Post Visit, afterward

Since post visit was a 5 or 6 day ordeal, depending on the definition of "returning from post," I will try to brush quickly through the monotomy and boring details. Especially those with which I can easily make a more in-depth blog entry once I live there. I also supplemented the text with some video I took along the way. Here goes:

As stated in the video, Elaina is posted north of me in the big city of Djougou, while Matt is ridiculously far north, on the Niger border (although his house will serve as a good jump-off point for the pan-sahara trip from Niger to Senegal that me and him are planning for a group of us to go on). That particular trip was in a shuttle to rendez-vous with more volunteers/homologues, and then drive eastward to the bus station in Cotonou.

 The bus station is pretty easy to navigate through. There's a guy who works there who will lead you to whichever bus you need to take. Since there's only a few "highways" in Benin, and the shape of benin is pretty straight and narrow, it's really easy to find the bus you need, since they pretty much all go northward, hit the major cities along the way, and will stop whenever you need to get off. 

Michelle is posted just a bit south of me, off of the main "highway," and despite her village being without electricity or running water, the map indicates that she is at a central point for a handful of other volunteers, and so her post will probably end up being a meeting point for other volunteers in the area to hang. 

You can see that the bus is pretty similar to charter busses in the U.S. This one happened to be a double-decker, and we nabbed one of the 2 table-seating arrangements. 

The bus drive across Benin was relatively cheap. To get to my village, which is at about the midway point in the country, only cost about $10 worth of West African Francs (5,000 CFA). The bus stops constantly for pee breaks (i.e. peeing on the side of the highway), and for street vendors to tempt the passengers with their products by reaching in the open windows, hands full of goodies. While I have been honing my ability to ignore even the most aggressive vendors, other Beninese seem to embrace the opportunity to buy things by stocking up on groceries by the bag full (the only bags people use here are industrial strength cement bags), so much so that it makes it very difficult to move around the bus.

Busses even come with their own vendor aboard, which is usually a "traditional medicine" pharmacist. Both times I rode the bus, the guys were loud, teeming with body odor, and promised to have the solution to any medical problem. They presented each product, which all seemed to look like either bark/wood shavings inside of a used liquor bottle, or little viles of liquid. The Beninese women would giggle and laugh, and when he was done with his schpeil, they would buy his cure-alls. At this point I would shake my head, and feel overwhelmed at the amount of work that needs to be done here, although from a cultural perspective, slightly amused at what I just witnessed.

Although this was technically my Post Visit, I'll spare a lot of details about my post, since I will be able to write more about that when I am actually living there. 

I did get somewhat of a surprise on Thursday morning in Pelebina, my homologue took me for a walk that ended up being a meeting with the "king" of the area. As we pulled up, I saw big round terra-looking buildings  with paintings on them of leopards and giant snakes eating people and the like. The buildings were connected by walls, creating a courtyard in the center.

I was lead into said courtyard where the "king" was waiting for me. He was dressed in baby-blue silky-looking robes, although not notably different than the attire of the wealthy citizens I see around the capital here in Porto Novo. He tricked me into thinking we would saluate with just a handshake by pulling me in to kiss both cheeks a la the Parisian well-to-do, and then pulled my forehead to connect with his while he murmured a few words probably in Yom, the language of Pelebina. He doesnt speak any French, by the way. He sat me down in one of the two chairs in the courtyard, while he took the remaining.

Seemingly out of nowhere (probably because I was distracted by the ambiance and rehearsing in my mind what to say and do to minimize my chances of a cultural faux pas) about a dozen men seemed to file into the courtyard, and thanks to several translators, from the king's language to some other language to French, so that I would understand, I learned that all these men were the kings counsel and cabinet. They sat on mats on the ground around the chairs, at which point I realized how much of an honor sitting in a chair was.

What was particularly interesting about their interaction was that their greeting here in Pelebina was grunting back and forth to each other. How it works is: one person starts it by saying "NNNggg" and then everyone else around, in unison, repeats "nhhnnnhnn." And this repeats about 4 or 5 times until the person who starts it gets bored. They talked and debated, while I tried to pick out French words from their conversation. They asked me a bunch of questions, such as how old I am, how many kids I have, how many wives I have, if I am the eldest son in my familiy, etc. Eventually, the decided I was to be called Ouarou. Wait, what? This was a naming ceremony? Ok, sweet, whatever. Henceforth, I am Ouarou de Pelebina (pronounced WAh-roo, slightly rolling the 'r'). A few minutes later, I said my "merci"s, exchanged a few grunts, and headed out.

So anyway, more about Pelebina in weeks to come. As mentioned in my previous blog post, I ended up being able to visit Djougou, the "big city" where Elaina lives, and eventually to Natitingou, an hour by taxi north of Djougou, which despite being smaller than Djougou is where the PC decided to build a work station for my region.

The original plan got messed up when Elaina got sick. Since I couldn't get a hold of Michelle, probably since she hadn't charged her phone, I decided the trip was worth even taking by myself. When I got to Djougou, Elaina looked terrible, and Doug, a current volunteer who is also posted in Djougou was facilitating the process of calling the Peace Corps doctors. Here's a bit about what Elaina had to say:

So Doug, Elaina and I all stayed at the hospital for about 6 hours while Elaina went through 3 IVs and a couple different forms of antibiotics, since the doctor didn't know exactly what the problem was. 

At about 6, Doug and I ordered a plate of spaghetti for Elaina, and headed out. Doug had found out that a lot of other volunteers and trainees were in Nati that evening, and decided it would be a fun time not to be missed out on, so he came with, which made it a lot easier for me. 

After stopping at his house to get a couple things, we headed over to the taxi garre, and flagged down a taxi (an old, beat up car that they cram full of people) that was heading to Nati. Despite cramming 4 people in the front and 4 people in the back of this little 4-door foreign car so full that I was losing circulation in my leg, I enjoyed the ride. At this point the sun was setting to our left, over rolling hills covered with very African-looking trees, and I would have pulled out my camera for a picture if I could move. 

I had heard the Natitangou work station was the prettiest of the 4 work stations in Benin, but I wasn't expecting this. It had a very cozy feel to it, and a je-ne-sais-quoi vibe to it that a lot of hip cafes in LA try to achieve. 

Me and some other volunteers went to a buvette for the evening (an outside bar. basically, the only kind of bar here in Benin). Before sunrise the next morning, we headed off to the bus garre to get stand-by tickets. The majority of the other trainees had bought their bus tickets the previous day, before I had arrived, so the only other PC people on my bus were Michelle, and a current volunteer and trainer named Brandon. Despite the bus being much slower and full of some pretty cranky Beninese, we had a good time.

The bus at one point began smoking from the engine. The Beninese people started freaking out in mass chaos, forcing their way of the bus, very uncivilized. They were hitting kids and trying to crawl over seats to get out. The three of us waited for the mob to exit the bus, and then we got off, where I took this video:

The bus ride took 13 hours total, (which was longer than the trip from DC to Benin via Paris) and as we arrived in Cotonou we realized we were too exhausted by travel to attempt to track down a taxi and do another 1.5 hours to Porto Novo, so we stayed at the bureau. We went out to a delicious expensive Thai restaurant to celebrate the end of an adventurous day, and spent the evening enjoying the bureau's free wireless internet, and sleeping very very well.