Peace Corps Update #5.5

Sunday, 19 August 2007

Host family life has settled into something of a routine. I wake every morning between 6:30 and 6:40 when the goddamn roosters start crowing. Up by 6:45, then the 3 S’s (shit, shower and shave), followed by breakfast – coffee and bread six days a week with an omelette on Saturday. We have class from 8:00 until 10:00, a break until 10:30, and then more class until 12:30. From 12:30 until 3:00 is repos (rƏ-po) – siesta, basically. Most activity and nearly all business stops during repos. I eat lunch and then most days I either study or write in my journal or read a book. (Someone here already has the 7th Harry Potter – I’m third in line.) After repos, more classes until 6:00.

Lunch and dinner have also settled into a routine of sorts. Chez moi, we have about five base meals. First, there is pâte (not to be confused with pâté), which is basically congealed corn meal paste. (I think pâte may actually be the French word for paste.) Then there is rice, noodles (spaghetti or elbows), fried potatoes and yams. Now these yams are NOT your grandmother’s holiday favorite. They are basically just big, white, tasteless tubers. The one thing these bases have in common is that they have little or no taste of their own – except maybe the potatoes. This is good because they really only function as a vehicle for the sauce(s) – this is where the real flavor comes from. Beninese cuisine is all about the sauce. Sometimes it’s just sauce – a base of water or oil with tomatoes or some other veggie plus spices. Sometimes it is a mélange of tomatoes, veggies, egg, spices, and maybe some meat or other goodies (like chunks of fried goat cheese – mmmm). Always it is SPICY! Not just hot spicy (although it is also that), but flavorfully, marvelously nuanced and wonderful.

However, there is one inescapable fact about food in Benin. If it’s meat, and you want to eat it, somebody has to kill it. And thus came about another quintessential Peace Corps experience…I killed a chicken on Thursday. (Yes, I recognize the irony of referring to killing as a quintessential PEACE Corps experience, but there ain’t no QFC around the corner over here.) We had planned a big fete for that night after taking our first language exam and we wanted some chicken for dinner. Well, as in the rest of the third world, the consumer is much closer to the food source here, so we had to buy six live chickens at the marche. We could have had the marche lady kill and clean them for us but that triples the price, so we brought the live birds back to the house and then had to do the deed ourselves. Then we boiled the meat off the bones, formed it into balls, dipped them in some egg and breaded them with some spices and Voila! Home-made chicken nuggets! And it was damn tasty, let me tell you. Now to those of you who find this appalling…get over it. This is how at least 75% of the world’s people get protein – they kill animals. It’s not clean, it’s not humane, and it is certainly not pretty, but it is reality.