Sticks and stones...

Monday in Cotonou and it’s actually very nice today. A fresh breeze has been blowing through the night, taking with it the poisonous haze that often lingers over the city and bringing in its place a layer of familiar overcast and cool temperatures. Very pleasant.

Not quite pleasant enough to make me forget the “incident” of last Sunday. I hate euphemisms like “incident.” They reduce experience to statistics and then assign them to conveniently discrete categories. They take no notice of the bruises (visible or not) left behind. They don’t account for the insomnia that lingers long after the “incident” is officially over. And they’re unable to penetrate those extra layers of armor erected as a result, for our own sake and the sake of those we love and wish to protect.

Forgive me for being cryptic. I was attacked last weekend; “mugged” as you might say in America. Rest assured, I am fine. The physical marks have almost entirely faded already, and I am dealing with the rest as well as I can. The details of what happened are unimportant. All I lost were my prescription sunglasses – which, though a pain to lose aren’t that big a deal. The two women who were with me were not accosted in any way – Thank God – and were able to get help before the situation escalated beyond control. I’ve gotten great support from Peace Corps and my fellow volunteers and I really am OK.

What remains can best be described, I think, as…vexation. I am vexed! My vexation is made up of approximately equal measures of anger, frustration and confusion. I’m angry that it happened at all, and also of the result: meaning that the little bastard took something of no value to him but that had enormous value to me that I had taken great pains to protect for the last year and a half. (I would have liked to have been there, though, the first time he put them on and realized he couldn’t see shit! I wonder if he thought I put gris-gris on him…)

I’m frustrated that I was so unable to do anything to stop it; on both the small and the grand scale. My resistance – even after he hit me – did not, in fact, keep him from hitting me again. And nothing I’ve done here has made it appreciably less likely that he will go out and do the same thing to someone else. Only time will tell if the conditions that made him so desperate in the first place will improve.

My confusion swirls around the question of what to take away from the experience. At first I was just pissed off! I was easily a foot taller than this guy and had probably 100 pounds on him, yet he came straight for me. And even after he should have figured out I wasn't just gonna roll over and give him what he wanted, he still hit me! I took it personally. I just wanted to lash out; to take my anger out on someone or something. I wanted to give up, say “Fuck Benin” and go home. Obviously, I haven’t done that.

Because after some reflection I realized it wasn’t personal. It couldn’t have been. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know who I was or why I was there. He had no idea I had volunteered to come to this country to try to ameliorate the very conditions that made it necessary for him to target me in the first place. (Not that I think it would have made much difference if he had.)

When he looked up that street and saw me coming, he didn’t see ME. He saw an image that has been ingrained in him since birth. He saw someone who, in his eyes, had everything they needed and more. The vast majority of Beninese have no experience of white westerners who are NOT exceedingly rich, by their standards. (This image is vividly perpetuated by such culturally sensitive exports as MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” and “My Super Sweet 16.”) And even as poor as I am by American standards, I am still far wealthier than the average Beninese. He just chose an unpleasant way of trying to redistribute a little of that wealth.

Do I romanticize my diminutive antagonist? Have I taken a violent ruffian and transformed him somehow into Jean Valjean? No, I don’t think so. Confronted with the same situation again, I would resist at least as strongly; perhaps more so. No, our role here can’t be just to give the Beninese what they think they need. It needs to be to show them how to achieve it and then get out of the way and let them try. Otherwise we’re just wasting our time.

So you might be wondering if I am reconsidering my decision to go to South Africa – which is a notoriously crime-ridden place – in light of this “incident.” The short answer is, no. It’s a question that came up during my interview in DC last month, if I had any qualms about going to a place that I knew could be dangerous.

Notwithstanding that Cape Town is a place I am already familiar with and am thus also familiar with the dangers there, I settled this question for myself some time ago. If I’m serious about doing this work there are certain realities that I have to face. One is that those parts of the world that are the poorest, that are most in need of people to do the kind of work I’m called to do, are also some of the most dangerous. The conditions make them so. Another is that in places like that I’m going to be a target for people who have decided it’s easier to take what you need than to earn it, or less humiliating than to have to accept it as charity. Doing this kind of work in places like that necessarily entails accepting a certain level of risk. That doesn’t mean being foolhardy or putting yourself in harm’s way. But it does mean that all else being equal, and even taking prudent precautions against the dangers that exist, the risks are just gonna be higher. This means that, in all likelihood, this is probably not the last time this is going to happen.

C’est la vie.