Edouard came by my house to chat. I showed him the papers I’d just finished going through, the results of a literacy test I’d given my students that morning. I read aloud to them two short passages in French, one simple (“I am a student at CEG Kêmon. I am twelve years old”), and one from a fairly easy novel, and told them to write down what they heard. They’re all in the equivalent of the seventh grade, the first year of secondary school here. About half of them seemed somewhat literate: they didn’t get most of the words, but they approximated them and they clearly understand the relationship between sounds and written letters. Below that half, about a quarter of the students got very little but did eke out a few intelligible words. The bottom quarter wrote pure gibberish.
To give you an idea, here’s the first passage I read to them:
Je suis élève de la 6ème au CEG Kêmon. J’ai douze ans. Mon père est menusier et ma mère est couturière. J’ai deux frères et trois soeurs.
Here are three students’ renderings:
je declami de 6 arinde G J D deime m est 12 manira est estingdmamoon i estinij deux et annie mrme
Jetsi OCDde6/A
Jedins conts
non Jsetieze tinsniJenllaites denlt
Jedes asas
nom partes
Jsetieze trinre
They have all completed at least six years of primary school, and are as illiterate as if they’d never gone for a single day. Now they’re in secondary school, where they’ll repeat seventh grade for as many years as their parents desire, and then drop out.
Edouard looked through the specimens I handed him. “Well, none of them were my students,” he said. He’s a primary school teacher. “Do you know what schools the illiterate ones came from?”
“I can ask,” I said.
“It might be better not to.”
“Why?”
“Be careful who you show these to. We all know this happens but to show proof is to make an accusation.”
That sentence ought to be tattooed on the foreheads of all Peace Corps volunteers in this country.
“When I first came here to teach,” he said, “I taught fourth grade. The first day of class I found that none of the students could even read A, B, C. I asked around and the people said that the teacher I replaced didn’t work. He only took his salary and left. So I started with the first grade curriculum.”
“I can’t teach seventh graders how to read.”
“No, it’s too late now.”
“What can I do?”
“Wait until they drop out.”
It was dark and the rain had started again. It pounded my sheet-iron roof and we had to start yelling.
“Many of the schoolteachers here are lazy!” Edouard shouted over the din. “But that’s not the whole problem! If these parents cared at all, their kids wouldn’t be illiterate! The parents of this village don’t give a fuck what their kids are doing!”
Edouard is one of the few people in this village who isn’t of the Nagot tribe. This is a standard line that other tribes use against the Nagot, that they don’t care about their children. It’s racist, but looking at those papers of gibberish, I was inclined to agree with him.
“I tried to start tutoring my struggling students a couple years ago!” he shouted. “In the south a tutor costs ten thousand francs a month! I lowered the price to five hundred a month, for tutoring twice a week! Not a single parent would pay!”
“Five hundred? Or five thousand?” I asked. Five hundred is about one American dollar.
“Five hundred! That’s a bottle of beer! Not a single father could give up a single bottle of beer so his kids could learn to read!”
I heard a child crying. It sounded like the kid was right outside my door. We got up and opened the door. Aboudou, my neighbor’s three-year-old son, was standing there, shivering in the downpour. We dried him off and I wrapped him in a bedsheet and tried to lay him on my bed, but he wouldn’t let go of me, so we sat down again with him on my lap.
“You see! He was off playing somewhere far away, and came back here when the rain started! His parents have no idea where he is, and they don’t care!”
Neither do the parents of the students whose papers were spread on my coffee table in front of us. Ignorance is practically hereditary. These parents—certainly uneducated, probably illiterate—see no reason why their children should be different from them. Those kids’ futures are already decided. The boys will work in the fields, the girls will get married to older men. “There is no darkness but ignorance,” and the most insidious thing about ignorance, about poverty, is that your right to choose your own course in life is stolen from you before you even knew you had it.
—————
The other day I received this letter from my best student.
Dear Monsieur Michel,
I am sending you this letter to ask for your help.
A long time ago I lived with my parents. In 2008 my father had a serious accident and hurt his arms, and could no longer work on the farm. After that he became a drunkard in the village. Because of this, my mother divorced him. To this day he cannot support me.
Since 2010 I have managed by cultivating a pepper field to support myself. But this year has been only a year of loss for me. It’s through this field that I had been paying my tuition and school expenses. Now I don’t know what to do. When I ask my father for help, he tells me to leave school. And I don’t have anyone in my family to help me.
That’s why I’ve decided to ask for your help.
Please do something.
Thank you.
Daniel Nara
All of last year I knew nothing of this.
His field failed for the same reason everyone’s fields are failing: this rainy season’s been too dry. I know his house. It’s far outside the village and he has to walk six miles one-way to school. He is going into the ninth grade. And he was first in his class last year.
What happens when I’m not here any more? He’ll have four years to go before he graduates—and even then, how does he go to college?
How many more Daniels are there who don’t have anyone to write a letter to?
The year before I came here I tutored English at a poor, mostly Latino high school. Whenever a kid got in to college their English teacher would hang the acceptance letter on the wall. There weren’t many of them and I never saw one from a University of California campus or any comparable school. When I graduated from my middle-class, mostly white high school, our class sent several dozen students to colleges like that.
When I get back to the States, any right-winger who wants to say that we’re all born with equal opportunity had better say it very far away from me.
—————
It started raining. I needed to got to Kilibo to flag down a Cotonou-bound bus. The buses had all left Parakou at seven and would pass through Kilibo between eight and eight-thirty, which meant that I needed to leave my village within a few minutes. The rain didn’t look like letting up any time soon and so I put on my poncho and backpack and walked to the village center. A moto-taxi driver drove out to me and we left.
The road was already turning into a stream and water fanned out into the air on both sides of the motorcycle. In places where the sandy mud was loose our moto wobbled and swerved but the driver somehow kept us upright. His name was François and he was one of my students. This was his summer job. He shouted over his shoulder to ask if I could bring him a French-English dictionary from Cotonou. I said I would, and held on to the moto for dear life.
Kilibo was deserted. We stood under a shelter—a sheet of corrugated iron held up by wooden poles—and waited for the buses to pass. A taxi pulled up and the driver asked for passengers going to Cotonou. When I told him I was waiting for a bus he left me alone but then he started getting desperate.
“If you get in, we can go right now,” he suggested, holding the door open.
“You can go without me.”
He gave me a hurt look. “Don’t you trust me?”
He already had three passengers; ideally he would have six. Every empty spot was lost money. But every minuted spent waiting for passengers who may or may not come withered his chances of reaching Cotonou by dark.
A bus came round the bend. I ran out to flag it down. The driver flashed his high beams to indicate that he’d seen me but had no empty seats.
I went back under the shelter. I was soaked. We stood in the water, ankle-deep and rising, and I wore my pack because there was nowhere dry to put it. François waited with me and we were hungry but the women who normally sell breakfast by the road here had all stayed at home, out of the rain. I had a bottle of hot tea but without food it just made me nauseous. The taxi driver tried again to talk me into his car. I knew that if one bus was full it didn’t bode well for the others, but a taxi would take at least two hours longer to reach Cotonou. I told him no. Another bus came. It was full too. The driver gave me a last chance and then he left. There went my backup plan.
Bus number three came and flashed its high beams and blew past. I finished the tea and told myself that I would give it another fifteen minutes before I started panicking.
Bus number four. François and I flung ourselves into the road, arms flailing. The driver turned on his hazard lights and pulled over. I got on and fell into a seat and put my bag and helmet and poncho on the empty seat next to me. The other passengers shot me looks ranging from disapproval to alarm. Among the locations and circumstances in which a bus might pick up a white man, this was among the more unlikely ones.
I could see why this bus had had empty seats. It was a rolling piece of shit. The windows leaked water and the engine frequently groaned in a register which was barely within the range of the human ear. A salesman stood up in the aisle and, bracing himself firmly against a stanchion, began hawking some homemade miracle medicine. One of the ingredients was snake oil. Some time later a man a few seats in front of me began shouting angrily into his cell phone. Beninese generally have no cell phone etiquette—even a speaker at the podium will answer his phone and carry on a conversation while the audience waits—but this is tempered by the high cost, and thus short duration, of phone calls. Not so with this guy. After ten or so minutes the woman behind him tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to quiet down. At this he stood up in the aisle and commenced to lambaste all of us in his tribal language. This went on for over an hour, interrupted only when he called someone to yell at them too. For sheer lungpower I’m not sure even Rush Limbaugh could have bested him.
I’d gone to Cotonou for my mid-service medical exam. While I was down there I went to Porto Novo to see my old host family. They were now someone else’s host family: the new trainees had been in Porto Novo since July and were going to swear in as Volunteers in a couple of days.
The new trainee wasn’t at the house when I got there. I sat and caught up with Dismas, the father of the family. He pulled out a booklet and asked me what it said. I flipped through; it had been written by Peace Corps and given to all the host families to address such issues as what they ought to feed their trainees, how much privacy they ought to give them, and other topics you should be aware of before housing an American in your house.
Dismas, being a Beninese carpenter, cannot read. He’d been hosting American trainees for four years without having any idea what this booklet said. Someone ought to call up Peace Corps and inform them that the literacy rate in Africa is under 100%.
I helped the trainee buy some stuff at the market and then he wanted to go to a restaurant where some other trainees were hanging out. While he locked his bike up outside I started walking in, saw the Americans’ table, and walked back out.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“That’s a lot of white people.”
He dragged me in and we sat down. Most of the trainees there were going to be teachers, like me, and they were full of questions. They were upbeat but you could tell it was a tense day for them. They’d finished training that morning and within a few days they’d be off to every corner of the country, far from the people they’d spent every day with for two and a half months. The conversation was mostly about training and the other trainees. I found it odd, claustrophobic, but it made sense. In training you don’t yet have your own village, your own workplace, your own friends, your own life. You just have the other American trainees. I tried to remember what that had been like but I couldn’t. It was too far away. These trainees, their perspective, were too far away. I didn’t feel superior toward them. It just felt as if I were standing outside myself, or a past version of myself, and I wasn’t really sure how to feel about it. It was the same way when I visited the States last July—looking through foreign eyes at what I used to be, at what my perspective and concerns used to be.
One of them asked about a peculiar phenomenon in this country, that male teachers tend to sleep with their students. I told the truth as directly and in as few words as I could. Looking at their faces, I saw that this had been a mistake. I shut up after that.
It was different, listening to them talk about things American. I’d never realized that we, the volunteers who were already here, talk mostly about things Beninese—and often to vent our frustration about the place or the people. I thought of the volunteers I’m closest with, how little I know about what they were like in America. It never really comes up. All they are to you, all you are to them, is who you’ve been for the past year. Each volunteer has a whole life they left behind and some will go back to it and some won’t, but that’s all been in the background for a long time. Now, listening to the new volunteers, for whom that life is still only a few months in the past, I felt as if I’d lost something without realizing that I’d lost it. I wondered when it was that this place swallowed me up.
The next day was my med exam, and their swear-in ceremony. There was nothing wrong with me and so I got out of the doctor’s office early enough to rush over to the ceremony. It was held at the Palais des Congrès in Cotonou, in what has to be the nicest auditorium in Benin. Two interesting things happened. After they’d taken the oath (“to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…”) in English, it was announced that they would now take the same oath in French. The Peace Corps staff member at the podium then commenced to read out a paragraph of fairly complicated French which said nothing about the Constitution and was instead closer to an oath of allegiance to Benin. Many of the new Volunteers are still struggling with French and may not have known what they were saying. It was a dirty trick to pull on them. Some of them did understand—I saw their mouths go shut halfway through—and as the volume from their section diminished, the volume of bitter laughter from the second-year volunteers increased.
The other noteworthy event was that toward the end, the back doors opened and a half-dozen soldiers walked in, followed by a guy in a suit. He took the podium and announced that he was the Minister of Defense. (The heads of the Ministries relevant to our work, like Education and Public Health, had been invited, but this guy was not among them.) He said, among other things, that our safety in Benin is absolutely guaranteed. This made me feel much better.
—————
I left Ouèssè a couple hours before sunset. It was twenty-five kilometres to my village and once the sun was down there would be the danger of bandits on this road. I wasn’t worried; the trip had taken less than an hour that morning. It hadn’t rained the night before and the dirt road was firm but not dusty and the biking was about as good as it gets on a dirt road.
About ten kilometres out I rode into a downpour. I was going down a hill and tried to slow down, and when I pulled the brakes the front wheel dug in to the mud and snapped ninety degrees to the left and down I went. I dragged the bike into a ditch by the side of the road and pulled my poncho from my backpack. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I was so concerned with the poncho.
I looked at my arm. Blood was bubbling from the elbow and the whole forearm was red. I look at my leg. It was all red too and blood was pooling around my foot. I tried not to look at it. There was nothing I could do.
I sat in the tall grass on the other side of the ditch and pulled the poncho back from my arm and leg to let the rain wash the wounds. I pulled my good leg up and rested my head on my knee.
I don’t know how long I was out for. Someone shook me awake. I looked up and there were the wide cold eyes of a Fulani herder, a man of the nomadic northern tribe that roams between the villages here. He said something in his language.
“Français,” I said.
He moved off. A minute later he was back with another Fulani, who pointed to me.
“French?” he said.
“American. Speak French.”
He knelt down and looked at my arm and leg. Then he pointed to the bike. “You have accident?”
“The rain made the road muddy.”
He nodded. He opened his canteen, tilted my head back, held my jaw open, and dumped a lot of water down my throat. Then they left.
I got up. The sun was low in the sky and the downpour had turned to a drizzle. My leg and arm were still leaking but not like before. I figured I had between ten and fifteen kilometres to go.
On the outskirts of the village someone yelled my name. It was Jacob, a carpenter I knew in the village. I went over and he took me to a barrel of water and washed my arm and leg, and then he produced a bottle of the strong local moonshine and poured it in to the wounds. This was the most painful part of this ordeal. With it all clean I assessed the damage. I’d had a sizable scar on my elbow from a bike crash a year ago; this and all the surrounding skin was gone. Better yet was the groove below my knee, at least half an inch wide and deep.
I’m writing this the day after. My leg is stuck out awkwardly from the table. Despite the inadvisable quantity of ibuprofen I took a while ago, I can’t bend the leg without severe pain. I wonder how I, with my modest level of pain tolerance, biked the rest of the way yesterday, bending that leg hundreds of times. I also wonder how much blood you need to lose before you pass out, or whether you can pass out from shock. The mysteries of life.
—————
Other than 1984
I just finished reading the volume of George Orwell’s essays published by Everyman’s. I doubt it’s complete but it’s longer than War and Peace. Here are some of my favorite excerpts.
[Written in 1937:] Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo [= war-hawk] with a bullet hole in him.
One of the big failures of human history has been the age-long attempt to stop women painting their faces.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened.
The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks to concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.
As for the Moslem Paradise, with its seventy-seven houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same time, it is just a nightmare.
Individual salvation is not possible…the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of führers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and Left Wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.
Indeed, I doubt whether Classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried on without corporal punishment.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are “only doing their duty,” as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood.…Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.
—————
Football and rape
A while ago all the Volunteers in this country had to go to our regional workstations for a training session put on by Peace Corps. The first half of the training was on how to make allegations of inappropriate or illegal conduct against Peace Corps staff and against people in our villages. I can only imagine what frantic ass-covering impulse possessed Peace Corps staff to organize this little program. As you can discover by googling “Peace Corps Benin,” reporting a Peace Corps employee’s misconduct in this country can have undesirable consequences. And calling Peace Corps up about some corrupt official in your village has two absolutely guaranteed effects: (1) said official, and most likely many other people too, will be mad at you, possibly endangering your life, and (2) nothing will happen to said official, since Peace Corps and the American government obviously have no jurisdiction in a foreign country.
The second half of the training was on how to intervene if you see a sexual assault that is happening or is about to happen. This was communicated to us by means of a booklet, apparently put together by Peace Corps in Washington, which throughout compared rape to a football game. Every few pages you got a cartoonish John Madden–type diagram demonstrating, in the style of a football play, how one might intervene to stop this or that type of rape.
The staff member running the training passed out skit scenarios involving sexual assault and instructed us to get in groups and act them out. I.e., a male Volunteer needed to pretend to sexually assault a female Volunteer. We decided not to do that.
Thus, Peace Corps masterfully responds to the public and Congressional outcry against its handling of sexual assault against Volunteers.
Would I still advise someone to join the Peace Corps? Probably, as long as you are aware of how you’ll be treated. Volunteers are, in principle, disposable, and the prime objective is to protect the image of the Peace Corps and the careers of its staff. Anything that happens to a Volunteer is bad only insofar as it makes Peace Corps look bad. If you are robbed, or assaulted, or raped, or killed, Peace Corps’ response will be intended to save face and not to support you or your family. If you can work under those conditions, and forget as often as possible that they exist, service can be an incredible two years of your life. It’s obviously infuriating, but those are the facts and I don’t see them changing any time soon, no matter what drivel oozes from Peace Corps’ P.R. office.
—————
A deficit of something
An elder had died and the funeral engulfed the whole village. As the only foreigner, the only white man, I stood out in the crowd. A man who appeared to be important called me over.
I sat with him. He was the imam at the mosque. As we talked I watched an odd spectacle. A constant stream of girls with huge basins of yams or cassava on their heads were walking over to a table where a man with a ledger noted each contribution, and then the food was piled in the room behind him. I asked the imam what that was all about. Each family was sending a basin of food, he said.
I thought about that. These are some of the poorest people on earth. Most families grow their own food using primitive tools, without machinery or beasts of burden. Each basin represented hundreds of hours of back-breaking labor and a significant portion of the year’s limited food supply.
“But what’s all that food for?” I asked.
He smiled. “You don’t understand?”
“No.”
“When we have a large celebration like this, the villagers store up food so that if someone comes here and has nothing to eat, even if he is a stranger from far away, he will have something to eat for as long as he stays in the village.”
After over a year living in the village, this seems less incredible to me than it did then. If a stranger comes at mealtime, he will be fed, even if there isn’t enough to feed the family—even if that stranger is me, someone who can clearly afford to buy his own food.
Meanwhile, in the wealthiest country on earth—the lords of finance wipe out the jobs and the homes of millions of ordinary people, and then get their hired liars and blowhards to eviscerate the services that might help these people, and the Walton family controls as much wealth as the bottom 140 million Americans combined.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
— Oliver Goldsmith
