So Benin life is as usual. We had an abrupt transition from the hot dry dusty season to the still-hot, more humid, not as dusty season. For a while our house was coated in dust and we had sore throats and couldn't breathe too well. I can only imagine how much worse it gets in the North. We had a freak rainstorm too, which is completely unusual in January. It makes you wonder, why are things like that happening more and more around the world?
My work is going alright. My Amour et Vie HIV/AIDS team is doing well especially. Though we've had some drama in which two of the members wanted to kick our female member out for not being there enough and for surreptitiously getting married/engaged, and replace her with another girl. They indicated to me that they informed her of this but then she came to my house and I had to break the news to her because she didn't know anything about it! That was embarrassing. Generally people really don't like confrontation here and will go through another person to relay delicate information- like "you're fired"- but having me be the bearer of bad new without me knowing that I have to be that is a pretty poor way of making sure everything works out the way it should. It's just another example of where there are cultural ways of dealing with things that I will just never understand, and they will always cause me problems. Anyway that drama is ongoing and I don't know how it will end.
Another cultural issue surrounds our electricity, which I know I've talked a lot about but I'm coming to see the problem as a cultural misunderstanding. Basically, everytime we get the bill Eric and I try to reason and use logic to convince our neighbor of why we should pay the amount we think we should pay. This never gets through to him. We even have an electricity counter to prove that we use less electricity than we even pay for now! The bill keeps getting higher each month, and this month the neighbor claimed that the electric company raised the price and that's why it's so high. I did the math for him on my cell phone calculator to show that no, the price is the same, it's our consumption that's going up. But even though I can prove that Eric and my consumption hasn't increased, he still wanted us to pay more! I have come to realize that no amount of reasoning will make him think that we should pay less, because we are rich and the rich are supposed to basically subsidize the poor, even if our "poor" neighbors are watching TV and rotting their brains with all that extra electricity! I never realized how much I took the use of reasoning and logic to solve problems for granted, and I never will again.
Anyway, Eric is doing well also and is counting the days until his teaching is done (not many days to go- with strikes and vacations and exams, it seems like he hardly has any teaching). He tried to do a local language club but do to "political" reasons the school told him he can't. Political meaning they think the club is an Aja club and don't want to be encouraging Aja nationalism or something like that. In fact it's a local language literacy club, not exclusive to Aja, but oh well. It's too bad that didn't work out though because it would have been an excellent project. I'd say most people who can read and write decently in French can't do so in their local language. It's just simply not taught. Which is really too bad! People don't think that their local languages are as valuable somehow as French and they don't take pride in them. They need to forget their inferiority complex toward the French.
I'll stop there but here are some funny pictures from our concession.
Pieces of wig and hair weave drying on a brick and an old moto carcass:
Chicken eating a mouse, which I think it killed itself- have you ever heard of that??
Scorpion in our shower. Don't worry it's really small and not very agile, and it's only the second one we've seen in our time in Benin.
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