I’m in Natitingou, a town in northwest Benin, for a belated Thanksgiving with the other education volunteers from my training class. It took most of a day to get here but the town is beautiful, built on the sides of two mountain ridges and along the road that runs between them — white mosques and stone churches with belltowers, quiet cobblestone and red dirt roads, hilltop bars where you can see for miles, dry and windy, very northern.
There are about fifteen of us here and we cooked an epic amount of food. On the menu, as I remember it, were:
- Turkey
- Stuffing
- Mashed potatoes
- Green beans
- Mac and cheese
- Garlic bread
- Rolls
- Some sort of black bread
- Salad
- Various pies and things
I carved the turkey. I have no idea how to carve a turkey, but the meat was separated from the bird and that’s what counts. When we ate our little salon was packed and it felt like a big family Thanksgiving — the same people we started training with eighteen months ago, except for the two who have gone to a better place, by which I do not mean the afterlife, et qui nous manquent. When we first met it seemed that we’d be here forever, and now that we have nine months left it feels to me that we’re about to leave. At this point that prospect is more anxious than happy. Most of us came here straight out of college. We don’t know anything of the real world except Africa. Before we ate dinner someone strung a banner across the wall, Home Is Where You Are.
That morning I’d found in our informal library a copy of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, which was a source of amusement throughout the day, but no amount of unintentional humor could spare this screed its ultimate fate. After dinner another volunteer, Jared, and I took it outside. I held it up and fanned out the pages.
“For America,” I said.
“For America.” Jared struck a match.
“You know,” I said as we watched the flames, “there was I time when I never would have burned a book. But that was before I’d ever heard of Glenn Beck.”
As the pages burned we attempted to read what was written on them. “Something about Woodrow Wilson being a fascist!…and there it goes. Barack Obama, Kenyan Marxist! The Cancer of Progressivism! The Jews!…well, now we’ll never know what Glenn Beck thinks about the Jews.”
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
—————
Here are some pictures of me teachering. This is my life…
Photographic evidence of me teaching, and of a student looking in the wrong direction
Shut up and write.
Copy in your copybooks.
