sophia in west africa

While I was in Savalou, I compiled a list of my favorite things about this place, the things that make it truly, one hundred percent worth it. Here they are, so I’ll never forget (and perhaps I might convince you to come see West Africa, too!)

• zem rides. the feeling of the wind in my hair, and the hot african sun on my face, as we race on a motorcycle down african roads and dirt paths, towards collines and past villages, full of children who watch and wave. there is nothing like it.
• “faire du sport” (playing soccer and ultimate and basketball and whatever else) in a big open field as the sun sets (and sometimes in the mornings, which is also incredible.)
• the foliage and landscape here. the wide variety of trees, including coconut and mango and baobab and a million other kinds that make up the unique plain, like nothing i’ve ever seen before.
• working in the garden in the mornings, before the sun comes out. hoeing, and clearing beds, and getting as dirty as possible, digging my hands into the soil and feeling connected.
• the collines, or hills/mountains here. Savalou is in the Colline territory of Benin, which means we’re surrounded by beautiful mountains. My favorite is the collines in the morning, when they are surrounded by fog and look just completely breathtaking. I’ll try to remember to take a photo of this soon.
• when i hear my name called by someone in Savalou. “SOF-YA!!” The pronunciation is so distinctive, something I know I’ll miss when I leave. People here remember my name. They call out to me when I pass. We are friends, and that makes me smile so much. Yvette the weaver, Romeo the other weaver, Yolanda the fabric seller, Marlise the (incredible) woman who cooks for us, Steven the Nigerian teenager, Clotilde the couturier, Madame Lovi the grandmother of the children who help in the garden, those aforementioned children Narcis and Emmanuel, and many more. i will miss these people, and i sincerely hope i’m having some sort of impact on them too, however small it might be.
• les etoiles. (the stars.) they are amazing here!
• when I’m able to give a child an experience they wouldn’t have otherwise had. examples: When Narcis tried using my camera and found he loved it, taking artistic photos of everything in sight. Or when Emmanuel started reading Kate’s copy of Le Petit Prince. Experiences they might not have had otherwise. A related favorite thing is the opportunity to influence a child. They seem to think that, being white and from America, we are strange and scary but also pretty cool and important, which means that when I take the time and effort to get to know one, they really listen. The ability to suggest to a young girl that she should go to university one day, that she is intelligent and worth it, and have her really take it to heart? I’m only surmising that last part, but I really hope they do. It makes me feel like I’m really doing something, like maybe I can truly impact at least one person’s life here.
• having spontaneous moments with the interns. dance parties on the porch during rain storms, singing Africa on the top of a jeep while getting drenched in the middle of a storm on the savannah, dancing with our bosses at Merci Pour L'Amour.
• that moment when I greet someone who seems so so shy, and they break into the widest smile. this happens most often with girls, and it makes my heart so happy every single time.

These are the things that kept me going here. I will miss them most. 

I’ll be home in three days! More reflections to come, now that my trip is ending. :)

First of all, happy Beninese independence day! This morning there was a big parade downtown (when I asked people when it was set to start, no one really knew of course. “between 8 and 9am,” they said. Of course, it started at 9:45.) It was nice to see people come together and cheer for the various groups of people that would march in the parade. The association of hairdressers, the association of mechanics, the local church, the association of taxi drivers. People here don’t wear Beninese colors to commemorate the holiday, but everyone seemed to have on some of their best garb.

Today is my second-to-last day here in Savalou, as Saturday morning I will be taking a bus down to Cotonou, where some of Sneha’s family friends will pick me up, stay in Cotonou for a night, and take me back to Lomé with them on Sunday morning. I will stay in Lomé with them for two and a half days until my flight Tuesday night, and I’ll arrive in Pittsburgh Wednesday evening. That means that I have six days until I see my family! What?!

It’s strange, that everything is coming to an end. I’ve become more reflective, as I’m realizing that everything is soon going to seem like a dream. I’ll be back in my bed, in my childhood home, feeling like this couldn’t have possibly been real. Did I really live this? Did I really just live two months in a foreign country, thousands of miles away on the African continent, living among villagers, some of which make only a dollar or two a day, and none of whom speak my native language? Did I really just live my entire life in a language I started learning only a month before I arrived? And if so, what am I leaving behind? Certainly not what I thought I would leave behind. I didn’t make any sort of groundbreaking impact on the NGO I work for; it was clear that this internship is much more for me than for the NGO’s sake, as even our boss encouraged me to spend less energy worrying about “work” and more energy taking in Benin and its people. I didn’t save the world. I didn’t solve the problem of malnutrition here, or fix gender inequality. I didn’t bring solar light to all of Benin, or even make my sought-after deal between the couturiers here and a popular clothing designer in the US. And because so much of my work depended on wifi that didn’t exist, I couldn’t even finish the website for SBE-Gratos, the one small task that I figured was a sure bet.  And this has brought me to wonder, on so many occasions: Why am I here? Why did I come here? Was it a waste? Do I matter at all?

But I can definitively say, as I leave here, that I have made an impact. I have made an impact in the only way that I really know how: on individual lives. Through sitting with Romeo for hours while he weaves and Clotilde while she sews, through asking excited questions as Lucille makes yam pilée. Through a smile and a greeting to nearly every person I pass, through photos taken and through extreme gratitude for an experience that I can never forget. I hope that maybe, for just one person among the hundreds I’ve met, I’ve been able to teach them something. To tell them about the United States, and to show them that white people aren’t any better than them, aren’t any different in many ways. To show them that it’s worthwhile to get to know us instead of just screaming from the side of the road. I hope I’ve encouraged people to be more enterprising, as I have tried. I hope that the high-five spreads throughout all of Benin, as has been my secret goal in teaching everyone the high-five since I got here.

But I know that, above all, this experience was for me. Every effort I’ve made to love this country I’ve gotten back tenfold. I’ve learned so much about people, and how much we both have in common and don’t have in common at all. I’ve learned how far goodwill can go, how much a smile really changes everything, no matter what the cultural differences. I’ve learned how to do nothing for an entire day, and how to be okay with that. I’ve learned to work under bosses from a completely different culture, and how to navigate those very real cultural barriers. I’ve learned that efficiency is not the end-all be-all of goals, and that sometimes, there really are things that are more important. I’ve learned the beauty of hospitality and generosity, as I have been touched by it over and over again. I’ve learned how to eat things I hate, because there are people in this country who would give all they have to eat like we do. I’ve learned to live without 3G – and usually without any wifi at all –, and how to appreciate that. I’ve learned more in two months than I know how to explain in words. This experience is bigger than words. It’s abstract and confusing and difficult and also more beautiful than I could have even imagined. I can’t believe I’m going home soon to a place where women won’t be carrying baskets on their heads, and strangers won’t greet each other as they pass by. I will miss this place more than I ever thought I would, and I won’t be able to forget the people or places I love here. Clotilde the couturiere; Dansille the woman who paints nails; Romeo and Francis the weavers; Armande, Adele, Louise and Shaquina from church; Salifa and Maman Fifi, our food-related friends; all the amazing women I’ve met at the market and around Savalou … I salute you all. You are the most incredible people (and especially women) that I have ever met. They inspire me to be a better person, and to appreciate the gifts that I am so, so lucky to have. I will think of them often.

Above all, all I can say is that I smiled at Benin. That was my work here. And anyone who knows me in the US knows I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alphonsine, a girl who is usually our waitress at the omelette sandwich place, has recently become a larger part of my everyday here, as she visits us at the garden and has visited us at home as well. I gave her my email address to keep in touch after I left, only to realize that she doesn’t have an email address herself, or a computer to use one on. To ameliorate this, I told her she could come over to NOVI and use the computers there, and I would set up an email address with her. So today, Alphonsine came over, and we did just that. But I guess even knowing what I knew, I subconsciously overestimated her computer experience. This girl had never so much as touched a computer before, so when we sat down and I had her enter her first and last name to sign up for Gmail, she took two or three full minutes just to type her name, hunting and pecking for each individual letter. The idea of a “password” was completely foreign to her, and tasks I thought of as completely intuitive, tasks like using the “back” button and clicking inside the “To”, “Subject”, and “Body” boxes to write the email, were decidedly not intuitive at all.

 It just shocked me that someone could be 18 years old and never have used a computer. I’m left trying to imagine my life if I had never had a computer. Would I know even half the information I know? Would all of my old friends be forever lost instead of still connected? How would I have known anything about colleges and universities, and which to apply to? It’s difficult to even consider. I hope by teaching her some basic computer skills, I might be able to somehow prepare her for bigger things down the road, and allow her to find and connect to opportunities that she never would have had otherwise.

Walking down the street, people shout my name. “Soph-ya! Soph-ya!” (or, sometimes, just “Yovo! Yovo!”, but that’s okay too.) The children, especially, are so excited to so much as get a greeting from the white people, and when I extend my hand to shake hands and greet them for real, they seem in shock, in total awe. They shake, then run away giggling and excited. They tug at my shirt, or hug my leg. I’m left feeling a little like Jesus might have felt, with people so excited to merely be in his presence, or get a “hello.” It’s strange; it feels wrong; What did I do to deserve such attention? Nothing, of course. Merely having white skin should not afford such treatment, but indeed it does. The phrase “white privilege” is a phrase that generally makes me roll my eyes, not because it doesn’t exist but because I associate it with the kind of university students who work it into every conversation, argument, and discussion, to the point where it’s tired and irritating. But here, I think I finally see firsthand what white privilege can entail – I feel like sometimes people think I have magical powers because of my skin. Hell, the only billboard on the main road here is for a skin-whitening cream. And as awful as that is, I’m glad I’m having this experience, a real perspective to aid in my understanding of such a concept as “white privilege” back in the States.

 We’ve gone through a lot of food phases here. We started with the Marlise phase (the woman who cooked for us for one blissful week), then the Merci Pour L’Amour phase (the restaurant we went to mercilessly often), then the general buvette (restaurant) phase, when we’d go out for every single meal, then the starving phase (when we never had our food stipend to go find food), and now the Maman Fifi phase (a new woman who cooks for us in her yard!) 

I realized recently that I talk about food an awful lot on this blog, but you all have no real idea what I eat (except that it’s primarily empty carbs and oil.) So, I’ve decided to give you a photographic rundown of the Beninese diet:

——–

Breakfast

The first meal of the day is breakfast, and there are pretty much two Beninese options: buille (boiled rice or yam flour or corn flour to essentially make grits), or beignets (dough deep-fried in oil to make what are essentially super-oily doughnuts.) Breakfast is the worst meal of the day for me, and most of the interns seem to agree, so we’ve chosen to forego the Beninese options and instead embrace the omelette sandwich. There is a restaurant on the main road that we go to for omelette sandwiches sometimes, but it is expensive so we have started to make our own version, often substituting fried or scrambled eggs for an omelette. Note the difference in appealing-ness between buille:

Lunch

The second meal of the day, lunch, is the most variable. It’s pretty much exchangeable with either breakfast or dinner foods. We’ve had omelette sandwiches for lunch, and we’ve had every dinner food under the sun for lunch. So let’s just move on to dinner.

Dinner

Dinner is the final meal of the day, and here’s how it works: you choose your carb, and you choose your topper, and it’s all covered in either a tomato-based or a peanut-based sauce, both oily. Carb options are pretty much limited to rice, spaghetti, pâte (a blob of corn or yam dough), couscous, or yam pilée (a more gigantic blob of yam dough). Topper options are meat (type unknown), fish (you get a full-on fish on your plate), egg (usually my choice), or fromage (fried cheese, which does not taste like cheese, but rather a squeaky piece of oil.) Here are some of the different combinations we’ve had:

Miscellaneous Meal Foods

But occasionally, we do get something exciting and out of the ordinary. Occasionally. Such as:

SALAD! Yes, vegetables do apparently exist here, just in extremely limited quantities. Also, the Beninese salad includes some interesting extra ingredients, including sardines, potatoes, and spaghetti:

 Snacks

And, finally, my favorite food group: the snacks. I could live on snacks here and be very happy. Examples:

Oranges (Beninese style!)

And, of course, everyone’s favorite dessert, FANMILK (basically, condensed milk frozen. Kind of like ice cream? Mostly not):

 Snacks not pictured: dates, peanut brittle pieces, and little packs of packaged cookies.

 ——–

…Let me just emphasize one more time how excited I am that in two weeks I will no longer be culturally required to eat carbs for every single meal. But fascinating, no?

Today, on our way to lunch, Kate and I stopped by the church near our house, and were welcomed in by several wonderfully friendly women. Armande, Adele, Shaquina, and a few others all quickly became friends, retying our pagnes “the correct way” and generally laughing together. We promised we’d come back at 7pm for tonight’s service, so while Will and Idun went to village, we ate our dinner as fast as we could and got there only a little bit late. They welcomed us so incredibly warmly, singing us a song to welcome us, and having a woman act as translator throughout the entire service, translating the French to English (which, while incredibly nice, was not actually very helpful, as the English wasn’t great, and we ended up getting more from the French than from the translation. but that’s beside the point), calling us up to introduce ourselves to the congregation, and then asking me to sing a song in English! Earlier I had sung Lean On Me for them when we first met them, and they wanted to hear it again, for the whole congregation. So I sang Lean On Me, and they played the drums and clapped and danced and cheered along, and it was probably one of the very most memorable moments I’ve had here. In the top five, anyway. After the service, almost everyone comes up to us to greet us. I am surprised by the fact that the vast majority of the church is women and children, though there are a few men, too. Everyone is incredibly friendly, and we promise to return Sunday, or Wednesday if we are out of town on Sunday.

I am making so many friends lately! Between meeting Lucille and Sylvie yesterday and getting taken to their house to meet their families; and befriending Clotilde the Couturier; and the waitress at the omelette sandwich place who asked for my email address, and when she wrote down her name for me, wrote “Alphonsine, une amie de Sophia” and nearly made me cry; and Giselle who lives in the little boutique below us and said that I couldn’t leave in two weeks, that no one could replace me and the fact that I was leaving would make her physically ill; and Eloise who fixed my pagne today when she saw me struggling on the road; and now all the amazing women at the church. Armande, Adele, Shaquina, and the rest, that means you; and also countless others, especially children. It is times like this, when I think about the amazing people I’ve met and become real friends with, that I never want to leave.

And it’s not just the people I’ve met that I’ll miss, but the difference in the treatment of people in general. Friendships are just different here - smiles are more genuine, and you say hello to everyone you pass, not just your friends. It is very rare that you would ever pass anyone without greeting them with a smile and a “bon soir”. I will miss not only the friends I’ve made, but just the idea of easy friendship, of helping each other and being friendly to everyone. To my friends in Philadelphia - promise not to get embarrassed when I come back saying hello to everyone on the streets?

It was incredible, and beautiful, and like the song Holocene, by Bon Iver. Definitely one of my favorite Africa moments thus far. :)

I am not in a good mood, so I seek out a change of scenery by taking a walk and taking refuge at Clotilde the couturier’s shop, where she sits at her sewing machine, and four friends sit on the benches surrounding her, talking and laughing. Clotilde, Elise, Monique, and two others whose names I do not recall, though I do recall their kindness. It is like girls’ club, a group of friends hanging together and catching up, and they let me in as if I’d been there for years. I can’t understand a word they are saying as they speak to each other in rapid Fon, but I enjoy their company, and the afternoon sun, and, more quickly than I can even notice, je deviens de bonne humeur.

I guess I just find it pretty incredible that I, someone who grew up speaking only English, and the women here, who grew up speaking only Fon, are able to communicate in French, a second language for both of us, well enough for us to become friends.

I guess goodwill can prevail no matter what the language … :)

I’d always been told it was there, that West African gender norms were not friendly to women. Marlise had told me, Idun has complained about it … I guess I kind of knew. But I wasn’t angry about it until it hit me in the face.

The night before Kate and I left Lahotan, I had a prolonged, 30-minute conversation in French with Jacques, a man in Kristin’s concession. (sidenote: I have improved so incredibly much! We talked about weather here and in the US, names and differences in languages, and various other things about Benin and the US.) But when I found out he is a zemidjan (a moto-taxi driver), I found myself in new and unpleasant territory. I’ll copy out the conversation to the best of my ability, to let you see for yourself.

me (in French): Your’e a zemidjan? Seriously?! I love zems! If I lived in Benin, I would want to be a zemidjan too.
Jacques (in French): (laughs) You cannot be a zemidjan. You are a woman!
me: …so what?
Jacques: Women cannot be zemidjans. If a woman were a zemidjan, everyone would look at her and scratch their heads.
me: But why couldn’t a woman be a zem? Do you believe that I could do it?
Jacques: (laughs) No.
me: But why? I am a good driver!
Jacques: You drive a car. That is different. You cannot be a zem.
me: I still don’t understand why. What does being a woman have to do with my ability to drive a motorcycle? It does not require big muscles, or anything that you have that i do not. It is not that kind of work. I could do it. I could show you.
Jacques: You cannot. (laughs)
me: Not true! In the US, women do the same work that men do. The two are equal.
Jacques: Yes, but women here are different. Women and men are not the same. Women prefer to stay in the house and do housework.
me: But don’t you think maybe the reason they “prefer” housework is just because that is what they are forced to do by society? I believe that women here could do more, and maybe they want to.

…spoiler alert: This conversation went nowhere. I finally just gave up, as I ran out of both French and energy to continue arguing with someone who clearly did not understand where I was coming from at all. I cannot fault Jacques, as this is what he has been taught from a young age, as part of his culture. He has never left Benin before. It just makes me so incredibly frustrated that people anywhere think like this.

The worst part came later: Olou (my boss), Kristin (Peace Corps volunteer), Kate and I went to eat dinner at the buvette, and I indignantly recounted this story to them. I was met, however, with a less than agreeable response. “That’s just the culture here,” Kristin said. Kate agreed. But worst of all was Olou, who said the only reason I wanted things to change was “so I would be more comfortable.” That’s when I got angry. “No, actually, the reason I’m angry and want things to change is because I can’t stop thinking about all the girls in this country, girls with bright minds and able bodies, who will never have the opportunities to use those minds and live up to their potential. Please stop assuming you know what I’m thinking, thanks.” I just snapped. He told me that what he thinks is that my desire for better gender equality is actually just a selfish desire, as it would “make me less uncomfortable.” But that’s not true at all! Hell, I’m leaving in a month. I’ve just met so many girls and women who are so intelligent, yet have zero respect or opportunity or people believing in them. And that makes me so incredibly angry. And anyway, the idea that wanting to improve conditions for someone else is a selfish desire because it would also make me happy is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. As Gretchen Rubin explained in the Happiness Project, “By making others happy, you make yourself happy. By making yourself happy, you are more able to make others happy. “ So if the women in Benin had more respect and opportunities, that would make me happy. Sue me.

It’s funny; in the States, I casually agree that women should obviously have equal rights as men, but if I’m being honest, I’m pretty complacent with the way things are, and even tend to roll my eyes a bit at the feminists who are eternally talking about “the patriarchy” and using other gender classes-esque language, when things are “just fine.” But after tonight, after seeing straight-on, first-hand the ugly mentality that still exists here so blatantly, that men believe they are inherently superior to and more capable than women … I just want to apologize to my mother, and to all of my feminist friends. I’m angry, too.