more images

a random picture christopher took, of the sky. but this is kinda what i see as i walk out to the highway...the way to get anywhere.


me on a zem. i look extra cherubic (haha) because the beninese are all like fitness gods and have no fat on them. especially the young men.


this is how we stack our helmets when we all get together.


this is a road i pass on my walk back home from school.


we played scrabble and i won the game with "juicer!" :D i was soooo proud. hahaha. i was playing against 2 competitive boys. one an English Major.


more from my walk home. that building in the back...students that do not live anywhere near me, that is as far as i let them walk with me...


this is essentially the garbage dump. not anywhere as near as bad as the dumps back home.


this is my cute little neighbor boy. i forget his name. he is precious.

a couple of pics

a basket of fruit. i can buy all this fruit for just a couple of dollars! pretty, no? and Rosie managed to sneak herself into the picture.




this is where i hang up my laundry to dry when i do it myself. That big piece of fabric...is called pagne (pa-nya)is an all purpose thing. women wear it as a skirt, to hold their babies onto their backs, a head wrap, you can use it as a blanket, sheet, towel...it has infinite uses! oh and you make clothes out of it too.

(mostly) on grading

One year later. May 16th 2008 I received my invitation to come to Benin. and then I only had six or so weeks to get ready. So that means that in about six weeks it is going to be July again!

Last year I was getting ready to graduate. I was a student: studying, writing papers, preparing for finals. And now it’s interesting to be on the other side of the spectrum. To be sitting in my living room (with the fan aimed right at me) correcting my students’ final exam. And I have to be honest, it’s a little sad…I almost don’t want the year to be over. I don’t feel like I am done yet with my students. And I have told them that I am going to be very strict on grading the papers. And I love grading the papers of the smart kids! It’s so easy. It’s the dumb-dumbs that make me think about how I have to divide up the points for partial credit. If their test was worth more than just 20 points I could be really mean and just say if it’s wrong, it’s wrong. and then they would get a zero. But as it stands, all tests and quizzes must be outta 20 points, why? Because that’s the way it is.

I kinda wonder if my teachers, when I was younger, felt the same way I feel about grading. And I wonder if they did what I do, and I search through the whole pile and I pick out the tests of my favorite students and grade them first. I dunno why though. Maybe I want to see if the test really was too hard (as sometimes they claim them to be) or maybe I want to make sure that my good/favorite kids got good grades.

Imagine finishing a really good workout.

And you are dripping in sweat. Every pore is leaking. Even your forearms and upper and lower lip. Your clothes are soaked. Gross, right? Well, now imagine feeling that sweaty, but you haven’t done anything. You’re just standing in the kitchen preparing your dinner. Yup, that’s what I have to deal with.

I have learned to avoid going out in the middle of the day. Pretty much from a little before noon to just about 4:30, 5 o’clock. Any time in between those hours and one is just asking to sweat a little, and then some. If I am out walking during those hours I feel like I am baking.

And now imagine the hottest day of the summer. And it hasn’t rained in a while so perhaps it’s a little muggy out. the sun has been baking the house all day, and there’s a little breeze, but not much. Oh, and PS there is a robber in the neighborhood, so you have to sleep in lockdown mode where all the windows are shut tight, and the doors are all closed. The only thing to keep you cool is an old fan. Now, back home the power doesn’t go out all that frequently, and I don’t know why it would go out in the middle of the summer on a perfectly normal day…but it has. So the only thing that was keeping you cool will not work due to a lack of power. This is what I deal with on a here-and-there basis. Sometimes a shower is the only way to cool down. And even like that the feeling is temporary because as long as it takes to dry off (it’s really humid here) you are going to start sweating as soon as you are dry. How about that?

In other news/parts of my day-to-day life. Oranges are now back in season. I can get a pyramid of 4 oranges for 100 francs…or I guess that’s about 25 cents. And I eat the oranges Beninese style. Note, the oranges here are not orange. First you start by peeling off the skin with a knife, which makes it easier to eat. Then you slice off the top of the orange, or you can bite it off if you have bought the oranges on the street and they were peeled for you…but that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth cause of the bitter white part of the orange. And then you stick your mouth to the top and squeeze the orange and suck out the juice like a juice box and spitting out the seeds. I can’t imagine how Beninese people might react if they were to come to the states and see HUGE orange navel oranges that are SEEDLESS! I like to eat the little stringy mangoes like this too. Although, you gotta leave the skin on. It takes some time getting used to eating oranges like this. And sometimes you can find the oranges peeled real prettily. I should find one/some and take a picture to accompany this post.

I have been meaning to go to the market with my camera too, but the ladies really don’t like having their pictures taken and a lot if not, most of them do not speak French.

Wow. Sometimes I am amazed at myself for having been able to pick up a third language. And now I am working on local language. I am not taking any formal class, nor working with a tutor—I never found one. But I am able to pick up/notice a few words during a conversation. And it’s funny too because everything will sound like jibber-jabber and then there will be that one word that I recognize! I wonder how much I will be able to understand at the end of my service.

Sixteen more months! And that’s not counting the 40 or so days I have of vacation. So really, it’s like 15ish months left. And then if you count my work being just teaching I have like 10 months of work. And I really can’t believe that the school year is essentially over.

Last days of school

And I am a little sad. I think I almost started crying as I was saying bye and thank you to my 6eme class. And then I remembered that I had my camera with me. And a colleague was sitting in the teacher’s hut so I asked him to take a picture of me with my students. I thought that all the kids would want to come in the picture…but here we only have a fraction of the kids. And most of them pictured are the trouble makers in the class. And the head above my left shoulder is Beatrice and she is great. A real good girl who tries really hard and is always participating and sad when I don’t call on her. And the boy in the front left side of the picture is one of my absolute faves: Sylvain. It was at his house/near his house that I got Rosie. The kid with his khaki shirt open and with the blue shirt is Ricardo. A real rico-suave. Haha. I think in another blog I had mentioned how one Saturday morning during tutoring, a kid asked me if I had eaten rice that morning…because I was smiling so much…well, that’s him, Ricardo. He’s a trouble maker, talks a lot. But he’s always crackin’ jokes, just like Sylvain. One kid, who’s not in the pic, Rodrigue ended up being one of my faves too. Rodrigue was a real punk at the beginning. And then one day he just stopped. And I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that I talked with him one-on-one and asked point blank, why do you cause me so much trouble? Please stop. And he did. And he’s a real sweetheart who ever since that moment really tried hard in class. The little kid with a smirk (and yellow shirt collar) on his face, ugh. He’s smart and all, but a real big punk. Not so much one of my faves. But he’s smart enough. And the kid, sorta smiling next to me with the white shirt collar, get this, his name is Dieu-Donnée, which literally means “God gives” in French. He had a real big mouth all throughout the year and gave me plenty of headaches, but he somehow weaseled his way into being one of my faves too.

So yeah, I hope to get some more pictures of my students. And I really wished I had taken their pictures at the beginning of the year, cause I am sure they’ve grown a lot. They had such baby faces just a few months ago. Awww, and they’re gonna be bigger and ganglier next year…they will not be as cute next year.

And I am sure it’s probably nice for y’all to have pictures to the faces I have to stare at every week. You now have faces to the stories of I have of these kids. And I was just now thinking, how in a few years I am going to be really sad when I won’t see them anymore. And I probably will not be able to keep in contact with them, just because that is kind of how it works around here. Man, I am already sad.

So bottom line, I will try to get some more student (and maybe with me) pictures. They’re just too fun. And take note, it’s kinda a national phenomena to not smile in the picture, if they do, it is ever so slight and subtle, casual. Ha, no big Yovo smiles like mine! Which is a shame, cause if you are to be around Beninese people, for the most part they are always so fun and joking and having a good time when they can.

more talk about food, lol

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

I never thought I would find myself talking about food so much…but here I go again!

(I hope that upon my return I don’t turn into Jabba the Hut!)

The other day Amber and I went out for some yam pile, and because it was easier to tell the zem to go to Bel-Air (sounds classy, huh) which is the supermarket that is where we were dropped off. And I decided that I wanted to grab some cookies to munch on after dinner. And then after Amber and I had our fill on yam pile, cheese, and peanut sauce I whipped out the cookies and thought out loud, that back home, I never really craved sweet things…after dinner, like I do here. And Amber’s response was something along the lines of…maybe it’s because my body is craving the sugar that it would normally get from EVERY food product back home in the form of high fructose corn syrup. And I had to agree.

And this morning as I was waking up, my dream was me visiting back home, for some reason, and I was asking my dad for 10, 20 bucks so that I could go buy some food at Fred Meyer to bring back home. And I remember wanting to bring things back like SPAM (don’t judge me), seasoning packets, crystal light, and other random deliciousness.

rain

Yesterday a moto-taxi driver tried to get an extra 100 cfa from me. I took a moto-taxi from my friend Nathaniel’s village back to my place. His village is on a road kinda in-between two places and in the middle of no where. So this zemi (or zem, that’s what we call the moto-taxis) passed us on the way into the other village, Athieme…cause he was dropping someone off…but he is from my town (I can tell by the color shirts they have to wear)….so really if he was going out to this town to drop this lady off, and wasn’t really expecting to have a passenger for the ride back. But I needed to get home and there he was…so we agreed on a price, 400 cfa. And then as we are getting to my house, he says that the 400 cfa is not sufficient. And I hop off and I said that yes, 400 cfa is sufficient and hand him a 500 cfa coin and expect my 100 cfa change back. But he jokingly holds onto it. And I joke back with him and tell him that if he had not found me he would have lost out on the 400 cfa and that I was lucky/a gift and he should give me my money back. And he smiled and chuckled and gave me back my change. HAha! I won! Sometimes I love playing these little games. But oh man, when you’re not in the mood, or having a bad day, these games are the last thing you wanna deal with. And sometimes they aren’t very nice. But luckily all conditions were right and things went my way.

The rains have come!! That means cooler weather! Well, kinda, sometimes. It gets cooler for a little while after the rains, cause it cools everything down, and then it takes just a little while for the sun to come back out an heat things up. I love the rain and everything, but it gets really muddy! And they tend to cut out the electricity when the rains come. So sometimes it gets a little annoying, but it’s cool.

This afternoon a mason is coming over to patch up the hole they punched through in my bathroom and to make a hole or a few in my front area for the water to run out. The other night I was scared that my house might flood cause it was raining so hard and it was just coming down so fast. My front gate thing kinda gets in the way of the water getting out so, it just creeps up to my door. And plus, with the dog (they’re like cats and don’t like water)… I want her to have enough dry room on the patio. So, I am having a hole or few punched out.

That’s all for now.