Thursday, February 24, 2011

All the way to Timbuktu (almost)

It’s an exciting time in Benin! Presidential elections begin March 6. Many people have their radios tuned to hear candidate’s speeches and election news. One of the top candidates even arrived here this weekend to campaign, though he was 4 hours late and I had already gone home. There is a primary round of votes (March 6) in which all candidates are narrowed down to two, followed by a second election a couple weeks later in which a winner is chosen. There are over 200 political parties in Benin (which I believe is more than the number of politicians), so you can imagine how many individuals are in the first round of elections.

As Peace Corps volunteers there is a whole slew of things we are not supposed to do during this time, including have political conversations with friends, work partners, or, and I quote, “people you meet in bush taxis.” We cannot support in any way any candidate. And, as an added measure of security, for the week preceding each election day we are on “standfast,” which means we can’t leave our village for any reason. Most people in my village think the incumbent, Yayi Boni, will be reelected (information they volunteered; I in no way asked ☺).
The first two weeks of February I took the last vacation of my service. Every year Mali, a center of culture and music in West Africa, holds two of the region’s largest music festivals. One we can’t attend because it is in Timbuktu (did any of you actually know where Timbuktu was before reading this?), an area off limits to PC volunteers because of recent violence and, if I understand correctly, fears that Al Qaeda has strongholds in that area. The other is called “Festival Sur le Niger” held in Segou, Mali, which I was lucky enough to attend! Sadly a full half of the vacation was spent on buses, in bush taxis, and otherwise on the road. I first took an 8 hour bus to the north of Benin, which broke down several times and had to be push started (I kid you not) at one point. I’m thinking of making Africa-inspired motivational posters like those you see all over in America: “Success.” “Determination.” This one would read “Teamwork.” Anyway, after the bus then two taxis to get to the city in which we could find taxis going to Ouagadougou. Thankfully volunteers live in each town along the way so we could break up our trip and visit the posts of volunteers I don’t often get to see.

The taxi to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso (no, I’m not making these places up) left Benin at 3am. We crossed the Benin border around 5am but oddly didn’t enter Burkina Faso until maybe 45 minutes later. All the borders we crossed were like that: you’d leave one country then wouldn’t enter another for many kilometers. Bizarre. In Ouagadougou we stayed at a PC transit house and got to spend the evening with Burkina volunteers who were fairly new and bursting with enthusiasm about their posts. In Burkina, very few volunteers end their service early, 30% of volunteers extend their service for a third year, and there are even a handful of fourth year volunteers. It was refreshing to see, especially since Benin loses at least one volunteer a month and disillusions many to development work. We continued on with day-long bus rides to Bobo, Burkina Faso, then to Segou, Mali, where we found that our tent reservation for the music festival had not been kept. Thankfully they offered us lodging on a boat that sounded pretty shady but ended up being amazing. The main festival stage was on the water, and the boat sat just behind it. They gave our group of 8 one dorm room to ourselves. We didn’t even have to leave the boat to enjoy the music, but since we were behind the stage we missed the colorful costumes and unique dances when we did that.

The food in Mali blew me away. They had French fries, salads, and kebabs available on the street! You would never see that in Benin. Sometimes we have meat on sticks but it always has bone chips in it and half is guaranteed to be intestines. But beer and alcohol was twice as expensive as it is in Benin, I guess on account of its being a hugely Muslin country. I’ll take my intestines-on-a-stick and $1 beer any day.

There were many Mali volunteers in Segou for the festival, so again we got to hang out with a lot of Americans and compare experiences. I got a chance to talk to the Peace Corps director of Mali who was a volunteer in my site about 20 years ago. Small world! I guess there aren’t too many crazies who join Peace Corps. The 5-day festival had events all day long (with a siesta from noon to 3pm, obviously), ranging from puppets to dances to drumming and singing from all over West Africa. We spent most mornings shopping the artisan stalls, where painted calabash bowls, camel-skin and leather jewelry, hand-dyed fabrics, and a wide variety of jewelry, natural remedies, fabrics, and souvenirs were sold. The men in our group all bought turbans and by the end of the week had perfected the art of wrapping them. I like to think how many ignorant Americans would be horrified at the idea that US tax dollars went to teaching a PC volunteer to wrap a turban. Evenings were spent at the concerts, where some of the biggest names in West African music performed (not that I knew of any of them). I saw more of a variety of instruments than I’ve ever seen, like the kora (below) and the balophone, a xylohphone-like instrument that has hollowed out gourds under the keys.


During the course of the festival we made friends with a group of Toaureg men who, in addition to wanting to sell us their handmade silver jewelry, seemed interested to just spend a few hours talking to Americans. They have an interesting culture and seemed to me to be a dichotomous people. They were at once sophisticated and yet very traditional. The have arranged marriages but say it is to ensure future generations of full-blooded Touaregs to carry on their culture; they can divorce after having children and marry outside of the Touareg population if they so choose. They have an elaborate style of dress and silver jewelry of a quality and style unparalleled in this part of the world. The two mornings that we spend with them, we sat down on mats in the shade and carried on conversations while one of the younger men prepared tea. Their manner of serving tea is very distinct. Not only do they have just one or two cups, and so those people must finish their tea before the others can partake, but they serve three cups in succession, each tasting different than the other. The first, they say, is bitter like death; the second, tough like life; and the third, sweet like love. The entire time only one man prepares the tea in a tiny teapot over a tiny stove, continuously fanning the flames with a tiny fan, and pours the tea from at least a foot above the cup. He continuously pours the tea into the cup then back into the teapot in order to stir it up. It’s truly an art.

The Touareg are a nomadic people, though this particular group kept a base home outside of Timbuktu and only traveled in camel caravans a few months a year to the salt reserves. They then load up their camels with salt to sell in the city and return to their families with other food staples not available at home. We learned about their dowry system, in which a male’s family pays the bride’s worth in camels. A twelve-camel woman, for instance, is not only beautiful but comes from a good family. While we were there a Touareg took a fancy to one of the volunteers and offered her a meager one camel dowry. She refused.

From Segou we traveled to Mopti, where we met the guide who would take us for three days of hiking into the region known as Dogon Country. The guide was hilarious. He is a favorite guide of Peace Corps volunteers and started/ended every other sentence with “shit, man,” obviously a product of his many exchanges with young Americans. Dogon Country is an incredibly arid region known for its rocky escarpments and stunning views. Atop an escarpment, you can literally see the land transitioning and the Sahara Desert beginning right before your eyes. The hike wasn’t strenuous, a couple hours in the morning and a couple in the evening. It was humbling to see women with huge loads on their heads pass us sprinting up or bouncing down the mountainsides. Each afternoon and evening we stopped at a different village, all of which have guesthouses for travelers. The tourism there is probably a large source of revenue for each village, and it seemed like half the village was implicated in preparing the meals and facilities for us. They wouldn’t know we were coming until we were there, so they’d be scrambling to make lunch or dinner for us as soon as they saw our group approaching. The days were tolerable (it’s the “coldest” time of year there), and the nights were freezing (for people acclimated to unbearable heat 24 hours a day). We slept on rooftops, under the stars, and awoke early to the laughs of children and the screeches of donkeys. Sadly my camera broke as a result of sand getting in the lens, so I have no pictures to share with you!

The trip back was eventful. The road from Mopti to Ouagadougou was closed to PC volunteers due to security threats. We instead had to backtrack and make a 4-day trip out of getting back to Benin. The unfortunate part was that since we couldn’t take the direct road, which had buses, we had to settle for taxis from one town to another til we finally got past the Burkina border. We ended up in one town at night and, hoping to continue and not sleep in the taxi station, rented a taxi to take us to the border. Instead he took us about halfway, then, at 3am, stopped. He planned to start again at daybreak but we were uneasy and unhappy and being misled, and insisted on him continuing. He finally did, and we made it til about 25 km from the border, where we waited from 5am til noon to find a taxi that would take us. When one would, after much persisting because he thought foreigners would take too long in visa control and delay him, we sat with goats tied up at our feet. There was nowhere to put your foot that wasn’t on a goat’s body part. Getting back after that was a series of early morning or all night buses. We didn’t get a full night’s sleep for I don’t even know how many days. Long trip, but worth it ☺
The more I see of West Africa, the more I understand it to be at once so diverse and yet, have common threads throughout. I suppose that’s like the US—there are huge differences between the West Coast, South, Midwest, and East Coast, but somehow we all identify with many traits of being American. I could see the change in mud house structure and design as we continued north, but they were still mud houses. Mali and Burkina Faso were overflowing with donkeys and had less goats than Benin, but there was still livestock running through the streets. Burkinabes and Maliennes spoke less French than the Beninese (owing to widespread local languages in the former, whereas the local languages in Benin change every few villages), but they were as welcoming and amiable as we knew West Africans to be.

Life in Zè is exactly the same as I left it. My latrines are nearing completion though we have a few that are at a standstill. The diggers dug only 8 meters on several latrines then led my work partners to believe they had dug all 10, and collected the pay. So now we have no more money to pay more diggers but families who, understandably, want the 10 meter hole that their neighbors got. On top of that, many people don’t see the point of putting a fence or building of some kind around their latrine. It’s not a health problem, because the latrine pits have concrete covers to keep insects out and odors contained. It’s more just a problem of privacy, but that doesn’t seem to be compelling enough for them to thatch together some palm fronds and put them up. This is a time when I’m glad I’m not fluent in my local language, and someone else has to have the “Why do you want to poop in other people’s view?” conversation with these families.

My next big project is a career panel for International Women’s Day. It’s going swimmingly except for the fact that one of the women I invited, a primary school director, I later found out is accused by her community of killing her two former husbands with voodoo spells (gri gri). If I uninvited her, I might be the focus of such gri gri, so I’ll have to keep her on and hope the girls actually ask her questions and applaud her, as I’ve been led to believe they might not. I have 5professional women coming in total and the 50-60 high school girls with the highest grades will be invited. International Women’s Day in March 8. I’ll post a blog about it after the event.

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