Friday, February 29, 2008
Happy leap year! Today is a day of recalibration… I just need to figure out if I’m running ahead or behind, fast or slow, hot or cold. In general I feel pretty good, but it’s always hard to diagnose yourself, like it’s hard to notice if you yourself have grown.
One time, I gained 25 pounds without noticing. I was enjoying the pastries and bread of Europe a little too much, perhaps. Only when I got home and my friend Rachel laughed at my big belly did I realize what had happened. So when here, in the space of two weeks, two different village lady friends of mine complimented me on filling out nicely (gaining weight here is a sign of good health), I started to get paranoid. An evil friend of mine seized on my paranoia and surreptitiously laid a foot on the med center scale as I was trying to calm my fears, and she had me convinced I had repeated my impressive 25 pound feat.
Luckily, her fits of hysterics eventually tipped me off and I am relieved to know that I am cruising at my arrival weight.
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I’ve got other news, growing stale, but not too stale to nibble on if you hunger for freakish slightly gross things. About 6 weeks ago, I got my very first blood sucking parasite! And my second, too! It started with a small bump near my heel, which I thought was some kind of wart. I ignored it. Then I noticed the tip of my pink toe was quite swollen, and pretty sensitive. I was studying it the day after I found it, when my friend saw it, laughed and told me I had a gigan. Fearing some exotic foot worm, I asked him what it was.
It turns out, there are these tiny, black, tick-like insects which mainly stick to pigs, but also enjoy human feet, especially soft baby and child feet. My friend was surprised at the size of my gigans because usually they itch like mad as they burrow under your skin and start to suck your blood. Any normal rational adult here quickly deals with it before it really gets in the door. Mine had been inside at least two weeks, feasting quite well.
Stoically, I sat with my foot on the table of my friend’s buvette as a small grinning crowd gathered and Yves went to work with a sharpened stick and a razor blade. Okay, I am lying. I was gripping the table till my knuckles were white as I softly whimpered and pleaded for him to wait and do it tomorrow, promising I would come back. (Sound familiar, dad?)
After fifteen minutes, Yves had harvested two impressive white pea-sized gigans, leaving blood-red holes in my feet. Many times in the next day or two, the image of peering into a hole in my toe and seeing a pearl imbedded there left me with a smile on my face.
Okay, I’m weird.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, I know, you didn’t sign up to read about weight gain (imagined or real), and certainly not about creepy blood suckers (you get enough of that in the Wall Street Journal…badoum, chink!) so I’ll tell you about my music club at school…
It’s in a formative stage, I’ve had 3 meetings with one group and 2 with another. We do solfege and theory and I’m teaching how to read and write music.
I composed a little singing exercise with two part harmony and it opened my eyes-this will be very hard. I want to sing three part harmony but everybody’s intonation is very loose (ie terrible) and they don't know how to listen to their voice (or others' voices)when they sing, so it just doesn’t work—not yet…
Traditional music here is basically percussion and unison voices, so they are not used to hearing much harmony. I don’t know if this contributes to the problem, or if any group of untrained, unexperienced singers is an intonational nightmare. Regardless, it will be an interesting challenge to mold them into a group.
I just need to show them what in tune sounds like before I can expect it of them.
At this point there are kids that can't replicate a pitch I sing. My work is cut out for me...Petit a petit le oiseau fait son nit…little by little the bird builds its nest…
I am scared that when I come home, having become used to using certain French, or even Fon expressions to express certain thoughts, I will be frustrated by English’s lack of a good equivalent—ca y est…petit a petit…bon travail…tu a fait un peut?
Anyway, eventually, I will post some recordings if possible…
Till next time…
Friday, March 7, 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
A Day at Sea
This is the main road passing through my village. I promise many more and better photos soon. Maybe even videos!!! those bananas are delicious ...
This guy was in my house, and he had a few words for me...
This guy was in my house, and he had a few words for me...
Friday, February 15th
--Azan yi aton!
--Dokpo jeji! Literally, “It’s been three days”…“And one more!” (This is the Fon equivalent of “long time no see.”) I first take this chance to thank my dad for buying me the shiny new computer happily humming on my lap as I decadently prop myself up in bed this early Friday morning, with no immediate plans to go anywhere (a luxury even more rare here than it would have been back there in my “real life”).
The thanks don’t stop there, as my brother did the grunt work of buying it and sending it to the friend of a friend who graciously dragged it from Colorado to the bustling road-side market of my village where I fought past the dozen women insistently thrusting bags of oranges, small bags of bocou (boiled corn mixed with boiled peanuts), bags of pur water (“madame, pya wata, pya wata!”) into the open windows of the taxi, or displaying platters of papayas, bananas, pineapples or a delicacy (heehee) called agouti, or “bush-rat” .
I call the market “road-side” because the English language hasn’t had much need for a word to describe a market which is actually in the road. For the length of my long village, taxis and trucks pull over along one side of the road where they need not even open a door to buy the fruit or agouti my village is famous (at least regionally) for. Despite the fact that they have widened the road to accommodate this commerce which is the life-blood of the village, often the stopped cars leave only one lane to be shared by the two directions of traffic. At least this bottleneck forces the cars to roll doucement (gently)…
It’s hard to know where to begin when you are trying to blog the story of your life, and it has been six weeks of new experiences, shifting perspectives, happy discoveries, small triumphs and disappointments since you last had the chance to write. I’ll leave for later the happy stories of my newly formed music club and my other evolving musical adventures, the decadence of swimming at the American Ambassador’s personal swimming pool, the intrigued horror of participating in a chicken sacrifice, and the sorrow of learning of the death of my friend’s teen-age brother. Instead, I’ll tell you about my housemates.
They are generally quiet, and luckily we keep opposite hours. I am generally up and about from 5 or 5:30 in the morning to about 9 or 10 at night, and usually they only get up after I’m sleeping, although we cross paths occasionally during the day. My biggest complaint is that they don’t have the decency to shit in the designated shitting area, they do their business wherever, even while eating (now that’s just wrong), and it doesn’t even cross their minds to clean it up.
Another thing that pisses me off is when they eat my food without asking. Basically, they will eat anything I leave out—bananas, pineapples, bread— they even have the nerve to start a second or even third banana before they finish the first—utterly wasteful and inconsiderate. They’re almost as bad as my recent roommate in Brooklyn who smoked pot every day, made a pathetic attempt to clean every few months or so, and regularly passed out fully clothed on his bare mattress with lights and radio on. (Did I mention it was a railroad apartment and I had to pass through his degenerate world just to go brush my teeth or fix myself a nice cup of herbal tea in the roach-infested kitchen?)
When I do happen to see these messy co-inhabitors, I always make sure to remind them that their days are numbered—a friend of a friend has a kitten that she fears will be eaten by her neighbors if she doesn’t find him a new home, so I will soon have his welcome company here with me. If the mice are smart, they’ll quit while they’re ahead and move on. If they sit too long at the table of bounty they will quickly see the tables turn and who was once eating will soon be eaten.
Well, I have spent about two hours delicately crafting these two pages without really saying much of interest at all. What self-indulgent rambling as usual, now followed by the usual self-effacing and slightly embarrassingly self-conscious criticism. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to have followed my blog regularly should have by now noticed this pattern and stopped reading long ago… If you are unlucky enough to have stumbled across this blog, let me be the first to warn you—you are likely to waste some perfectly good time and leave with a bad taste in your mouth. Till next time! Edabo…
Saturday, February 23, 2008
The worst thing about a party is that it must end. This morning I woke up in Cotonou and did not want to go back to my village. I have spent the last week enjoying my freedom from the daily grind and spending time with friends.
The “party” vibe culminated last night at a brand new night club called Tantra where a number of us danced until the DJ went home at six a.m. He played an eclectic mix of American hip-hop, European club music, African dance music and Lebanese club music. The crowd was weller-to-do Beninese, Lebanese (there are a bunch who do business here), our modest American contingent and a few Frenchies. I had the pleasure of being fought over more than once by friendly (and strong!) Beninese girls who tried to snatch me away from each other on the dance floor.
The slightly pretentious scene at the club contrasted strongly with the place I had left the morning of the same day, a beach not far from Porto Novo. I have a friend in this small, beautiful ocean-side fishing village and I took the opportunity to spend a day and a night there.
The village is set just back from the beach itself, and is scattered with quite a lot of coconut palms, nicely spaced to create an airy tropical atmosphere. The homes are also nicely spaced, and each is surrounded by a thin wall of inter-woven palm leaves. The houses have walls of palm branches and roofs of—you guessed it—palm leaves. The result is quite beautiful, the unity among the homes and between the homes and the landscape.
Albert is in his late forties but seems younger. His lips are discolored in a splotchy pattern, a result, I would assume, of the boat fire which also badly burned his hand and left it scarred. Having spent years in Nigeria working on and eventually captaining a large fishing boat, his English is decent, about on par with his somewhat broken French. His native language is gungbe (pronounced goon-gbay), a sub-dialect of the fongbe language family. This is the language of the Oueme departement of South-east Benin (which includes the capital of Porto Novo).
I met Albert in December as I was walking along the beach with a few friends, enjoying the relative solitude of the place. We came across a group of twenty or so people heaving a canoe out of the water and up the beach. Always wanting a part in the action, I suggested that we help, and we nonchalantly lent our incredible strength to the task.
The people were pretty friendly, and Albert in particular talked to us for a few minutes. After we shot the shit for a while, he mentioned that next time we should come find him and he would cook us some fish. He thus planted a seed which I have patiently kept for three months until I found the conditions to let it flower this week.
Thursday, when I arrived, we went to a nearby buvette where he insisted on buying me three large beers. Then we walked a bit through the village, visiting a few friends. At one house, he grabbed a little fish, thin and about three inches long, off a fire where it was being smoked, and handed it to me. I carried this little fish for about thirty minutes without really considering what to do with it before he asked why I hadn’t eaten it. Ah, now I understand…you just take a whole little animal and nibble it, of course! I did my best to enjoy this gift. Probably they would just bite the whole damn thing and chew it, bones and all, I’m not sure.
Worn out from our grueling afternoon, we lay down on a straw mat that he had laid out in the shade of a –you guessed it—palm leaf roof. He called a young boy, and told him fetch us some coconuts. In other words, “go scale that 30 foot palm tree, risking life and limb”. The boy, with bare feet and hands, climbed in stages, resting every few feet. At the top, he hauled himself up onto the palm branches and with much effort, shoved a few green coconuts off with his foot. I don’t know whether he was fearing for his life, but I definitely was.
With his machete, Albert expertly chopped an opening in several of the coconuts and handed them to me. Green coconuts are quite juicy I learned, and the juice is mmmmm… sweet. The flesh is somewhat thin and very moist, tender and delicious. I had three or four.
For the evening’s entertainment, Albert took me with his twin sons of four years to his friend’s house, where a gas-powered generator ran a tv. Just what I was craving—some nice modern technology to relieve me of the oppressive boredom of a sky speckled with glittering stars, fringed by towering palm trees, swaying gently in the constant breeze to the relentless rhythm of waves beating the shore.
The feature was a rather low-budget affair, a series of vignettes taking place on the streets of nearby Porto Novo, in which a rambunctious midget wandered around getting into trouble and loud arguments (quite a common theme in Fon movies) with various people—a bread seller and a sugar-seller, among others. A mixture of boredom and distaste for unabashed midgexploitation drove me to retreat into my book, the sci-fi masterpiece Ender’s Game.
At my insistence on sleeping outside, Albert spread a large straw mat in his fenced-in front “yard” and I had restless sleep until he in turn insisted that we move inside onto the all-too-solid concrete floor to escape the feared early morning dew of the harmattan.
Having been told that we would not be fishing since recently the sea had not been giving many fish, I was pleasantly surprised the next morning when Albert told me that his friend was going out, and would be happy to have me tag along. Albert decided to come along, too, and his seniority put him at the helm.
The boats are made in Ghana, the bulk of the body carved from a single large tree. About 18 feet long, these canoes are quite stable and handsome, if somewhat sea-worn. A small triangle juts out to the side near the back, seating a large 25 horsepower outboard motor.
When I arrived at the boat, it was halfway down the beach, just close enough to the sea that the largest waves came up and licked its belly. Having stowed nets, a large container of drinking water (ratty old engines can fail, after all) and little else, we got ready for a day on the sea. I reluctantly entrusted my cell phone to Albert’s friend who was staying back, but only after checking and memorizing my pre-paid credit balance. (Recent events have given me trust issues-more later…)
About ten of us now took advantage of every large wave which washed up under the hulking boat to heave it a foot or two farther into the water. At a certain point, we seemed to wait for nothing at all in particular, until Albert gave a shout, we all pushed to boat to full buoyancy, and we leaped in. With the speed and precision of a well-practiced football team, one guy lowered the motor into the water, pull-started it, and gunned it. Albert stood on the rear bench and grabbed a ten-foot oar-shaped rudder, directing us into the on-coming waves.
He had timed the launch well, and the boat easily scaled and crested three or four waves before they became harmless swells. It was only after we passed out of that hairy situation that it occurred to me to ask if they often tip during the launch. He said it depends on the captain. The captain must study the sea, grok the waves which come in sets, and carefully time the launch so that it takes place between the sets of larger waves. Call me reckless, but my captain’s age and demeanor had given me full confidence in him.
I’d like to interrupt this narrative for a moment to say that just because you, the reader, are likely sitting in a nice chair in a climate-controlled home or office, enjoying a nice cup of fresh coffee and a blueberry scone, or an avocado roll with green tea, or a mozzarella and fresh basil sandwich on organic 16-grain bread, I’m not jealous, no! I’ve got a gigantic half-papaya in front of me, roughly the shape, if not the size, of the very boat on which our narrative takes place. Back to the story…
Call me short-sighted, but it wasn’t until we got out into the sea, with the coastal palm and pine trees slipping behind the morning fog that I thought to wonder how on earth we would navigate. How did they used to do it? Oh yeah, stars…well there aren’t too many of those during the day. Actually, there’s exactly one, and it’s called…………………………………………..that’s right—the sun.
Albert claims he uses his “experience” to know where he’s going. Okay, I can understand that waves generally head towards the land. I can accept that the wind in turn heads away from land. But that doesn’t explain how he headed out for about 20 min, at an angle to the shore, and without much difficulty found the little flag and buoy that mark the nets that the crew had cast the previous day.
Before hauling in this catch, we cast another net, about 200 meters long. While one guy gently rowed us along and Albert kept our course true, the other two let out the net. About four feet wide, it was lined with floaties (mostly pieces of old flip-flops) along one side, and sinkies (small bits of metal) along the other. The floaties aren’t strong enough to overpower the sinkies and keep the net at the surface, they are intended to keep the net upright along the sea-bed.
Pulling in yesterday’s net, one guy kept laying these crabs, still stuck in the net, on the top edge of the side of the boat, an improvised anvil, and bashing them with a stick until glittering bits of crab shell and flesh rained down in the water, manna for some little guys, I’m sure. Turns out these crabs, which numbered at least one of every two animals caught, are inedible.
Among the edible catch were other crabs—these were removed from the net with a bit more delicate touch—a couple handsome well-red snappers about two feet long, some medium sized flat silvery-white fish, and a lot of what I think may be flounder. Flat, they fly through the water by creating wave motions which run along the side of their bodies. They have long rattails and their mouths are found on the lower surface of their flat bodies, well-positioned to scavenge the ocean floor, I imagine. Not too attractive if you ask me.
As they worked, the crew passed the hours joking and telling stories which were obviously unintelligible to me. I passed the hours alternately gazing at the horizon, similar in every direction, and watching the men work much as I studied construction workers as a young boy.
Eager to get to Cotonou to see which other volunteers were in town and cook up some week-end festivities, I decided not to wait long enough to eat the fish which we had earned (I did bail a little! ). Instead, My buddy quickly steamed about seven crabs, which we ate with gari and sauce. Gari is a rough flour made of manioc. It is often mixed with cooked beans and can be eaten dry as a snack, or countless other ways. Today it was mixed with water to create a slightly sticky, subtly bitter, kind of rough dough. Taking a bit between the fingers, you roll a ball, dip it in the sauce (tomatoes, hot pepper, crab fat, and water) and enjoy. Enjoy I did. Albert spoiled me by deftly cracking open the crabs and tossing chunks of white flesh onto the plate of sauce.
My sojourn at the beach had come to an end, and in fact 24 hours seemed like enough. Hanging out with Beninese, even quite nice and pleasant people, is different from hanging with other friends. We are truly from different worlds, and there is a divide there which has not shown signs of dissolving in my seven months here.
He welcomed me to bring a friend or two next time, and I will surely take him up on his offer. Maybe having a third wheel along will make a stay of two or three days more appealing.
--Azan yi aton!
--Dokpo jeji! Literally, “It’s been three days”…“And one more!” (This is the Fon equivalent of “long time no see.”) I first take this chance to thank my dad for buying me the shiny new computer happily humming on my lap as I decadently prop myself up in bed this early Friday morning, with no immediate plans to go anywhere (a luxury even more rare here than it would have been back there in my “real life”).
The thanks don’t stop there, as my brother did the grunt work of buying it and sending it to the friend of a friend who graciously dragged it from Colorado to the bustling road-side market of my village where I fought past the dozen women insistently thrusting bags of oranges, small bags of bocou (boiled corn mixed with boiled peanuts), bags of pur water (“madame, pya wata, pya wata!”) into the open windows of the taxi, or displaying platters of papayas, bananas, pineapples or a delicacy (heehee) called agouti, or “bush-rat” .
I call the market “road-side” because the English language hasn’t had much need for a word to describe a market which is actually in the road. For the length of my long village, taxis and trucks pull over along one side of the road where they need not even open a door to buy the fruit or agouti my village is famous (at least regionally) for. Despite the fact that they have widened the road to accommodate this commerce which is the life-blood of the village, often the stopped cars leave only one lane to be shared by the two directions of traffic. At least this bottleneck forces the cars to roll doucement (gently)…
It’s hard to know where to begin when you are trying to blog the story of your life, and it has been six weeks of new experiences, shifting perspectives, happy discoveries, small triumphs and disappointments since you last had the chance to write. I’ll leave for later the happy stories of my newly formed music club and my other evolving musical adventures, the decadence of swimming at the American Ambassador’s personal swimming pool, the intrigued horror of participating in a chicken sacrifice, and the sorrow of learning of the death of my friend’s teen-age brother. Instead, I’ll tell you about my housemates.
They are generally quiet, and luckily we keep opposite hours. I am generally up and about from 5 or 5:30 in the morning to about 9 or 10 at night, and usually they only get up after I’m sleeping, although we cross paths occasionally during the day. My biggest complaint is that they don’t have the decency to shit in the designated shitting area, they do their business wherever, even while eating (now that’s just wrong), and it doesn’t even cross their minds to clean it up.
Another thing that pisses me off is when they eat my food without asking. Basically, they will eat anything I leave out—bananas, pineapples, bread— they even have the nerve to start a second or even third banana before they finish the first—utterly wasteful and inconsiderate. They’re almost as bad as my recent roommate in Brooklyn who smoked pot every day, made a pathetic attempt to clean every few months or so, and regularly passed out fully clothed on his bare mattress with lights and radio on. (Did I mention it was a railroad apartment and I had to pass through his degenerate world just to go brush my teeth or fix myself a nice cup of herbal tea in the roach-infested kitchen?)
When I do happen to see these messy co-inhabitors, I always make sure to remind them that their days are numbered—a friend of a friend has a kitten that she fears will be eaten by her neighbors if she doesn’t find him a new home, so I will soon have his welcome company here with me. If the mice are smart, they’ll quit while they’re ahead and move on. If they sit too long at the table of bounty they will quickly see the tables turn and who was once eating will soon be eaten.
Well, I have spent about two hours delicately crafting these two pages without really saying much of interest at all. What self-indulgent rambling as usual, now followed by the usual self-effacing and slightly embarrassingly self-conscious criticism. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to have followed my blog regularly should have by now noticed this pattern and stopped reading long ago… If you are unlucky enough to have stumbled across this blog, let me be the first to warn you—you are likely to waste some perfectly good time and leave with a bad taste in your mouth. Till next time! Edabo…
Saturday, February 23, 2008
The worst thing about a party is that it must end. This morning I woke up in Cotonou and did not want to go back to my village. I have spent the last week enjoying my freedom from the daily grind and spending time with friends.
The “party” vibe culminated last night at a brand new night club called Tantra where a number of us danced until the DJ went home at six a.m. He played an eclectic mix of American hip-hop, European club music, African dance music and Lebanese club music. The crowd was weller-to-do Beninese, Lebanese (there are a bunch who do business here), our modest American contingent and a few Frenchies. I had the pleasure of being fought over more than once by friendly (and strong!) Beninese girls who tried to snatch me away from each other on the dance floor.
The slightly pretentious scene at the club contrasted strongly with the place I had left the morning of the same day, a beach not far from Porto Novo. I have a friend in this small, beautiful ocean-side fishing village and I took the opportunity to spend a day and a night there.
The village is set just back from the beach itself, and is scattered with quite a lot of coconut palms, nicely spaced to create an airy tropical atmosphere. The homes are also nicely spaced, and each is surrounded by a thin wall of inter-woven palm leaves. The houses have walls of palm branches and roofs of—you guessed it—palm leaves. The result is quite beautiful, the unity among the homes and between the homes and the landscape.
Albert is in his late forties but seems younger. His lips are discolored in a splotchy pattern, a result, I would assume, of the boat fire which also badly burned his hand and left it scarred. Having spent years in Nigeria working on and eventually captaining a large fishing boat, his English is decent, about on par with his somewhat broken French. His native language is gungbe (pronounced goon-gbay), a sub-dialect of the fongbe language family. This is the language of the Oueme departement of South-east Benin (which includes the capital of Porto Novo).
I met Albert in December as I was walking along the beach with a few friends, enjoying the relative solitude of the place. We came across a group of twenty or so people heaving a canoe out of the water and up the beach. Always wanting a part in the action, I suggested that we help, and we nonchalantly lent our incredible strength to the task.
The people were pretty friendly, and Albert in particular talked to us for a few minutes. After we shot the shit for a while, he mentioned that next time we should come find him and he would cook us some fish. He thus planted a seed which I have patiently kept for three months until I found the conditions to let it flower this week.
Thursday, when I arrived, we went to a nearby buvette where he insisted on buying me three large beers. Then we walked a bit through the village, visiting a few friends. At one house, he grabbed a little fish, thin and about three inches long, off a fire where it was being smoked, and handed it to me. I carried this little fish for about thirty minutes without really considering what to do with it before he asked why I hadn’t eaten it. Ah, now I understand…you just take a whole little animal and nibble it, of course! I did my best to enjoy this gift. Probably they would just bite the whole damn thing and chew it, bones and all, I’m not sure.
Worn out from our grueling afternoon, we lay down on a straw mat that he had laid out in the shade of a –you guessed it—palm leaf roof. He called a young boy, and told him fetch us some coconuts. In other words, “go scale that 30 foot palm tree, risking life and limb”. The boy, with bare feet and hands, climbed in stages, resting every few feet. At the top, he hauled himself up onto the palm branches and with much effort, shoved a few green coconuts off with his foot. I don’t know whether he was fearing for his life, but I definitely was.
With his machete, Albert expertly chopped an opening in several of the coconuts and handed them to me. Green coconuts are quite juicy I learned, and the juice is mmmmm… sweet. The flesh is somewhat thin and very moist, tender and delicious. I had three or four.
For the evening’s entertainment, Albert took me with his twin sons of four years to his friend’s house, where a gas-powered generator ran a tv. Just what I was craving—some nice modern technology to relieve me of the oppressive boredom of a sky speckled with glittering stars, fringed by towering palm trees, swaying gently in the constant breeze to the relentless rhythm of waves beating the shore.
The feature was a rather low-budget affair, a series of vignettes taking place on the streets of nearby Porto Novo, in which a rambunctious midget wandered around getting into trouble and loud arguments (quite a common theme in Fon movies) with various people—a bread seller and a sugar-seller, among others. A mixture of boredom and distaste for unabashed midgexploitation drove me to retreat into my book, the sci-fi masterpiece Ender’s Game.
At my insistence on sleeping outside, Albert spread a large straw mat in his fenced-in front “yard” and I had restless sleep until he in turn insisted that we move inside onto the all-too-solid concrete floor to escape the feared early morning dew of the harmattan.
Having been told that we would not be fishing since recently the sea had not been giving many fish, I was pleasantly surprised the next morning when Albert told me that his friend was going out, and would be happy to have me tag along. Albert decided to come along, too, and his seniority put him at the helm.
The boats are made in Ghana, the bulk of the body carved from a single large tree. About 18 feet long, these canoes are quite stable and handsome, if somewhat sea-worn. A small triangle juts out to the side near the back, seating a large 25 horsepower outboard motor.
When I arrived at the boat, it was halfway down the beach, just close enough to the sea that the largest waves came up and licked its belly. Having stowed nets, a large container of drinking water (ratty old engines can fail, after all) and little else, we got ready for a day on the sea. I reluctantly entrusted my cell phone to Albert’s friend who was staying back, but only after checking and memorizing my pre-paid credit balance. (Recent events have given me trust issues-more later…)
About ten of us now took advantage of every large wave which washed up under the hulking boat to heave it a foot or two farther into the water. At a certain point, we seemed to wait for nothing at all in particular, until Albert gave a shout, we all pushed to boat to full buoyancy, and we leaped in. With the speed and precision of a well-practiced football team, one guy lowered the motor into the water, pull-started it, and gunned it. Albert stood on the rear bench and grabbed a ten-foot oar-shaped rudder, directing us into the on-coming waves.
He had timed the launch well, and the boat easily scaled and crested three or four waves before they became harmless swells. It was only after we passed out of that hairy situation that it occurred to me to ask if they often tip during the launch. He said it depends on the captain. The captain must study the sea, grok the waves which come in sets, and carefully time the launch so that it takes place between the sets of larger waves. Call me reckless, but my captain’s age and demeanor had given me full confidence in him.
I’d like to interrupt this narrative for a moment to say that just because you, the reader, are likely sitting in a nice chair in a climate-controlled home or office, enjoying a nice cup of fresh coffee and a blueberry scone, or an avocado roll with green tea, or a mozzarella and fresh basil sandwich on organic 16-grain bread, I’m not jealous, no! I’ve got a gigantic half-papaya in front of me, roughly the shape, if not the size, of the very boat on which our narrative takes place. Back to the story…
Call me short-sighted, but it wasn’t until we got out into the sea, with the coastal palm and pine trees slipping behind the morning fog that I thought to wonder how on earth we would navigate. How did they used to do it? Oh yeah, stars…well there aren’t too many of those during the day. Actually, there’s exactly one, and it’s called…………………………………………..that’s right—the sun.
Albert claims he uses his “experience” to know where he’s going. Okay, I can understand that waves generally head towards the land. I can accept that the wind in turn heads away from land. But that doesn’t explain how he headed out for about 20 min, at an angle to the shore, and without much difficulty found the little flag and buoy that mark the nets that the crew had cast the previous day.
Before hauling in this catch, we cast another net, about 200 meters long. While one guy gently rowed us along and Albert kept our course true, the other two let out the net. About four feet wide, it was lined with floaties (mostly pieces of old flip-flops) along one side, and sinkies (small bits of metal) along the other. The floaties aren’t strong enough to overpower the sinkies and keep the net at the surface, they are intended to keep the net upright along the sea-bed.
Pulling in yesterday’s net, one guy kept laying these crabs, still stuck in the net, on the top edge of the side of the boat, an improvised anvil, and bashing them with a stick until glittering bits of crab shell and flesh rained down in the water, manna for some little guys, I’m sure. Turns out these crabs, which numbered at least one of every two animals caught, are inedible.
Among the edible catch were other crabs—these were removed from the net with a bit more delicate touch—a couple handsome well-red snappers about two feet long, some medium sized flat silvery-white fish, and a lot of what I think may be flounder. Flat, they fly through the water by creating wave motions which run along the side of their bodies. They have long rattails and their mouths are found on the lower surface of their flat bodies, well-positioned to scavenge the ocean floor, I imagine. Not too attractive if you ask me.
As they worked, the crew passed the hours joking and telling stories which were obviously unintelligible to me. I passed the hours alternately gazing at the horizon, similar in every direction, and watching the men work much as I studied construction workers as a young boy.
Eager to get to Cotonou to see which other volunteers were in town and cook up some week-end festivities, I decided not to wait long enough to eat the fish which we had earned (I did bail a little! ). Instead, My buddy quickly steamed about seven crabs, which we ate with gari and sauce. Gari is a rough flour made of manioc. It is often mixed with cooked beans and can be eaten dry as a snack, or countless other ways. Today it was mixed with water to create a slightly sticky, subtly bitter, kind of rough dough. Taking a bit between the fingers, you roll a ball, dip it in the sauce (tomatoes, hot pepper, crab fat, and water) and enjoy. Enjoy I did. Albert spoiled me by deftly cracking open the crabs and tossing chunks of white flesh onto the plate of sauce.
My sojourn at the beach had come to an end, and in fact 24 hours seemed like enough. Hanging out with Beninese, even quite nice and pleasant people, is different from hanging with other friends. We are truly from different worlds, and there is a divide there which has not shown signs of dissolving in my seven months here.
He welcomed me to bring a friend or two next time, and I will surely take him up on his offer. Maybe having a third wheel along will make a stay of two or three days more appealing.
More soon...lots of love...
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