Peace Corps Update #6

Friday, 24 August 2007

[Yikes, I just went back and reread my last update and realized I hadn’t really finished it before I sent it. I hadn’t intended it to end so abruptly. Or so adamantly. I am constantly confronted here by the exigencies of subsistence living – things like killing chickens. Even here in Cotonou (see below) the vast majority of animals are sold live in the marche. There are some boucheries (butcher shops) but only the richest shop there. The vast majority still lives in what would be described by most Americans as “squalor” and have to do what it takes to survive. We in the West have little or no conception of subsistence living any longer, with the possible exception of some family farmers. Our food doesn’t come from the land, it comes from the supermarket. Our water doesn’t come from a well, it comes from the wall. Instead of mosquito nets we have air filtration systems – because we don’t have to worry about malaria, just allergies. And we wonder why much of the rest of the world thinks of us as soft and over-privileged… ]

Wow!

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here over a month already. And we have less than a month left in our training. I’m in the middle of my post visit, spending a few days in Cotonou getting to meet the folks I’ll be working with, getting to know the city a little bit, sending out all my email updates ;-) , etc. One thing I know for sure; my French is going to need to get A LOT better if I’m going to be effective here. For most volunteers here, it will be enough to speak “villageois” French; not for me. I’m going to need to speak good, professional French and even with four weeks of training left I don’t think I’m going to be at that level by then. The good news is that PC will pay for a private French tutor for up to a year to help me get up to speed. The bad news is that it may take that long.

My housing situation once I start my job has yet to be arranged which makes me slightly uneasy, but PC has been doing this for 45 years so I’m not all that worried. During this visit I’m staying with one of the Assistant Directors of the project and he has a bangin’ house (for Benin). Marble and tile floors, furniture all in teak and mahogany and leather, ceilings custom molded, art works everywhere. It’s about on a par with the PC Director’s house, and she gets paid in dollars! I have my own little mini apartment with its own bathroom (very rare in Benin), a HUGE bed and cable TV. If my place is half as nice when I get there I’ll have the best house in Peace Corps Benin. And I think I already have the best job.

Ok, maybe not the best job. I think that depends on what you expected/desired when you got here. It may, however, be the least Peace Corps-like job in all of Peace Corps. The thing of it is, I could not have imagined, from everything I read or heard or was told, that it would even be possible to come to West Africa with PC and to do this kind of work. Almost everyone else here is going to be living in small-to-medium villages, working with artisans or farmers or with tourism (one girl is going to be doing Hippo conservation in a town not far from Azove), trying to build Benin from the ground up. I’m going to be in the capital (OK, so Cotonou isn’t the official capital – that’s Porto Novo – but it might as well be.), a city of 2 million people, working from the top down so that all the rest of our efforts aren’t in vain. It is not a level at which PCVs usually get to work so I am both excited and a little intimidated by the prospect. I’m having breakfast tomorrow morning with the head of the Millennium Challenge for all of West Africa, who is an American, so I should be able to get a good clear picture – in English – of what the priorities are and what the sequence of work needs to be. From talking to my counterpart it seems that the process of making a plan and working to it is a very new thing in Benin, so I think I have a lot to contribute in that arena.

From a purely self-serving perspective I couldn’t have asked for a better situation. To be able to participate in the fundamental restructuring of an entire nation’s judicial system; to see it from the very beginning and to contribute (hopefully) to it’s success; to be able to shape the experience into a case study for my Master’s degree; and then to be able to put all that on my resume at the end of two (three?) years…somebody wake me up, I must be dreaming. On second thought, if I am dreaming please DON’T wake me up because this is too perfect. Now I just have to hold out against the amoebas, parasites, mosquitoes, cockroaches, boredom, alcoholism, isolation and depression that are the daily risks of every Peace Corps volunteer. C’est la vie! Say la Freak!