The Great Beninese Gas Crisis of 2012

Benin does not produce any oil.  Nigeria, our neighbor and biggest trading partner, however, does.  In fact, Nigeria is the largest oil producer in West Africa and Benin imports close to 100% of its petroleum from its large, overpopulated neighbor.  Talk about being addicted to foreign oil!  Much of Benin’s economy is concentrated in what is called the “informal sector”, which means that most people who work do not get a paycheck like we do in the United States with taxes taken out.  Instead, employers (and employees) in the informal sector get paid in cash only.  Examples are women who walk around and sell food, men who grill meat on the side of the road, women who sell vegetables at the market, and people who sell gas on the side of the road.

Wait, gas?  Yes, every city has a thriving informal gas market, brought over illegally from Nigeria and sold in stands on the side of the road.  Well, that is until last week when the Nigerian government ended its domestic oil subsidy that kept the price of oil down and affordable for everyone.  Protests have erupted in the streets of Nigeria and illegal roadside gas stations have disappeared in Benin since the end of the subsidy last week.  Roadside gas in Benin is no longer affordable; long lines are popping up at the few legal gas stations in the country.   Roadside gas used to be 300 cfa per liter (about 60 cents), but has now skyrocketed to more than 1,000 cfa per liter (about 2 dollars), almost triple the price of legal gas offered at (likely state-subsidized) gas stations. 

You can see how the end of the gas subsidy not only affects Nigerians but Beninese, as well.  Add to that rumors of a rumored 35% devaluation in the price of the franc cfa used by 13 countries in the West African Economic Union, and there is a possible disaster on the horizon.  My work partner, Arimi, makes 30,000 cfa (or about 60 dollars) each month which supports him, his wife, and small child (his wife also works and makes 20,000 cfa per month, so together they make $100 each month).  Gas prices have just tripled, and soon he will make essentially 10,500 cfa less each month if the rumored devaluation happens.  The local mayor’s office pays his salary and since the mayor’s office refuses to even give us a $400 marketing budget for this year, I would be surprised if they would increase salaries to make up for the devaluation, if it happens. 

So, what will happen to Arimi if the cfa is devalued?  Well, with the gas issue I have heard other volunteers complain that their work partners will not go to work until they can afford gas for their motorcycles.  Arimi would have to find some way to cut back on expenses, which would be a stretch for a guy who already essentially lives on $1 per day (the other dollar he makes per day goes towards recurring expenses, such as rent, electricity, water, motorcycle upkeep, and, of course, gas).  What will it mean for us?  The price of transportation has already massively increased.  Zemijohn prices have doubled, bush taxi prices have gone up 20%-50%, and it seems as if bus service has declined.  Rumors abound that buses are now installing a bench in the aisle of the bus to pack more people in, plus slightly increasing the price of fares, to make up for the difference in gas prices.  With more people on the bus, the bus is heavier and more difficult to navigate through the slalom of potholes that litter the main north-south corridor and can cripple a vehicle.  I imagine that we will see more bus accidents as they continue to become more and more overloaded with passengers and more difficult to maneuver.  

Higher gas prices have also driven zemijohn drivers to literally fight for business: zem drivers have been pushing volunteers off of the back of other zem’s motorcycles to try to literally steal their business.  It is not difficult to see the social and economic consequences of the new gas prices and we cannot imagine what will happen if the cfa franc is devalued, as well.

Travel is less safe and more expensive.  Crowds swarm to legal gas stations while the thousands of people who once made a little money selling illegal gas now must find another profession.  There are no jobs here, no craigslist or monster.com to search for jobs, a poor education system, and shoddy, crumbling infrastructure.  It feels like the country is literally falling apart in front of our eyes.  But people will find a way to get through it.  The roadside sellers of gas might make and sell charcoal instead, or grill meat.  People may ride bicycles instead of motorcycles.  Without any help from the government, everyone will need to find a way to scrape and save and find money for their next meal.  As Arimi is fond of saying to me, “C’est l’Afrique.”  That’s Africa.

**Update: Nigeria reinstated their fuel subsidy last week, albeit at a lower rate than it was previously.  There are still problems with zem and food prices, but they are becoming part of "normal" life now.  Check out this line at the gas station!

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Fête de Vodoun, 2012 edition

We passed the holidays at home in Bohicon with local volunteer pals.  Big thanks to Kev & Danielle, Tim, and Cherise for the Christmas packages!  We are so fortunate to have great friends and family that supply us we goodies from Americaland.

On 10 January, Benin has a state holiday for Vodoun (Voodoo).  Minutes and untold minutes of research have led me to believe that Benin is not only the only country in the world that has an official state holiday for Vodoun, but also the only one that has state holidays for three different religions (Christian, Muslim, Vodoun).  Technically referred to as "Traditional Religions Day", the Vodoun fête day is celebrated with dancing, drinking (heavily), offerings to vodoun spirits and/or deities, singing, dancing, having fun with vodoun characters (such as Egunguns and Zangbetos), and dancing and drinking.

We are in the beginning stages of planning our girls' camp for this year which will take place in June and we have also recently found out that new volunteers who will arrive in July (or maybe June?) are already receiving invitations to come here and have a facebook group already.  Many volunteers are busy facebook stalking them already.

We will try to post pictures from the fete the next time that we have a fast internet connection.  Tried to post a video + pictures here today but it wasn't working out.  Sorry!

Cheers

On Being Busy and Whatnot

Heather has been busier than I on this blog lately, so here is a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to and what is in store for me/us coming up soon.

My biggest project that I have been working on, the website that I have been creating for my parc is finished—for now. My supervisor and I recently wrote up a budget for the calendar year 2012 that included funds for everything involved with allowing folks to view my labor of love.

Last year we submitted our marketing budget too late. Apparently it needs to be submitted in July so that numbers can be bandied about before it is voted on in November. If or when the funds are approved, we can move forward on the other items included in our funds request, which mainly consist of printing flyers, brochures, and other promotional material to deposit at local hotels and give out to Beninese tour guides/companies to promote our little piece of fantastic in the craziness of Bohicon.

As Heather wrote in the last post, our first annual Bohicon Camp GLOW was a success. See her post below for more details.

Last weekend after the camp we hosted some new stagiares (read: trainees) who arrived July 2 for their “demystification weekend”. It was basically a chance for them to see what volunteers actually do with their time in Benin, and it was a great opportunity for Heather and I to see just how far we have come. This weekend we will host three more and I will leave with them to go down to their training site in Porto-Novo for the week where I will be leading some training sessions.

Our favorite Zemidjan recently revealed to me that he wants to start his own business, so I will start meeting with him on a weekly basis to teach him the essentials (accounting, keeping track of stock, marketing, etc.). If that all goes well (and I have the time) then maybe I will approach the nice folks at the Maison des Jeunes and see if they would like me to lead a free weekly seminar to budding entrepreneurs.

We will be spending a week in Parakou in a few weeks to help out with the Camp GLOW there, then hit Savalou for a few days on the way back down south to take part in their (famous in Benin) Ignam Fête to promote my site. That should be a great opportunity to network with tour guides and eat lots and lots of Ignam Pilé (think: super-mashed potatoes with peanut sauce and meat).

A few weeks after that, we take our month-long vacation to Greece/Italy, and shortly after that, a pair of very special folks will be visiting us for a few weeks (can’t wait to see you, Brian and Dustin)! That will take us into the holiday season and the end of the year.

But before Brian and Dustin arrive (and after our vacation), my girls’ soccer club at our local school will start up again, and I hope to get a good turnout. I received approval from the American NGO who supplies us soccer balls to have Peace Corps release some to me, but due to what I believe is a miscommunication between the NGO and our vast bureaucracy, I have yet to receive anything. Here’s hoping that that all works out.

I have been so busy that I haven’t finished a book in over a month! It’s a good busy. Don’t worry Mom and Dad, I am eating plenty and working out a lot. I even feel like I am gaining some weight back.

Premier League starts August 13! Glory Glory Man United!

Cheers.

A Perfect Storm?

June 8th...

Chaleur is over. No more sleeping with the fan on full blast. No more sweating through the day and night. No more trudging through the heat down the street to our local bar to sit out on the breezy second story with an ice cold drink (though that’s still a good idea any time, regardless of the weather). La saison, they say, est fini. It has been replaced, though, with la saison des pluies. The rainy season. And it came with a vengeance.


We have actually been saying for weeks now that the long, hot, dry season was coming to a close. The days have cooled off and become a little more humid. Clouds have been dotting the skies. Some rain has come down here and there. But not like today.


We were fortunate and blessed to come here from San Diego, which sees more than 300 days of sunshine each year. Rain was always an enigma to me. Sometimes when it rained in San Diego, I would just curl up on the couch and watch out the window as the rain would be illuminated as it came down through the glow of the streetlight. For part of our honeymoon in Miami we were entranced as South Beach flooded so massively that patio furniture outside the hotel began floating down the street. A lone biker slowly made his way down the street, his feet submerged completely under the water as he cranked the pedal downwards. That was me today.


I went to my girls’ soccer practice at 4pm at our local school, and saw some dark, ominous clouds on the horizon and coming my way, but didn’t think anything of them, even though they brought with them thunder and lightning. In my naivety, I thought it would pass. It didn’t. I decided to call an early end to practice, and as we were on our way out of the school, Heather called.


“Craig, are you coming home soon?”


“Yeah, we’re finishing up and on our way out.”


“It’s going to pour!”


As soon as she hung up, it started pouring at our house, about a mile away to the east. Less than a minute after that it would get to me and I had to ride into the storm. I was just at the front of the school when I was smacked in the face by a blinding, sideways rain. I literally could not see more than 20 yards ahead of me. The dirt road I was riding down was a river a few inches deep and I was pedaling against it. For some strange reason, some people were still outside! I pedaled past men pushing rickshaws full of wood as well as quite a few children whose parents had sent them outside to get water, balancing the full bassines on their heads while waiting for someone to open the door to their concession so they could enter. Our concession was under a few inches of water when I arrived. Our welcome mat was not, in fact, welcoming. Electricity was out (though it came on soon thereafter). Heather was taking a video of our concession as I tramped in, soaking wet.


I watched the video later. I looked like a wet dog. My hair was matted and my clothes stuck to me as I trudged through the concession, high-stepping through a few inches of water with my bike in tow, trying to keep my sandals from sliding off of my feet.


The storm kept up for a solid two hours. By nightfall the storm was on its way out. Over the next few days, we discovered that some trees in a rare pretty shaded area had fallen over, their exposed, gnarled trunks shredded from the high winds; roofs had been ripped off houses; some dirt roads will need to be re-graded from the rivers that ran down them just a few days before.


The rainy season is here, and I learned an important lesson this time: Whenever I go out, in addition to bringing a book, always pack a poncho. At least until chaleur rears its ugly head again.

Football, Part Deux

It has been far too long since my last football update. I thought that these would be much more frequent.

A few highlights from the past month or so:

•I played for the first time in a long, long time with my neighbor’s team. It was kind of silly how this all came about, since I had been bothering the guy for six months about playing football with his weekend buddies. Heather and I will be running a week-long girls’ camp in June and are soliciting local schools for lists of their girls with the top grades so we can invite them. Our neighbor is the equivalent of a Vice Principal at our local school, and one day he came by to drop off his list of girls for us to formally invite to the camp. While he dropped it off, he started gloating that he would get to play soccer the next day (a Wednesday) because, since it was the day of the presidential inauguration, the president gave all state employees the next day off. Heather suggested that he take me along and, with his back to the wall, caught between a rock and a hard place, he was forced and coerced into inviting me. I woke up early the next morning and went with him to our neighboring city of Abomey and we played for 2 straight hours without a break. I have been busy the past few weeks but apparently everyone asks about me. Can’t wait to get back to post to show off some more Yovo skills.

•After I wowed Gilles and his friends with my skills, he invited me to play in a soccer game at his school. The school was having an end-of-the-semester party and part of the week-long festivities, of course, was a Teacher-Student football match, presumably so the teachers could literally kick the crap out of their students. Long story short, I started the game and scored the opening goal of the game (with a header, no less!) on a brilliant front-post run. The crowd went bezerk. Not bad considering I don't have cleats (I've been wearing my flats and everyone else has real cleats). We tied, 1-1. See the “Photo Mélange” page for pictures of my triumphant debut.

•I have started a girls’ soccer team at said school (CEG 2, in case you were wondering), and it has started off well. Actually, when I went to the school to make the announcement that I wanted to start a girl’s soccer team, I was literally—literally!—laughed out of the school, then of course nobody came to my meeting that I scheduled. Out of nowhere, my neighbor told me that girls had been asking him where I was because they wanted to play (apparently everyone already knows that he’s my neighbor, or that I’m his neighbor—whatever). We had our first practice and I just let them play. We had 9 girls show up and more are on the way when word gets out about it. I am working on getting a soccer ball for each girl (and some for the boy’s team, as well). We will practice on Wednesdays where I will lead a formal training session, and probably Saturdays as well (on their own to mess around).

•My neighbor is quickly becoming one of my best friends at post. We get together to watch all Champion’s League matches. He calls me when the game is about to start to let me know that there is a game on, which is hilarious because 1. I can hear him shouting into his phone from the other side of the wall and 2. We always discuss our “game plans” the afternoon of the game. “Of course I know there’s a game on! I’ll finish my dinner and I will be right over!” Heather gets some peace and quiet out of it, and since Manchester United is in such great form, she doesn’t have to deal with me sulking around when we lose. I just finished watching the first leg of the Man Utd-Schalke match up here in Parakou. We went to a bar to watch the game but the TVs kept going out (weird because the lights stayed on…most of the time). At halftime Heather and I went back to the workstation and just streamed the game live and used the in-house projector to watch the game on the wall. Two-nil and advantage Manchester to take back to the Theatre of Dreams!

Life is good. Football is here and it is plentiful.

Cheers!

Dog Days of Chaleur

We are in the long, hot dry season, and it is turning out to be everything that we were promised: hot, steamy, humid, and hot. When we sit in our concrete house with tin roof we feel like we are sitting in an oven (with electricity and running water). It feels like South Florida without the ocean breeze.

I try to do my important stuff in the morning before it gets too hot. After riding the 5-7 km to work or into town in the middle of the day makes me sweat so much that my fingers pucker up like I just spent too much time in the bathtub (if I had one). We try to run a few times a week but if we sleep too late (every time), we have to wait until it’s almost dark and the heat is down to bearable levels.

Beninese people do not sweat. Maybe it’s just because I’m new in town, but my hyperactive sweat glands were never much of a problem until I moved here to the near-tropics. Fortunately we have a bar a stone’s throw away from our house with a breezy second story, plenty of music, and cold drinks. Beers are only a dollar!

Other than the oppressive heat and humidity, things are going well. I’m starting to work on a website for my park, and Heather has been running around like mad applying for grants and organizing a girl’s camp for this summer and our marathon team for September. Our mamá down the road sells ice and cold bisap (a sweet, sugary, dark-purple hibiscus drink; think: Kool-Aid).

Thank you all for the care packages, love, prayers, and support. It’s almost rainy season again! Yay!

Cheers.

6 Months In Country!

Yesterday, January 17^th, marked six months since we started training and began our lives in Benin as Peace Corps Volunteers.  It seems like much longer ago.  It feels like we’ve been here a year already but at the same time, we can’t believe how fast time has gone by.  Craig and I were talking about the very beginning of our journey last night.  We were talking about how sad it was to get on the plane to leave San Diego and how I could barely control my blubbering when we were at the airport in New York, waiting to board our flight to Benin.  It hit me then how insane I was to be moving across the world from everything and everyone that I knew and loved for over two years of my life.  We packed up all of our belongings, found homes for our animals, quit our decent-paying jobs (mine, I actually really liked), did a farewell tour with family and friends, and then we found ourselves at the JFK airport, saying our last goodbyes to family and friends on our T-Mobile contracted phones, wondering what we were really getting ourselves into. 

We’re very happy that we took that leap into the unknown, especially since it’s not scary anymore.  The unknown has become known.  We are well-integrated into our community, are starting up projects left and right, have gotten used to West-African French, are learning local language, and actually know how to live here.  We know how to get from point A to point B, know how and where to pay our electric bill or water bill, we know how to haggle prices even better than how Tijuana taught us, and we know exactly how to handle our unimaginably hectic taxi gare in Bohicon.  The bus gare is still a mystery sometimes, but we’ll get the hang of it before we leave, I’m sure.  Overall, we are really happy here.  Joyfully happy.  The kind of happy that puts a smile on your face about something insignificant and you can’t wipe it away.  It’s a great feeling. 

Moving to Benin, a little-known place, and joining the Peace Corps to embark on the unknown adventure has both been the scariest thing and the most exciting thing that either of us have ever done in our lives.  We have had some lows, but we have had a lot of highs.  Without the support of all of you back home with all of your loving care packages, letters, emails, and words of encouragement, those lows probably would have taken a much harder toll on us.  We count our blessings that we have such an amazing support network of family and friends back home, patiently waiting for our return after our adventure is over.  Here’s to the next six months! 

PO Box

Quick update: Our PO Box will remain in Cotonou. The Bohicon post office decided to raise the fee for the PO Box this year and we have decided not to pay for it, since we go to Cotonou on a somewhat regular basis and there is a monthly shuttle that comes through our little town, anyway.
Thank you for all of the packages and love!
Cheers