It was wonderful to see everyone during my visit home earlier this month. You can’t really say in words how important support from family and friends is to Peace Corps volunteers. I’m back now, so here are the stories that have piled up.
—————
Interplanetary travel
I was at the airport in Cotonou, catching a flight to go home and visit my family for a couple weeks. A police officer was checking passports and taking customs forms. I handed her my papers and she opened the passport.
“Interpellez-le,” she said to the guard next to her.
“Wait wait wait,” I said. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s no visa here. You are in the country illegally.”
“There is a visa.”
“No, there’s not.”
“Give me the passport and I’ll show you.”
“I will keep the passport.”
I appealed to the guard who was supposed to be interpellering me and he asked to see the passport himself and commenced flipping through the pages.
“There it is,” I said. “It says right there, ‘Official Mission.’” He said nothing but showed it to the policewoman. She regarded it for a moment.
“What is this?”
“It is a visa issued by your government.”
She thumbed the page and frowned and I saw the wheels in her brain turning, trying to invent some new reason why I needed to pay her a bribe, and before she could finish that thought I began protesting loudly enough to make the Frenchmen behind me look up from their paperwork. The guard looked uneasy. He took my passport and handed it to me. “Go ahead.”
At the security checkpoint the guards informed me that it was illegal to take West African francs out of the country, and that I would therefore have to leave my pocket change with them. When I refused, they dumped out the contents of my backpack for inspection. Twice.
After all that the room where we waited seemed eerily calm. We sat not saying anything and facing a glass wall and out there was only the lights of our plane on the tarmac. A muted television was tuned to France Vingt-Quatre, their equivalent of CNN. Most of the white passengers looked to be permanent expatriates—businessmen and officials—and they all looked permanently tired.
On the tarmac my bag was again unceremoniously inspected and we were off. It was midnight but I couldn’t sleep. There was nothing but darkness out the window while we were over northern Benin and later the Sahara, and as we passed over Algeria I looked down at the tiny clusters of lights, and then some bigger ones, and then the sea of lights that must have been Algiers, and the abrupt black line where the Mediterranean began. No matter how much of the world you see, you really only see this or that corner. There’s a lot more of it out there.
We reached Paris as the sun was coming up. In the terminal I had to make an effort to walk straight, and not from fatigue. I wasn’t tired at all. The shops were not yet open but I looked at one for a moment. All the tales I’ve heard of visceral reactions to materialism after being in the Peace Corps did not come true. The shop was there and I had no desire to go inside or buy anything from it, and that was all I knew.
A woman walked past carrying a little kid. Something seemed off with the kid, but I couldn’t quite figure out what. I later realized that that was the first white child I’d seen in a year, and also the first one who didn’t stare at me, whose eyes simply slid past me as if I were not an extraterrestrial.
I found a place that sold coffee and pastries. In front of me in line was a middle-aged American ordering some intricately customized beverage in fast, idiomatic American English. The barista was attempting to follow his words, her face somewhere between panic and despair. She apparently got it right, because he boomed “MAIR-SEE” for of all of Charles de Gaulle International Airport to hear, and strode away. I told the barista in French that, on behalf of the American people, I wanted to apologize. She gave me free coffee.
As I sat in the terminal I began panicking. There were Americans everywhere. I began to fully appreciate why foreigners can’t stand American tourists. It’s hard to describe but the volume of conversation has a lot to do with it, and also that they could not seem to stop talking, even when they clearly had nothing to say. Did I really have to go to the land of these people?
Once I was in California, though, all that disappeared. Seeing family and friends brought back the part of me that still lives in America. It felt alternately like dreaming and like having just woken from a dream—one moment it couldn’t be real, and the next it was if I’d never left. Interplanetary travel can be disorienting.
—————
A sense of waiting
On market day, the merchandise like food and soap are only half the market. The other half is a millet beer called tchoukoutou. Women who brew it come from all over northern Benin to sell at each village’s market. You sit on a log under a thatched covering about eight feet square and held up by four wooden poles. The logs where you sit are laid around the edges and the woman who brought the tchoukoutou sits in the middle. You sit and she ladles a bit into a shell for you to taste and it’s warm and grainy and some shade of red or brown, and you pay fifty francs, about ten cents, to have you fill the shell.
You look around the stall. It is mostly young men. One drives a taxi, another repairs motorcycles, others work in the fields—all irregular jobs that bring little money when there’s any work at all. A girl comes by and is immediately offered four shells of beer. For these men she’s a coveted commodity: an unmarried girl their age. Almost all the girls are long married, many as plural wives to men old enough to be their fathers.
Here you feel the mentality that is poisoning this country—a sense of waiting, a sense that anything you do to improve your lot will be useless, that you can only hope that things will change on their own. The worst kind of fatalism. I can’t blame them for it. Things may be opening up elsewhere but in villages the old rigid society stands as solid as a mountain. Girls get the worst of it, by far, but conditions for them cannot be improved in any meaningful way without the cooperation of boys and young men, and they want nothing to do with it so long as their own circumstances remain so stacked against them. There are no older men sitting here drinking tchoukoutou. They’re in the brick-and-mortar buvettes, drinking real bottled beer that is ten times more expensive than this local stuff. To the older men go the wives and the status and the money, and the young men can only wait to get older, when they can hope to marry the girls who are now in diapers.
When countries explode, this is the powder keg: a mass of young men who have nothing better to do than loot and rape and kill. A madman may yell and bluster all he wants but without people to do the dirty work it will come to nothing. I’m not saying that anything like that will happen in Benin or in any specific country, but rather that this social arrangement—or any unjust social arrangement—can make a bad situation worse. People are essentially the same everywhere and the recurring horrors in some places is not testimony to some inevitable barbarism inherent in that place or in its people. It is often a symptom of outmoded and unjust structures like this—structures that existed in Europe for millennia—structures that aren’t inherent and that can be changed. Theoretically.
When countries explode it means that there are a lot of people there who kill not necessarily because they’re evil or love war or support this or that leader or political program, but because a peaceful world had nothing to offer them.
—————
A burial
One of Dismas’ brothers had died. We left the church under a grey sky and we all followed the hearse until it stopped. I got out to see what had happened. The road ahead was flooded from the morning’s rain and two older boys were wading ahead to test the water’s depth. It came halfway up their thighs. Dismas and I tried walking through the tall grass beside the road and we found a relatively dry path. Everyone got out and walked around so that the cars would be as far off the ground as possible when they drove through. The brothers of the dead man took the coffin from the hearse and carried it.
We walked through the narrow stone gate and past the lepers grasping at our ankles. We were on top of a hill and the red earth sloped down the hillside to the jungle at the bottom. The hill was tightly packed with raised coffin-length cement slabs. Our gravesite was halfway down. A crew had just poured the cement on the next grave over. One of them picked up a stick and in crude letters wrote the name and dates of birth and death in the wet cement.
The brothers carried their brother over to the hole. We circled around. There were a few dozen of us. The widow and children—two girls in their late teens and a boy a little older—stood opposite me. The priest made some somber noises and then the son began a eulogy he had prepared. He told how his father, a gendarme, had been injured in a traffic accident while escorting the President, how at first he had seemed to recover well, but how over the years the internal injuries had tormented and finally killed him.
“Père, père, père, pourquoi quand je t’appelle, tu ne reponds pas?” he said, and two of the brothers sank to the ground in tears. “Father, father, father, why don’t you answer when I call?” I looked around for Dismas. He was standing away from the rest of us and staring down the red hill into the trees.
The daughters were looking down at the hole in the ground and the tears left dark spots on their dresses. The son was still holding on to himself, carefully enunciating each word to keep his voice steady.
“Ceci n’est pas adieu. C’est au revoir.” “This isn’t farewell. This is until we meet again.” He tossed the written eulogy on to the coffin and everybody threw on handfuls of red dirt and the priest sprinkled some water. A light rain had begun to fall, I don’t know when. One of the brothers jumped down into the grave in tears and scooped some of the dirt from the coffin onto a white handkerchief and tied it shut, and holding it up he said his brother’s name three times and three times said goodbye in their tribal language. That word in their language literally means “Come back to me”.
We left. I found myself in a car sitting next to Dismas’ sister. She was cradling her baby. We attempted to get back another way to avoid the flooded road and ended up driving entirely out of the city, into the jungle, trying to see through the rain and bumping and sliding down a twisting red road to nowhere. Whenever we saw a hut the driver asked for directions in the tribal language but from his mounting frustration I knew we weren’t getting back anytime soon. He kept the windows up against the rain, through we were all already soaked, and with the heat it soon felt like the conjunction of a rollercoaster and a sauna and Hell.
“Bonjour, bébé,” I said to the baby.
“Do you want to hold her?”
“Sure.”
The baby looked up at me for a moment, and then got bored and closed her eyes.
“She doesn’t cry at the sight of a white person,” I said.
“No. She hardly every cries at all.”
“You’ll have plenty to cry about when you’re older,” I said in English.
“What do you say?”
“I said that she’s very well behaved.”
—————
A corner of the world
Another teacher invited me to a ceremony in which his cousin would become a schoolmaster. It would be held in a tiny village in the nearly uninhabited central region of the country. I could not have cared less about any ceremony but this last part piqued my interest.
We left at first light in a misty rain. To get there we had to go thirty miles away from the paved highway, thirty miles farther into the bush than we already were. The road was all right for a while and the rain let up, and then the landscape changed from wooded savanna to real jungle and the road went to hell and we were in a mist that seemed inseparable from the trees and the ground. I wondered at times whether we were following a road at all. We came to the bed of a stream of which only a few puddles remained, and after thudding down the slope to the bottom we got off the motorcycle and pushed it through the mud and across the hugh smooth flat rocks to the other side.
And there were the people, fading in and out of the mist. If we were indeed on a road, they didn’t care about it. They walked in and out of the seemingly impregnable underbrush without a sound. They wore the dress of the Fulani, a nomadic herding tribe from the north. They said nothing to us or to each other but you felt their white eyes staring, wide and white and cold in the mist. We had only seen women so far. I had no desire to see the men.
After the streambed the path was narrow so that the brush tore at our legs, but it was definitely a path to somewhere and we felt better. Then there was a fork in the road.
We got off the bike and stared dumbly at the two paths. On cure, two women carrying basins on their heads materialized from the jungle.
“We’re looking for Idadjo,” I said.
They retreated a few paces and stared at us with an alarmed look on their faces.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Idadjo. The village. Do you know it.”
Staring.
The teacher with me tried asking them in a couple different tribal languages.
More staring.
Fortunately, this is a familiar situation when you are a foreign language teacher. I pointed to the two of us, to the motorcycle, said “Idadjo” in as many pronunciations as I could think of, pointed at the fork in the road, shrugged my shoulders, and made a sad face.
“Ah-HUH,” they said.
A few minutes later the road led out of the jungle. Everywhere was fields sown with cassava and corn. The land was flat and the road smooth and straight and the sky blue, and the midmorning sun shone on the remnants of the mist and lit the air aflame. Occasionally there was a thatched mud hut, alone or in a small cluster, far out in the fields, and we flew past them on the good road.
Then we stopped. There was a gully and another dry streambed. Across the gully stretched a bridge consisting of three narrow parallel boards laid across with no support in the middle. It was at least thirty yards across. Down the slope we went, and we pushed the bike across the streambed and back up. I was getting tired of this routine.
And then there was more jungle, more dark and more mist. The path twisted violently and I wondered if we were now going in the opposite direction but there was no way to tell. The place was insane, almost not a solid place at all—the road jagged everywhere and we slid and turned and the people materialized and disintegrated in silence, and that was it, the most eerie thing, the silence. Even with the noise of our engine the place seemed silent. I couldn’t even hear animal noises.
Next to the road was a small building built in the colonial style. Like all colonial-era buildings it did not appear to have been given a new paint job since independence. A faded sign in front said
RÉPUBLIQUE DU BÉNIN
GENDARMERIE NATIONALE
IDADJO
Two gendarmes wandered out, swinging their Kalashnikovs lazily in one hand like kids carrying their lunchboxes. They told us the village was just down the road.
“How’d you like the road?” one of them asked me.
“Ça casse vraiment les couilles,” I said. “It really breaks your balls.”
“You are French?”
“American.”
“Obama!”
“Obama.”
In the village the women were preparing epic quantities of food while the men sat on their asses. I planted my ass next to that of a teacher at the village’s primary school.
“How many people would you say live here?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
“If you had to guess.”
“Maybe three hundred.”
This seemed to be an optimistic estimate.
“Are there any nearby villages?”
“No.”
“So why do these people live here?”
“They fish.” Indeed, as we talked I was watching some women dress some of the largest fish I’d ever seen this far north. They came from the Ouèmè River, which flows down the middle of the country.
“How far is it to the river?”
“About two kilometres.”
“Can we walk there?”
“Sure.”
In the thirty seconds it took us to walk out of the village, several children screamed and fled upon seeing me.
“When was the last time a white person visited this village?”
“I can’t remember there being a last time.”
Out in the jungle the mist had burnt off but the sun barely pierced the canopy. We did not talk and everything was green and still and the leaves and flowers were still damp from the morning mist.
Out of a wall of green came three men of the same nomadic tribe we’d seen on the way in. Their skin was lighter and their features sharp and they moved in flowing robes and headscarves, and outside the robes they each wore a sword. They stopped on the path in front of us and they looked at us. This was as close to the river as we were going to get.
One of them locked eyes with me. I knew they had no intention of hurting us because to rob someone you first have to care about what they have; to kill someone you have to care whether they live or die. And that was more frightening—the knowledge that there are people in the corners of the world who do not care about anyone else, about anyone else’s notions of civilization or justice or morality, who live as they have always lived and have no intention of becoming part of the world. His eyes were expressionless but they said that. And as he stared me down I saw that those eyes were also telling me something else: that the devil has blue eyes.
