Finally!

at cybercafe now; found high speed internet, its awesome!

Friday, October 12, 2007

Sitting on a chair in front of a table, not to mention a laptop computer, I feel so civilized, and nicely at ease. For the first week in my new house, my furniture consisted of a single foam mattress on the bare cement floor. Buying a couple of kitchen stools which raise my ass almost a foot off the ground made me feel like a king, but the novelty soon wore off, and it wasn’t until I received the table and two chairs that I had commissioned that I once again felt like I’m on the way to being comfortable in my home. Now I tell myself that the three sets of shelves which will arrive next week and allow me to organize my belongings, for the moment lying in disorder around the periphery of each of my three rooms, will surely make me feel like myself.
Dangling carrots in front of myself with each new piece of furniture, I am buying time for the real process which will make me feel at ease, which is actually multi-faceted, difficult to pin-point, and involves basically a slow settling in on all fronts.

I have met some nice people—Yves runs a buvette (bar) on the main road adjacent to his shop where he can sometimes be found welding bicycle frames, car axles, or basically anything made of metal. He has grilled me on the logistics of arriving in America where he is determined to one day live for at least a few years. He constantly offers me free beers and soda which is all the more welcome in contrast to the near constant demands of children for “cadeau” (gift). He often watches DVD’s of action movies on a small t.v., making his establishment a popular hangout, even if few people can actually afford to casually buy a cold drink. More than once it has provided the perfect temporary shelter during the short but intense rains which have been falling almost every afternoon.
It seems most people here can smell the rain coming. You always see women hustling to remove clothes from the line, children running in their khaki uniforms trying to make it home before the sky erupts. Even if you are not gifted with an acute sense of smell, you’d have to be pretty blind not to notice the huge menacing dark grey clouds or the distant flashes of lightning.
I am almost constantly in awe of the skies here, especially in the late afternoon and early evening. Majestic pillowy clouds tower, slowly churning. Silvery blades slice the yellow backdrop of an evening sky. Standing by the village football field explaining for the six hundredth time who I am and what I am doing here, I was put in a state of reverence when I noticed a distant slice of rainbow sharing the sky with periodic bolts of lightning. The Beninese laugh when I remark about the sky. I suppose I might chuckle too if in New York they went on about how tall the buildings are, or how many taxis there are. They think it’s hilarious that in New York, you see only a small part of the sky at a time, and rarely the horizon.

Have I mentioned the lizards? They are the squirrels of Benin. Everywhere. When I open the back door of my house, where I have a few walled passages which will hopefully be cemented and given a roof to become a kitchen, a family of lizards scurry away over the cinderblock wall. They are curiously fond of push-ups—they will scurry a bit, stop and do a few, scurry a bit more, do a few more… I have stopped seeing them, the way I had stopped noticing pigeons in New York by the age of seven or eight.
I wonder if the people here will stop noticing me, as I have stopped noticing the lizards. I admit that at times the attention is flattering, but it can be tiresome just to go out in public. Monsieur! Bon soir!...Yovo, Yovo, bon soiiir! Ca va bien? Merci!...A blo kpede a? Fite a hwe? Yovo, A na yi axime? Women ask where I am off to. Children race along following me like the pied piper, even if my flute is at home. My white skin alone calls them loud enough. Sometimes if I stop to saluer somebody, a brave child’s small hand will caress my arm just to see if it feels as weird as it looks.
This morning I took out my saxophone for a while. Then I did some yoga. When I feel a bit adrift, I must remember to keep a hold of those things which have been solid ground for me in the past. In my adult life, I feel that my spirit has been yearning for new experience, adventure, and change. It is interesting for me to now see more clearly that I also yearn to feel rooted, stable, and connected to my past.
It’s about midday, and I have yet to leave the house. I’m gonna get on my bike, cruise down to the market, and get some beans and rice, and a slice of fried cheese if I’m lucky enough to find it. Till next time, enjoy your furniture. It’s nice.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I do just enough work to keep from feeling that I’m on a luxurious tropical vacation. Okay, that’s stretching it, but as I lie here on my bed, stomach bloated with fresh Papaya, enjoying the breeze of an industrial-strength fan, I can’t help but feel a bit spoilt. Siesta, or “repos” as we call it in francophone West Africa, is a great idea. The three-hour lunch break with built-in nap-time. I have afternoon classes only once per week, but I have been finding ways to keep myself busy after nap-time.
Mondays, there is a group which meets every week to play drums, sing, and dance. About six men sit at one end of a cramped courtyard, beating drums. One beats a cadence on a cowbell, and another plays cross-rhythms with a shaker. About thirty women, with at least a dozen small children and infants, sit on benches clapping, singing, and taking turns dancing two by two. They will approach the drummers, slowly shuffling feet and thrusting torso. As they get closer, the music intensifies to match their mounting enthusiasm. Arriving by the drums, they turn to slowly dance their way back to their seats.
Some shake it even with a small baby tied onto their back. Some whip out a breast to offer to a crying baby in their lap. Dancing, drumming, or just sitting there (me), everybody is sweating even though a tarp offers shelter from the intense sun. In between songs, heated debates mount in Fon, which, according to a few whispered summaries, relate to the group’s purchasing fabric which everyone will use to make matching outfits so they can play at political functions for money.
Two older women seem to be directing the proceedings. They point with sticks at whom they want to dance next. I have been let off the hook so far after some adamant refusals, but I wonder how long my luck will last. It’s one thing to dance while everybody else is too. But to get up and offer my feeble yovo imitation of their powerful movements in front of everybody, as if on stage, is a bit too much even for me, enthusiastic dancer that I am. I hope to start playing a drum next week, and that will provide an excuse to keep my ass in a chair, where it belongs (for the moment, of course).

Today, I spent a couple hours with my unofficial Fon teacher, Faustin. He’s a friendly old grandpa who would seem to prefer nothing to holding my hand as I take my first timid steps in his native tongue of Fon. What he lacks in pedagogical finesse, he more than makes up for in patience, a decent grasp of French, and grandfatherly good vibes.
One day, I was walking around the village trying to plot a mental map of the village and get to know some new nooks and crannies. Here and there people would saluer me in French or in Fon, stopping me to ask where I was going, where I was coming from, what I am doing here, and all the usual questions. A woman decided I should meet her father, and I obliged her, since I have greatly enjoyed meeting some other older gentlemen here in the village. She led me between some small houses into a sort of courtyard where her dad was reclining under a thatch-roofed peyote, the African pagoda. Actually, it’s basically just a thatched roof. Anyway, he started beaming at me, asked the usual questions, and then patiently proceeded to correct my broken Fon, enunciating clearly and giving me a chance to repeat. Everybody knows that some people are just natural teachers, and this guy is one of them, even if his concept of word-for-word translation is just now developing. I have returned now twice, and he swears to be there with me till the end helping me to learn the language. It’s an offer too good to refuse.
I aim to also find a native-Fon-speaking English teacher or French teacher who has the pedagogical perspective to give me the grammatical explanations I crave, but I don’t expect to leave those sessions feeling as warm and fuzzy.
Well it’s about time to start planning tomorrow’s lesson, or go to bed now so I can get up and do it while I’m waiting for the sun to rise. My father’s nine o’clock bedtime has been making more and more sense to me lately…

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

…But then again, go to sleep too “earl”y and you might miss something good. It is nearly midnight, and I have just come down from the rooftop terrace. The full moon tonight illuminates a thin, patterned layer of clouds. It bathes the trees beyond the walls of my enclosure in silvery light. Lest you get the impression that I am pampered with four-star accommodations, let me specify that the roof that is my terrace is a small, flat piece of concrete over my latrine. But a man’s home is his castle. They say that, don’t they?
It’s been a month that I’ve been in my home, a couple of weeks since I recognized the potential of my private perch, and I’ve only just made it a reality. I asked a neighbor friend to make me a ladder out of teak and he came today with his coupe-coupe (a.k.a. machete) and did just that. I cut him up some Papaya and invited him up to enjoy the newly accessible hangout. He had the vision to scrape up the black moss which has profited from the roof’s poor drainage with his coupe-coupe, and sweep up that and the dirt, dust and bits of plaster which were left from its recent construction. He even installed a couple of sticks upright in the corners when I explained that I would put up a mosquito net so I could sleep out there.
I consider Etienne to be a friend, even if his French is about as stellar as my Fon, and he is the illiterate African field-worker to my cosmopolitan city-slicker. Somehow, he always ends up laughing, and it never feels like it is at me, as I often feel when others laugh during exchanges in Fon. I wonder what kind of relationship we would have if we could exchange more than the usual plaisantries and rudimentary information.

Anyway, getting up there does me a world of good. It feels adventurous, and reminds me that even though I’m living in an African village, I must create my sense of adventure. It’s not hard even in an “exotic” place to fall into habitual patterns of thinking which render your life mundane. It also reminds me that if living an adventure is a mindset that must be cultivated even here, it must therefore be just as possible even where one is burdened with responsibilities and routine.
These are the kind of clichéd ideas which come to you alone on the roof of a full-mooned eve, bare torso caressed by a cool soothing breeze and the mingling “here-I-am”s of insects, birds, bats and who knows what else. In fact, after hearing frogs in a tree and looking up to discover that it was a number of large bats instead, I have lost my confidence in identifying animal sounds, at least here.
I don’t mind having clichéd ideas though, nor experiences. In the midst of some full-moon roof-top yoga, I decided that if I can live the clichéd hippie peace corps experience for the next two years, I’ll be on the right track.

This weekend should be a doozie. Tomorrow, I’m goin shoppin in a big city—I have run out of money and I need to go to a bank. Saturday, it’s off to a funeral. These are some of the best parties around, with drumming and dancing, so I’m excited. My friend Parfait, one of my favorite people I have met, has invited me to go along with his wife, baby, and some extended family. Sunday, it’s a date with some local fishermen who have agreed to let me and Parfait tag along in their pirogues (canoes).
Parfait’s wife is the sister of my neighbor from Lokossa, the other town I spent two months in. My neighbor there, who also happened to be my tailor and the father of two of my favorite little girls in Benin, called Parfait and told him to “take care of me”. If by “take care of him” he meant “give him large quantities of fresh cabbage and carrots (otherwise impossible to find), tangelos and/or papaya every time you see him, introduce him to the host of the weekly Monday night drumming-dancing extravaganza, take him on a bike ride to a nearby village and hike down to the lake and find fishermen to give him a little dugout canoe tour, arrange to take him to a funeral and back to spend a few hours with the fishermen hauling in their nets full of fish, and just be a humble, happy, interesting person for him to talk to”, I’d say Parfait is doing a pretty good job of it so far. Sorry about the length of that sentence, but my mom once told me about a sentence in a book that went on for pages and pages, and if I’m not confusing it with another story, I believe to make things worse he was talking about his bowel movement of all things. An Irish gentleman, I believe she said, perhaps Joyce. Or was it Proust? Now if he could do it, you’ll indulge me a few longish sentences, won’t you? After all, it is my blog. And if you find that I’m rambling too much, I will also remind you, this is my blog and nobody is making you read the damn thing, (if anyone is actually reading the damn thing, that is.)
Well, I seem to be getting a bit defensive and self conscious, so I think I’ll leave it at that for now. My apologies for such a long delay in posting my adventures (luckily no real mis-adventures yet). Once again, I congratulate those readers who made it this far through my meandering narrative. You must really miss me, or be really bored. Perhaps this is the best way you have found to put off doing those other, important things that you are really supposed to be doing right now. G’night.