It Isn’t All Pleasantries but Nonetheless I Remain Capable

This week I had a long weekend thanks to the national holiday spanning January 9th-10th: Voudoun Days! This celebration largely takes place in Ouidah, a city in southern Benin also known as the Voudoun capitol of the world. I didn’t go this year because I am financially wiped from my exciting December until payday on January 17th. It’s beans and rice for me until next Friday. That said, voudoun has been an incredibly exciting cultural feature of my stay in Benin! It’s a vibrant and compelling religion, and I’m in awe of how excited practitioners are to include others. Please follow this link to see images and videos!

This week also marked the first week of school in the new year. My get-to-know-you activities went quite well! It remains to be seen how setting classroom norms will impact classroom culture, but I’m now much more confident in enforcing the rules we all agreed on with specific, measurable consequences. I also am getting better at keeping students on track. Students SHOULD be annoyed at me sometimes… I’m their teacher, not their friend, and I’m placing their learning first! This, of course, comes in balance with a consideration of the lived realities of my students. I’ll never blame poor performances on my students. If everyone fails, it probably has to do with instruction design. That said, I can’t keep doing what I did last semester and taking every single failure on myself. 

Sometimes students don’t want to study. I can encourage them to do so and explain the benefits of doing the work (even if it means being annoying by encouraging accountability), but that choice does ultimately lie with them. It’s complicated because I’m not ever going to give up on a student, but I need to accept that sometimes students give up on themselves or life just makes school not the right thing for them in that moment, and I can’t rewrite the universe even if I wanted to. I literally cannot. I need to stop carrying the weight that I’m just choosing not to when in actuality many things lie outside of my control.

I feel like I’m finally getting a feel for the curriculum: the wildly ambitious lessons that fail to account for the standard 40+ class size and the underdeveloped concepts alike. I am remembering that I studied how to cope with circumstances like this at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education. I can adapt curriculum according to student needs. I know how to do this and I’m even pretty good at it, so long as I overcome perfection paralysis to at least try. 

I learned how to French braid my hair! My braids stumble and twist in odd ways. They always end up going down quicker than they’re supposed to. But I can do it! For years I truly believed that this skill was not in my repertoire. That it would always evade me as a matter of fate and spite. This is not the case! I’m very proud to have broken through a high barrier of learned helplessness to acquire this new skill that helps me to manage my thick, unruly hair.

The tailor apprentices and I have entered an allyship in which we exchange candies when the tailor is gone. I was sitting under the mango tree reading about how languages are learned when I was humbly offered a toffee the size of a golf ball (it’s not toffee it’s more like a mega breath mint, but it does taste very good). I reciprocated and gave each apprentice two Jolly Ranchers.The shade of the mango tree is cooler than any air conditioner. The heat can’t bother me there as I lounge and read, exchanging conversation with my neighbors.

I love my home. It’s charming and familiar although I’ve been here only two weeks. I’m settling into the rhythm of a space without running water. It makes me far more aware of the water I consume to see my water buckets slowly depleting with every flush of the toilet, handwashing, dishes and laundry doing, and more. There’s no sound more pleasant to me than the crash of water refilling my buckets. 

I have killed hundreds of ants building mounds in cracks in the foundation. Sorry, ants, but that’s how it is you can’t be in my house and bite me. The mice in my ceiling only bother me at night, teaming up with the Muslim call to prayer early in the morning. The mice have also infested my dreams as of last night. Peace Corps is going to help me seal the ceiling so hopefully this problem is short-lived. I shout at them and shine my flashlight manically all around the ceiling when the skittering sets me on edge. I don’t think they particularly care but I don’t have much more in my arsenal. Except I’m thinking about getting a cat.

It is rather surreal to witness a winter storm sweeping through midwestern state and to only witness it through social media. I'm jealous of the inches of snow and snowmen and Gilmore Girl edits of the University of Oklahoma’s campus. That said, I think I prefer my eternal summer to the biting cold that goes along with the snow. One of my students read my mind and asked to see a photo of snow, something he’s never witnessed. Thrilled by the coincidence, I showed him photos from home.

Yesterday I went to my first market day in the nearby city. The most common commodity was livestock: goats and chickens. I couldn’t find eggs, but I guess I could have bought a hen. I did find spinach, though! I cooked a cheesy rice, spinach, and chicken dinner. Those were the first leafy greens I’ve had in weeks. I also bought a pineapple, bananas, more pasta and tomato paste, and beans. One consolation for not having a lot of money is that even a little money does go a long way in the village marketplace. I’ll have to go to the bigger population center for my powdered milk and eggs, I guess. It’s an adjustment from my pero-urban site in the Collines where I could get pretty much anything I wanted any day I wanted from the strip of super-marchés.

There was an incident with the beans. The vendor didn’t double bag them, so at a certain point I accidentally punctured a hole in the thin plastic sack and my beans started cascading to the ground. “Ahhhh! My beans! Oh no!” I hollered in English in a clownish, high pitch. My surprise translated through my tone, though, because a very kind woman ran over and double bagged my beans and helped me pick every bean off of the dusty ground. I was very touched by her instant response and care and attention to detail. I was going to leave the fallen beans, but I dropped to my knees next to her to pick out each precious morsel.

I often reflect on the waste I create here for multiple reasons: my trash service is dumping my trashcan into an overgrown section of my lawn. I have a lot more plastic waste than my neighbors do, and honestly, living here has already necessarily made me cut down. It’s unfortunate to create mounds of waste within eyeshot of my front door, but I also think it’s important for me to come to grips with my own excess. If there was a trash service, the waste would still exist. It would just be out of sight.

Let me tell you: anything I post on social media about having a good time is partially true but it does exclude how much I hate biking right now. I’m so weak. Mostly because the last month was rather inert, but I’m willing to bet it’s also due to a chronic protein deficit. I anticipate that things will get better. One thing that won’t is the road conditions! I hate the dusty sand dune of a road outside my house. There’s no worse feeling than your tires losing traction and that gut-wrenching tip to the side. Luckily I just get off and walk the bike, it’s not that big a deal, and I’ve already gotten better about finding the less sandy lines so I don’t have to dismount at all, but also I hate it! And I’m sure when the roads get muddy in rainy season it will be even worse. I’ll adapt, though. It’s not as if I have a reasonable alternative, so I’ll level up on this one eventually. After I have to drag my bike through a dune, sand burying my toes with each step for the 30th time, maybe.

Edit: I found eggs! Hooray. Malnutrition who? I never met her.

The thing with Peace Corps is that I’m always reaching for better: better integration, better work, better self-understand and self-care. It nearly always feels daunting. But as a reminder to myself, let me say that I’ve already experienced tremendous growth and there’s no reason to think I won’t continue to be changed by being open to the experiences around me. I’ll continue to move forward, even if I sometimes have to walk my bike through the sand.

With love, 

Lena

The content of this blog post is mine alone and does not reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Benin Government.