August 9, 2010
Hard thing to deal with of the day…
What do you do when a girl is crying in the dark on your porch? Ask questions? Console? What if you don’t speak a common language? Sit there awkwardly? Give her back a gentle, hopefully commiserative and consoling, rub? Get her a peppermint stick?
The girl in question is Yvette, or “Yovo” as everyone else calls her, because her skin is a little lighter than most people. She is an “apprentice” to my neighbour, who sells alcohol. So apparently she is learning the business, but mostly, she is a slave. Not that this is at all unusual or illegal here, I just know how much work she does and how little anyone pays her any kindness at all. I attempt to be sympathetic, but when I don’t speak Gun and she doesn’t speak French how much can I do? Mostly I sneak her food, usually something tasty with some protein in it.
August 3, 2010
Hopefully the pictures upload with this…
So a lot has happened since my last post. Let’s start at the beginning.
The Peace Corps did eventually figure out what was wrong with me. It was my gall bladder. At the time I wondered what exactly my gall bladder was and why it made me think I was dying. Why did it make me up-chuck my very tasty (and expensive) lasagne all over the med unit? Well, it turns out that I had a very sizable stone hanging out in there. It took three days in what is (apparently) the best hospital in Benin to confirm what my friend Antonio diagnosed in about ten minutes. A note about Beninese hospitals: DON’T GO THERE! They don’t know how to put in an IV and as a result a month later I still have a bruise on my hand (that’s right- they put an IV in the back of my hand). You know how when you throw up a bunch you are supposed to get IV fluids? Well, they did that- but in Benin IV fluid comes in glass bottles. I thought that only happened in movies about the thirties, forties and fifties. The pain medication that they gave me (which didn’t work very well) also came in a glass bottle- but it was a powder that you had to add saline to and then shake up. I will say this, I did have round-the-clock observation, but with a few African twists. For example: one of the nurses that stayed overnight with me had some scrub pants. On the back pocket of these scrub pants it said “I danced my pants of at Alexandria’s Bat Mizpha”, oh Africa. I was also in the ‘Presidential’ Suite of the ER- it had a flat screen TV (that wasn’t plugged in) and an electric bed (also not plugged in). The Beninese doctors wanted to do surgery right there and then, but the Peace Corps doesn’t allow that (thank God!), so it was a question of where and when I would get medivaced (medically evacuated). I got sent to South Africa.
South Africa in the lead-up to the World Cup is a crazy thing. It’s also cold as hell (it’s winter in the southern hemisphere). My second thought (after damn its cold) was ‘Wow, this looks just like Southern California’. Not just the landscape, but also the highways and the houses and the shopping malls and, well, the first-worldliness of it. The Peace Corps puts medivacs in The Rose Guest House, which is pretty much the nicest place I’ve ever stayed in, even if there is a little too much chintz for my taste. One of the best things about being on medivac was that I got to meet and live with other PCVs from all over Africa. When I was there everyone was there for fairly urgent (read: surgical) things because the Peace Corps was holding back everyone else, if they could, because of the World Cup. It is so interesting to talk to everyone and compare and contrast the differences between region and country. For example it seems that West Africans are a lot more friendly and open than East Africans and that West Africa is a lot less developed than East Africa. Of course these are some gross generalizations, but from talking with the other girls that seems about right. It was also a happy accident that we all got along great (with one exception- and she wasn’t there long) and could break up into different groups whichever way and it was all good. This was also great when we did what little sightseeing that we could.
The most expensive (totally worth it!) thing that we did was go to Ukeltula (sp?) lion park. Since we were there a couple of weeks before the World Cup actually started, the 6 of us got our own (really adorable) tour guide and we got to get REALLY CLOSE to lions. We got to feed babies and pet adolescents and just generally see things that you could never see in the wild. There were tigers too. It was amazing. See the pictures they say everything. The other wild life thing that I got to do was go on a hike with Dr.Cedric (one of the Peace Crops docs). He took us all to a wildlife park, which reminded me of a big state park at home, and we hiked around and saw Zebras, Impala and Giraffes, which was really, really cool, again because we could get really close to the animals because we were on foot instead of in a car or even on a bike. The last thing that I got to see was the Apartide Museum, which was both sobering and really well done. We were there for about 5 hours and I probably could have spent another 5 there. I have known about apartide and what it was in an academic sense since I was in high school but to be there and really see what it meant to people in South Africa at that time and also just the absolute absurdity of all of it was really amazing. For example that everyone had an assigned race. Ok, not surprising but what is surprising is that there were over 60 racial classifications and a person could protest to a judge and have your race changed. I mean if that doesn’t tell you that race is a totally objective classification I don’t know what does. The section of the museum that I did scoff at was the part about “coloured” children’s education under apartide. 60 to 80 kids in a class, hardly trained and underpaid teachers, administrators who steal from the school funds, kids walking 30 miles to school, not enough desks/supplies/books/teachers/classrooms. I’m sure if you are a reader of my blog you can see why I scoffed. It pretty much sounds like the rest of Africa right now. The reason it is unacceptable in South Africa is that just a few mile away from these typically African schools there are American or European quality public schools where only the white kids were allowed to go. South Africa was an interesting place because even though aparthide is over now there is still that paradox of you can go from a place that looks like the US to a place that looks like Benin in about ten minutes. I mean I know that there are slums and projects and whatever at home, I’ve seen them, but I’ve never seen a true shanty town until I came to Benin and to think that there exists a country where all of that exists is really weird.
About the surgery: WARNING; NOT FOR THE WEAK STOMACHED Do you know what a gall bladder does? Yeah, I didn’t either. Here’s how my awesome doctor in South Africa explained it to me. So your liver makes bile (yeah- I didn’t know that either) to help you digest food. It squirts bile on food as it goes to your stomach. So, when your liver makes to much bile, it puts the extra in your gall bladder, so that when you eat something that is hard to digest (like something really greasy) both your gall bladder and you liver squirt bile all over it, the more bile the easier it is to go down. OK, so now that you know what it does I’m going to tell you what happened to mine. So the bile that was chillin’ in my gall bladder decided to crystallize. Now, everybody has some crystals in their gall bladder, but what happened to me was that the crystal got really, really big., mine was the size of a golf ball. I got to keep it. It’s pretty cool. I like to show it off. So when they took out the stone they also took out the whole gall bladder, because if you make a stone once then you will probably make another one, so…
South African hospitals (at least the private one that I was in) are awesome. I woke up from surgery and there was a tiny little woman with a tea trolley saying “Would you like some tea dear? And a biscuit?” (Me: “Yes, please!”) Of course she asked first in Afrikaans, which, when you are on morphine and also coming off anaesthetic can sound an awful lot like English with a funny accent. Pretoria, which is the capital of South Africa (not Johannesburg or Cape Town!), is in an Afrikaans part of South Africa, so the first language that everyone speaks to you is Afrikaans. I think that the Peace Corps should have a big rubber stamp to put on the forehead of every volunteer going into the hospital “I AM AMERICAN”, that way they know that you only speak English. Anyway, after my terrible 3 day stay in the hospital in Benin it was awesome to have a 2 day stay in the hospital in South Africa, with real beds that were comfortable and nurses in these crazy uniforms that make them look like flight attendants from the 80s and food that was actually good (and I got to pick what I wanted!). I’ve never stayed overnight in the hospital in America before but I suspect that it is similar.
I was very happy that even though I had a gastro-intestinal surgery that I could still pretty much eat whatever I wanted, because the food in South Africa was awesome. Not only did the guest house we stayed at have free (made to order) breakfast, but you can pretty much get any food that you can get in America in South Africa (with the exception of Mexican food). We ate well, everyday. I also went to 4 movies “Date Night”, which was hilarious, “Iron Man 2“, which I thought was better than the first one, “Sex and the City 2”, which had a negligible plot but I can forgive that because it was pretty, and “Killers”, which was far better than I expected it to be. I was really excited about the movies, because I love the movies. I love to watch movies in the theatre and have that connection, if only for a moment, of sharing laughter or sadness with total strangers. There is something wonderfully humanistic about it. Unfortunately, there is nary a movie theatre in Benin. I hear that there is one in Lagos, but I’m not allowed to go there so the closest movie theatre to me in in Ghana, on the other side of Togo. We also spent A LOT of time at the mall, like 13 year old girls. I didn’t buy much except a sweater, slippers that I could wear all the time, and a new hard drive because my other one was full, and groceries to bring back. One of my favourite things that I got was a full mani/pedi and a leg/bikini wax, I actually got down to the real colour of the skin on my feet! I’m not as tan as I think I am, it’s just that the dirt takes a while to come off (or in this case some paraffin wax).
For the third time in my life, I have “accidentally” found myself in a country that was having the World Cup, and once again, I did not go to any games. It was fun to be there for all the excitement though, even if I HATE those fucking vuvuzellas. (Those big horn things that they blow) I’m sure that I would be ok with them in a soccer stadium, but I was really no happy with people blowing them in enclosed spaced like shopping malls.
So, after 3 depressing weeks in Cotonou and 3 amazing weeks in South Africa I returned home, to Benin and to my village. I got back the week after my students had taken all their exams, so I had just enough time to calculate all of their grades before I took girls to Camp GLOW.
Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), as I think most of you know, is a camp for girls to encourage them to be leaders in their communities and also to stay in school, and all that good stuff. Girls here fight for so much. They are not as encouraged in their studies as boys, and when I say not encouraged, I mean that the moment they get home from school they are working taking care of their younger siblings, cooking, cleaning, carrying water, everything you can think of. By the time they have the opportunity to get to their homework they often cant do it because there is no electricity and their parents wont let them us the expensive kerosene lanterns. They get hit on and put down by boys at school and even their professors and are often sexually active as soon as they hit puberty, sometimes sooner. So, Camp GLOW is much more than a summer camp. Yes, it’s the chance that for the girls to be kids and have fun for a week, but they also are given the ideas and incentive that there is something outside their village, something to aspire to. We brought in professional women to talk to the girls both about staying in school and about how to succeed. There were sessions about sexual health, contraception, gender roles in society, fiscal planning, malaria, health issues, and computers but also sports, arts and crafts, a trip to a museum and just the time to play and laugh and be with other girls. I have to say that I also had a really good time, playing games and singing songs that I learned at camp and also watching the girls become more and more active as the week went on.
After a week back at post, doing nothing, as I am on summer break, I went to Cotonou to meet the new incoming soon-to-be volunteers. Granted, they were a little shell-shocked and apparently some of them see “pain in [our] eyes” but mostly they seem like a good bunch and I cant wait to get to know them more during their training. I am not actually a trainer, but as the 2-month training is taking place in Porto-Novo and I live not even an hour outside Porto-Novo I can safely say that I will be there a few times while they are there. Also, when they get their post assignments (the 6th of August) I will be really excited to get to know my new post-mate. I know that my current post-mate is being replaced and I also believe that I am getting at least one more from TEFL and maybe another from another sector as well.
As I am on vacation, I took a little (12 hour) trip to Kandi. Kandi is way up north in Benin, about 4 hours from Niger. There was an English Camp that one of the volunteers there organized and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to get up north without taking vacation time. Kandi was really nice. At this time of year it is cool and it is always dry (unlike my village is which is always wet and humid) and the workstation there was really cozy, like a family home. It was nice to relax and hang out with other volunteers. We watched movies and cooked and read a bunch of books. They tell me that Nattitangu is even better, so I have to get there sometime. Camp was really great too, because there were not too many kids in our classes and the kids that were there wanted to be there and were generally the best students from the different CEGs in Kandi. It was a day camp, so in the morning we did English class and then in the afternoon health and environment volunteers would do sessions in the afternoon and then arts and crafts and games.
That about brings you all up to date on my life in Benin. Other than yesterday I got some shelves delivered, one big one with lots of little shelves for all my odds and ends in the kitchen and then one just one shelf in my shower area. Woo Hoo. No, really, I’m really excited about the ones in the kitchen especially because there really wasn’t a place for storage for anything where I could really see it. So I would forget that I had all these amazing things that got sent to me (thank you very much everyone who sends things to me!) so I wouldn’t use them. So getting shelves was like getting packages over again.
