Bariba and Peuhl Cultural Festival

In mid-December, Sonsoro hosted the Noma Wode Bariba and Peuhl Cultural Festival. This annual event celebrates the traditional culture of the Bariba and Peuhl people. The festival location rotates amongst six local villages, and this was Sonsoro's year. The festivities included music, dancing, traditional jousting and fighting, and horsemanship. The event attracted an enormous crowd, and even two government ministers attended and spoke at the event. The festival was set to last three days but ended a day early when the principle organizer's sister died.

As the event was closing down on the final day, the Peuhl horsemen rode through town. One of them stopped at the shop where I spend much of my time. Shockingly, he just rode his horse right into the front patio area. Thanks to that, I was able to get an up-close picture of the horse in all of its regalia.

Down to Business

Last week I returned from 1.5 weeks of training in Parakou and decided to hit the ground running and get some projects started in my village. Here's a look at what I did:

Health education sessions: Three days a week, women come to the health center and wait for hours for their pre-natal visits or baby vaccinations. Essentially, this means that I have my primary target group as a captive audience for extended periods of time. I decided to take advantage of this fact and start teaching health topics to the women while they wait to be served. My colleagues and I taught more than 100 women about mosquito net use and 60 about HIV transmission. From now on, we hope to teach health topics at every such opportunity.

Baby weighings: The eight-hour wait on vaccination day also afforded me the perfect opportunity to start weighing babies. I hooked the baby scale up to a tree limb and weighed 60 babies. When the pharmacist was available, she served as a translator and helped me provide nutritional advice to mothers. We found four moderately malnourished babies and two severely malnourished babies. I plan to weigh babies every week on vaccination day and have some ideas for opportunities to weigh babies outside of the health center.

Girls' Club: I met the middle school principal and he agreed to help me start a girls' club. The ultimate objective of the club is to keep girls in school. This will undoubtedly require addressing unwanted pregnancy, which is the biggest reason girls drop out of school, according to the principal.

English Club: I offered my services to the middle school English department and agreed to start a weekly English club to help students improve their English.

Elementary schools: I spoke with the principals at all three elementary schools to propose giving health lessons to their students. I consider students to be a great vector for health information because they can pass the information on to their families, plus they are the generation of the future. Since their schooling is in French, I am able to work with them without a translator. The principals were enthusiastic about the idea and all agreed to give me a weekly time slot. I will address groups of up to 500 students at a time. I gave my first lesson on Thursday: I taught 73 students about hand washing.

Amour et Vie: I met with my Amour et Vie team to plan our first health education session. The two Amour et Vie peer educators will teach health topics in our community. Another villager and I will serve as their coaches.

Moringa: I planted my first moringa seed. If it grows successfully into a moringa tree, it will be the basis of a moringa nutrition initiative in the future.

Those are just a few projects to get me started. I have much more up my sleeve for the future.

A Beninese Wedding

On Saturday, I attended my host sister's wedding in Dangbo. The wedding was somewhat of a cross between an American wedding and the church services I grew accustomed to in Dangbo. It was like an American wedding in that the bride wore a white dress, the couple exchanged the same "for better or for worse" vows, and the groom lifted the bride's veil to kiss his new wife. One difference was how they walked down the aisle: the groom and best man came first with a slow ten-minute step dance down the aisle, then the bride and maid of honor did the same for 15 minutes.

The ceremony was reminiscent of Dangbo church services in that it was 3.5 hours long and had similar music, dancing, and drums. But the funniest resemblance to a Dangbo church service was how late everyone was. When the wedding started at 10 am, I was one of only eight or so people in the whole church. The other 150 came in over the course of the next few hours.

In fact, part of the reason the wedding ran an hour longer than scheduled is that the bride and groom arrived so late. The pastor had to stall until the groom arrived to walk down the aisle, then when it was the bride's turn, a pastor in the back signaled that we would have to wait because the bride hadn't arrived yet. The bridge and groom came 30-45 minutes late. About 45 minutes into the ceremony, the pastor asked the bride and groom's parents to stand to be recognized, but they weren't there! The pastor lectured them in their absence, and they finally showed up about an hour and 20 minutes into the service.

A reception followed the wedding. It was similar to an American reception - music, food, dancing - except that there were no scheduled activities like speeches, first dance, tossing the bouquet, etc. The bridal party just sat at the front of the tent as the guests ate and enjoyed the entertainment.

A host cousin grabbed my camera and took pictures during the ceremony. He had no qualms about being intrusive and taking pictures right at the altar, so he got me pictures I wouldn't have otherwise had. Unfortunately, my camera died during the ceremony, so I have no pictures of the rest of my host family or the reception.

The maid of honor and bride doing their slow step dance down the aisle.

The groom has lifted the bride's veil and is preparing to kiss his new wife.

A view of the church in which I spent so many hours during training.

The percussion section next to the choir. Lively percussion is a standard part of church music at this church.

The Dry Season

A new season has started: the dry season. When I left my village in October, we were finishing off the last of the six months of rainy season. Since my return in November, there has not been a drop of rain in my village and shouldn't be for another six months.

The dry season has brought a number of changes with it. As would be expected, the puddles in the dirt roads' massive potholes have dried out, plant life is turning yellow and dying, and the roads are transforming into beaches thick with sand. As the sun sets, a thick layer of dusty haze fills the air.

The weather remains hot and uncomfortable during the day, but the evenings and early mornings are nippy as the mini-season of harmattan begins. Harmattan is the dry, cool, windy season that I have been eagerly anticipating since my arrival. Villagers warn me that I will want close-toed shoes and long sleeves. I am told that the season will be full throttle by Christmas and will last a few months.

The dry season brings along a number of dietary changes. Guinea fowl only produce eggs during the rains, and since chicken eggs are rarely eaten here, eggs have gone from omnipresent to completely absent. Cows produce significantly less milk during the dry season because there is less to forage on, so milk and cheese have become extremely rare. Tomatoes are fewer and more expensive. Essentially, my diet has been reduced to starch. The only upside I have seen in terms of food is that honey has flooded the market and can be purchased cheaply ($2 per liter).

Another infiltration that I am less fond of is the lizards. They are more numerous than before, notably in my house. For some unfortunate reason, my bedroom is their favorite hangout.

The start of the dry season also means that the growing season is nearing its end. Villagers are quite busy during the rains, but I have always been told that they have more free time when the field work is over in the dry season. The difference is obvious already. For example, with the change in seasons, our pre-natal visits at the health center have doubled from 50 per week to 100 (and the pregnant women are actually gaining weight, whereas before, their weight was stable or dropped during pregnancy because they toiled so hard in the fields).

The new abundance of time has also sprung a series of municipal projects. The neglected maternity center project got its porch tiled, and the village's water pump system was fixed after having been out of order for eight months.

But perhaps the most exciting new undertaking is the line of electricity poles that sprung up in early November. That said, at the rate at which things progress here, I will be lucky if my house can get an electrical hook-up before I leave in September 2014.