Girls’ camp, etc.

Before I start, I need to make a fundraising pitch for a girls’ camp that I and several other Peace Corps volunteers will be running in August. Beninese society, especially in rural villages, firmly believes that girls should remain uneducated and have no choice about the courses of their lives. Girls work from 5 am to night chopping wood, cooking, sweeping, washing, and caring for younger children, and therefore find little time to study. At school they’re beaten, taunted by male students, and sexually harassed or even raped by their teachers.

Since 2004 Peace Corps volunteers from northeastern Benin have run Camp GLOW, which stands for Girls Lead Our World. This year we’re taking 50 8th and 9th grade girls, the best in their classes, to spend a week at the University of Parakou, in the second-largest city in Benin. It’ll be the first time that many of these girls, who come from rural villages, have ever been to a city. They’ll learn about health and hygiene, a healthy diet, sexual and reproductive health, malaria, clean water, study skills, nutritional gardening, sexual harassment in schools, violence against women, and computer skills. They’ll also play sports and take a field trip to a cultural museum. Most importantly, they’ll be surrounded by other hard-working girls and by several Beninese women who will accompany them to the camp and serve as role models. The woman coming from my village is university-educated and is the principal of a school, and is also married with a young daughter.

Camp GLOW is, obviously, free for the girls. We’ve raised 60% of the camp’s expenses from Beninese sources, but we still need about $3,000. If you can help, please donate here. Thanks.

—–

In central Benin the dry season goes from October to April. For the first three months the Harmattan wind blows from the Sahara, bringing dusty but otherwise pleasant weather. I think it’s pleasant, at least. In the early morning, when it got down to 65 degrees, I would get to school and find the other teachers waddling about in parkas, bemoaning their immanent transformation into cubes of ice.

The dry season’s last three months, February to April, the Beninese unambiguously call “the heat.”

At noon life stops. No one has work or school between 12 and 3. My neighbors all lie motionless under mango trees, attempting to generate as little body heat as possible. The best way to forget the numbing afternoon heat is to sleep through it. If you want to buy anything from a roadside stand, you have to wake up the owner, who is usually under the table. The women who sell pounded yam for lunch sometimes shut down early, saying that if they have to pound any more yams, they will die.

When another teacher and I went for a drink one afternoon, we made an extensive search for the barmaid before I found her sprawled comatose in a corner. She opened one eye and slowly, laboriously, raised her arm to point to the cooler, indicating that we should help ourselves. Then her arm fell and she dropped back off.

As the morning wears on, I inevitably resemble the frog in the boiling water. At first the temperature inside is bearable and so I sit down to read. Some time later, I wonder why the words are swimming. I look around and realize that I’m soaked in sweat and it’s running down into my eyes. I run into the backyard, open the cistern, dump water on myself, and later lie outside on a woven mat and try to forget I’m alive.

—–

Flies swarming on tomatoes and dry fish with glassy eyes, and mounds of cassava and yams, goats and chickens alive and dead. Flies on their corpses as they lie in the dust and later as they’re skinned and butchered with long curved knives that look like toys but cut muscle and cartilige like butter. The fresh meat laid on tables between which humans filter, tightly packed, with children running between their legs. People negotiating prices, shouting, pleading, customers pretending to stalk off in disgust, vendors crying out against the injustice of a hard sell at a low price. Flies buzzing in their faces and chickens and goats, the ones still not dead, nibbling at the piles of food when no one is watching. Emeciated dogs with shoulders and ribs jutting out over tightly stretched skin stalking among the butchers and waiting for a bone or cut of meat to fall. In this spectacle of stinking, sweltering, sticky death and life, there’s no hierarchy of living things because they all have the same goal: to claw their way ahead of the other living things.

And none of those living things are willing to concede to humans. The jungle seems entirely unaware that my house was built for my sole inhabitation. What’s amazing isn’t the presence of pests, but the scale and speed with which they try to reclaim this bit of earth. I often wake up to find my chairs and table knitted together with spider webs, as if the house had been uninhabited for a hundred years. Or I walk into my kitchen and the floor and walls are crawling with enormous ants, and I come in, bandana tied to my face, and discharge more deadly chemicals than were used in all of World War One. Then the flood of lizards of all sizes and colors to clean up the dead, and later their bodies lying everywhere because they gorged themselves on poison ants, and more ants and flies swarming over them.

Between my roof and my plywood ceiling, where I can’t get at them, live bats, mice, lizards, and cockroaches. Their scuttling about stopped bothering me after a while, but occasionally they wage what I can only assume is a full-blown war because it sounds as if the entire house is about to cave in.

My house, one of the few with plastered cement walls, isn’t likely to collapse. The houses of mud or sticks are less durable. Throughout the village you see them in various states of decomposition, the rain and wind wearing them away, reclaiming to the earth what humans took from it. They look like they’re melting. Nearby, people are throwing up new mud structures. Among ancient tribes and ancient villages there are no ancient buildings, or even old buildings. Man is not conquering nature or staking off his patches of earth. He’s struggling against nature to hold on to what he’s got, and nature is struggling back.

I’m sitting on my veranda after sunset to escape the suffocating heat inside. On a clear moonless night I can see only the black shape of the jungle outlined by stars, the Milky Way spread across the sky, and can hear only the buzzing and tweeting of the jungle’s invisible chorus. For humans, for civilization, Africa is the first continent. It’s the homeland of us all. Yet looking into the night, I feel as if I were sitting on the world’s edge — on the last continent, not the first. It’s where I’ve seen most clearly what an animal is man — for all his culture, his beauty, his memory, ultimately another party in the struggle for existence, and one whose disappearance would cause no great alarm among the rest of the living world.

—–

Foreign Aid

I walked into my school’s office the other day and found secondhand Western clothes covering the desk, the chairs, the filing cabinets, the floor.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“These,” the principal said, “are clothes.” He and the vice principal were digging through the piles in some vain attempt to organize them.

“Where did you get them?”

“The French sent them.” The empire had struck back. “We’re going to give them to the best students.”

I picked up a thick woolen cardigan and a leather miniskirt. “Is this stuff really going to be useful in Africa?”

“Sure. Why not?”

—–

There are precisely two roads in my village. To get anywhere, you need to cut through the tangle of mud huts and mango trees, greeting everyone you meet along the way, whether you know them or not. I’ll often come across a family eating, and inevitably they invite me to join them. In this culture, it’s an offer I can’t refuse.

We sit outside on a straw mat around a bowl of pâte, a white mash made by stirring ground corn or cassava into boiling water. You scoop some up with your hand, dip it in a bowl of sauce, and enjoy. In this family, the father is the only one who speaks French. You learn French at school, and girls’ education is a fairly new concept here. Two-thirds of students at my school are boys.

He offers me one of the few pieces of meat floating in the sauce, as he takes one himself. I mumble something about not being very hungry. We’re the only ones eating. When the men are satisfied, the women and children, who cooked the meal, will take what’s left. There won’t be any meat.

In poor rural villages, pâte is usually the main course of any meal. The explanation is simple: corn and cassava cost almost nothing, and almost nothing is what these families can afford. They provide calories but almost nothing else, so that poor Beninese starve for nutrients. It’s less visible than starving for calories and the problem is less sexy, but it’s no less dangerous. Meat helps, but it’s too expensive to have some for everyone. One of those pieces in the sauce probably cost five or ten cents.

In the closest city to me, there’s a restaurant where you can sit outside and eat fried chicken. I was there with some other volunteers when, seeing that we’d finished eating, a group of children rushed over, grabbed the bones and scraps from our plates, and ran off through the trees, stopping about fifty yards off to squat in the dirt and shove it all down before someone could take it from them, crunching and swallowing the bones, leaving nothing for the dogs. The robust men at a nearby table erupted in riotous laughter.

Back in my village, my host is still inviting me to take the last of the meat. His children are watching. It would be an insult to refuse, an insult to imply the obvious: your children need that meat more than you or me. I take the meat and chew on it, avoiding the hungry staring eyes.