(no title)

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. Me and the internet have not met for some time. Without further ado…
—————

A year ago, on the morning of my second day teaching school in my village, I woke up to a downpour. The condition of the dirt road put riding my bike out of the question, but I didn’t want to miss my second day on the job. I rolled up my pant legs, put on my poncho, and started walking.

A few minutes later I reached the main village with the small storefronts lining the empty road.

“Come here!” someone yelled in English. He was waving from under an awning. I didn’t know that anyone else in the village spoke English.

“For where are you going?” he asked as I stepped under the awning.

“The school.”

“Which school?”

“The collège.”

“In this weather? Is madness. Have a seat.” He brought two chairs from inside the shop and we sat under the awning. I hung my poncho on the door.

“From where do you come?”

“Over there,” I said, pointing toward my house through the curtains of water.

“I mean your country. Unless you are Beninese.”

“Oh. The United States.”

“Why you go for the collège on a dismal day such as this?”

“I teach there.”

“What is it that you teach?”

“English.”

“English. Is logical.” He leaned his chair back against the wall and closed his eyes. He looked to be about my age and his clothes were heavily stained with grease and oil. I asked him his name.

“God Blessed.”

“God Blessed?”

“God for short. And you?”

“Michael.”

“Michael. Your name is from the Bible, like mine.”

This was his real name. Names like that are quite normal for West Africa. Nigeria’s current president is Goodluck Jonathan; several of my male students are named Bienvenu or Dieudonné, meaning Welcome and God-Given, while some of the girls are Reine or Merveille, meaning Queen and Wonder.

“Are you from here?” I said.

“No. Nigeria.”

“Where in Nigeria?”

“Lagos.”

“But you live here.”

“Yes. I no go for Lagos no more. Is big-big go-slow,” he said, meaning that there is a lot of traffic. (Lagos is the biggest city in Africa and may soon be the biggest in the world, so I’d imagine the go-slow is quite a problem.)

“You left Nigeria because of the…go-slow?”

“And the bandits. They go to steal everything. They go to steal even the shirt from your back. You must never go for Nigeria! You, being white like that. They go to steal everything from you, and also to kill you, probably.”

“Maybe I could paint my skin black.”

He pondered my idea for a moment. “I do not believe this will work.”

I looked at my watch. The rain wasn’t letting up any but I still had over a mile to go. God Blessed read my mind.

“Pay no attention to your watch. We are in Africa.”

“But I’ll be late.”

He threw up his hands. “We are always late in Africa! You no need to worry. The rain, it is still falling.”

“What if it rains all morning?”

“Everybody will stay at house.”

“Oh.”

“Is not like this in USA?”

“No. You have to go to work, even if it’s raining.”

His brow furrowed. “Is strange.”

He was right. I never got to the school and, as I learned the next day, neither did anyone else.

God Blessed sold motorcycle parts out of the store in front of which we were sitting. Whenever I would stop by to chat, I would find him in front of his shop playing draughts with various other young men. I had no idea what draughts was but soon saw that it is essentially checkers but played with more pieces on a 100-square board. They played lightning fast but the strategy involved was profound. When the players knew what they were doing and you had some idea of what you were watching and could keep up with their speed, you could spend all afternoon sitting there. Which is exactly what they would do, and what they still do to this day.

One of the best players was from San Pedro, in Côte d’Ivoire, and spoke some English. I don’t remember his name, but he remembered mine.

“Michael! You must come to visit me in San Pedro!” he exclaimed as he feverishly moved pieces about the board. “Life is good in San Pedro! Everyone have a car! Everyone have a house! Is not like this habitat of dirt and rats, this country! You come visit me, then I come visit you in États-Unis, I meet your family, I meet your president! He is a Africa man, like me!”

“He was actually born in America,” I said.

“I hear he from Kenya,” the Ivorian said, giving me a puzzled look. He had already won the game.

“His father is from Kenya, but Obama was born in America.”

“Ah, like I say, he from Kenya.”

Trump was right all along!

My acquaintance with him got more interesting when the Ivorian shit hit the Ivorian fan last December. Incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after losing an election, eventually causing a short civil war between government forces loyal to Gbagbo and supporters of President-Elect Alessane Ouattara. Back when it was still just a dispute over election results, I asked the Ivorian what he thought about it.

“Ouais, il y a un petit problème. Yeah, there’s a small problem. Très petit. Very small. Not good to go to Côte d’Ivoire right now.”

As the small problem escalated, I checked back with him.

“Hardly even a problem at all! Just a friendly disagreement. You know how it is in Africa. We will visit San Pedro very soon, no worries.”

Then came the civil war.

“What are you talking about? Il n’y a rien! There’s nothing! Aucun problème! No problem! You know the international press, the United Nations, they like to have things to chatter about. You could go to San Pedro right now, and walk down the street, and not notice a thing! Not a thing!”

I never heard him take sides in the conflict, which I took to mean that he supported Gbagbo. I heard some Gbagbo support floating around but generally the village—or, more specifically, the small percentage of people who paid enough attention and cared—was cheering for Ouattara. As far as I could tell, they didn’t know anything about either side, only that Ouattara had won the election and Gbagbo hadn’t. Their singular focus on this criterion made me a bit more optimistic about the future of Beninese democracy.

I thought it was funny to regularly ask the Ivorian draughts player how his buddy Gbagbo was doing. He was less amused. He disappeared from the village about the time that Abidjan fell to Ouattara’s forces, and no one’s seen him since.

—————

Camp GLOW

I rented a bush taxi with Stephanie, a volunteer posted near me, to take us and our girls to the camp at the University of Parakou. We got to the university about lunchtime but no food would be provided for the girls until dinner. Stephanie and I decided to take our girls to La Fraîcheur, an expensive outdoor restaurant normally patronized by functionaries and expats.

While we were waiting for the food the girls were oddly quiet. There was none of the constant chatter they usually keep up in village. What the hell kind of teenage girls are these, I thought.

“Maybe if we start teaching, they’ll start talking,” Stephanie said in French. The girls chuckled but stayed silent.

They were from different villages and, I realized, different tribes—my girls were Nagot and Stephanie’s were Mahi. They spoke different languages. This was probably the first time they’d ever had to speak French outside of school. In Parakou we were in the territory of a third tribe, the Bariba, also with its own language. We were still in Benin, and it felt like the same country to me, but to them they were in a foreign country and among foreigners.

The food came. They’d all ordered the same thing, couscous and chicken. In village this would mean a couple scoops of couscous and a mouthful of chicken. Here it meant a mountain of couscous and half a chicken. They had no trouble putting it all away. Then the bill came, and there went my living allowance for the month.

That evening a few of us went to set up the mosquito nets at the dormitories where the girls would be staying. The beds didn’t appear to normally be covered with nets. There were no hooks in the walls or raised beams on the bedframes. We improvised. When the girls got there, they couldn’t stop peeking in the rooms and giggling at the fact that, thanks to the heat, the male volunteers weren’t wearing shirts. They were finally acting like teenage girls.

I was about to leave when one of the female volunteers who was going to stay the night came to tell me that all the toilets had stopped working. As a man, I was naturally the person who knew how to fix this problem.

The communal bathroom was packed. Beninese always bathe before going to bed, and tonight would be no exception.

We stood outside the door. The other volunteer shouted in French, “A man is going to enter!”

The girls could not have cared less. Beninese have very little sense of privacy.

The place was a war zone. My girls had never seen running water before, and it appeared to be the same for most of the others. The sinks were running nonstop and there were buckets of water everywhere. Despite the female volunteers’ efforts to explain how to use a shower, the girls had insisted that we commandeer buckets from an unlocked janitorial closet so they could take bucket baths. Annoyingly, you had to hold the bucket right up to this strange overhead spigot, or else the water would spray all over you.

Based on the overwhelming evidence, I concluded that there had not been a water cut. But none of the toilet tanks were filling, and I was at the limit of my knowledge of African plumbing. These girls were not getting a good first impression of the flush toilet. I announced to everyone that the showers and sinks were using all the water, and that as soon as everyone was done bathing the toilets would work again. This was a wild guess which I presented as fact. I learned the next day that the toilets had never started working.

Most of each day was taken up by sessions on nutrition, health, sexual harassment, and other things which Peace Corps volunteers are supposed to talk to people about. My favorite session was essentially a free-for-all at the university’s computer lab. This was yet something else the girls had never seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such confused faces. After I showed Reine and Christianne, the girls from my village, how to change fonts in Word, they typed their names, made them huge, and spent the rest of the time scrolling through all the fonts. The liked the ornate cursive ones the best.

This being camp, they also learned songs and sang them to no end, including this one:

Le palu, c’est une maladie [clap clap clap]
Le palu, c’est une maladie [clap clap clap]
On peut l’éviter en dormant sous moustiquaire
Le palu, c’est une maladie [clap clap clap]

All of which means that you can avoid malaria by sleeping under a mosquito net.

Stephanie and I were supposed to bring a tutrice, a Beninese woman who would help run the camp. I had no problem choosing her: Monique, the wife of Edouard, my best friend in village. She’s university-educated and runs the village’s preschool, and also gave birth to her second child in April—proof to a skeptical country that a woman in her 20s can have both a family and her own life. She speaks the fastest French of anyone I know and consequently thinks that I am the stupidest creature who ever walked the Earth.

Her: blahblahblahblahblah.

Me: Uh…what?

Her: [disparaging look] The. Girls. Want. To. Go. To. The. Market. Tomorrow.

Which they did. Before going back to the village, they wanted to see Parakou’s massive open-air market. We took our bags to the market, where we would meet our taxi after we’d looked around. Stephanie sat with the bags while I walked the girls around. It was too early in the morning; the gates to the main market were locked and outside the vendors were selling only uninteresting things like tomatoes and cassava.

“Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” I asked.

“A shirt,” said Christianne.

“Earrings,” said Reine.

Of course.

This wasn’t my field. I watched the bags while Stephanie took them to the area where Western clothes are sold. A guy made me move all the bags so that he could put his merchandise where I was sitting.

“Women and their shopping,” I grumbled as I hauled all our crap into an empty alley.

Monique was there too, sitting and breastfeeding her baby and watching me haul all the crap. She called over a kid who was hanging around and gave him some instructions.

Some berobed Muslims came over, laid their prayer mats on the ground in front of us, and commenced to praise Allah.

The kid reappeared with a plastic guitar-shaped toy that played a different song when you pressed each button. It was for Monique’s 3-year-old daughter. It needed batteries. A few minutes later these materialized as well.

I thought of all the hours I’d spent combing markets for far less improbable items. Monique had made it happen sitting down, literally. Africans can do that.

Stephanie got back with the girls. Reine and Christianne had each bought earrings.

…

Back when I’d picked the girls I was going to bring, Reine’s father had refused to let her go. This was because he is a misogynist. Her mother was also against me, but for a different reason. If a male professor from my school wants to travel somewhere with a female student, you are fairly safe in assuming the worst.

A couple days after we got back to Kêmon, her mother came by my house to thank me, and to give me a sack of oranges.

—————

Things I Have Seen on a Motorcycle

5. Five grown men
4. A barrel of gasoline
3. My living room furniture
2. Another motorcycle
1. A cow

—————

Here are some assorted stories from my flights to and from California last July.

On the flight from Paris to San Francisco I had the suicidal-thoughts-inducing pleasure of sitting for eleven and a half hours among a gaggle of American high school girls. I am sure that when I was myself an 18-year-old flying to Europe, my group was equally annoying, but this was little consolation.

At the end of the flight Homeland Security kept us sitting on the tarmac for some time. The captain made an announcement to the effect that certain crew members should go to the door on the top deck. (We were in the new 2-story Airbus plane.) One of the girls, apparently under the impression that she understands French, announced to her companions that all passengers on the lower deck were to go to the top deck. Off they went, bags in hand, while everyone else stayed seated. A minute later they were escorted back by a haggard-looking stewardess who explained that if an announcement was made which concerned the passengers, it would also be made in English.

Before getting on the plane to go back to Benin I had the experience of TSA’s new body imager doodad. You all can sleep sound with the knowledge that on some government computer somewhere, there is a hologram of me naked.

Attempting to connect to my Cotonou-bound flight in Paris was madness. The terminal for flights to sub-Saharan Africa is 2E. I remember this specifically because the letter E is one of those things that I have never been able to pronounce correctly in French, along with vieux and accueil, and this caused me much misery. Many a Frenchman in that airport could not understand why I was making this sound as if somebody had punched me in the gut.

This would not have been such a problem if the location, or mere existence, of Terminal 2E was indicated on any signs anywhere. After getting off the plane and finding my gate number I stood baffled, trying to find 2E on any of the signs around. I asked an employee and was directed down some stairs. At the bottom of these stairs was a glass door leading to the tarmac, next to which was another employee.

“What is this?” I asked.

“This is the shuttle stop.”

“Where does the shuttle go?”

“Terminal 2F.”

“I’m looking for 2E.”

“Oui.”

“Do I get on the shuttle?”

“Oui.”

So after some waiting, on the shuttle I went. I got off at the only stop and asked yet another employee where 2E was. He pointed up a set of stairs. I went up the stairs and reached a room that was empty except for the uniformed employee, who pointed me down the stairs at the opposite end of the room. At the bottom of these stairs was another empty room with another employee, who directed me down a hallway, at the end of which was a security checkpoint. There was, of course, no one there except for the security officers.

“Empty your pockets,” one said.

“I’m looking for terminal 2E.”

“Bag on the conveyor belt.”

“Do I get to 2E through here?”

“Now walk through the metal detector.”

I walked through and set it off, realizing too late that I was still wearing my watch. The officers were clearly bored and commenced everything short of a strip-search, ignoring my protestations of “C’est le montre! C’est le goddamn montre!” My layover was not long enough for all this.

After that I walked into another room with glass doors and a uniformed employee.

“What is this?”

“This is the shuttle stop.”

Terminal 2E is the Platform 9¾ of Charles de Gaulle International Airport.

“Where does the shuttle go?”

“Terminal 2D.”

“What about 2E?”

“Oui.”

This shuttle dropped me off by what appeared to be an auto repair garage, except for some of those ubiquitous glass doors off to the side. Inside was a small room packed with several dozen Africans, all of whom were angrily yelling. I was getting close. There were some stairs on the other side of the room. I knew the routine by now. Up the stairs, across a room, down some stairs, up some more stairs, and into Terminal 2E.

—————

Independence Day

“Here are the white people. You can go with them,” said Odette as she compelled me into the back seat of a car. Next to me were two white girls who did not appear the least bit surprised, unlike me. I get as confused as everyone else when a white person shows up.

They were French. They had spent two weeks teaching villagers how to use Microsoft Word, and now they were going to go back to France. This appears to represent the typical nature and duration of the République’s activities here. But first they were going to the commune’s Independence Day parade, and now, so was I.

I remembered that about a week before, someone had mentioned the presence of French people in that village, which is three miles from my village.

“Are the nice?” I’d asked.

“Who cares? They’re French.”

“Ah.”

“Do you want to meet them?”

“No.”

This sentiment appeared forgotten among the villagers when we got to the road where the parade would take place. It was forgotten among the important villagers, at least. We didn’t talk to any of the non-important ones. All manner of high-level bureaucrats and tribal kings and school directors made a point to greet us, and we were seated in the front row of the impromptu reviewing stand.

An announcement was made that the parade would commence momentarily. I instinctively took this to mean that it would commence at some point in the next hour or so. A few minutes later the French girls started craning their necks this way and that, trying to look down the road.

“What?” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“But they said it was going to start ten minutes ago.”

“Everything happens late in Africa.”

A few minutes later they were back at it, and I couldn’t seem to communicate to them that I wasn’t trying to be funny about everything happening late in Africa. I wondered how they had managed to spend two weeks here without figuring that out.

In between their bouts of worrying about the time we chatted. They found my living situation highly disagreeable, and seemed to think me somewhat crazy for not thinking the same. (I’m sure their low opinion of my sanity also owed a lot to my French.) They’d spent their two weeks in a compound with electricity and running water—the only such compound in the village, to my knowledge—and they had a car and driver and a guy who was something between a tour guide and a bodyguard. Also, someone came and cooked French food for them every day.

(I should add that I believe they were volunteering through a private organization, not through a government agency like the Peace Corps, so we cannot directly blame the French government for this one.)

I wondered whether Independence Day festivities in a former colony might be somewhat awkward for them. I didn’t ask.

A television cameraman started walking up and down the front row of chairs, where all significant personages were seated—the king, the mayor, the white people. Each time he passed I gave him two thumbs up and a goofy smile, knowing that this way his footage would never make it on air. I was done being the white monkey a long time ago.

“Why are you embarrassing us?” one of the French grumbled.

He eventually caught me off my guard, as I learned when other American volunteers started calling to find out why I was on TV with two strange white girls.

The parade finally got underway. It was led by soldiers from the army units posted nearby. A military march was playing over the loudspeakers, but the MC kept interrupting the music to make pointless statements—a favorite practice of Beninese DJs. Each time he interrupted the music, the soldiers got out of step. They also tried to swing their arms in time, Soviet-style, but ended up out of sync and bending their elbows and generally looking like a lot of crooked windmills. It was the saddest display of military discipline I have ever seen.

They mayor of the commune then made a speech. He listed ad nauseam various projects that had taken place and buildings that had been constructed in the past year, and took credit for all of them. He neglected to mention his new cars, or his new house with electrical lines built specifically to serve it, or his trip to Paris.

“This is ironic, because he’s stolen so much money from the commune,” I said to one of the French, quietly.

“Comment, volé?” she whispered, wide-eyed. “How, stolen?”

When I repeated the conversation to my neighbor Edouard, this is the point where he doubled down in laughter.

Every time I’ve been in that village since they left, at least one person has randomly approached me to present me with some mind-numbingly obvious piece of information—the name of the food I’m eating, or how to say hello in the tribal language, or the name of the village. It usually goes like this:

“I know. I’ve lived here for a year.”

“Oh, you’re American. Obama!”

—————

One day the mother of the family next door disappeared, and the next evening I saw her sitting on her veranda and staring into space. She’s normally always chatting with someone or yelling at some kids. I went over and sat on the half-wall separating our verandas.

“So I traveled yesterday,” she said after a few minutes of silence.

“Very good.”

“To a funeral.”

“Oh.”

“For a woman at our church.”

“Was she young?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“She had only one child. We can’t even call her a woman. Only a girl, a little girl.”

I never thought to ask why she died. I guess it doesn’t matter what gets you in the end.

We sat and didn’t say anything for a while.

“To bury her we had to go to Dassa,” which is three hours away, she said suddenly. “We couldn’t afford a car, so we put her on a motorcycle.”

They had sat the corpse on the motorcycle behind the driver, and someone else sat behind the corpse. Both driver and passenger were roped to the corpse. In the hot sun, for three hours.

Roman emperors tortured their political enemies by roping them to corpses. To do it voluntarily——