Recipe: Sinri Flower Sauce

Over the past month, I have repeatedly been served a sauce containing sinri flowers. Last week, I asked my friend to come over and teach me how to make the sauce. An illustrated guide is below:

Collect the sinri flowers.

Our flowers are plucked and ready for cooking. If you don't have fresh flowers on hand, you can use dried flowers that you harvested previously.

We washed and boiled the flowers, then drained them and set them aside.

This particular recipe calls for beans. You do not want the skins on your beans, so you must pound them to loosen the skins, then place them in water so that the skins float to the top. These beans have already had the skin removed.

Next, you cook 1/3 cup of beans in water, then add the "sauce ingredients" (pureed garlic, pepper, salt, hot pepper, and special Beninese condiments).

 

When the beans are cooked, you add the flowers back into the pot, and then it is time to eat! This sauce can be enjoyed with pate or akassa.

On the Farm

Now that the rains have stopped, we are nearing the end of our farming season. Most people will finish harvesting over the next few months and will return to Sonsoro in January.

During the farming season, farmers (that is, nearly the entire population of Sonsoro) actually leave town and move into their country homes amidst their fields. Most people only return to town on our market day, which is every fourth day. On Friday, I went to visit my friend's farm, which is about 15 miles from Sonsoro.

My friend has a large farm and hires laborers to help out. He grows cotton, soybeans, corn, manioc, mangoes, edible flowers, millet, and more, and he also raises bees and chickens. Below are some photos from his farm:

A storage container full of millet

I'm very comfortable in this giant pile of cotton.

See how tall the millet grows? The top is eaten, and the stalks are used for construction projects.

The top of the millet can be turned into porridge or mash.

A field of cotton. All the related labor is done by hand. No cotton gin here!

My friend's house, where he lives during the eight or so months he spends every year on his farm.

Snake Oil Salesmen and Traditional Medicine

A few days ago, a traveling salesman arrived at our health center with a briefcase full of traditional medicines. He presented us with a list of 60 different ailments he could cure with his products: hepatitis, malaria, incontinence, etc. While he is from southern Benin, he was trained in traditional medicine at an institute in Mali, and he presented a certification to that effect.

The traveling salesman with his briefcase of medicines and handful of charm necklaces

The pharmacist purchased his hepatitis cure for $2 and was instructed to mix the powder with a cup of honey and to consume one tablespoon every morning and night until the product was finished. I later pointed out to her that the product looked like ash, so she tasted it, declared it tasted like ash, and swore she had been swindled.

The hepatitis cure

The same salesman tried to sell me a powder that he said would ensure that every single person kept every promise to me for the rest of my life. For $10, it sounded like a steal! He instructed me to mix it with lotion and spread it on my skin. He was also selling charm necklaces to put around children to help them with teething and more.

This powder will make everyone I know keep their promises to me for the rest of my life.

Before he left, he made a prophecy to my friend. He said that she was the victim of malicious witchcraft and told her to do kindness to twins in order to set things straight. He himself claimed to be the only surviving brother of a set of triplets, which in the Beninese mindset means that he absorbed the powers of his dead brothers and is now somewhat superhuman.

While some of the products may be legitimate, obviously parts of what the salesman said would raise a red flag to any American. Traditional medicine, however, is very popular with the Beninese, and it is even recognized by the Ministry of Health.

One place I often see sellers of traditional medicine is on the bus to or from Cotonou. A salesman always boards the bus about halfway through the trip, and he hawks his wares to a captive audience for 30 minutes until he can catch a bus in the opposite direction. Like many traditional medicines, some of his products are claimed to have six or more purposes: you can cure cavities and have a memory aid all in one bottle!

However, one need not depend on a traveling salesman for such products. Whenever a Beninese person is sick, his first recourse is generally home-brewed traditional medicine. He will go out and find the necessary roots or leaves to make a cure for his ailment. When my friend's baby was a picky eater, for instance, she prepared a special brew that was to be used in two ways to induce appetite: she bathed her son in it, and she also gave him some to drink.

Our pharmacist prepared this drink to cure an ailment.

Since I work at the health center, I encourage villagers to rely on the proven medicines we sell there, but my advice often falls on deaf ears. Even my colleagues at the health center use traditional medicine. When I described to a school principal the rigorous testing our Western medicine undergoes before being marketed, he dismissed such testing, saying, "In Benin, if you give a medicine to ten people and two get better, we say it's a cure." Given how much cheaper traditional medicine is than Western medicine, it is no surprise that we have a hard time getting sick people to seek treatment at the health center.

At the Pump

Now that the dry season has begun and many wells have nearly dried up, the villagers in Sonsoro are increasingly reliant on the pump. The pump provides cleaner water than the well, but at a price: 5 cents for a six-gallon jug or bowl, whereas the well is free.

There are about 10 faucet pumps in Sonsoro. These pumps receive water from the water tower, which is filled with water using a motorized pump. The water tower empties out very frequently, often within a day of being filled, and the pumps cannot give water again until the water tower has been refilled. For whatever reason, the water tower often remains empty, which is one of the major reasons that water is difficult to acquire during the dry season. When the wells have dried out and the faucet pumps have no water, all of the village depends on our two foot pumps and one hand pump, which work at all times (except when broken!).

Recently, one of my good friends became a pump operator, and he told me more about how the system works. Each faucet pump has a meter that tracks the number of cubic meters of water that have been dispensed. For each cubic meter, the pump operator collects $2, of which he keeps 20%. The remaining 80% is remitted to an agent who collects it on behalf of the village government. From the records, it looked like the pump operator might dispense 4-8 cubic meters of water per day.

My friend got his job when the last pump operator was fired for stealing money. While the theft was easy to catch from the pump records, that only applies to the faucet pumps. The foot pumps and hand pump have no meter, so the pump operator simply reports how much money he claimed to take in and gives 80% of the money to the town hall agent. Even my pump operator friend did not know how the village government uses the money.

My friend at his pump

A woman and child at the well

A Peace Corps Volunteer working a foot pump in another village

Yayi Boni Comes to Sonsoro

Last Saturday, the Beninese president, Yayi Boni, came to Sonsoro. He chose my village to celebrate the start of the cotton-selling season. Cotton is one of Benin's top commodities, especially in my region of the country.

The president's visit sparked a festival-like atmosphere, with huge tents, dozens of food vendors, traveling musicians, and horsemen. Road crews even came before the event to level out our pothole-riddled dirt road into town.

Piles of cotton provided decor for the event. This one had a sign for the president.

Trucks full of cotton

Attendees literally came by the truckload.

A traveling band from Parakou

Peulh horsemen

The president arrived in style.

Can you spy the president? He's near the left wearing a grey cowboy hat and white shirt and has his back to the camera.