Tales from Rohan

Alex, Mom and I went whale watching in the San Juan Islands. I think the pictures speak for themselves. While we saw members of all three resident pods (J, K, and L), I got the best pictures of K-pod.

This is K21 “Cappucino”. He was born in 1986.

Below is K40 “Raggedy” (check out her dorsal fin) with her calf. She was born sometime around 1963. Calves aren’t named until they are a year old because so many of them die due to all the accumulated toxins passed in utero and via breast milk. It’s hard being at the top of the food chain in the chemical age.

Some “head shots”.

In early March, I went on a bike tour with 11 other Peace Corps volunteers in Northwestern Benin (the “Atacora triangle”) to raise awareness of hand washing and water sterilization techniques. We gave our talk in French which was translated into Baatonum (Bariba in French) by a community translator. During the 4 days of the bike tour, we stopped at 14 villages and saw some really isolated parts of the country. This was one of the physically hardest, most rewarding, and most interesting things I did during my service.

Why do I think it is important to give awareness raising sessions on water sterilization? At one village, everyone was drinking untreated well water that was especially bad (middle bucket below). Even if a handful of families start drinking only treated water it can make a big difference in the health of lives of a few people:

We were not the only ones getting around on bikes in the area.

us on the same road.

In village, most community meetings and education happen outdoors under a big tree.

This village has an especially nice baobab tree:

At one stop, the chef de village gave us two pentades (guinea fowl) to take along to our next stop. They were delicious!

This village was especially responsive and interested.

We pretended to leave town as evening was falling so we could have a bit of privacy having dinner and getting ready for bed. The kids ran after us for several kilometers before giving up the chase.

At this village we had a mixture of Baatonum and Fulani people.

demonstrating proper hand washing techniques. Just using water doesn’t kill the germs.

It is customary in Benin to look very serious when your photo is taken:

The bike tour was organized (very well) by Karina and Kristin. Bon travaille!

all done. on the way to the waterfalls outside Kuande now!

In February I went on Safari in Park Penjari in Northwestern Benin with my friends Nia, Christine, Naima and Naima’s dad who was visiting. The dry season is the best time to go because the animals are near water and the grasses are not too tall to see the animals.

red monkeys

warthogs

Jaibaru of Senegal

A hippocamp. These guys are big. They look like giraffes leaning over to eat something on the ground.

It’s lonely at the top, or maybe not.

Hippos! A whole family of them! (By the way, this is the most dangerous animal in Africa)

Here kitty, kitty…

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.

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!

Today I rented a bike. On my way somewhere else, I was riding by the Intercontinental Phoenician Hotel (the most expensive hotel in Beirut which is also home to parliament members and other big wigs that don’t want to get shot) and decided it would be fun to ride the bike in and have a look around. I went in the main entrance for cars. After explaining that I really was going into the hotel rather than around it, the guard cheerfully scanned my bike for explosives, then I waited for the crash barrier to retract, then I pulled up at the front door and the front door staff got the giggles. They all thought it was fantastic that I rode a bike to the Intercontinental and immediately offered me complimentary “valet parking”.

Next I went into the hotel, put my backpack through the x-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. Once inside I headed for the pool balcony to check out the view. The view is a bit surreal. There a bunch of very handsome new buildings intermixed with buildings which were obviously bombed, shelled, and shot to hell. Behind the Intercontinental and still visible from the pool is the husk of the Holiday Inn. In front are a few less famous buildings shot to hell, plus to a very exclusive yacht club in perfect shape.
I don’t know if this is the same yacht club, but the very popular former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and several of his aides and bodyguards were assassinated in front of the St George yacht club with a massive car bomb in February 2005, widely suspected to be the work of the Syrian government. A month later a million Lebanese protested in the main square (Martyr’s Square) demanding that Syrian troops leave Lebanon.

Holiday Inn with holes, Intercontinental in pink

View from the pool at the Intercontinental

Rafiq Hariri and other staff killed the same day

A million Lebanese marched a month later demanding Syria to pull its soldiers out of Lebanon

I went to the National Museum in Beirut today. This place has the best preserved early (Bronze Age through Roman Period) artifacts I have ever seen. The most amazing thing is that the museum was closed during the civil war and was heavily shelled (it was right on the Green Line separating the more Muslim West from the more Christian East). Before abandoning the museum, the staff packed away some small artifacts and poured giant slabs of concrete around some of the larger items (like sarcophogi) and burried the mosaics. The bulk of the medium sized artifacts were left down in the basement. Fifteen years later when the staff ventured down into the basement, they had to wear hazardous waste masks. The humidity in the basement was 92%. There was standing water everywhere and lots of bombs had exploded in the basement. Amazingly they managed to recover and restore a lot of amazing pieces.

Big Stuff:


Small artifacts that made it:

Some things that didn’t make it:

I left Syria a few days ago and I am in Beirut as I write this.  Like I did in Jordan, I rented a car for 3 days in Syria to see sights that are hard to get to. I found a French freelance journalist named Antoine and an Australian couple (Alan and Kate) to share the trip with me. All of them have traveled much more than I have and we are all in our 30s, so we had a lot to talk about (and a lot of open road during which to talk).

Our first day we drove from Aleppo to a castle overlooking the Northern Euphrates (Qala’at Najm). We had tea with the caretaker Albert’s family and then continued on to another castle (Qala’at Ja’abar) on Lake Assad. We slept in a big tent behind the castle restaurant and woke up with a wonderful view. Alan and I even went swimming in the lake. In both cases someone had to unlock or lock up the castle for us as we were the only visitors at Najm and the last visitors at Ja’abar.

The second day we went to Halayibba (where Queen Zenobia fled from Palmyra), and Dura Europos which was a truly enormous city which predated the Romans. It was forcibly evacuated by the Persians in the 600s and wasn’t found until the mid 1900s. We spent the night in Dier ez-Zoor and got invited to join a couple (John and Stella) for dinner who are Chaldean Christians. They had a really interesting perspective and it was great talking with them.

Dura Europos is about 40km from the border with Iraq. The US military attacked a town just over the border in Syria just two days later, killing several civilians. I was never in any direct danger, but it doesn’t exactly make we look benign or even harmless as an American.

Finally, our last day, we went to the museum in Dier ez-Zoor. The musuem probably had the best explanation of the progression of civilization in the fertile crescent that I had ever seen. I was especially interested in the progression of phonetic alphabets. Finally we got on the road to Qasr al-Hier ash-Sharqi. This place is seriously out in the middle of nowhere–38 km on a dirt road. The caretaker didn’t even bother to unlock the place for us, he just handed me the key and asked us to bring the key back when we were done. We met a family of Beduins on vacation who hung out with us, made us tea, gave Kate an incredibly vampy makeover, and offered us chicken. Unfortunately we had to get on the road. I dropped the others off in Palmyra, then I continued on toward Hama.

By this point I was driving by myself and it was quite dark. I was making pretty good time, but I wasn’t on the good road yet. It started to rain. When I was almost to the good road I came down a hill and hit a monster puddle, hydroplaned for several seconds and ended up just off the road in water about mid-calf deep. I waved down a truck driver and together we pushed the car onto the road and I got it started. I had to bail out the driver footwell which was full of red mud water. The rest of the drive was uneventful, but I was wondering how I was going to explain this to the rental car company. I was still wondering the next morning as I drove into Aleppo, but I found a car wash and vacuumed the remaining water out and had the car looking good as new when I dropped it off.

Enough driving for this trip!