• Done With First Semester! All of the tests are graded, the grades calculated, and the calculations turned in. I have now completed ¼ of my entire career as a teacher. Thank God.
• Music Class. I taught my 5eme class “Waving Flag,” the English version, because we just learned comparisons and the song has “older” & “stronger” in it. That’ll help them remember English grammar, right? Right?
• Umm… What? This was the week of professors saying hilariously strange things. One of my fellow profs told me (in English) that I had pretty bracelets and nails and arm hairs, and then that my hands were sweet like honey. This is the same prof who went to my friend’s house to ask if I was married. Her response: “Yes, she’s married. Her husband is white and rich, and he has a gun.” I loved her from that moment on.
• Umm… What? Part 2. I met a German prof I’d never seen before. He introduced himself (with all 8 of his names), and then said, “Your physiognomy made me cry.” I’m still trying to decide if he was insulting me, telling me I need to eat more, or creepily hitting on me. Sigh…
• Bortomize – (verb) the action by which a woman poisons her husband to make him crazy; after bortomization, a husband will help her with the housework if she asks him to, because it would be ridiculous for him to do so without being bewitched in some way. Definition and word invention by a professor in a nearby school, who really, truly thought this was a real word.
• I Have A Homologue! TEFLers are the only volunteers in Benin who get to pick their homologues, or work partners. I should have picked mine a long time ago, but I had to kind of break up with the one the director picked for me first… Anyway, so I finally did that this week. The breakup went well (he seemed relieved), and I got him to help me pick a good English prof to work with. We talked to Guy #2 (Epiphane), and he agreed to work with me/go to the PC training week in April. Yay! Huge weight lifted off my shoulders!
• Short Bio: Epiphane is from Daagbe and actually lives here I think (unusual for my school, where most profs live in Porto Novo). He’s fairly young and unmarried, but he’s always been respectful of me and has never, ever hit on me… I really appreciate that. He’s a good teacher, wants to improve his listening skills, and doesn’t hit students all that often (I’m going to try to convince him to not hit kids with sticks ever). Plus, he just told me today that he can drink 15 beers without being drunk. He’s 5’2’’ish, so I’m pretty sure the weeklong training (April, Cotonou) will be entertaining if nothing else.
• The PC Experience. This week my water and electricity each went out for 2 days straight again. Luckily I just started storing water in case of emergency, so I could still drink enough H20, I just had to bathe out of a bowl again and avoid dirtying dishes.
• There’s a Petit for That. That’s a favorite saying of one of my fellow volunteers, and while it’s a little… uhh… politically incorrect, it does kind of speak to the cultural idea that kids should be doing everything for the grands (adults). I am a grand. Thus, yesterday when I was taking my nail polish off, four of the little girls in my concession called me outside, took the remover and Q-tips from me, and proceeded to remove the nail polish for me all at once. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty fantastic, and they were weirdly excited about it… they made it into a competition between them. I think I won.
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