A Week in the Life

October 24, 2010

A Week in the Life

So I know that I have described a typical day for me here in Benin, but recently I have decided that there is not so much a typical day for me here so much as a typical week. So I decided to write about the week, day by day and maybe that will give you a better idea about my life here.

Monday.
Monday is one of my long days, I teach for 6 hours from 8-10, 10-12 and 3-5. Today I was totally exhausted because I didn’t teach last week so my sleep schedule went back to my more natural night-owl sleep pattern. It’s not that I am so tired when I am in class, but getting myself to leave the house can be difficult. This week I finally am teaching all of my classes, even if two of them are “les classes volantent”- “flying classes”, meaning that every time we met we have to search for an empty classroom. Finding empty classrooms has been pretty easy up to this point, but mostly just because many of my colleagues have not started teaching yet, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I can still find some empties in a few weeks. Usually, on Monday the whole school has the flag ceremony, at which we all stand around saluting the Beninese flag, singing the Beninese national anthem (I know it now too!) and then having announcements. Today though, by the time the ceremony was supposed to start it was raining cats and dogs so we all kept (mostly) dry in the classrooms. And I tried to keep my class busy even though they couldn’t hear me above the sound of the rain sheeting down onto the tin roof. I also wrote the word “write” up on the blackboard so many times (making a verb chart in 2 classes) that it did that weird thing where the word starts to loose meaning and I second-guess myself as to wither or not it is spelled right.

Tuesday.
Tuesday is my shortest day, I only teach from 8-10 and then I have the rest of the day free. Normally, I go home and do chores, but I promised my classes that I would let them know how much a French-English dictionary would cost, then they could bring me the money and I could by the dictionary on one of my fairly frequent trips to Porto-Novo or Cotonou. So I went straight from school to the bookstore in Porto-Novo and found out that they are between $4 and $5, which is a lot of money to most of my student’s families. That’s about a quarter of what it costs to send a kid to school for a year and about as much as a day laborer makes in a week. So last week I also offered to let the kids come and do chores for me to earn money, for their school fees, a dictionary or just if they want to make some money. While I was in Porto-Novo I also got myself the very healthy lunch of French-fries and Coke and then I got some Blackberry jam at the supermarket. Jam and peanut butter are two of the things that I spend money on because they make my life here so much more pleasant. When I am having a bad day I can have biscuits and jam or toast and pb and it makes life bearable sometimes. I know that seems terribly odd, but hey, it works for me so I keep it in stock. When I got back from P-N I found two of my students waiting on my porch, wanting to work for me. Unfortunately it had just started raining really hard so I had to find something for them to do in my house (at least until the rain stopped). So, they did my dished and swept my house for less than a dollar for both of them and when I gave them the money they looked at me like I was crazy. This was the first time that I have had students work for me and I think it went pretty well.

Wednesday.
Wednesday is another short day. I have one class from 8-10 and then an English department meeting from 10-12. Class was fairly uneventful, except that I noticed that some of the pencil wells in the desks in my classroom were still full of water after it rained so hard yesterday. Boy, am I glad I wasn’t teaching! It’s bad enough when the class can’t hear you, but when they start getting wet all hell breaks loose. The way they react to a little bit of water you would think that they would all melt like the Wicked Witch of the West! Department meetings are fairly pointless and frustrating. My principle is also the head of the English department and since he is busy being the principle and is always running out of the meeting or being called out of the meeting and nobody will continue on without him there tends to be very little that goes on at these meetings. Although today we all did get the chance to coordinate our classes within each grade and decide how far we want to get before the exam, which is scheduled for right before Christmas break. Last year I had one grade-level all to myself so I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, but now that I have two grades I share the 7th grade with one person and the 8th grade with two other people. It was interesting to see how the other 7th grade teacher was really anal about the whole thing- in a very Beninese way. He is making a chart of what we are going to teach week by week and then he will give me a copy of it. The two guys who are also teaching 8th grade were totally the opposite- they were super laid back and we just basically agreed that we would get all of our kids to the same point by the end of the quarter. Oh, that was the other thing that I found out today, the whole Beninese school system has switched from semesters to trimesters, just like that. The other profs don’t know what to think of this and I don’t really either, but I guess we’ll see. The principle told us that and then just moved on. I just thought it could be worse. Like in Rwanda where they switched the whole school system from being in French to being in English the same way- no phase out, no pilot program, nothing, one year school is in French and the next year school is in English, with no warning or anything. I know that cant have gone down so well there if only because I know that it wouldn’t go down so well here.

Thursday.
Thursday is my other long day, same class schedule as Monday, but it always seems longer than Monday does. In the morning I have one 7th grade class followed by an 8th grade class and I noticed for the first time how much bigger my 8th graders are all of a sudden. Last year I had all of the 7th grade, so most of the students (except repeaters and transfer students) in my 8th grade classes are kids I know. When did they get so huge?! Part of the reason I noticed was that I was in the same classroom for both classes and there were about as many kids, but the 8th graders took up way more space. For example, when 3 7th graders are sharing a desk built for 2, sometimes it takes me an hour or so into class (until I start counting them to write down in my notebook) because even thought there are 3 of them at a desk, they are still sitting comfortably. But when 3 8th graders are sharing that same desk they look very uncomfortable, the same way 3 adults would look, all elbows banging and butts hanging of the edge of the bench. When I walked home from school for lunch it was very hot, so hot I could feel the sun burning my skin on the short walk from school to my house (yes, Mom, I was wearing sunscreen!) but by the time it was time to go back to school it was thunder and lightening and raining buckets. I also was freaking out on the inside as I walked through the half-grown cornfields, praying that I wouldn’t get hit by lightening. To make matters worse, just what I predicted on Monday happened and it took about 10 minutes of running around the school to find a classroom. They are building 3 more classrooms at the moment, but I have no expectation that they will be finished before January, that way if they get done before then I will be pleasantly surprised. (I was told it would take 2 weeks- and those are my classrooms). I had one kid give me the $5 to buy him a dictionary- yay! I really think that all of my 8th graders should have dictionaries, this is their 3rd year of English and I have talked to the 9th grade English teachers and know that they need them even more next year, as a the end of 9th grade there is a huge nation-wide exam and if they don’t pass it they don’t move up to the upper school (I teach in the lower school). So if they have to have it for next year anyway, then why shouldn’t they buy it this year and get more use out of it? Especially when I’m offering to go and pick it up for them.

Friday.
I have no classes on Friday. So when 3 students of mine showed up to do my laundry I was still in my sweatpants. This was I think weird for them as they have never seen me in anything but teaching cloths, which are my nice cloths, mostly Western-style in an African “tussu” or printed fabric. They did a good job on my cloths though, but since today is overcast and not very hot my jeans are still out drying after 6 hours on the line. There was a bit of excitement in the capital of my commune (county) last night. As you may have heard, there has been some really bad flooding all over Benin, including in just the next village to the West of mine, which for 4-5 months out of the year is a stilt-village (there are pictures of it on facebook) but it has rained too much this year and that village and many like it as well as some that are usually just barely above the floodplain have flooded. Well, as you can imagine the government and also many of the NGOs in Benin have been really good about giving supplies (not money-they know it would just get stolen) to the mayors of the communes to disperse to the displaced. Things like rice, corn, condensed milk, tents, sleeping mats, mosquito nets, water purification tabs and the like. Most of these things are expensive, especially right now as the most fertile part of Benin in underwater and vegetables and fruits are hard to come by. Well the mayor of my commune gave out very little of what he was given and held back all the rest of the donations. One of the TV stations got a hold of this info and late last night the mayor and his cronies were caught sneaking out of city hall with carloads of things that were supposed to be given to people who have lost everything in the last few weeks. It’s kind of like if after Hurricane Katrina instead of FIFA not delivering trailers to the newly created homeless of Louisiana and Mississippi they were selling them on the black market. Of course this is a huge scandal and because our mayor is a member of the party of Yayi Boni, the President of Benin, this whole thing reflects really badly on him and could swing the election away from him in the next election. I was talking to my friend Sylvester about this and asked him why the mayor stealing these things was different from the president or any of the ministers or the mayors or even the principles of the schools stealing money everyday and the only answer that he could give me was that those people don’t get caught sneaking out of their offices with pocketfuls of cash by GOLFE TV. Moral of the story: if you are going to steal something in Benin, make sure you can just wire it into your off-shore bank account and you don’t have to load it into your car.