Girls of the Future, the Kandi Girls' Camp

Today concluded a week-long regional girls' camp organized by local Peace Corps volunteers. We called the camp "Girls of the Future" because that is what we were training the girls to be. We motivated them stay in school in order to fulfill their career dreams, and we also taught them about how to stay healthy, be good shepherds of the environment, and more. We are hoping that they will apply the lessons learned to their own lives and also be models for their communities.

Nine volunteers ran the camp and we invited girls from nine villages, for a grand total of 28 girls. Each volunteer invited the top 3-6 girls from his/her local middle school. During camp, I led or facilitated sessions on puberty, reproductive health, pregnancy, nutrition, diarrhea, potable water, hygiene, malaria, the importance of education, careers, sexual harassment, and more. Since it was a residential camp, the girls stayed in dorms and ate all their meals on site.

Overall, I was very impressed with the girls. As corny as it may sound, they made me feel very hopeful for Benin's future.

Here are some photos:

These girls are performing a skit on sanitation practices. The girl on the right is pretending to defecate in a pond from which many others get drinking water, and the girl on the left is explaining to her why she should not do that.

Group photo at the end of camp

My Gardening Adventure

I decided last year that I wanted to have a garden in Benin, and now my plans are finally coming to fruition. With the help of a Peace Corps volunteer and a local teacher who loves gardening but has no room for one at his house, I now have this lovely garden in my backyard:

My garden! The man in the picture is my gardening friend. And see those two six-gallon yellow jugs? That's what I use to fetch water (50 lbs when full).

As you can see, there are about a dozen garden beds, including two nurseries. One nursery is covered with leaves, and the other with a white cloth, to reduce the intensity of the sun and to help keep the plants moist all day. When the plants in the nursery grow larger, they will be transplanted to some of my empty garden beds.

My major problem for the moment is water. The rainy season has not really started yet, so we are only getting once-a-week rains. My garden, however, needs to be watered twice a day. That means that for the most part, I have to fetch all the water to water my garden from a local pond or pump. Each water run takes 15-20 minutes, and some days I do eight water runs or more. Ultimately, I have been dedicating 2-4 hours each day to the garden. Here's hoping I get some good eating out of it!


Most gardening work is done with a short hoe. Every Beninese person owns one of these because nearly every Beninese person works in the fields during the rainy season, and all such work is done by hand (no tractors!). The hoe is good for digging, weeding, and most everything else. I have personally found the club-like part that holds the blade to be useful for clubbing scorpions.

As for other pests, look closely in the first picture and you can see the fence we built to keep my neighbors' chickens out.  Snails are also a pest here, so whenever I see one, I chuck it over the wall. If snails really become a problem, I have been advised to set up a beer trap for them: stick a bowl of beer in your garden to attract the snails, and the next day you will have collected a bowl of snails who were attracted to the beer, climbed in, then got too drunk to climb out.

As for whether this garden is successful, only time will tell. I am also working on spin-offs to make this garden relevant to my work in my community. In the meantime, pray for rain, but not too much!

Lalee: Black Feet

This week, in my never-ending effort to be well-integrated in my community, I turned the soles of my feet black with a product called lalee (this spelling is approximative). In my community, black soles are a way of enhancing your beauty. The product has a similar effect to henna (ie, it temporarily dyes your skin), but the substance itself is different.

There are two forms of lalee in Benin. There is the traditional lalee, which I selected, and also a new version which is called lalee Yayi Boni (named after Beninese president Yayi Boni).

The traditional lalee comes in two parts. First, you mix a green powder with water and apply the paste to your skin. Ideally, you will leave this on for at least three hours and repeat the process multiple times. The green paste will dye your skin red. To make sure that your dyed soles have very clean lines, electrical tape is used to define the area to be dyed, much like painter's tape and plastic tarp keep you from painting your baseboards when painting a wall.

Lalee. The paste in the bowl is ready to be applied to my feet. The green powder in the plastic baggies is for the next round. The small baggie on the left contains the crystals that will help turn my red soles black.

My sole is orange from the last round of lalee that we applied, but we are adding another round to make it even darker.

Once your lalee is deep red, you apply the second part. For this step, you mix a crystal powder with water and ashes or cement, then apply it to your feet. You let this sit for 20-30 minutes before removing. Any place that had been deep red before will turn black.

Applying the cement-crystal mix that will turn my red soles black

However, if your sole was not deep red, the black will not come in properly. On my first attempt, the red color did not set in very well, so I ended up with red soles with black spots like leopard skin. The next attempt produced a similar result. For my third attempt, my friend decided that I needed to wear the green paste overnight to make sure that the red color set in well. She applied it for me at 9 pm, then sent me home with plastic bags around my feet. I slept with those plastic bags, then removed the green paste. She had me do another round of green paste (three hours to set in), then the final step to turn it black, and voila! I have black soles.

Success!

School in Sonsoro

Every week, I do health lessons in three local elementary schools. Since school is almost out for summer, let me give you a glimpse of what a Beninese classroom is really like.

As soon as I enter the classroom, the 50-70 students stand up and greet me in unison, then respond in unison to my greeting. Next, before we start our actual lesson, the teacher calls on a student to pick a song, and all the students sing the song together. Once the lesson begins, we proceed very slowly. School is conducted in French, but most of the children did not know any French before starting kindergarten, so it is the Beninese equivalent of having a room full of ESL students. As a result, we have to constantly rephrase our questions and check for comprehension.

To be called on, a student raises a finger in the air and says, “Here! Here!” When a student gives a particularly good answer, he is rewarded with rhythmic clapping. That is, the teacher gives the signal, and the whole class claps a certain pattern to congratulate the student. When a student gives a wrong answer, the teacher never says the answer is wrong, but instead asks the students, “Who can give a better answer?”

All of the students wear uniforms, which are called “khakis” because they are all made of a khaki- colored material. Girls are expected to shave their heads for fear that extravagant hairstyles could be distracting in class. The uniforms and shaved heads makes it easy to recognize which children go to school. Ultimately, only a minority of local children are enrolled, mostly because the other parents do not understand the importance of school or do not have the means to send their children. Between tuition (only boys pay), school fees, uniforms, and supplies, educating a child is expensive.

I always make up a song to teach the kids in order to help them remember the key message of our lesson. When the kids learn the song, I know that even if they forget everything else I taught them (or perhaps they did not truly understand because of their French level), they will at least retain the key message. Plus, singing is such a part of Beninese school culture that my song is a perfect fit. Even if I did not teach them a song, they would sing one at the end of the lesson before I left.

So to conclude this blog post, let me share a song with you:

Je bois de l'eau potable

pour la bonne sante.

Et je couvre bien la jarre

pour la proteger.

(“I drink potable water so that I'll stay healthy. And I make sure to cover the water jug so that the water stays clean.”)

We sing this song to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. Now if only I could get them to sing it in a round!

Bariba in Sonsoro

Since the upcoming end to the school year means I will have significantly more free time, I finally hired a Bariba tutor to teach me the local language. I discovered that one reason I have struggled to pick up Bariba on my own is that almost everything here is different from the Bariba I learned in Dangbo, where I was taught the “standard” Bariba spoken in Parakou and Nikki. There are so many differences between the two that it is as if I am being expected to speak Portuguese after having taken a semester of elementary Spanish.

Here are some examples:

Good morning: 'a kunando' in Sonsoro instead of 'a punando' elsewhere

Good afternoon: 'ka sonhon' instead of 'ka sonson'

How are you?: 'anna wahi?' instead of 'anna wasi?'

What's your name?: 'anna wen yisiru?' instead of 'amona wunen yisiru?'

My name is...: 'nen yiha...' instead of 'nen yisiru'

Morning: 'bude' instead of 'bururu'

How much?: 'yea?' instead of 'n'yewa?'

Market: 'yowo' instead of 'yoburu'

Work: 'soru' instead of 'soburu'

Father: 'tuno' instead of 'baa'

Teacher: 'metu' instead of 'metiri'

Foot: 'kona' instead of 'nasu'

5: 'no' instead of 'nobu'

10*: 'wogu' instead of 'wokuru'

16: 'woganogatia' instead of 'wokuranobatia'

18 (age): 'yendu yiru seri' instead of 'wokuranobaita'

(*Nearly every single number after 10 is different in Sonsoro from standard Bariba.)

As you can see, many of the differences are small, but since so many words are different, especially key words, the effect is that nearly everything I try to say is just a little bit wrong.

Ultimately, Bariba is an intensely localized language. Each village puts its own twist on the language, and even nearby villages do not quite speak the same Bariba we speak in Sonsoro. The “true” Bariba, or standard Bariba, is the Bariba spoken in Parakou (the largest Bariba city) or Nikki (considered the heart of the Bariba region). There have been some efforts to codify Bariba in books and dictionaries and to spread standard Bariba to villages like Sonsoro. During the dry season, a Swiss NGO sponsors language classes in Sonsoro to teach the villagers how to speak and read/write French and how to read and write standard Bariba.

In closing, I would like to impress upon you the challenge that lies ahead of me by showing you how to say 999 in Bariba:

wonoosunobainegawenegawoguganogaine.

Now say that three times real fast!