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!