Adieu, Bénin

So. As many of you know, I completed my Peace Corps service at the end of August, and for the 2012–13 school year I’ll be a foreign language assistant at a senior high school in Gap, France. I hope you liked some of what I’ve written here over the past two years. This blog will no longer be a Peace Corps blog, obviously, but if anything interesting happens in France, I’ll post it here.

Here’s my last post about Benin.

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My last few days in Kêmon were largely spent clearing out my house. Anything useful went to my friends and neighbors. Anything else — the packaging for a pair of earbuds, an empty bottle of cooking oil, half a can of expired powdered milk — went into the black garbage bags that I periodically carried to the nearest trash heap.

As soon as I walked away from each bag, small children descended on it and tore it to pieces, kicking and clawing at each other to claim anything that might be fashioned into a toy, or merely anything that gave a hint of the other world, the world where earbuds come encased in shiny, colorful plastic. One of the children found the can of rancid milk powder, ripped the lid off, and poured it into his mouth.

I knew that if I stopped them, they would just go back to it as soon as I left. And so I watched and dwelled on the same thought that had haunted me every day for two years: Somewhere, right now, someone is dropping a hundred dollars on dinner and wine. Someone is dropping a thousand on a hotel room. Someone is dropping a hundred thousand on a sports car.

Now I’ve left that world for this one. That haunting thought has been reversed, every time I am reminded in some small way of the vast divide between these two worlds. Somewhere, right now, a child is eating a chicken bone off the ground. A girl is being forced out of school. A family is going to bed hungry.

That is the best idea I can give you of what, for me, coming back from the Peace Corps is like. Before I left, I knew that inequality was evil and that I ought to do my part, as the saying goes, to fight it. Now I have no sense of having done my part, because it is one thing to cognitively understand an evil and another to experience it at close quarters. The people in the other half of humanity, the ones who helplessly watch their lives being warped or destroyed by poverty, are no longer just people. They are friends and neighbors. Some of them are like family. I knew all of the children who tore through my garbage bags, and had come to love many of them, but always knowing that their lives will be, in many ways, dead ends.

Once you know an evil like that, you can never have done your part until it exists no more — and, of course, it will always exist.

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A few weeks ago I saw the below painting at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. I want to use it as a conclusion, at least for now, on what I’ve been trying to write about for the past two years.

Adolphe Bouguereau, “The Broken Pitcher”, 1891

In rural France at the time this was painted — as in rural Benin today — going to the pump to get water for drinking, cooking, and laundry would have been a daily ritual for women and girls. Right now, as you are reading this, someone in my old village is pulling water from a pump exactly like the one in the painting. Its presence is a small way of telling us that this girl’s life, in the most boring ways, is a harder life than most of us have ever known.

The pump is showing rust around the spout. Its platform is chipped. The pitcher, obviously, is broken. The girl’s feet are bare and her hair loose. Her gaze is hurt and vulnerable. Her hands, clenched but in the way of a child, are perhaps trying to hold it all together.

But her gaze is also a stare, a defiant regard of whoever is watching her in her moment of weakness. You do not imagine this girl accepting a helping hand. The sunlight on her loose strands of hair wreathe her face in a golden glow, like the halos of light behind the heads of holy figures in medieval paintings — and, like them, she knows something we don’t. She has some power, even if it’s only the power of unconquerable weakness, that we can’t grasp. And she dares us to judge her on first appearances.

That is how I’ll remember the village.

A few assorted pictures.

Weavers at work.

A settlement of the Fulani, a northern herding tribe.

Sometimes inequality shows itself in the smallest ways. This is outside a hut where they were doing a voodoo ceremony that required everyone to take their sandals off before entering. See if you can find mine.

Girls playing some clapping game.

The two hills next to my village.

Life in Benin

Say you’re driving somewhere on the highway and stop for a bite to eat at one of those junctions where there are a few fast-food joints, a few gas stations, and nothing else.
You go to the Burger King but find it closed. It’s a Tuesday afternoon. A hobo sitting outside informs you that the people who work there didn’t feel like coming to work today.
So you walk over to the Carl’s Jr. next door. It’s open. You go to the counter and order a cheeseburger.
“We don’t have that,” says the cashier.
So you order a chicken sandwich.
“We don’t have that either.”
You order some fries.
“Don’t have it.”
“What do you have?”
She sighs in exasperation at your stupidity. “We didn’t make any food today.”
So you go to the Taco Bell, which is not only open, but has food. Your total comes to $3.50. You hand the cashier a $5 bill.
“Ah!” she gasps, as if you had just kicked a puppy in the face. “How am I supposed to make change for that?”
“You don’t have change?” you ask.
“No!” she wails.
You look through your pockets and tell her you don’t have exact change. She makes a show of looking all over the store for change and then, huffing with indignation, walks over to the Carl’s Jr. to ask for change there. You watch her leave the Carl’s Jr. and proceed to the McDonald’s, the Subway, the Arco, the KFC, the Burger King (whose employees, you remember, did not feel like coming to work today), and the 7/11.
She storms back in to the Taco Bell. “Did you find change?” you ask.
“No! No one has change!”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
She heaves a tragic sigh and produces a plastic bucket from behind the counter. You look into the bucket and estimate that it easily contains $100 in small change. She takes out $1.50 and, giving you a look of pure death, hands you your change.
That is life in Benin.

Pictures

A few months ago I got funding to put the roof on a new school building via a Peace Corps Partnership Program project, to which about twenty people back home generously gave money. The roof was built last May. The carpenters built the scaffolding one day and laid the corrugated iron roofing the next. Here are some pictures of the construction.

Laying the sheet metal.

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The carpenters.

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The changing world

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

– Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

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Forest and orchard surround the school where I teach. Just down the rough dirt road, a patch of forest has been clearcut and a house built, a large, modern house surrounded by high walls. Students and teachers alike gape at it on their way to school. If you pass at the right time, you may see the owner rolling out the gate in his late-model Lexus SUV.

If my math is right, that Lexus alone could have sent every child in the village to school for five years.

The man behind the wheel can barely read and speaks French like a child. One single feat distinguishes him: he cut down a hell of a lot of trees.

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Some evenings I visit the president of the school’s PTA. He’s a retired teacher who’s so old that his teaching credential bears the seal of the French Republic. We sit and he produces his inevitable bottle of brandy and two tumblers.

“The doctors tell me I must not drink liquor,” he says as he pours a generous amount into each glass. I think of my grandfather, who had wine sneaked into his hospital room in a plastic coffee mug.

We get to talking about seasons. I describe summer, autumn, winter, spring.

“Yes,” he says, “When I was young, there were four seasons here too.”

“Four? Like in the south?”

“Exactly like the south. Dry, rainy, dry, rainy.”

“But now there are only two.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

He throws his arms open. “The world is changing!”

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You walk into the bush outside the village and it looks wild enough. It’s not. Man’s godlike power and stupidity are written everywhere.

When he was young, the old man says, it was real forest all around, like what I’ve seen in the near-inaccessible center of the country—trees reaching to the sky, blocking out the sun, a throbbing ecosystem of countless plants and animals. Then someone figured out that those trees were worth money. They cut and stripped them, shipped them to Europe and later to China. They boxed up the forest and sent it to countries whose people had already raped their own lands. Now we have scrub with a sprinkling of trees, thick only where there’s a stream or pond.

The whole environment changed. Wild animals followed their habitat, retreating into the center of the country. Now the people here are mostly confined to eating small game like bushrat and guinea bird. When we get meat from bigger game, like hippopotamus or elephant, it’s been dried and brought in from far away. It tastes like ash and is about as nourishing. And the dry season, which lasted nearly a murderous eight months last year, would cause complete drought each year if not for the few deep-well water pumps scattered around the village.

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Yam, traditionally the most important food source in this region, is a fickle crop. It’s planted at the beginning of the rainy season because it needs rain to grow. But if the crop stays in wet soil for too many months, it rots. The ideal condition for yam farming, then, is a few months of heavy rain. A generation ago, that was what they got—but that was then.

In Benin there are two season structures. In the southern forest there’s four months of rain followed by a dry season and then two more months of rain. In the northern savanna there’s six months of rain followed by six months of drought. The change that the old man described to me happened when the northern season structure moved south into this region. There’s no reason to think that its slow march southward is going to stop any time soon.

Now the rainy season is not only longer, but also less intense. That change can easily destroy or seriously reduce a yam crop. Last year’s rainy season was particularly light and I remember the choice the farmers faced: harvest your scrawny, bitter yams now and risk running out of food before the next harvest, or wait and risk that your yams will rot in the ground. The soil was wet enough to eat the yams alive, but not wet enough to make them grow.

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Half the story here is deforestation. The other half is global warming—which, of course, is exacerbated by deforestation. It changes weather patterns, makes rainfall less dependable from year to year. It also quickens desertification. The Sahara is expanding south toward the coastal countries of West Africa, drying up previously arable land and forcing people to migrate.

I know several families in the village who belong to northern tribes. These tribes were never seen this far south a generation ago. They came here, they tell me, because it is no longer possible to grow crops on the land where their ancestors lived and farmed and died for hundreds of years. Forests fell, seasons changed and rainfall decreased. The soil, dried out and unprotected by tree roots, blew away. Now you put a seed in the ground and nothing happens.

The Peul, a tribe of nomadic herders who range throughout West Africa, are also here in numbers unseen a generation ago. They’re abandoning their traditional stomping grounds in the north because the grazing lands are disappearing and becoming desert. They’re also abandoning their nomadic lifestyle, putting up small permanent settlements outside the villages of the agricultural tribes who are native to this region. The stories of both these groups could easily be a prophecy for regions further south.

When environmental degradation and climate change increase the likelihood of famine and drought—and, among people who rely on subsistence agriculture, the two are intimately linked—war often follows. Otherwise peaceful people are reduced to doing what they must to survive. I haven’t seen anything like that in Benin, but it’s happened and is happening in countries throughout Africa, and this is where it starts.

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Western technology has made two major contributions to the destruction of Benin’s forests. First, chainsaws. The primitive axes made by the village blacksmiths are dull and unwieldy. Their inefficiency once limited the extent to which people could exploit the forest. In comparison, chainsaws give people such godlike power to sweep whole forests away that it is illegal to use one to cut down a tree in Benin.

Not that that stops anyone. Like most Beninese laws, this rule is little more than words on paper. It seems that the only reason a Beninese policeman or gendarme would ever intervene would be to solicit a bribe, which is quite affordable when you’re making a killing shipping lumber to China. The gendarme gets beer money and you get to carry on business unhampered. Everybody wins.

Second, trucks. Specifically, deuce-and-a-half–type trucks. Judging by their color and design, they’re probably bought secondhand from the army. Their massive tires, high ground clearance, and powerful engines allow loggers to drive them deep into the bush and load them with thousands of pounds of lumber at a time. The previous method of transporting logs—putting them on someone’s head—was obviously not conducive to clearcutting.

Despite these boons, loggers here have only a fraction of the technological power wielded by their Western counterparts. You can’t blame Benin’s deforestation on chainsaws alone. It’s not overpopulation either. Despite Benin’s tenfold population increase since 1945, this region seems lightly populated—and, in any case, the lumber is usually meant for export and not for domestic consumption.

The real problem is the same old story of environmental degradation: ignorance and greed. The loggers do not, or will not, understand that they are destroying the world their children must live in. The authorities employ similar mental gymnastics to pretend that their endemic corruption doesn’t undermine the rule of law and make the country’s physical destruction possible. And the ordinary villagers, in their uneducated narrow-mindedness, don’t make the connection between the shiny Lexus and the dry wells, the dead crops.

Not fun

An update on the guy from the motorcycle accident I described here about a month ago.

Three weeks later he came back to Kêmon. I went to his family’s house and talked with him. I could barely understand him at times because of all the teeth he lost. His jaw and neck weren’t broken, as I’d feared, but it wasn’t all good. His family showed me the x-rays, which I held up and illuminated with a flashlight as they hurriedly explained in a tribal language I barely understand. There was a sizable gap in his hip. He’ll never walk right again.

He lays on the ground all day in a back room in his family’s mud hut, an inflated motorcycle inner tube under his hip. I go there as often as I can to relieve the boredom. In his situation, I’d be depressed as hell. He’s a university student in Porto Novo. He was coming to Kêmon for a funeral. Now he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

I talked with his cousin. The gendarmes in Kilibo did not keep the driver who hit him in jail until all medical bills had been paid, as promised. They let him go. My guess—money talks louder than anything here. The family has already spent 450,000 francs—$900, a titanic sum here—on medical fees. The people who caused their grief will never answer for it.

Mango(e)s

A couple of my fellow volunteers made a rap video that’ll inform you about our diet this time of year. Here it is.