Tales from Rohan

The University got some new computers and moved some of the older computers from the student cyber to a new location—in traditionally Beninese fashion:

It is almost cashew season here. This is a nice tree at the University with several low accessible clumps. Apparently the cashew fruits are also really tasty. I bought some cashew jam at a monastery North of Parakou so I should find out pretty quickly if this is a new favorite.

Happy Holidays!

This is my end of year letter for 2009. This year I managed to start two new jobs. From January till June, I consulted for Skype while waiting for time to leave for the Peace Corps in Bénin in West Africa. Skype is a great company and I really enjoyed working for its widely distributed crew, and the opportunity to go to Austria, Taiwan, Tallinn (Estonia) and Stockholm (Sweden) a few times to work with colleagues there.

Tallinn in winter and spring

I also spent a lot of my spare time working on my acrobatics. I attended several workshops including a four day seminar in Oakland with the founders of AcroYoga. I made some great friendships with my acrobatic partners. Yes Mom, I stayed home and joined the circus.

Before I left for Peace Corps, I packed up and rented out my house and find a home for Tyler with my tenants Ian and Christine. Alex came back from Evergreen and a week-long kayak school just long enough to help me get things packed up and ready for visits with my Mom, and my Dad and Jill.

Near the end of July I went to Philadelphia for two days or orientation and then got on an airplane for Benin with 55 other stagiaires (trainees). After 9 weeks in country, living with our host families in Porto Novo, 50 of us swore in as volunteers and went to our posts. My post is at the University of Parakou.

My host family; the new SED/ICT (business + me) volunteers just before and after swear in

Parakou is the third largest city and is about mid-way along the main North-South highway, however, like the American “Midwest” starting in Ohio. The “North” of Benin seems to be anything north of Bohicon. The comparison is a good one. The North is (like the Great Plains) a scrubby savannah with wide open spaces and occasional beautiful thunderstorms. Where the comparison ends is that our “cold season” just finished with temperatures dipping as low as 55º (brrrr!). Now I am bracing for the chaleur which should bring temperatures upwards of 100º everyday. One major consolation is that mango season coincides with the chaleur. There are mango trees everywhere which provide welcome shade and even more welcome mangos.

I am here:

Being in good sized city, life in Peace Corps is far more luxurious than I expected. I have running water and electricity (most of the time) and access to lots of variety in terms of food (fruit, vegetables, cheese, live poultry, lamb, fresh beef, frozen fish, even yoghurt). The University even has an Internet connection that is very good by local standards.

Pass the papaya please…

As part of my primary project, I am teaching three computer classes in French. Because most of the professors in my school come up from the other public University in Benin (Abomey-Calavie near Cotonou), the classes at my college are usually taught in one or two weeks as a single 45 hour or 60 hour sequence. My 60 hour Linux class for example runs 0900-1200 and 1530-1830 every day for two weeks. The students here are used to classes consisting almost entirely of theory. They are starved for practical instruction and seem to thrive on it.

The rest of my primary project includes managing the school’s teaching lab of about 20 computers (a time consuming but necessary evil) and a seminar series on entrepreneurism. In addition, I am working on lots of secondary projects in my community and providing tech support for other Peace Corps volunteers and for a variety of Beninese nationals. I am also finishing up the installation of a database and web front end written by a previous volunteer for a national “planned savings” bank.
One of the groups in Parakou that I’ve been doing some work with is the Corps de Volontaires Beninois (CDV). This is a group of a little over 20 university and “high school” students who do projects in health, the environment, and social concerns . As far as they know they are the first Beninese-only volunteerism group in the country. I recently attended one of their hand-washing awareness seminars (sensibilisations in French) at a primary school, and another awareness session on volunteerism. When I first arrived in Benin, CDV was in the process of distributing the balance of two community savings and loan groups. One of these groups of women (mostly street vendors) managed to save an impressive 1.5 million CFA (Central African Francs) over the course of the project.

In addition to making Beninese friends like my neighbor François (a young plumber) and Ibrahim (president of the CDV), I see lots of other volunteers who come to Parakou for banking, shopping, and official Peace Corps events. For Christmas, I am going to the northern city of Kandi where a lot of friends will be gathering.

François and Ibrahim

Meanwhile, Alex is doing well as a sophomore at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He is very excited that he was just accepted for a spring quarter program in Peru as part of the course “Andean Roots”. He spent Thanksgiving in Santa Cruz with Lisa and will be in Pennsylvania with his mom for Christmas and New Years.

Alex with Carmen at Lisa’s house

I wish you all a very happy, safe, and joyous holiday season and good luck for 2010.
Du Courage!
Love,
-rohan

Around this time of year in Benin, groups of men go through fields of tall dry grasses or stalks of corn and hunt rats. I managed to catch a few shots of some of these chasseurs. Compared to the domestic animals here, the rats look remarkably healthy. They are medium sized, filled out and have healthy coats. I’m not sure exactly how they are cooked, but according to locals and volunteers alike they taste pretty good.

This particular group had already collected around 20 rats in a rice bag. The weapon of choice is a stick with a loop snare near the end.

Hi Everyone. Unfortunately I won’t have any new photos for a little while, as my camera finally decided to break down during a Thanksgiving fête. However I did want to share a few thoughts.

Here is Benin, how do I know it is almost Christmas? Is it a light dusting of snow? Christmas carols in every store? My mailbox filling up with requests for donations? Cards appearing and gifts going up under the tree? Not a chance.

Today I hit my head on a fist sized mango (still hard for about a month). The Harmattan winds are slowing down and the temperature is creeping up into the 90s. I’ve received almost all of my birthday cards. Students who were otherwise finished with University last year are doing their equivalent of a dissertation defense (called a soutenance) while their friends and family peer in through the windows in their best clothes and call out a big cheer when they pass. Yup. It must be almost Christmas.

I had a good time in Parakou celebrating Halloween with many other volunteers who were in town for a regional meeting. A volunteer in a town a few km North of me bought a few pumpkins in a village nearby which specializes in growing them. These pumpkins were promptly turned in Jack o’lanterns. Not to be wasteful, this weekend I baked some of the flesh for pie (well sort of pie cupcakes) and plan on making a Thai pumpkin stir fry with the rest tonight.

I’ve taken a few nice bike rides out on dirt roads from my house. It is good exercise, beautiful and fun, but I come back not only sweaty but coated in the red dirt that is everywhere here.

Here are a few assorted snapshots I like of village life near Parakou. You don’t need to go very far outside of town to find it.

time for homework…

Here in the North of Benin there are a lot of mango trees. There is also a type of spider here called the mango spider that like to spin their sturdy yellowish webs from mango trees. They eat a variety of insects including mosquitos and also a type of pest that causes some kind of blight on mango trees. In short, they are a very good thing. They also happen to look like some machine invented for a sci fi movie. There are usually several around a tree and sometimes I have seen more than 100 in the same spot.

I’ve been trying to get some good pictures of the mango spiders, but it is difficult since they are usually backlit against the sky and there is rarely anything to provide a sense of scale. Then I found this medium sized specimen below, conveniently at head height in a small mango tree on the University of Parakou campus. The largest ones are roughly twice the size.

Here is Africa, as in many parts of the world, most trash is just thrown out onto the road, the street, or wherever. My neighborhood is no exception, but most people here actually carry their garbage around the block and dump it in the ditch in front of a vacant lot (conveniently located across from a primary school). There are a lot of animals wandering around, so goats, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, guinea fowl, and all manner of lizards and insects eat the organic material. However, the rest of the garbage either gets burned periodically or just sits there. Paper and metal will decompose within a few years here, but plastics last a long time.

Fortunately, people here are big on reusing things. For example, yesterday I bought baking soda packaged in cardboard boxes originally used to sell lantern wicks. So the relatively few glass and plastic bottles tend to get reused over and over. Of course you still have to be careful that you are not buying cooking supplies out of a container recently used to hold insecticide or drain cleaner. Beer and soda in bottles are much cheaper, because the bottles are used over and over. For example, the contents of a glass bottle of soda is 250F, but a smaller plastic bottle is 450F.

Unfortunately, one of the most ubiquitous and obnoxious forms of trash here is the black plastic sachet (bag). Everyone uses these, and it is hard to go the market without using at least half a dozen of them (I bring mine with me to reuse, but most people do not). The owner will then (usually the same day) jeter the sachet which will be blown away, dumped in a ditch, filled with something gross, or swept into a pile of other trash. There may be many kinds of trash in the trash pile, but the things that accumulate are plastic bags.

As I puttered around this morning, I wondered what will happen to all this material as it eventually photo-degrades. Plastic bags exposed to sun and wind will eventually turn into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. In many respects this stuff resembles some perverse kind of man-made sand—another ubiquitous biologically inert material.

What would an alien geologist think of the current period of Earth history in a few million years? Maybe the geologist will treat the disposable use of plastics over 100 years or 500 years as a pseudo-geologic event, like a volcanic eruption or a tsunami. It distributes a layer of this stuff all over the world, much like a layer of ash, but more permanently.

These are some pictures of my friend Elizabeth “Biff” McGee, who passed away a few days ago. She was one of the happiest people I have ever known. She could light up a whole room with her enthusiasm.

I met her in 1990. She introduced me that year to several of my best friends. She helped me get what I consider my first real professional job as a network administrator for NASA; I returned the favor by helping her get her job at Cisco; we worked in the same team; then I worked for her. We’ve seen each other married and divorced, happy and sad, professional and silly. She was a fireball of energy and optimism. Throughout her fight with breast cancer, her therapy, her remission, and her relapse she showed more grace and determination to keep going than anyone else I have ever seen.

We will miss her more than words can express. We love you E.