You are not going to copy.

Camp GLOW, the girls’ camp for which I begged for money in my last post, has been fully funded. Thanks to everyone who helped out.

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A few weeks ago I received letters from a sixth-grade class in America. The plan was to give them to my students, who would write letters back. First the letters needed to be translated into French. This mind-numbing task having been accomplished, I explained to my students what we were going to do.

“I have here letters from students in America. I am going to pass them out. You will read your letter—”

“In English?!” a munchkin exclaimed.

“In French. I translated them into French. You can read the French. OK?”

“OK,” said all the munchkins.

“So then. You will read the letter—”

“In English?!”

When that got straightened out, it was time to write responses. This would be an uphill battle. Beninese students’ activities are mostly limited to copying what their teacher writes on the board, and then memorizing it for later regurgitation. When I supervised a history exam once — teachers never supervise their own students, which I suppose is an anti-corruption measure — I found that almost everyone had written, verbatim, the same essay. They hadn’t cheated. They’d memorized whatever diatribe their teacher had written about the slave trade and, seeing that the question had something to do with the slave trade, wrote it back down.

I wrote instructions on the board, indicating that each munchkin would include their name, age, favorite subject in school, and so forth.

“You will write a letter about you, you, yourself, including this information about yourself. You will not copy the board. You will not copy the letter which you have received. You will write an original letter concerning yourself.”

The smartest munchkin in the class pointed at the board. “We are going to copy.”

“No. You are not going to copy.”

She pointed to her letter from America. “We are going to copy.”

“You are not going to copy.”

Her face betrayed existential panic as she pointed back at the board. “We are going to copy.”

After some time a munchkin produced a few original sentences. I could hardly contain myself.

“This is what you’re supposed to do!” I declared, holding the paper up for all to see. “Look. Constant wrote about himself. Not about Mohamed. Not about Angèle. About himself.”

A dozen munchkins swarmed over and commenced copying the exemplary letter.

As I began translating the letters into English that night, I was pleasantly surprised at the results of the two-hour debacle. It had not been a total disaster. Most of the munchkins had done mostly what I wanted them to do. Out of fifty-two, only half a dozen or so had copied something. Unfortunately, in their quest for originality, some munchkins had accomplished feats of spelling and grammar as yet not experienced in the glorious French language — or, for that matter, in the Latin alphabet.

With that done, it was time to send the letters off. I had to go to the nearest village with a post office, about 30 miles away. I found a northbound bush taxi in my village and sat down to wait. African mass transit doesn’t operate on a timetable. You leave when all the seats are full.

After an hour we were ready to go. Several hundred pounds of cassava had materialized and been strapped to the roof until it had tripled the height of the car. As the passengers began climbing in, the car’s suspension groaned pitifully. The driver moved the passenger’s seat all the way up so he could compel two rows of adults into the back seat. Enfin we had four adults in the back seat, three more adults in the space between them and the front seat, four adults including the driver in front, and at least four children inserted into various nooks and crannies, bringing us to a total of fifteen human beings simultaneously existing within a single 5-seat Peugeot 504 that probably predated the sovereign Republic of Benin. Even by bush taxi standards, this was epic.

Besides their talent for compressing the human body, bush taxi drivers have one other distinct trait, and that is an allergy to forward motion. We rolled forward for ten seconds before the driver stopped to have the tires inflated. He managed to stop four more times while still in the village. Beninese are late to everything because en route they stop to chat with everyone they know. For a taxi driver, the fact that an incredible quantity of men, women, and children are currently roasting alive in his shitty Peugeot is no reason to eschew this practice.

After spending an hour advancing less than a hundred yards, my fellow passengers were starting to complain. When the Beninese are getting antsy, you know you’re taking too long. I got out, decompressed my skeleton, and proceeded down the road on foot.

“Where’re you going?” shouted the driver from the shade of the tree where he and his friend were enjoying a beer.

“I’m going to walk and get there before you!”

From the tangled mass of humanity still in the car came what was either chuckling or the last gasp of air before sweet death takes away the suffering.

“The white man is impatient!” he sneered.

I made some retort to the effect that the white man, at least, has a father, whereupon he appeared to be concentrating his formidible brainpower on calculating the trajectory of his beer bottle on its voyage from his hand to my skull.

At this point a motorcycle-taxi came along, cutting short our pleasant conversation and despositing me in the next village over, where I found another taxi.

And that was how all the munchkins’ letters got sent.