anna Karenina, love it), and cooking, mostly Beninese meals but we had mac and cheese one night (well as close to it as you can get without refrigerated cheese). I get props from other volunteers for being adventurous with eating the food here, which I legitimately love most of the time. That’s probably not all I’ll get for eating the food if you know what I mean. As far as observing the volunteer’s work, most of what we did was “public relations”: greeting people who are important, checking on people who are ill, visiting village chiefs. This is honestly one of the biggest time commitments of a PCV, especially since when you visit someone they first pass around a cup of water that everyone takes a sip out of, then pass around some sort of alcohol that everyone has to take a shot of (“pour la sante et defendre de la malaria”), then ask about each other’s health, family, friends, their health, and so on. Completely superficial 99% of the time but very necessary. This PCV is coordinating a trash clean up competition between villages, with the winners to be awarded tools, so when we visited many of the chiefs that was the topic of conversation. We didn’t actually discuss details with anyone, most of the “talking” is talking about talking, saying things need to be done and agreeing to do them later. So this was our full day of work: breakfast, a shot of gin with one chief at 11am, lunch, a shot of moonshine and roasted peanuts with another chief at 2pm, a shot of scotch at the last place (he was wealthy to have had scotch), a nap, and dinner. And it is disrespectful to turn anything down one is given. For instance, when we were leaving to go back to the capital one neighbor insisted we stop by for some coco. When we got there he has a dozen kids scaling 40 foot coconut trees, retrieving fruit for his guests, and cutting them open for us to drink out of, then taking the coconuts back and cutting out the meat for us to eat. We each had to eat and drink two entire coconuts, which were huge. Despite the fact that we were all full and I don’t like coconut, and on top of that we were late meeting our ride back, we had to finish each one. Chugging coconut milk is not a good time. I had to pee the entire 3 ½ hour ride thanks to the coconut pusher.