Craig and Heather's Excellent Beninois Adventure: Bonne Année!

We hope everyone had a wonderful New Years. Craig and I left Cotonou on the 28th of December to go all the way up north to Tanguieta for some work. Another health volunteer who works at a CPS (like me) has a Moringa system in place at the CPS and it acts as a well-oiled machine. I was hoping that I could do some research and copy it at my CPS. It is also the start of the tourist season there and Craig wanted to check into their tourist system and put some flyers for his park at the Parc Pendjari office so people coming down from safari would stop in Bohicon at his parc. It took us 11 hours to get up to Tanguieta. Once we got there, the other married couple from our stage, Krista and Andrew, met us at the “bus stop” and we went back to their house. It was already too late to do any work, so we went to dinner and went chuking. Chuke is fermented sorghum that they serve in homemade bowls for 25-50f (5-10 cents) and it tastes like warm Belgium sour beer but with more alcohol content. I am not a fan of the Belgium sours back home and I wasn’t super crazy about the chuke either. Nonetheless, we were in the north of the country, land of chuke, so we had to go chuking. We went to a couple different chuke bars around the dusty quartier and had some bowls of chuke. I gave most of mine to Craig or Andrew though because it was starting to hurt my stomach.

The weather up north is remarkably different than the south of the country, where we live. It was actually cold! We also learned that we are not used to dry heat/cool anymore. It was so dry I thought my eyeballs were going to crack. Between the dryness and the harmattan winds, I was overwhelmed with the weather. It felt like Arizona in the wintertime with its strong cold winds, dryness all around, and dust! By the end of our time up there, every time I blew my nose, the Kleenex would be filled with dust. For the first time, I missed the humidity of the south. The north does have one good advantage though: fresh watermelon! There are watermelon stands everywhere that sell the watermelon in thoughtfully sliced chunks for 5 cents and it was deliciously fresh. I felt well integrated as I walked down the street eating my slice of watermelon, spitting out the seeds into the dirt, then throwing the rind to the goats.
We spent a couple days checking out Krista’s work structures. The Moringa system was sadly a little disappointing because they had chopped the Moringa trees down for the dry season and the boss wasn’t there while we were there because of the holidays. I did get some good information and strategies about nutritional recuperation however, that I will begin to try to implement at my CPS.

In doing our tourism research for the archeological park, we decided to spend the holidays on safari. We wouldn’t be able to work anyway on the 31st and 1st since they are both holidays here in Benin, so we gathered up a little group of 7 people and went on safari. While staying at the workstation, someone took 25,000cfa out of my bag, which is the equivalent to $50, or a quarter of a volunteer’s living stipend each month. I have already filed a report with the Peace Corps. I doubt they’ll find the money; as I’m sure it’s long gone, but hopefully they’ll be able to catch the person, especially since it had to be a fellow volunteer who took it.

The safari was amazing! We all sat on the roof of the car most of the time. Our first sightings of animals were baboons, birds, antelope, boars, hippos, and crocodiles. We also saw a couple lions, several elephants, monkeys swinging from tree to tree, coyotes, water buffalo, several other kinds of deer-like animals, and lots of other colorful birds. One morning, we were out on the roof, and we saw a teenage boy lion lying in the road. He saw us coming and ran into the tall grass. What he didn’t realize was that there was a family of elephants walking right over there and they saw the lion and charged at the lion to scare it away. The elephants, about 100 yards away, eventually saw us, too, as a threat and began to charge at us. We were all yelling in French for the driver to “go”. One of us took a video of the elephant making it’s elephant noise with its ears up and the car racing off. I’ll try to post it on here, but it will eventually be on Facebook. It was really cool and more than fulfilled our expectations of the safari.
That same day, we went to the watering hole, and we saw lots of hippos, four of them, in the shallow water, yawning and walking around. They never actually got out of the water, but at that same time, there were probably 50 baboons all around the watering hole as well. That was very interesting to watch. The baboons were trying to get water while the crocodiles were trying to sun themselves and several times, we thought a baby baboon was going to get eaten. While some tried to get water, another climbed the baobab tree and was knocking down fruit to the other ones that were waiting on the ground. This was all going on while the hippos were walking around and yawning. It was really amazing! Also that same evening, we went out, and just outside of where the hotel was, we saw a beautiful lioness teaching her cubs how to hunt about 40 feet from our car. We didn’t actually see the cubs (only the guide did) but the lioness saw us. She looked at us every time we made any noise but we didn’t seem to bother her. She would just turn around and look at us, then turn back around and watch her cubs. It was incredible.

On New Years Eve, we decided we wanted to take a break from our grocery store food and treat ourselves to dinner at our hotel, the only hotel/restaurant within 2 hours from the nearest civilization (we were in the bush!!) so we went into the restaurant to reserve a table. The usual dinner is 6,000cfa ($12) and that was a very big splurge for us. They informed us that the New Years Eve dinner would be 15,000cfa!!! We, the only grungy, dirty poor people for hours, decided that that was far too much money. One of us, the dirtiest of us all, decided that they were going to talk to the manager. As he stormed off, another one of us yelled at him to be sure to tell them that we were poor. This was hysterical to me because clearly, they could just look at how dirty he was and see that we couldn’t even afford soap! After five attempts at talking to the manager, he decided that they would give us the same dinner for 10,000cfa ($20) and then, we decided that each pair of us would split the dinner so that it would end up being even cheaper than we first thought. What smart volunteers we were! The dinner was a 5-course meal and was very good and definitely enough for 2 people to share.
Craig and I had stashed a bottle of very cheap champagne in the hotel bar fridge and at 11:15pm, we decided to get it. After some confusion and the bartender trying to give us a $300 bottle of champagne that belonged to the table next to us, we got our champagne. After midnight, all the French people decided that they were going to make a conga line and dance around the room holding the person’s shoulders in front of you. We decided to join in to the silly Frenchies’ dance and when we got back to our table, someone had STOLEN my freshly poured glass of champagne! I looked over at the table next to us, whose champagne we almost ended up with, and saw a Beninese person with the Frenchies drinking champagne out of a glass shaped like ours (and shaped differently from everyone else’s at his table). One of the people in our group confronted the Frenchie about it and they said that it was beer that they got from a friend at another table. Silly Frenchie, they don’t serve beer in a champagne glass! I was stupefied that a table with a $300 bottle of champagne would steal a glass of my $4 champagne. That is bad karma that is going to follow him all throughout 2011.

On the 1st, on our way back to Natitingou, we stopped at the waterfalls and went swimming. Craig and I were both coming down with the flu by this time, but I wasn’t going to allow that to stop me from swimming in the cold waterfall runoff water. It was so beautiful. It was also so cold that it was hard to breathe. I’m sure for you guys back home, it wouldn’t be that bad, but to us, who are use to 100 degrees with 100% humidity, it was cold! We got back to Natty and in failing to buy our bus tickets because they were on repos, we found a guide that was friends with our guide who just happened to pull up next to our car and say hello, who was headed to Grand Popo the next day and could take us to Bohicon for the same price as the bus. We jumped at the opportunity. It meant comfy seats, AC, door to door pick up and drop off, and a quicker ride down. And quicker it was! It shaved off over an hour and a half off of the normal time it takes to get from Natty to Bohicon. By the 2nd though, when we left, I was so sick that I just slept the whole way. I had a slight fever and body aches and a sore throat that kept me up all night. . Craig’s flu soon caught up to mine but didn’t hang on as long. I called Sister Madeline to tell her I had her mosquito nets but I was sick so she would have to come get them and a couple days later, another nun that she works with came all the way to Bohicon to check on us because she heard we were sick. They’re so sweet!

I went into work the next day, the 3rd, in my fragile condition (just as I would if I were in the States) and my supervisor told me to go home and not to come back until the following week when I feel better. It was a nice and welcome rest, especially since I have been bouncing around hotels and workstations for the past month. It has been almost a month since I had been home. I left on December 9th and didn’t come back until the 2nd of January. Our mama around the corner that sells us stuff thought I called it quits and went back to the States for good. My supervisor was ecstatic to see me. And our neighbors held us hostage to catch up when I went by their house to ask them to help us kill the mouse that Craig had trapped in our bathroom. It is good to be home! I am only going to leave one time in January, and that is for a Camp GLOW meeting that I really do need to attend at the end of the month, around the same time that Craig has to leave for training. Other than that, I am staying put for as long as Peace Corps will allow me to.