Yesterday the education trainees went to Gran Popo, a seaside town near the Togo border. In its heyday it was a major slave-trading port. Now it’s half ghost town and, thanks to the beach, half tourist attraction.
Unlike Cotonou’s depressing beach, Gran Popo lacked large piles of trash, emaciated dogs, and children playing in the piles of trash. In fact, seeing a place in southern Benin that wasn’t covered in trash was incredible on its own.
The Beninese beach experience is slightly different from its American counterpart. First, thanks to Benin’s conservative dress standards, you can’t wear a swimsuit. Second, you can’t swim anyway because the riptides will kill you. That said, sitting in a clean and peaceful place and watching the ocean felt incredibly luxurious.
We met a couple of English college students who were spending a month in “Ghaner” and were traveling through Togo and Benin over the weekend. I saw more Westerners yesterday than in the previous 50 days combined. They all looked like tourists. It’s getting easy to tell aid workers and tourists apart: the latter look as if they’d just walked out of a Neutrogena commercial.
My wise-ass habit of using Nagot greetings with my non-Nagot family paid off. I discovered that the wife of my host dad’s brother (the whole family lives in the same compound) was Nagot before she married into a Gun family. Now I have a language tutor for the next couple weeks. Kemon has a history of having volunteers who spoke excellent Nagot, so the pressure’s on.
