Jacob handed me a folded scrap of paper. “A girl in the village sent me this note.”
“What girl?”
“A girl.”
I unfolded it and started reading.
“What does it say?”
“Hold on.” I had an idea of what it said and so did he.
She needed money. Her father refused to pay her school tuition. Because of the unpaid tuition she had not been allowed to go to school since Tuesday.
I looked up. “This is a student?”
He shrugged.
She was hungry and had no money to buy food. She could be found at home.
“She wants you to pay her tuition.”
“How much?”
I added up the various numbers in my head. “10,800 francs.” About 24 American dollars.
Jacob scoffed. “If I had that kind of money, I’d have plenty other things to spend it on.”
I frowned at the note.
“She sent this one too.”
I unfolded the second note. “I am hungry I have no money for food I am at home.”
It’s common for a father—often with little objection from the mother—to stop supporting his daughter once she is old enough to get pregnant. The situation is a bastard child of the old Africa, where a girl marries soon after having her first period, and the new, where girls go to school alongside the boys. A teenage girl can go to school if she wants, but her parents often expect that she will no longer be a financial burden on them. She has to find one or many men—men with some money, not boys her own age—to act as her husband, paying for her to eat and go to school. In the likely event that she gets pregnant or drops out of school for other reasons, she’ll become his wife, or one of his wives.
Marriage sometimes takes place with a ceremony and a legal contract, but it can also mean an informal arrangement in which the girl is not sleeping with anyone else and the man is paying her food and lodging. It’s assumed that a married man like Jacob is still shopping around for a mistress who will de facto become his wife once he gets her pregnant. When I tell the other men that I’m with only one woman at a time, they view me as less of a man for it. This is equally true with Christians and with Muslims. Girls, whether in school or not, learn to see sex as their livelihood and pregnancy as insurance against financial abandonment.
It shapes the teenage boys too. If the cute girl you have a crush on at school starts sleeping with a middle-aged man so that she can eat, you learn through the pain and humiliation that women are commodities. He didn’t get her by bringing her flowers or going on long walks with her. He bought her. It was that simple, and when you are older and have money, it will be that simple for you too.
That, I think, is the story of how girls are treated here. We may not be so crude about it in the West, but I expect a lot of men would not mind it if we were.
—————
The Fous
Fou is the French word for “crazy” or “crazy person”. In common parlance here it means “village idiot”. My village has five full-time fous. They wander around the village getting drunk on moonshine and acting fou-like. They are, however, apparently harmless, and the people view them much as they view the weather. Here they are:
Santa Claus Fou: So called because when I first met him he informed me that he was Santa Claus and that I therefore needed to give him a present. He would not let me get away, and in the end two guys walked over, picked him up by the hands and feet, and carried him away. Santa Claus Fou is also noteworthy for the fact that he smokes the only pipe I’ve ever seen in Benin and that he speaks French with a British accent. I have never heard a British person talk in French, but that’s the only way I can describe his unparalleled way of talking. It fits well with the pipe, and with the pinstriped sportcoat and Nietzsche mustache he unfailingly wears.
Teacher Fou: He hangs around primary schools, posing as a teacher. He is therefore the most well-dressed of the fous. If a teacher doesn’t come to work one day, he’s liable to take over the unsupervised class and make the students sing the national anthem.
Town Crier Fou: He staggers continuously up and down the main road, yelling things. For a few hundred francs, he’ll yell your things. This is probably the surest way to spread information throughout the village. He is, incidentally, the fou who most often forgets to put his pants on.
Nice Fou: He wanders around the same territory as Village Crier Fou, occasionally yelling things, but mostly saying hi to everyone with a huge smile and, if you’re far away, a dramatic wave. He speaks the best French of any of the fous, but it’s best not to get into a conversation with him.
Spanish Fou: Possibly the most fou of the fous. Also the most consistently drunk. He gets in your face, yells something that makes no sense, and then sticks his neck out at you, pursing his lips and staring with his beady little eyes. The first time I met him, he shouted ¡buenos tardes! and then executed the aforementioned maneuver. A very short conversation in Spanish followed. Neither of us really know Spanish. When I refused to give him my watch, he went and told the whole village that I’m a Spanish spy. This was about a week after I first got to the village. I don’t think the spy thing was widely believed, but people still ask me if I’m from Spain. And to this day I’ll be walking somewhere when I see a ragged figure staggering in my general direction—“L’ESPAGNOL! ¡Venga aquí, Espagnol! Non non non tais toi, il n’est pas français! C’EST UN ESPAGNOL! ¿Como estas, Espagnol, como como como ta mère estas? L’ESPAGNOL!”
—————
I was sitting in my house reading and someone came to the door.
“Come in,” I called. A soldier in a regular army uniform ducked through the doorway and snapped to attention and saluted.
What the hell, I thought.
“Good afternoon, teacher,” he said in carefully enunciated English.
I looked at his face again. He’d been my student in troisième last year. When I didn’t see him around the village any more I assumed he’d transferred to a lycée in a bigger village somewhere. (In the French system, students have to pass a test called the BEPC after completing troisième, which is the equivalent of tenth grade and is the last year of collège. Then they can get a job that only requires the BEPC, or go on to a lycée.) He’d joined the army and is posted in a large town in the south. For a boy from this village, this a dream come true. You get out of the village and you have money. Most important, you have the status and respect that the uniform and the gun give you.
A visit from a former student is not something I should be experiencing at my age. He’s only three years younger than me. But I won’t be getting many more of these visits. Out of 110 students in troisième last year, half of whom I taught, five passed the BEPC.
—————
A classroom at my school has desks and benches for the students, a table and chair for the professor, a chalkboard, and nothing else. I walked into one classroom at the start of this school year and attempted to write the title of the lesson on the board. The chalk glanced off, hardly leaving a mark. I broke the chalk in half, hoping that the broken end would write better. It didn’t. The board was worn too smooth. I went to the Directeur and told him the situation.
“Well, you can try teaching or you can go home,” he said.
“What about repainting it?”
“We haven’t got around to it yet.”
I went back. Teaching without a chalkboard was out of the question. There are no books; students’ only study material (for when they theoretically study) is what they copy from the board into their notebooks. The school’s classroom shortage saw to it that we couldn’t move to another room. I noticed a large sheet of plywood leaning against the back wall. I had the teachers’ table brought to the front of the room and the plywood set on top of it, leaning against the erstwhile chalkboard. That’s how I’ve been teaching since, until someone gets around to repainting the goddamn board.
—————
I live near the foot of the small hill on the edge of the village that begins at the foot of the big hill. In the older parts of the village the houses are tightly packed but out here there’s more space. A stand of mango trees and a tobacco field separate our few houses from the rest of the village. In the morning, as the sky is getting light, you hear the birds in the mango trees, and the roosters, and the girls’ palm-frond brooms scraping the dirt, and nothing else.
My house is at the end of a row of three connected houses. In front of each house is an open veranda surrounded by a half-wall. This is where you sit in the evenings, talking to the neighbors and hoping for a breeze.
In the front room there’s a small unvarnished wood table and, for some reason, an extra bed that was here before I was. On the other side of the room, a coffee table with a couple plain wooden armchairs—fabric and cushions absorb heat and get dirty—and my Peace Corps–issue footlocker, and a couple of bookshelves. I don’t usually have more than a dozen real books at a time, because once I’ve finished one I give it to another Volunteer. The shelves mostly hold Peace Corps policy manuals and such, documents related to teaching English, and virgin volumes with titles like Small Project Assistance Program: Supporting Sustainable Community Development, Using Participatory Analysis for Community Action, and The Peace Corps Volunteer On-going Language Learning Manual, which the people in Washington produce and foist upon us under the apparent impression than somebody reads them.
The walls are covered with maps and with various poems that I know, written directly on the wall in pencil. I am that weird.
There are two small rooms in the back. The bedroom is different from one in America only because of the mosquito net and the open-face dresser. Mice and cockroaches will colonize anything with drawers. The kitchen consists of a gas stove, a table for preparing food, and shelves with jars and cans of whatever can be stored. Anything perishable needs to be bought the day you eat it. Some baskets hang from the ceiling. These hypothetically prevent mice from nibbling your food, but by some gymnastic feat the mice still get in.
The backyard is surrounded by a brick wall on two sides and an outbuilding on the third. If I were Beninese, this outbuilding would be my kitchen, because I would cook over a wood or coal fire and would otherwise die of carbon monoxide poisoning. As it is, it is unused.
In one corner of the yard there’s a large plastic water cistern. I shower by standing in the dirt next to it and dumping cold water over myself with a plastic bowl, pausing periodically to rub soap over myself. Even other Peace Corps Volunteers make fun of me for this.
I am the sixth Volunteer to live here. The first three did environmental work, especially on their house. A papaya tree and a moringa tree populate the backyard; the latter supplies leaves which, when dried and ground up and put in food, are nutritious. I tell the men in the village that these leaves will make them sexually fort and the resultant children costaud, and consequently people come to my house all the time to get leaves. They also left an ad hoc scrap-iron gutter which channels rainwater into a large concrete cistern. Snails have a habit of drowning in this cistern. I use its water for laundry only.
Traces of these past Volunteers, and of the exquisite boredom that this place can inflict on you, are everywhere. On the appropriate sides of the back screen door someone wrote DEVANT (front) and ARRIÈRE (behind). A vertical scrawl on the front screen door asks, “How do I know what I know?” A board in the latrine door, the one that is right in front of your face while you are doing your business, is adorned with a row of five clovers drawn in chalk. The fourth one has four leaves. On the outer side of the door, a bit of practical advice: “PCVs, use this toilet.”
They also left an archaeology of furniture, with attendant mysteries. Why the extra bed? Why, in addition to that, two folding cots? My only contribution was the armchairs, but when I moved in there was already the coffee table, without anything you would normally sit on while using a coffee table. The four chairs appear to have been made by four different carpenters. When I got there, there were no less than eight little stools in the living room, not one of which could support the weight of an emaciated Peace Corps Volunteer, much less a normal human being. Why?
—————
I wrote a while ago that many of my students in sixième, the equivalent of seventh grade and the first year of secondary school, are completely illiterate. They are also, I’ve found, only vaguely acquainted with French, the school’s language of instruction. A few weeks ago, for example, they were having an awful time learning the English possessive adjectives (my, your, his). It transpired that none of them knew the possessive adjectives in French. They didn’t understand “It’s my pen” or “The pen is mine.” The only way they could express possession was “The pen there, it is for me.” I’ve been effectively teaching two languages at once.
There are other difficulties relating to the parley-voo. Whenever I want to explain a somewhat complicated concept, I have to bring in an older student to translate what I say into the tribal language.
Each of our faculty meetings since the start of the school year has turned into a riot over this situation. The general sentiment is that we are wasting our time with students whose educational careers were finished long before they got to us. In the absence of the kind of intensive literacy and language program that’s hard to find even in an American public school, this is the situation. The administration is so far only vaguely concerned about it.
We just finished our first series of exams, a bimonthly ritual that’s kind of like finals week in college. I spent a week on an extensive review of precisely what material and what kind of questions would appear on the exam. The next week we did the same review lessons a second time. I also showed them how to make flashcards. They were inordinately excited about this; I think they believed that I had personally invented flashcards.
About half of them still contrived to score under 25% on the exam. Many of their answers weren’t even written in the alphabet of any language I am aware of. Yesterday I turned the grades in to the Directeur. He read down the list, holding it a few inches from his face and squinting his bad eyes.
“Not good!” he concluded.
“No.”
“They didn’t read through their notes at home?”
I just about lost it. “They – cannot – read! We’ve all been saying that since October!”
“Hmm.” He flipped to the second page.
