The Egg Cuber

One night in Kemon I noticed that my right foot and lower calf were swelling to alarming proportions. My neighbors said it was the bug bites. I pointed out that my left foot had an equal number of bug bites and no swelling. They maintained that it was the bug bites. I called the Peace Corps doctor the next morning. It wasn’t the bug bites. So here I am in Cotonou being treated for a skin infection. And school starts on Monday.

In order to come to Cotonou I had to take a zem (motorcycle taxi) from Kemon to Kilibo, a village situated on the Goudron (the paved road), and then take a bush taxi south from there. It’s 5km to Kilibo. My zem broke down four times. I spent a long time standing on a dirt road in the jungle in the middle of the day, watching my driver’s dubious methods of fixing his motorcycle and wondering if I could walk to Kilibo without being mugged or dying of heat stroke. Eventually we got there and I found a bush taxi. These are normally standard 5-seat sedans, but the normal passenger load is 4 in the back seat and 2 in the front seat, plus the driver. At one point my taxi had 7 adults and 5 children in it. Also, the A/C never works.

The journey up to Kemon a couple weeks ago was far more eventful. This trip was supposed to take 7 hours. Keep that in mind.

I was going up in a mini-bus (like a full-size van in the US) with two Volunteers who are posted near me. We were taking our lockboxes, mattresses, bikes, and cetera, so we were crammed on the bench behind the driver. After taking at least twice as long to load things as necessary, we went to a fueling station and got gas and then sat around for an hour for no reason with our driver AWOL. Some guy kept coming over and making remarks of a sexual nature at the other two Volunteers. After I thought he’d gone away I got out and found our driver and told him to get a move on. When I came back the guy was climbing into the van. I yelled and he ran and for some reason I chased him down the street and through a market, while yelling, before he hopped a wall. While I was walking back the vendors in the market were wide-eyed. “What did that guy do to you?”

We finally left Porto-Novo around 9:30. To get up north from Porto-Novo you can go two ways: west to Cotonou and then north to Bohicon, or straight to Bohicon going up the eastern side of the country. We took the road straight to Bohicon. Over an hour later we found out that the road ahead was cut by a flood. We turned around and got back to Porto-Novo at noon and then had to go through all of third-world traffic hell on the causeway between Porto-Novo and Cotonou and in Cotonou itself. We got to Bohicon around 3 and had to wait for an hour in the market, with people harassing us, while our driver got a flat tire fixed. We then got two other flat tires after passing Bohicon. We also got stopped several times by the Gendarmes (the military) who had set up all kinds of roadblocks in order to extract bribes from travelers. (I haven’t seen this the other times I’ve traveled, so this was unexpected.) Normally the Gendarmes wear your standard jungle camo, but one guy who stopped us had was wearing this formal uniform with knee-high polished black boots and a hat that made him look like George Armstrong Custer.

It got dark and we were still driving. Another roadblock. They had torches and Kalashnikovs and had laid boards with nails across the road, and I didn’t notice until we’d already stopped that they weren’t wearing uniforms. I was getting close to the panicking stage. But there was a sign that said “National Police,” and our driver said that’s who they were. They let us pass, at any rate.

Once it was dark it was (relatively) safe to travel on the Goudron, but not on the dirt roads. There are bandits on the dirt roads after dark. We had to stay the night at the first Volunteer’s house that we reached while the taxi driver slept in the van, and then in the morning the other Volunteer and I continued the short distance to our posts. And that’s the way it was.

In contrast to all that madness, my village is incredibly tranquil. My neighborhood, on the edge of the village, is green and jungly. Chickens, goats, dogs, and piglets wander around freely. I can walk uninvited into anyone’s house at any time and be welcomed. If I’m there around mealtime they give me food. If they don’t speak French we just sit around — luckily for me, long silences aren’t considered awkward in Beninese conversation.

It’s almost insane how hospitable the villagers in Kemon are. (This is tempered by snobbery among some of them about tribal language and frequent attempts to rip white people off.) When I arrived at the village – 12 hours after I’d promised over the phone, but this being Benin, no one cared — about 30 villagers swarmed into my house. They moved all of the furniture out, beds included, and cleaned the entire house. They took all of the dishes from the kitchen out back and cleaned them. They sorted through food the old volunteer had left and threw out what was spoiled. They weeded the backyard. Then they put everything back and left. In an hour and a half they saved me several days’ work.

Without electric lights you notice the stages of the day more vividly. The roosters guarantee that everyone’s up before sunrise. It’s too dark inside to do anything so I usually sit in front of my house and watch the sunlight work its way down the side of the hills to the west. Once the sun’s set it’s too dark inside again, so if the night is clear people sit outside for the starlight and talk to their neighbors.

Most nights Kemon is visited by a Voodoo phantom called Oro. (Benin is Voodoo’s birthplace.) The Beninese are superstitious about saying the name so we just say “the Phantom.” Starting around 10 or 11 he comes out of the jungle and wanders around the village making an unearthly noise. Seeing Oro is a major crime. You have to stay inside with the doors locked and shutters closed and with all lights out. If a man is caught outside by the Voodoo priests, they steal his money and beat him up. If a woman is caught outside, they kill her.

I asked my neighbor if I should close the shutters in the front of my house during Oro. “If you like.” What if I didn’t? “They would beat you up.”

One night I was sitting in my latrine when I heard Oro come out. My house is on the edge of the jungle where he comes from and he sounded close. Talk about getting caught with your pants down. No way I was sitting in that latrine all night. I sprinted back to my house with my hand shielding the light from my flashlight.

While mindlessly passing my time here in the bureau I came across an excellent emblem of all that is great about America: the egg cuber, as seen in this slideshow of stupid kitchen gadgets. I then walked over to the cafeteria (not the same thing as in America) down the street and told the guy there that ”je veux que mes oeufs en forme de cube” (I want my eggs shaped like a cube). He, being a reasonable person, thought I was fou.