Sheena and Eric in Benin: June 2008

Hi everyone - I'm in Cotonou with Sheena now as she has told you. School finally ended. I still have to enter all my grades into the official grade book, using blue ink for quizzes and red for averages and exams.
Exams took place last week. The vice-principal found a girl cheating in one of my classes and gave her a 0. I had given her a 0 on the 2nd exam of the year for cheating too. She had a note, and I found 5 people who had copied off it. They swore they didn't cheat, so we talked to the principal. I said I might not give them 0s if I found who wrote the note. The kid who wrote it came up to me said that he wrote it and everyone copied it. In the end, I said either I would give them all 0s and leave it at that (I have made it abundantly clear that any cheating results in a 0), or we could tell the principal who wrote the note and that they all lied to him. Oddly enough the students opted for the latter, so I'll be talking to the principal this Thursday when I get back.
Sheena has told you about most of the other events here, but she hasn't updated you about the 24,000CFA (~$50) electricity bill. We went to the principal of my school to talk to him about the bill. He sent someone to the house who found out that our neighbor had not paid the bill the money we had given him, but rather was just keeping it in a jar or something like that, thus the electric company sent us a bill for everything. The principal's lackey didn't seem to understand the problem here, but the principal did.
Our neighbor assured us and the school that the landlord had paid the huge electricity bill. A week later, our neighbor brought over the new bill. It was 2000CFA (~$4), which is normal compared to what other teachers and Tom pay. Before we were paying 6000CFA bills each month, which was suspiciously large. I think that whatever shady activities our neighbor was up to involving the electricity have ended. Nevertheless, he gave us the bill at 9.30 at night the day before it was due. We said we wouldn't pay until we had shown the bill to the principal, and he was pretty unhappy to let us have the bill.
Sheena went to the electricity company to see what we've paid over the year. It turns out that nothing had been paid, not even the huge bill. We told the principal, he instructed us to get our own counter and say that the school is going to pay our bill. That way we won't make our neighbor angry.
Hopefully we'll get the counter installed soon...

We haven't been to Cotonou in a while. Eric and I are down here now getting our visas ready to go to Madagascar and South Africa. We're flying out of Ghana to save a huge amount of money, so we need to get visas and such. We also dropped some girls off in Porto Novo from Klouekanmé for a girls camp called Camp GLOW- “Girls Leading Our World.” It's a week long camp with information sessions on hygiene, the importance of education, and other life skills to motivate girls to pursue positions of leadership. This is a wonderful thing, as women are still afforded less respect than men (even though they do SO much of the work keeping the house together, among other things) and I hope that the girls get a lot out of it.

A few interesting things have happened since last I wrote. The biggest development in Eric's and my lives is that our postmate Tom is leaving Benin. So very soon we will be the only volunteers in Klouekanmé. Tom hasn't been around a lot in the past few months because he's been working in other villages, so we haven't even really spent too much time with him lately, but it will nevertheless be very strange to know that there is no longer another American-inhabited house in our town. One benefit of his leaving though is that we received all of his furniture, pots and pans, etc. so now we have a new and improved house. We added a huge bookcase, a kitchen table, a big coffee table and even a mattress that we propped up as a couch. So now we have a much more organized, comfortable house. It's pretty posh, I think.

We had a fun going-away party for Tom at Fagla's house (the guy in a nearby village who is very involved in Voodoo rituals and ceremonies). There were six volunteers plus a lot of Beninese people I didn't know. We ate fire-roasted potatoes and vegetables, and the non-vegetarians (everyone but us) ate a slaughtered goat, the slaughtering of which Eric and I were glad to miss. Thankfully the sodabe (local grain alcohol) was not forced upon us like in times past at Fagla's so we came home feeling good. There was entertainment in the form of a troupe of kids dancing Beninese-style to techno music, and a very drunk guy dancing strangely and sensually to American rap music. It was entertaining but the drunk guy was a bit sad, as I think this is normal behavior for him.

Some of our other postmates in nearby villages will be leaving within the next few months as well. I do know that at least one new volunteer will be placed near us when his/her training is over in September, so things should balance out. I'm hoping that I can do a lot of work with the new volunteer, who is supposedly in the health sector, as a lot of my projects overlap with health volunteer work here.

My work has been very up and down lately. When I last wrote, things seemed to be improving at work because we were actually meeting and beginning to plan some projects. Well, I haven't seen my work partners since then and have barely talked to them. I can't say I'm not disappointed, but I am not surprised. The NGO has great intentions but it is difficult to get things going here.

My other work projects though have been pretty good. Eric and I finally got our English club going, and it is quite fun. It's almost all male students. We do activities like reading and discussing stories, having discussions, and playing games. It's very interesting for me, since I don't interact with students much, to see the types of things are easy for people to learn or understand here, the things that interest them etc. For example, I was rather surprised that this group of men (for they are men, since many are older than we are!) found the story “Sleeping Beauty” to be interesting and worthy of discussion (and in terms of vocabulary it was quite good- we got to explain things like “thorny briar hedge” and “spinning wheel”) We also get to help them with vocabulary such as “thick” and “thin,” for which one student made the example “Eric is thin and Sheena is thick” to illustrate. Ha. (I'm not really insulted by this because they didn't mean anything bad, but still I don't really like people's direct references to your weight here, especially when the person they most often compare me with is my very skinny husband!). As for games, we've played boggle and hangman with them. Both games are very difficult for some kids to understand, but one student found words that I didn't even find, which greatly impressed me. I'm very glad to have this opportunity to interact with students who are motivated and interested in what Eric and I can teach them, and of course it is great having a fixed activity to do every week!

I've also tentatively begun Environmental club with a biology professor at the school. There's not much to say about that as we've only had one meeting thus far, since we started pretty much right before finals and now school is out. I'm afraid the club might be too academic and not really fun for the kids because the biology teacher seems to want it this way. I guess we'll see next year how that goes.

Besides the clubs I've been doing my usual meetings with women's groups. I did some more mud stove and moringa demonstrations. And soon I'll be teaching a group how to make tofu! I love working with women's groups because it's so nice to see women trying to improve their lives by learning new skills, and they really appreciate the work I do with them. To show this they give me lots of gifts of fruit and food!

I've been doing a lot of gardening in my free time, and I'm very proud of the outcome. I have: eggplant, tomatoes, basil, onions, carrots, sunflowers, okra, corn, cucumbers, beans, and some cool-weather crops: arugula, peas, and broccoli. Miraculously everything grew and we've already had some edible things! We ate some delicious green beans the other day, and today we are going to eat an enormous cucumber. There is even edible arugula, which delicious. Soon we'll have okra and tomatoes, and sunflowers, which are already taller than Eric! Seeing the progression from the beginning stages when there was nothing but a pile of crappy dirt to the verdant paradise (I think so!) that my garden is now has been really rewarding for me. And people in the community also think it's really cool. Our neighbors help me all the time and love planting things, and some of Eric's students even come over just to look! It's amazing what a very small garden can inspire in people here.

I don't think there is too much else to mention. We are getting ready to go to South Africa and Madagascar in a few weeks! Frankly we desperately need a real break where we can travel freely. Not to mention I think the accommodations and cities are a little nicer where we'll be going than they are here, so we'll be living in luxury. And it will be cold! It's been “cold” here some days since they rainy season has really begun, but it's still hot. Going to a more temperate climate in South Africa will be absolutely delightful.

I'll sign off but leave you with some pictures.

Me holding a mango we were given as a gift, the absolute largest mango I have ever seen as it was almost the size of my head: