Beninese Wives

Earlier this week, my best friend in village informed me that her husband had decided that she was no longer allowed to spend time with me. While my conduct in their household has been irreproachable, the husband is merely exercising what he views as his right to control his wife's life.

In Benin, or at least in my region of the country, men and women generally accept that the husband can give orders to his wife. In particular, a woman's movements are dependent on her husband's permission. For instance, when I wanted to invite a colleague to attend a training in Parakou, she agreed but said she needed permission from her husband. Her husband vetoed the idea, so I had to invite someone else to the training.

In another example, twice a month I participate in health education sessions with my Amour et Vie team. When we started, the female member of our team was separated from her husband, so she was free to attend our sessions as she pleased. In the spring, however, she moved back in with her husband, and now she can no longer attend our sessions without permission from her him. Her attendance has thus declined from nearly 100% to now less than 50%.

In the case of my friend I mentioned initially, her husband has long been oppressive. The list of examples could go on and on, but to give one example, her husband does not allow her to leave the house - even to buy food from the market - unless he accompanies her (which he rarely does). She is essentially a prisoner in her own home.

While this post touches on Beninese domestic life (though it barely scratches the surface of wives' suffering), Beninese women live hard lives from birth to death. Another recent example: one of my girls' camp attendees, one of the brightest students in her class, was pulled out of middle school definitively this year because her parents were forcing her into marriage.

For an interesting read on the subject of girls and women in developing countries, I recommend Half the Sky by Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof. In particular, I was impressed by the authors' ability to distinguish effective development projects from ineffective/damaging ones. Happy reading!

Mailing Address

Just a quick note...

When I was on vacation in the US, some friends and relatives asked for my mailing address. While this information is buried in my blog somewhere, it requires some patience to find it, so I have added it to a tab at the top of this page to make the information more easily accessible.

Return from Mecca

Last Saturday, I returned to village after my vacation in the US to find 40 people camped out in the courtyard I share with my neighbors. It seems my landlord had just returned from his pilgrimage to Mecca (this pilgrimage, called the "Hajj," is one of the five pillars of Islam), and his family, friends, and fellow villagers dropped by to welcome his return. The Hajj is particularly prestigious in my Muslim community because it is impossible for most local Muslims due to the expenses involved. The trip costs $4000-6000, which is unaffordable for nearly everyone around (the median wage in Benin is $1.25 per day).

My landlord, however, is considered to be the wealthiest man in the village. In fact, he sent his wife on the Hajj last year, and she had a similar homecoming upon her return. The Hajj is timed to the lunar calendar, like all Muslim holidays, and it always falls around Tabaski. The lunar calendar does not quite align with our Western, solar calendar, so the date moves up about 11 days each year.

Having completed the Hajj, my landlord will be held in even greater regard in our community. Instead of being simply referred to by his name, Yacoubou, he will now be addressed as Al Hajj Yacoubou (my spelling of this title is phonetic; please forgive me if it is wrong). To honor his return, hundreds of people came to our courtyard to welcome him, and some of these people, having traveled great distances, stayed overnight or longer. This mass of well-wishers is the scene that I found in my courtyard upon my return from vacation.

The swarms of visitors quickly tried my patience. To make more room for their guests, in my absence, my neighbors cleared all of my belongings off of my porch, and each day the guests spread large plastic mats out on my porch to relax on. My neighbors dumped everything from my porch into a pile on the side of my house, and in the process, some of my belongings disappeared, never to be seen again. After a few days, I returned my remaining belongings to their rightful place on the porch, only to discover the next day that they had been removed again! This game continued several days in a row, until the morning when I awoke to discover that instead of putting my porch things into a neat pile, they had just scattered them about the yard. That was the end of my patience on that matter.

Another point of frustration related to food. For the first few days after my return, my neighbor constantly asked me about what gift I had brought him from the US. I had not brought him anything (he would be about the 50th person on my gift-giving list for Benin), so I initially tried to playfully bat away his question. When he kept insisting, I eventually silenced him by pointing out that in their many days of festivities, they had never offered me any food, which is extremely rude by Beninese standards. I came to regret that because then he did have someone offer me food, and what they brought me looked so revolting that I imagine it must have been the anus of the goat they had slaughtered. I have never seen a more disgusting piece of meat, though as a vegetarian, I admit that my tolerance is low. Worse, they chose to slaughter both goats behind my house - far from the view of their own homes.

Unfortunately, this celebration has already lasted a week and a half, though I am hopeful that it may end soon. For my sanity, it needs to. Some of the guests are already awake by 4 am and making noise, whereas others are loud until midnight, so the disruption is nearly constant. Another frustration: my neighbors raided and emptied my reserve water supply while I was gone.

As stressful as this has been, it was just one of many challenges upon my return to village. While I was away, many insects took up residence in my unoccupied home, and at least a dozen lizards moved in to eat them. No matter how hard I work to eliminate the insect population, the lizards refuse to move out of their new home. While I was away, one of the lizards drowned himself in my bucket of shower water that I had forgotten to dump out, so I found his decomposing body in my bucket when I got back. It took a lot of bleach to be comfortable using that bucket again. In another assault from the animal kingdom, a wasp has decided to build her nest in my bedroom. I destroyed it as soon as I found it, and by the next day she had already rebuilt it.

As you can imagine, even though I just got back, I think I need another vacation already!

Tabaski

I'm back!

I took a vacation from Benin and a simultaneous vacation from this blog, but now that I am back in the country, I will start updating this blog regularly again.

While I was away, I missed one of the biggest local holidays: Tabaski. Even though it is a Muslim holiday, you may very well know the story on which it is based because Islam shares its roots with Christianity and Judaism. In this case, the shared story is about Abraham.

In Islam as in Christianity, the story goes that God asked Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. As a faithful servant of God, Abraham accepted, but at the last moment, God allowed Abraham to sacrifice an animal instead.

To commemorate this event today, devout Muslims slaughter a sheep or ram on the day of Tabaski. Families with sufficient means slaughter at least one animal, and they share with their neighbors and the less fortunate to demonstrate their charity.

This year, Tabaski fell on October 15. However, the date changes every year because Muslims follow a lunar calendar; last year's Tabaski was later in October.

Since rams and sheep are in such demand for Tabaski, they are very expensive as the holiday approaches. In my village, Muslims with foresight buy their animals well in advance when they are cheaper. My neighbors, for instance, bought two sheep in the spring, when they cost about $30 each. They fattened the animals up over the summer, and by Tabaski they had two fat animals for slaughter. If they had purchased the animals in October instead, they would have cost $100 each.

For the meat lovers out there, maybe you should consider a trip to West Africa next fall. You might just need a strong stomach if you are not used to seeing your supper killed in front of you.

And for the Christians out there, did you have any idea that you shared this story with Muslims? You have a lot more in common than you may realize.