DEJA VU IN NATITINGOU; CHUTES IN TANGUIETA; CORRESPONDANCE CLUB

I apologize in advance for this e-mail. I have been wanting to write it for a while, but life has actually been picking up in terms of work. I am also still digesting from our makeshift Thanksgiving last week (one down, one to go). I had to write about that one in a separate e-mail, though. This one was hard enough and I know bombarding your inboxes with these huge files gets tedious. So open each at your leisure and just enjoy. There won't be a test, I promise. Luckily for you all, I fear I'm sinking into the hole where nothing is new anymore and I forget to tell you guys about the interesting things that happen in everyday life. Perhaps this will result in my being less of a prolific correspondent. For some of you, I apologize. If there are specific things you would like to know about, don't hesitate to ask; perhaps there are different things here to which I have already grown accustomed and don't bother to mention to you.


For Early Service training we went right back up to Natitingou. It was another 7 hour ride of joyous fun and delightment. Going to the "bus depot" in Bohicon is always a trip as it requires you to jump up at the first sight of a bus (usually anywhere from 20-200 minutes late) and run to snag the empty seats that may or may not exist on said bus. To accomplish this task, however, you must run across the red terrain lot, barge through the vendors with heavy lids of crap on their heads, shove and shoulder out the other potential riders then finally grab the attention and plead convincingly with the maitress charged with managing the passenger load and fares to land yourself a spot.
In this particular instance (and the reason I prefer to not travel in groups – any more than two travelers and the difficulty of your voyage increases exponentially with each addition) there were only three empty seats and we were four (with a fifth on the road up ahead). We (I) pleaded with the woman to let us board as four and we could share one seat and she acquiesed, begrudgingly. Much to the chagrin of another gentleman who legitimately held a reservation but from whom we stole an empty seat nonetheless. The result of which being that I was sitting cheek to cheek with Sebastian and a little African boy who looked as though he had been in situations more comfortable than he was in now pressed up against the side of a bus, but had also been punished worse enough to know better than to say so. Three older French people also managed to persuade their way onto the bus and so the styrofoam luggage had to go under (where it belonged anyway); although it took some manouevering around the foot of a gendarme agent who refused to budge (although I can't say I understood his protests unless he didn't want white people sitting at the back of his bus) and carried the big gun to validate his protest.
The trip itself was relatively uneventful. I scared the crap out of this little girl by my whiteness and we stopped in a few random towns for food and snacks. When we arrived in Nati, it was raining and that sucked, but we got to the hotel without problems and had air conditioning in our rooms (though it was raining, you still want the air conditioner – that humidity)! There isn't really much else to say except we ate really well (the $8 pizza photo), stayed up really late, and drank expensive Nescafe freeze dried coffee (it took us two hours to get the price down from $2 to a little over $1 – it's insane to think of paying Starbucks' prices for worse than 7-11 flavor!). I left Nati as the person in charge of updating the formation binder for the next stage of volunteers coming July 4th (yea, sucks for them!) and being the official contact on radio programs. I'm loving having some new responsibility once again with which to occupy my excessive free time.
CHUTES IN TANGUIETA
After our stint in Nati was over, a group of us took off on in a taxi up through the beautiful hillsides of northwestern Benin. It looked like California, but I think that about everyplace I visit. The only difference was the little roadside stops were red, straw-roofed huts and little naked black children and goats ran along side the highway. This was a new Benin for me and I was thrilled to be viewing some different terrain than what I normally see in the south.
We went up to Tanguieta where another volutneer, Mike, lives in a neat little concession complete with with a grave, memorial and the first full latrine I have seen in-country. (All they do is tear down the surrounding walls and move them to where they have dug up another pit latrine. Sometimes they'll cover the old latrine hole with cement, but was not in this instance what they chose to do). We spent the first night just hanging out and seeing the town – which is right in the hills and is quite charming! They did controlled burning on the hillsides that was eerily beautiful to watch as we ate our street meat and beans and rice while the sky behind the hill was lit up orange and blue.
The next morning we set out for the waterfalls; each of us on the back of a moto to traverse the 40km trip of red dirt and burning sunny hillside. My moto broke down at one point and we had to walk a distance (his spark plug gave out). We finally got it going again, just in time to head up to the town of Tanagou which is just as picturesque as all get-out. Here we waited and waited and waited for the volunteer posted there and her friend to get out of their hut and come up the last little way with us. Emily is the health volunteer used to living out in the bush; the place where no zemidjans go. Sweet girl. While we were waiting, Emma's driver dropped his moto on his foot and we had a bit of an emergency. Luckily, we always have a little bit of a med kit on us and we patched him right up – but then he left his bloody rag on the ground and I had to scold him for being an idiot (and how is AIDS spread?).
We finally made it up to the waterfalls and had a little hike in through some beautiful rivers and streams and some really stinky mud pits that were hard to avoid slipping into. The biggest fall (there are a couple on the way up) is beautiful and the brackish water below has been approved by decades of volunteers for swimming so we all dove in without hesitation while our moto drivers watched (they're afraid of water and aren't really known for their swimming abilities). Nearby was a cave full of bats where we spent some time just hanging out... very cool to say you hang out in a cave, toxic guano or otherwise.
To get to top of the fall itself you have to scale the wall, hoist yourself up using vines well-rooted into the rock for leverage and them climb and shimmy your way through cracks in the wall up to the top. Basically, once you've already reached the summit, you have to jump off because there is no safer way of getting down. Now if you really know me you know that I'm absolutely the worst at guessing heights and distances, weights and childrens' ages, but I would say this fall is about 45 feet high (take with a pound of salt). We got up there and it was far enough to really make you shake in your booties; a very impressive height. Far enough of a distance to hurt my feet when I hit water – the second one to jump – even though they were pointed, far enough to hurt the inside of my legs for two days. It was much higher than I remember being the Spanish Flats at Lake Berryessa or the rocks of our youth at D.L. Bliss. Those didn't hurt when I hit the water. And I got off easy; you should see the other guy! We spent the day swimming and lolligaggin around afterwards and I wish I had the photos to prove it, but alas, I have no camera and my friends are in other towns. One fine, random day you'll see a blur in some water and that's me at the falls; don't doubt it. I was hideously ill on the bus the next day so I'm going to chalk that up to being in water that was neither boiled nor filtered. But it was fun!! Took some of the heat off, too.
CORRESPONDANCE CLUB
This week marked the first of our (Jordan's and my) Club de Correspondance. Kids from both the "quatrieme" and "cinqieme" levels (equivalent to seventh and eighth grade) of CEG (General Learning School) come to the club on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and we help them write letters in English to American students. There is a lady in Georgia (the state, not the former Soviet country) that helped Amanda and Erin (the two volunteers we replaced in Azovè) do the same club and she agreed to help us this year so we gather up all the letters and send them off all together for her to distribute once they reach those shining shores of U.S.A.
You show up to the school and immediately children (I use the term loosely as some of these kids are 17 or 18 years old) swarm to ask you questions in poor English (American standards); trying to pry your bike away and walk it for you while messing with your gears (most often there are at least two doing this, one at each handle); trying to tell you where the class is but no one really knows because the classroom is decided upon the moment you are so fortunate as to find one that is not currently being used by someone else. An order of use is in existence, although its efficiency and efficacy are questionable, so Jordan and I are forced to hunt for classrooms each meeting.
Finally finding the classroom and all the students (yes, that comes next, they all arrive from other parts of the school grounds; some of them never make it), we commence with correcting and reading the letters they, hopefully, have all prepared and written beforehand. This itself is quite a challenge as they are all so eager to sit next to a white person (a girl especially) that they yell, scream and crowd around as you attempt, in vain, to listen to the soft-spoken girl sitting next to you who is trying so hard to pronounce "How" instead of "oh" that beads of sweat are forming on her brow. That sweat also might just be because for that brief moment she has lapsed in her Africanness from as a result of being in such a proximity to me that my whiteness rubbed off – I sweat profusely and incessantly here, and not just beads of sweat but entire necklaces and back rivers. Let's just say it requires no less than three showers a day to feel adequately free of dirt and debris from just existing here; but that's another story for another time and another audience.
So we are writing letters; rather, I'm trying really hard to focus on what the kid next to me is trying to say (they all pretty much write the same letter), while everyone else is circled up in a hideously close range to my face breathing answers (correct and otherwise) down our necks while we try to work. Some of the students are really pretty good and have a strong command of whatever type of English it is they are learning (it's not really "American" english, not quite British, either – it is the special breed of African English that is so unique to this area of the world, the .. um.. African area). One such pupil is named Josh (a.k.a Marus) and wrote a quite impressive missive about the merits of tackle football (he could take out his aggression on people when he is angry) and how his favorite music is hip-hop. Everything about him said he would fit in quite well in America. I just couldn't get past the purple John Lennon shades he was sporting. Undoubtedly, he was the teacher's pet and the coolest kid in school. Which is funny because thinking back on it, no one is really "cool" here. You just are who you are. No one can really afford nice clothes or a car or go out to fancy restaurants to eat. In fact, many people can't afford to go to public school – yes, that's right, the kids at the public school where we are doing our letter club have to pay for their tuition and then they have to pay for their books. If you think about it, we do, too, but in the form of taxes and because there is no feasible way to tax people (their roads don't have names let alone everyone possessing mailboxes or house numbers) continuing education in a "public" school requires cash money and so only those who are wealthy enough may attend. More on the schooling system another time, I really just wanted to tell you about Josh. The kid was hilarious. He literally wrote "My favorite sport is tackle football because I can take out my aggressions when I am angry." I'm pretty sure if a kid in the States wrote that Mrs. So-and-So would send him to a counselor to talk about anger management issues. Another pupil, one of the many princes of Azovè (yes, son of the king of Azovè), asked his American counterpart if he would send some tennis shoes like the ones he wants to wear because he likes hip hop and wears "big clothes" - literally – but in French that means something that Americans would never understand, and we don't like them asking for money or things and so I had to delete half of his letter. Including the beginning part where he mentions that all of his uncles are dead and that he misses his brother who died in 1997. I suggested he wait a few exchanges before diving into that pool of sorrow – he didn't quite understand why (Africans throw huge parties instead of funerals and no one cries when someone dies), but agreed.
Another week and another two days of reading the most ridiculous stuff you can imagine and trying to explain how "having the exchanges with you" doesn't really translate into English.
I hope you are still enjoying these e-mails as much as I enjoy writing them. I hope just as fervently that I continue be a studious observor and manage to share these interesting things with you.
The list of goods that keep a volunteer happy:
NEW STUFF:
Granola!! (Been craving it; used to eating it every day and I don't have the energy to make it myself)
THE USUALS:
Peanut Butter
Parmesan Cheese
Brownie/Cake mixes (boxed ones put in Ziploc bags w/ instructions cut out)
Dried Apricots, Craisins and Raisins
Cliff/Luna Bars
Drink Powders
Yoga/Pilates/Tae Bo & exercise CDs (like those cool dance in your house music ones!)
Jell-o and Jell-o Puddings powders!!!
Trail Mix/Nuts in general(we have peanuts here)/Sunflower Seeds
Sauce, Dressing and Spice Packets, Marinades, etc.
Kraft Mac&Cheese Powder (put in baggies; these explode!)
Makeup/Perfume samples
T-shirts and Tank Tops (crappier is better so I don't feel guilty when I ruin them with my "spin" cycle)
Earrings (nickel-free)
Good Hot Chocolates
Good Football and Soccer ball!!!!! (great way to meet kids)
Face wash/acne stuff *(St. Ives Apricot Scrub is nice)
Any good new reads you've finished (in softback)
Mixed MP3 cds
Letters/Photos from you
Check out the Amazon.com wishlist
Allison Henderson
B.P. 126
Azovè, Benin
Afrique de l'Ouest
Par Avion
Send it in a padded envelope with anything that could explode (including bags of candy) stuffed in separate plastic baggies. When you fill out the customs forms be sure to put that there is absolutely no value to what you are sending (it's just a little white lie to the man so I don't have to pay more to pick it up). Say it's bibles or books or something educational – nothing you would actually send - and the value is $10 or less; that should get to me just fine.
THANK YOU!!