Peace Corps Update #3

Saturday, 4 August 2007

Greetings from Azove! (A-zo-vay)

First things first…buckle your seatbelts because the ride is about to get a lot more interesting. I am being posted to the capital, Cotonou (KO-te-noo), working with the Beninese Ministry of Justice. As part of something called the Access to Justice Project, they have formed a group of lawyers and other legal types who are going to be responsible for dispute resolution between individuals, private enterprises and the government. This includes contract enforcement, consumer protection, property rights (including intellectual), etc., with a particular emphasis on empowering and protecting women. This group is brand new and is currently getting most of its budget from the Millennium Challenge Account. However, over the next four years this budget gets progressively smaller so that at the end of that time they are supposed to be a self-sufficient enterprise, deriving their budget from fee-for-service or ongoing grant funding or something. The crux of my work, as far as I can tell, is to help them get from here to there. This may include market analyses to determine the needs of the private sector in this arena as well as to determine a fee structure for those services; creating one or more marketing campaigns to promote the availability of the services; project and/or system management either for specific initiatives and/or for the entire five year program; and God only knows what else.

Though to some of you this may seem boring as all hell, I am incredibly excited about this opportunity. It is an important step toward making the rights that you and I take for granted actually REAL for the people of Benin, rather than just words on a piece of paper somewhere. Think of all of the ways that the laws of the US protect both people and businesses from one another and from the government. None of that currently exists here. They are attempting to fix that in only 5 years! What an amazing case study! (MKG – think DP.) And I get to be part of it. While I am somewhat ambivalent about being in Cotonou, I couldn’t have imagined having the chance to do work anywhere near this exciting; so fundamental to the future of this country. I anticipate both satisfactions and frustrations in equal and enormous measure. What else is new?

How perfectly ironic is it that having started out intending to do conflict resolution, and having found CHID instead, and having moved on to Peace Corps and the Master’s International Program in Public Administration, that I should arrive here – exactly the right place in exactly the right time – to find that I will ultimately be working in conflict resolution? It’s almost enough to make one believe that God has a plan for us after all…

Now on to more mundane stuff. I have been incommunicado because the government has shut down two of the four cell companies in the country and the one satellite ISP that provided most of the internet service. Why? Because the companies were operating under contracts negotiated with the previous government and never enforced, so they owed the government somewhere in the tens of millions of CFA francs in license fees that had never been collected (a textbook example of the problems the Justice Project is designed to prevent). The government said, “Pay up or shut down.” and these companies chose to test the government’s resolve – to their regret as it turns out. Unfortunately, it is to our regret as well. There is one working fiber-optic line from Cotonou to Parakou (PAIR-a-koo) which is about half way from the coast to the northern border, and that’s it for internet access. The two remaining cell companies have, predictably, jacked their rates sky high as a result of the decreased competition so cell phone service is a bitch to get at the moment also. There are only about 46,000 land lines in the country, which may seem like a lot until you realize there are 8 million people here. Imagine having only 46,000 phones in New York City…

Certain aspects of this experience so far have been reminiscent of Alice’s Restaurant. Two in particular come to mind. First: In the song, Arlo refers to the draft board in NYC where you go to get “inspected, injected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.” Well, so far Peace Corps has been very much like that. I have received no fewer than eight vaccinations thus far, with several more to go. I have been interviewed four times, examined twice, tested multiple times and neglected more than I can possibly describe (mostly in the form of “Hurry up and wait.”). That being said, I cannot deny that they are taking very good care of us. They have done a great job of making sure we have everything we need to succeed and thrive in our new environment. Their emphasis on safety and security is no joke, which leads me to the other Massacree-esque experience.

August 1st was Independence Day in Benin and like in the US on July 4th there is a huge fete on that day – actually many fetes all over the country. All of the stagiaires (trainees) were invited by the mayor of Aplahoue (AH-plah-way) – the biggest town in the district – to attend the fete there. I, on the other hand, was invited by my host family to attend the fete in Abomey (A-bo-may) – the largest in the country this year with the presidents of Benin, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and South Africa in attendance. Well that was too good an invitation to turn down, so I told several of the trainers and my APCD that I had been invited and their universal reaction was, “Have a great time! It should be incredible.” So that morning we all got dressed up – me in my first Beninese tissue – and headed out to Abomey. About five minutes from the city we came upon a gendarme roadblock. And I didn’t have my passport with me. Not good. I was told politely, but firmly, that I couldn’t proceed without my passport. When we suggested that we would simply turn around and return to Azove to retrieve the passport we were informed that I would be required to stay AT THE CHECKPOINT until my passport arrived, since they had no guarantee that I would return if I were allowed to leave.

Now understand, they were very cordial, very professional and very insistent this whole time. So…I waited at the checkpoint, sitting in basically a grass hut, while my host papa first got his other relatives into another car headed for Abomey and then drove back to Azove (about 40 mins) to get ALL of my baggage (I wasn’t sure which bag the damn passport was in!) and drove it all back to the checkpoint. I dug through all my bags and found my personal passport and the photocopy of my PC passport and we showed them to the chef de gendarmes. At which point he told us we would then have to go to the Gendarmerie in Klouekanmey (CLICK-a-may) to get permission from the Commandant of the Brigade to pass the checkpoint. So we piled into the car, with an armed gendarme in the backseat (I kid you not), and drove to the Brigade in Klouekanmey. The gendarmes there had to track down the Commandant, who interviewed us for about half-an-hour, took down all our information, made copies of all my documents and explained that it was all due to presidential security and he hoped we weren’t “inconvenienced.” He then got in his personal vehicle and drove us back to the checkpoint, where we were finally allowed to proceed. From our first arrival at the roadblock until we were allowed to pass was ultimately FOUR HOURS! And the whole time I was sitting in the little grass hut all I could think about was Officer Obey and “the twenty-seven 8x10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin’ what each one was to be used as evidence against us.”

Needless to say the parade was long over and all that was left of the fete was the drinking part (a BIG part of any fete in Benin). So we picked up the relatives, ate a little, drank a little and drove back to Azove none the worse for the experience. It was the quintessential example of our motto here in Azove, ”C’est l’Afrique” or as we like to put it – Say la Freak!

Hopefully my next update won’t be so long in coming and maybe I’ll go back in time a little, because our staging in Philadelphia was an experience unto itself. In the meantime, be well and in light. And remember that you are exactly where you are supposed be; and if you’re not – get up and move!