- Girls' Club. Despite my collegues' continued confusion over my girls' club (this week one of them suggested that I use the girls to clean my house every week), I'm still excited about it. This week, I invited the sage-femme, the local obstetrician/medically-licensed midwife to talk to my girls about sex and puberty and things like that. The awkward stuff that people just apparently don't explain to their little girls here. Anyway, so I don't know how or why or whatever, but somehow word got out and 50 girls showed up to my meeting -- !!!!! That's up from 16 usually.
The sage-femme was fantastic, and we answered a lot of questions about how pregnancy happens, what periods are (the girls were really confused and worried), and contraception... a lot of people, fully-grown women included, believe that counting the days of your period is effective (it's only 60%) and that you can't get pregnant the first time you have sex. False. So we did a lot of mythbusting, and the girls responded really well. Next week I'm having a health volunteer come to do a condom demonstration and talk more about not getting pregnant. I never really thought I'd be a sex educator for teen girls in Africa, but I'm here, and I'm really, really happy that I'm getting to do it. - The Birds and the Bees. A girl got preganant in one of the other volunteers' girls' clubs, and she wondered how that could have happened after all of the sex ed she'd done with them. Another friend explained it in a sad-but-funny, and unfortunately accurate way: "Well, when a professor is attracted to a 15-year-old schoolgirl, he takes her out into a cornfield..."
- The Voodoo Dates. I went to a voodoo man this week to see more about Beninese traditional medicine, and I have fun stories. This will be a separate post, and I'll probably password-protect it if I can. If I do, I'll put the password on my Facebook page.
- Friday Fete-Day. My neighbor is a teacher at the primary school (everyone calls him Maitre, which means teacher), and he's also the founder/director of a fancy private school near Cotonou. He was having a ceremony at his school to recognize the best students, and he invited Sam and I to go and present some of the gifts. We went, and had a full day of being the honored white people -- we got great food and lots of free beer, we got to see some of the students do some crazy-awesome choreographed dances (dude, the kids can daaaance.), and the DJs played an entire Rihanna CD just for us.
At one point Maitre and his wife Elise invited us up on the stage to dance, and obviously, we did it. The crowd went wild, cheering, joining us on stage, and giving us a traditional good-dancer compliment by sticking coins to our sweaty foreheads. I can't tell you how entertaining it was... just imagine white girls trying to Beninese dance. The English teacher who was MCing, after we got off the stage, yelled (in English) into the microphone, "Congratulations, you tried!!"
After that we gave the gifts and little speeches, waited until Beninese superstar Sonia showed up, and watched her lipsynch/dance for a while. She's close to 300 lbs. and a fierce dancer, and we were told we had to dance with her before we left. We did, and she was terrifying -- she pawed the ground with her stiletto heel and then tried to start a dance-off with Sam and I. Fearing loss and/or early death, we smiled, shook our butts a little bit, and got off the stage. All-in-all, a thoroughly entertaining fete. - Return from Friday Fete-Day. Sam and I tried to leave the fete well before dark, but were basically tied to the chair until we danced with Sonia. We left, and were hoping to grab a taxi straight home. Elise was traveling with us, and another teacher, but we couldn't get a taxi -- every single one was full. Dark was falling fast, and we're supposed to be back in our houses by dark... we were a little worried. The teacher finally talked a private vehicle into taking us (a woman in a Jeep Grand Cherokee), and we started out for home. Five minutes later, we found ourselves in a solid traffic jam stretching from Cotonou to Porto-Novo with no signs of moving.
The next three hours included the following: sitting still, offroading next to the highway, narrowly avoiding getting stuck in a big sand pit, sitting still some more, driving the wrong way on a busy road, walking on the same busy road, doubling on the back of the teacher's motorcycle, hitchhiking in the back of a wooden-floored truck, and, finally, zemming. We got back at 11pm, exhausted and giggling uncontrollably. We made it! - The Invisible War of March 26th, 2011. The day after our traveling nightmare, I had to teach 6 hours of review classes for my kids... If I don't make them study their English, they usually don't. I'd just finished teaching the first class when all of a sudden, the schoolyard went crazy. Children and professors were fleeing from their classrooms, running away through the forest and yelling for everyone to leave. The food-selling mamas were sprinting with their coolers on their heads, screaming the names of their children as they took off through the bush. Everyone was yelling, "La guerre! La guerre!" -- the war, the war!
I didn't know what was going on, but since everyone was leaving, I guessed I should too. I had started packing up my things when one of my 6eme kids, Georges, came back from the forest to help me. "Madame, move fast, there is a war! Faster! Leave your bike, we will get it later, run with me!" I started jogging, and saw a professor. I asked him what was going on.
"There's fighting in Porto Novo. The zemidjans came back and reported it in the marche, and now everyone thinks they're coming here." So basically, the people in my area are just really bad at relaying messages accurately... I bet Telephone would be a hilarious game here. No one was convinced that the army wasn't going to start a war in Daagbe that afternoon, so I went home. No kids came back to the school, and all of the vendors on the streets, shops, and marche stands were closed. And that, my friends, is the story of the Invisible War.
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| The sage-femme, doing basic sex-ed for my girls' club. |
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| Voodoo man. Note the holy voodoo moonshine container the man in front of him is holding. We all took shots. |
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