Rising food prices

Hi All- We are in Cotonou now. We're doing quite well. I have a lot of work to do now but thought I'd write a short post to the blog.
The school year was supposed to end on May 26th. This got changed to May 9th, which would result in only 2 weeks of class between our 3rd and 4th(final) exams. The end date is as far as I know now the 26th, but I'm sure that will change.
The other day I was talking to a student I tutor. His parents work in Nigeria and send money back home. Well, they did until January, when food prices started rising. I hadn't really noticed rising prices in Benin, but according to the student they rose about a month ago.
Corn, the staple food here, used to cost 100CFA ($0.20, which by my estimate is the equivalent of $4) per measure (which I think is about 1kg). He would spend ~100CFA a day for food. Now corn costs 350CFA, down from its peak of 475CFA. Beans went from 150CFA to 600CFA and have stayed there. He depends on his neighbors for help, but they can't afford to help him too much any more, so he's been pretty hungry. We're employing him for gardening work, but this is only a temporary solution for one person and this problem is facing anyone who survives on less than say, 450CFA($1)/day (if living alone, less if in a family), which is most people here it seems. Quite depressing.

A long awaited update

It's been quite a while since I last wrote. I haven't been to Cotonou since the all-volunteer conference and to be honest I'm happy to have the break from being in Klouekanme. The past month and a half has been pretty eventful and somewhat stressful.

I'll start with my work situation. I've been meeting with my NGO and our main project now is establishing a trash collection and recycling program in the town. I might have mentioned that the central area of town is cleaned by women's groups who are employed by the mayor's office (I'm not sure if they are paid or not though) and they burn the trash after they sweep it into piles. What my NGO wants to do is hire some young men to pick up this trash and instead of burning it they would bring it to a site where we could sort it, compost the biological waste, knit with the salvageable plastic bags, and dispose of the remaining trash somewhere. In the future we hope to get a tariff system for trash pickup at people's homes, but I'm not sure how far we'll get with that. Our long term goal is to build a sort of recycling center, which would be a building with areas for making compost, washing and knitting plastic bags, selling our products, and holding classes on waste management and such. If we actually get this project rolling I think the recycling center is feasible. If I left Benin having established a successful waste management project and recycling center, I will be very content with my service!

Some downsides to my work: first, people at work seem to assume I know more than I do or that I understand the way the system works here better than I actually do. For example, they want me to write a schedule for my work for the next three or so months. I asked for some guidance on this because frankly I don't know how I can write in dates and places for things I'm going to be doing in a month, even a week, because things are always subject to change and I still don't even know exactly where the NGO wants me to be working, or what they want me to do with the other women's groups who aren't involved in the trash collection project! So I feel lost sometimes. Another problem I've been having is that for events that happen at the NGO, I am often warned at the last minute or not told at all that they are going on. A month ago there was a meeting to launch a project to stop child trafficking that my NGO is working on. At 8 AM on the day of the launch, my work partner came to my house and told me that we have a big meeting really soon- no advanced warning! It turned out that at the meeting I was to represent the American Embassy, who gave my NGO a huge grant, because I am an American I guess. Thus I was to sit on the stage with all the other bigwigs who were speaking at this event. My work partner assured me I didn't have to speak at all. Well, about four hours later after innumerable speeches, my NGO boss asked me if I wanted to say anything. I of course said I hadn't prepared anything (and I couldn't really make up something on the spot about a project I'm not even involved with) and my boss responded that, well, next time I had to say something. This made me feel rather bad and angry that I was a) not told in advance about the meeting, b) nobody told me I was the US embassy rep for this event and therefore c) I had no idea I was expected to speak until the moment my supervisor asked me to! This is frustrating mainly because I felt like my boss was disappointed in me for something I couldn't have helped and that I was sort of used in this situation.

So my work situation has been good and bad but has definitely caused me some stress. We've also had some stressful situations at home lately. The biggest thing is due to the cursed mango tree next to our house. As you know kids throw rocks at the tree to get the fruit down and they often hit our house or land in our backyard, causing us to fear being outside sometimes. Well, a few weeks ago I was in the backyard drying mangoes and suddenly a mango bounces off our roof and comes about three inches from knocking me on the head. I looked up and saw a guy in the tree shaking mangoes down- yet the tree doesn't overhang our house so he must have thrown that mango that nearly hit me in order to get another mango down, or something like that, and his aim was bad. Who knows. Anyway, I was so fed up with this situation that Eric and I went out and screamed at the people in the tree and all the neighbors showed up. The people in the tree- neighbors mostly- came down and were just laughing at us as we were yelling. And the other neighbors kept saying “you shouldn't get mad”. Both of these things made me SO angry, as if the situation weren't serious to them at all. I was on the verge of tears and being laughed at didn't help me feel any better. Finally our neighbor who is sort of the leader of the concession said he'd go in the tree and shake all the mangoes down so nobody was tempted to try to get them with rocks or otherwise. Of course this didn't solve things and in the following weeks there were still plenty of kids trying to get mangoes, but it worked well enough. But this situation left me with some discomfort toward our neighbors. We are constantly afraid of offending them because we don't know what will bother them and they won't ever tell us directly. So we feared that this whole mango ordeal would make them think that we are tyrants who don't want them to eat their own mangoes and who only talk to them when we are angry. Because the times we talk to them most are definitely when we are angry!

The other big neighbor-related event that has caused us grief lately is that we received a 24,000 franc electricity bill, roughly $50, an astronomical amount of money for the amount of lights and appliances we have here. Eric and I are convinced that the electricity company is doing something wrong, they claim that we didn't pay our bill in October in November and that this charge is included in the most recent bill (side note: we didn't see our first power bill until around January. Before that we thought our NGO and the school were paying for our bill as part of their agreement with Peace Corps. Then our neighbor told us he paid our bills for October and November since we were new and wanted to be nice. And now that the electricity company says we haven't paid for those months, the neighbor can't seem to decide whether he told us he paid or not, and switches between the two claims!). However this amount is way too large even for that. But our neighbor hasn't involved us at all in the process to fix the situation although he said he would so Eric and I are extremely frustrated.

It's my impression that people here, when faced with such a situation, often just grin and bear it rather than raise an issue. We were told that a house down the street received a similarly large bill and just paid it, without really asking any questions. Partly I think this is to avoid conflict. But Eric and I also realized that a lot of people don't even know how to read a power bill. That's a modern thing in this not modern world, especially when so many people are illiterate and even more are largely innumerate. I've gotten the sense that our neighbor thinks Eric and I are really smart because we can read and understand the electricity bill and explain it to him. So why doesn't he let us help him?!

A big development in our concession has been the birth of two babies! The first baby is the child of the neighbor I was just discussing and his wife- the one I got to name. She cries a lot and looked sickly at first but is growing well. People treat infants so differently here than at home- first, they don't hold their necks and they often pick them up by one arm and bounce them around and kind of shake them if they are crying to soothe them. In my opinion this is reckless but what can I say? They also give tea infusions and water to the baby when it is “thirsty” or has a “stomach ache” (meaning when the baby is crying!) which really scares me because who knows what parasites are in that water. And they give it honey to make it intelligent. I tried diplomatically to tell them that breast milk is the absolute only thing the baby needs, but to no avail. I just hope the baby is ok. The other baby was born to another neighbor. That happened only a few days ago and apparently it was a hard birth that resulted in a C-section, so I hope baby and mother are alright. It's sad but the incidence of infant and mother death here are so high that one can't help but worry a great deal.

Moving on from neighbors. I've finally been able to start my garden! Tom (postmate) and I even built a fence for it with teak saplings that we had to go and cut down (from a teak plantation, not a natural forest!) because that's what you build out of here. We of course had plenty of “help” from the numerous children who swarm any time you are doing something interesting- actually they “help” by crowding around you and giving you no space to work while each tries to get their hand in the task, but it's cute nonetheless. Anyway things have already begun to grow! Unfortunately I think I'll be on vacation when much of it is ready for harvest, but it's a fun experience still and it's nice to have a real hobby to occupy my time. I've also been drying mangoes and they are delicious!

What else has been going on... I got to go up to my friend's house near Dassa in the center of Benin last weekend. It's gorgeous up there- lots of hills to hike up and lush vegetation. The people are also so much more easygoing than they are down in the south (our region is known especially for its aggressive, in-your-face character) and it was nice to be able to walk around without hearing “yovo” or being asked for money from kids or accosted by people wanting to talk to a foreigner. I got to hike up one of the hills where local people fled when the Fon ethnic group were selling people into the slave trade. There are remnants of houses up there and down below I posted a picture of these little pools that are the result of women crushing their corn by grinding it between the rock face and a small rock pestle-type thing. That's pretty neat. The whole trip made me a little homesick because it reminded me of going hiking back in Oregon! Oh an embarrassing story from the trip: up north there are many cashew trees and the cashew apple, the fruit to which the cashew nut is attached, is really tasty. So my friend picked one for me to try, pulling off the nut part. I ate the apple, but then was curious about the nut. I have seen the process of extracting cashews and know that it requires roasting the nut and taking off the shell in an arduous process, but I wanted to see what the raw cashew nut looked like inside of its shell. So I bit into the shell, trying to pry it open with my teeth. Suddenly my lips started burning and my tongue felt numb, and my mouth felt like it has some sticky varnish or glue all over it. I threw the nut away and we went home and I washed up but still had a burning mouth. We looked up the cashew tree in my friend's encyclopedia and it turns out that the cashew tree is related to poison ivy!! So I basically put poison ivy on my mouth, and even days after the incident my lips are peeling awfully and blistery. You know I will never eat something again from a tree without knowing it's safe! It was embarrassing but also extremely funny.

One more interesting thing that's happened to us: we've realized that a lot of people, both young and old, do not realize the world is round here. A few weeks ago we were talking to a guy who has traveled a lot in West Africa and is very curious about the world (although he holds some strange stereotype, such as the one that Russians eat bananas with the peels on, and so forth). We were showing him our Atlas, specifically the world map page, and he remarked that to get from China to San Francisco you must go up around the top of the map- as if you could literally go up the coast of Russia and go left on a world map, coming down on the West coast of Canada to SF. We told him that no, you just go right on the map and end up on the left. We soon realized that he didn't know the world is a globe; he knew it was "round" but didn't have a conception of what that means. I subsequently drew a world map on an orange- a very strange moment in my life. This was a revelation to our friend. We also later had a similar encounter with one of Eric's students. It makes realize that we take so much of our learning for granted- understanding maps and globes, among so many other things. Plus they have no materials here- most kids don't have the books and you know the schools have no maps, globes, ABC charts, photos of other places and other people, etc. We are so lucky in the West that even if we can't visit places and know what they and their people are like, we can at least have some knowledge about the world outside of our own bubble.

I don't have much more to write and I've probably already exhausted you. Life goes on as normal. We are making progress teaching people not to call us yovo, getting read for the torrential rains that characterize the rainy season, and just trying to feel at home in a foreign world. Hopefully I'll be able to write soon. In the meantime, I'll leave you with some pictures!

First, here I am with Tom, bringing back 5 freshly cut young teak trees from about a mile away on our bikes. There was a huge rainstorm in the middle of our search so we wheeled these logs (which are really heavy by the way) through some intense mud and garnered many stares from people.


Here's the garden area before it had a fence:

Fence building in process (notice all the kids crowding around to help Tom)


Here I am mashing up yams in a gigantic mortar to make "yam pile", one of our favorite Beninese foods . The yams turn into a sortof sticky ball and you usually eat it with peanut sauce. This is REALLY hard work! I only did it for the photo op, I'm not strong enough to do it all!


This is a view from the hill that I hiked up with the volunteer I visited near Dassa.

A view of the little pools formed from years of crushing corn in the rocks. Also the rocks in the background are naturally like that- apparently a Japanese tourist asked Debra (my friend) who put them there because it was "great art" or something like that.


Finally, here is a picture of a large quantity of peanut butter we commissioned from someone. No more handmade peanut butter from me! I am thankful for that. This is a few gallons, at least. It cost us about $9 and it's delicious. It's so nice that you can get such things made!