Emily Becker

The most controversial project that I’ve started here so far has been my Girls Club. At eleven weeks in, the boys still ask me when I’m going to start my Boys Club when I show up at school at 17:00. The controversy only worsened this week when the t-shirts I ordered for the club arrived. The question changed from when the Boys Club would start to when I would be making them t-shirts. 

In the US, my usual response to questions such as those would be that the entire rest of the country is a Boys Club, every other month is White History Month and the Men’s Center is the entire rest of campus. Those responses don’t really translate here.

My general observation about men here, both my students and those older, is that they are not used to hearing the word, “No.” No you cannot join my club. No you cannot play with my iPod. No you cannot take my bicycle. Chauvinism is not just an underlying part of the culture. Chauvinism is the culture.

When I started the club, I was tentative. I could feel myself bending under the incessant questioning, by students and other teachers. But then the girls took hold of the club. It became their place. Their one place where they held dominion. The one place where they could say no boys allowed.

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My colleague and I are in my 6eme class trying to get 52 students to understand the concept of adverbs of frequency. We are trying to get them to use them in a sentence. There is a list of them on the board. (rarely, sometimes, never, always, often) What they can’t seem to grasp is that they need to include one of those six magical words in order for their sentences to be correct.

“I sometimes eat pounded yams,” my colleague says.

“I always ride my bicycle to school,” I say.

“I always walk to school,” Leon offers.

“John usually sleeps in class,” Rodrigue says. 

“Landry never does his homework,” Alexandre adds.

They seem to be getting the hang of it.

The next student I call on is Marcos, a shy boy who seems younger than most of my other students. 

He stands up proudly, arms straight, hands at his sides. 

“Marcos is a student!” he yells, so sure of his answer that I also want it to be right. 

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which means my thoughts have been even more on development recently. But not on work that I am doing, but what laid the foundation thousands of the years ago that I am here and my neighbors are not in the United States.

(If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. It takes some concentration, but its scope is outstanding. That I am reading this book now had a direct effect on my appreciation of it. The question posed in the prologue is a question that I hear everyday: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”)

In Chapter 14, Diamond lays out a nice chart mapping the evolution of societies from bands to states. What struck me when I was reading it was how much the society in which I am currently living lands in characteristics that pertain to all four of the categories of societies he outlines.

Certainly, my village is part of the country of Benin. It relies on a central government to partition resources and enforce laws. But there are many times when if there is a choice between choosing the modern or traditional methods of an action, we go traditional. For example, there is no courthouse in my village. If there is a disagreement between citizens, they visit the King for a resolution. The government has no need to be informed of such things.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, as much as G,G,&S is the most successful explanation of worldwide human development of which I know, it also fails in some senses. It would be impossible to be able to tell all the truths of life and development around the world.

In some way, what I’m trying to do with this blog is tell the truths of life in Benin. (The judgment of my success or failure is up to you.) But even after I will live here for almost 27 months, this is an unattainable goal. I cannot know all the truths of Benin. Even Dave, who lives 5k away from me, is having a difference volunteer experience than I am. His truths of life in Benin are different than mine.

So, I guess that the only thing that you can do is try to find your truths. And realize how those truths will shape the person that you become. 

Put the verbs in the indicated tense and form.

1. You (to watch) the film. Future tense with will, affirmative

2. Bart (to have) a cow, man. Future tense with going, negative

3. Vinny (to get) his drink on tonight. Future tense with will, affirmative

4. She (to buy) a stairway to heaven. Future tense with going, affirmative

5. Frodo (to destroy) the one ring. Future tense with going, interrogative.

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Sometimes when I have students (and several adults that I know) at my house, it seems like they think that I have a magical, endless supply of things. The thought of the consequences of what would happen if they broke my iPod doesn’t cross their mind because I can just another one. They can continuously ask me for stickers because I must have a sticker Mama at the market who keeps me in supply. 

What they don’t realize is if I really had access to magical things fairy, I would have passed its contact information along to them a long time ago.

I was coasting down the other side of the hill I just climbed when I looked down at my front bicycle tire. That I could push it in to the point where I could touch the rim was not a good sign. 

I could no longer see Kristin, the volunteer with whom I was biking the 50k to Dassa, so I started walking. 

The first village I came across was 3k down the highway. I stopped two men who had just left the fields.

“Do you know a mechanic?” I asked.

“Yes. He is over there,” the man said, pointing in the general direction of the village, a classic example of Beninese directions.

Nothing in the direction he motioned looked like a place where I could get my tire fixed, so I kept walking, chalking up the interaction to a failure to understand my accent. 

Thirty feet later, another man comes running up from the village to me. He was the mechanic. So, I followed him back to his shop. And I made faces at the group of kids that steadily grew as word spread there was a Yovo in town. And I thought about how much I love that I live in a place where I’m never more than walking distance from someone who can help me along my route.

I looked up from my lesson planning as someone knocked at my door. A student of the teacher who lives next to me walked in.

“The monsieur next door asked me to ask you what we could do with this pomade,” he said handing me a small canister of Play Doh.

Something had been lost in that cultural exchange.

Things that I’ve noticed that seem to imply that sometimes, the priorities in development in my village need to reevaluated:

-Almost everyone I know has a cellphone. No one I know has running water.

-My neighbors have satellite television, but also feel that it is sanitary to shit on the side of the road.

-We have cars, but feel the need to put at least seven people in them at one time.

-People have built libraries and computer labs and health centers, but never bothered to educate the population that washing your hands involves more than just pouring water over them.

Now, I understand that I’m approaching this situation with the biased lens of my westernized experience, but as much as we’ve talked about needs v. wants and sustainability and creating projects that are not your projects, but community projects, it seems to me that something was off in the past.

And there is a lot that needs to be done. (Again looking at my situation from my westernized perspective) So the question does have to be where do you start? Is anything better than nothing?

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