Oh 2010...

I’ve been bad about blogging lately but have a good excuse. The last two weeks I’ve been in the capital city, Porto Novo, with other volunteers for mid-service training. I never wrote on the New Years here so I’ll give a recap:
Many people ring in the new year with a midnight mass then dance and sing afterwards til the wee hours. I opted to save my energy for the next day so for the first time that I can remember I slept through the stroke of midnight. I went to mass the next morning but apparently the fun people were sleeping. I spent the afternoon at the mayor’s house, where the kids ran around, the women cooked, and the men watched TV, ate, and drank. I was promised dancing but when I was there the women were hard at work crushing peppers, onion, and tomatoes and cooking goat, chicken, plantains, and rice over traditional three stone stoves. Later in the day kids get dressed up and go house to house eating families’ leftovers. Kinda like trick-or-treating. Kids of well off families and adults are not supposed to do this, however, and if they do they lose respect. I ended the day sitting with my friend and her kids, laughing and spooning out leftover portions to kids who came by. Much more low key than I had anticipated but much enjoyed nonetheless.
The entire month of January Beninese visit family and friends in other villages and make trips to the village they grew up in, usually their father’s village. To the repertoire of greetings is added “Kudo Whey” or “Bon Fete.” January 10 is the big voodoo holiday here and though we were in Porto Novo for training my friend Kara’s lives just 15 minutes outside the city so we were able to see her village celebrate. For most of the afternoon and evening people stand in a big circle, older women dressed in a mélange of fabric strips fashioned around their upper arms and waists. The entertainment is the zangbetos, which you may or may not remember is a big haystack looking creature that is central to the voodoo tradition. The zangbeto is said to come from the sea and has two responsibilities: patrolling the streets at night and providing entertainment for voodoo celebrations. The Beninese believe there is no man under all that hay. Each village or neighborhood has it’s own zangbeto so there were a few there that day. They mostly dance and charge the crowd, at which point everyone at that corner runs in fear. You aren’t supposed to touch it, especially if you’re a woman, but the zangbeto actually approached our group of 4 Americans in the middle of his act and told us we could take pictures with him if we gave him some money. I can only imagine what a nonhuman mobile giant haystack spends his money on.
The two weeks in Porto Novo were like a much needed vacation: TVs with CNN, rooms with ceiling fans, showers (cold, but I’ll take it), many foods we hadn’t seen in months like salad and beef, and, best of all, American company. I definitely regressed in my French and Fon but that’s a small price to pay. The trade off was a hellish 8am to 6pm schedule every day but Sunday. I realize that is a normal work week for many Americans but it’s hard to adjust to such a slow-paced society as Benin and, as we’re seeing, even harder to adjust back. Our training covered HIV/AIDS education, designing and implementing projects, applying for funding, seed collecting and planting, and potential and difficulties at each respective post. We alternated between expensive ($5) meals of steak and mashed potatoes with cheap ($0.20) meals of rice and beans so as to not blow our entire monthly allowance in a week, and between nights together sampling West African brews on the roof of our hotel (which did not have a ledge and, in hindsight, was a really stupid idea) and low-key nights watching episodes of Arrested Development, The Office, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from people’s external hard drives. One particularly awesome night we watched the first of Benin’s games in the Africa Cup (soccer, for those who don’t know). One of the outside bar/restaurants in town set up a projector screen and we cheered on our team, Les Ecureuils (The Squirrels), alongside other Beninese (all men, not surprising). The Squirrels are about as intimidating as UCSC’s Banana Slugs, but conveniently it rhymes with “Allez” thus making “Allez, Allez, Allez les Ecureuils!” an awesome cheer. We played Mozambique and tied 2 to 2 but lost a few days ago to Nigeria and are now out of the running.
This last weekend we spent making our way back to each of our villages. I only had 3 or 4 hours to go but many people’s trips took the entire weekend. A big bus traveling with 3 PC volunteers crashed into a semi on Sunday and, though fortunately they are fine, several passengers in the front of the bus died and a Japanese volunteer was in the hospital. That combined with the news of two suicides in my hometown (not people I knew, but horribly sad nonetheless) and the withdrawals from American company have made for a somber last couple days.
Thankfully I have my dad and Jan coming tonight!

My photos!

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I'll be putting pictures up as often as I can, so check periodically!