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.

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.

I took a taxi with two of my post mates, Mark and Kyle, up to Parakou with all of our stuff. On the way, I had the opportunity to take some photos of this beautiful country out of the open window, that just would never come out through the window of a bus.

My host family was fantastic to me. Family who had been around during my first few weeks came in from Cotonou and they made a big dinner the night before I left. They gave me some of my favorite foods to take with me and gave me plenty of American-style hugs. Papa came for dinner, but unfortunately he was still pretty tired from fighting off a bout of malaria and anemia, so he didn’t see me off in the morning.

Once you get north of Bohicon, the landscape starts to open up and spread out a bit and the livestock gets bigger. Here are some cows being led to graze through land right on the edge of the road.

Houses in Benin are either mud walls with thatch roof, mud walls with tin roof, or cement with tin roof. This is a pretty representative portion of a small village on the main road.

As you get into the provinces of Zou and especially Collines, you start to see these very cool—well—collines (hills), which are basically piles of rock jutting out of the ground without warning and then surrounded by semi-tropical vegetation. They form the backdrop for some very pretty villages.

There is an area along the gadrone (the main paved North/South road) that specializes in growing and selling manioc. This is what you make tapioca from. It is also what you need to make gari, a kind of manioc flour about the consistency of corn meal. While it has a pleasant texture, and does a good job soaking up the copious amounts of oil present in many local dishes, unfortunately it doesn’t have a whole lot of nutritional value.

Bananas growing at the base of a colline, and some classic mud huts with thatch.

Cotonou is a major port, and the source of much of the gasoline in Niger to the North. Pineapples are a humid climate tropical fruit, but much appreciated in the North (I brought 6 pineapples as gifts to Parakou). All of the gas trucks I saw from Niger were loaded up with pineapples on the roof.

And remember folks: “The views expressed here are mine personally and not necessarily those of the Peace Corps or the US Government.

On Friday, fifty of us former stagiaires (trainees) swore in as Peace Corps volunteers. As is traditional in Benin, at a big fête you wear même tissus (the same fabric) among some group you are a part of. As the only Information and Communications Technology volunteer from this year, I didn’t really have anyone to pick tissus with, so I wore the fabric of the business volunteers, since I have been training with them almost nonstop for 9 weeks anyway. As another show of solidarity, most of the male stagiaires grew some sort of mustache for the occasion.

These are some group shots with nearly everyone accounted for.
Environment

Small Enterprise Development + ICT
Yves (the program director for SED and ICT) is to my right.

Rural Community Health

Teaching English as a Foreign Language

The folks from my host family who came. They are always smiling until someone says they are about to take a photo. It’s one cultural aspect that you get used to quickly, but I don’t think I will ever stop smiling.

Me with “Bak”, the coordinator for SED and ICT. Bak ran the SED technical training and still found time to arrange for me to give two 90 minute presentations in French at a local Cyber, and found the owner of a local computer store who was willing to talk to me about what is available. And he did most of this while he was fasting for Ramadan.

Lucie was in charge of stage this year. She is also the SED program director in Madagascar, but Madagascar evacuated earlier this year, so she was available. What she lacks in size, she more than makes up for in energy, intelligence and enthusiasm. She got the loudest applause of anyone during the ceremony.

And remember folks: “The views expressed here are mine personally and not necessarily those of the Peace Corps or the US Government.”

I am now a Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) or a “stageur” as we are known in country. When my staging group of 56 people arrived, we got a very warm and enthusiastic greeting from large portion of Benin’s current volunteers. We stayed for a few days in Cotonou (the biggest city and commercial capital) at a retreat center so they could give us the most essential training (including learning how to ride a zemijohn motorcycle taxi), figure out what French class we would be taking, and get our shots and our malaria meds. Then we hopped in a few minibuses to meet our families for the rest of our 9 weeks of training.

We are each staying with a host family in Porto Novo, the second largest city in the country and the administrative capital. My host family are great and I am settling in well and very happy, though a bit tired. Below are my host papa, my host sister Nora with a cousin, and my mama with the three granddaughters who are staying here over sumer vacation (Oceane, Orfrise, and Barbine), and my room. These pictures were taken on Saturday August 1st which was Benin’s Independence day, so everyone was already dressed up to party.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment here is the tempo of life. A very common phrase you hear here is “Doucement” which means literally gently or softly, but in Benin means “Take it easy” or even “chill out”. I was shaving getting ready to go out with the family on Independence Day when papa came in and said “Doucement Rohan. Il y a assez de temps.” Take it easy. There is plenty of time.

Of course, no good independence day celebration can be complete without a parade and speeches are appearances from various officials. I happened to get a decent picture of the king of Porto Novo (in the center under the umbrella) only to later have an audience with his majesty with my French class on Thursday. The statue below of King Toffa the first is in the main square and is visible from to bridge over the lagoon to Cotonou.

Below are mostly some photos of my fellow stageurs. By now many of have had time to either buy “tissus” (fabric) to have stuff made, or in the case of Mark and I (first photo) we borrowed some clothes from our papas. The second photo is one of our volunteer trainers with some local kids who were already hanging around.

Please don’t be upset if you get a letter from me with US Stamps and US postmark on it. I went to the post office yesterday and realized that enough stamps to mail one post card to the US costs half of my daily living allowance. US volunteers regularly hand carry letters to mail in the States, so I may be using that option a lot.

À la prochaine!