Hello all, I’m feeling like an update has been long overdue (December 7th last post?), so without any more excuses and rebuttals let’s get this thing rolling.
Life is moving along fine in Benin. I am now 10 months into my service and still everyday I feel like I understand a little bit more, feel a bit more comfortable in this environment, yet still am astounded several times a day at the sites I see. The chaleur (hot season) is coming to an end, which means lots of rain until October. I have seen it rain only 3 times since last October 15. I have been busy at post, building houses, clay pot refrigeration systems, working at the hospital doing baby weighing and vaccinations, developing an artists club with students from the high school, and hosting some American visitors- my girlfriend Ariela twice and my mother once. My pops has told me he is also on his way over to test out Africa as well… see you soon D!
Currently I am up at the northern volunteers workstation, helping build a new house for the Peace Corps volunteer leader. I am in the midst of changing the bathroom that the masons built out at 5x4ft, and changing a storage room into the new bathroom. Its quite an experience working under this building system, or lack thereof, compared to the states, where there are 20lb binder after binder of building codes, then followed by inspections. Here? Whatever floats your boat, that’s what gets built here. You wanted a doorway there? Ok, smash the wall out. The building’s only 7inches from the property wall/setback? Don’t worry, you can get behind from the other side (meaning you can only get behind the house from the other side leaving you stuck in a dead end crack between the house and the wall.) These are a few of the conversations we had just yesterday.
In my village, the building gets even more perplexing. They build these small little prison cells, with a salon (entrance room, like a living room I suppose) and a bedroom. The two rooms combined almost always have a total of 2 2’2ft windows, and less than 200sq ft of area. Almost all buildings in villages are built like this, little compartment after compartment with no hallways, one small door at 6ft if you’re lucky. I ask them why they don’t put in more windows. They have several reasons; there isn’t money for the window (they cost more than the mud that would fill that hole), or they just put in a window to have a ‘window’, meaning they don’t understand that a window gives air and natural lighting. They also say the windows jeopardize the structure, which they do since they don’t want to pay for 3 pieces of wood to make a window frame, and since most the houses are made from either mud, mud brick, or cmu’s, the easy option is to just fill it up with wall. What they are left with is a small prison-like oven, that is ingenuously designed to bake all day from the Sahel sun, with a thin highly conductive metal roof, putting most these spaces at over 105 degrees most of every day. I’m working with a number of masons at the moment trying to teach them about direct sun exposure, and cross-ventilation, etc… with some encouraging results, but the big hurdle is still the people, since they are the final say in how their house gets built.
As for my own oven rooms, I have undertaken several projects in hopes of cooling the place down. I began with building a large veranda off the west side of my house that was just baking under the sun every after afternoon. Then my friend and I knocked two holes in the wall up by the roof and placed screened hollow cmu’s to allow for the hot air to escape. Then, the grand finale was covering the entire corrugated metal roof with thatch, which has two benefits, one it stops the direct heat gain from the sun, and second it makes the rain on the roof soothing, instead of the typical Armageddon sounds of the water pounding right through to your core. Now finally, I plan to ‘snorkel’ my house like I did at my old post. This means cutting holes through the metal and putting in a periscope-like tube with screen on the outside end, and fixing it to the wood structure inside underneath the metal. It worked amazingly well in my old house, so I have high hopes here. Eventually I want to develop an object that anyone living under a corrugated metal roof can use, to let the hot air escape and still keep the rain out. I think if one could make and sell that system for under $3 a tube, you would be selling millions. By the way, if anyone knows the amount of people in the world that live under corrugated metal roofs, I would love to know. I would guess the number is astounding.
Onto other things, my health hasn’t been this poor since I can remember, so I am being consumed often by tactics to get myself on the right track. The food/diet consists of corn flour, leaves, and some tomatoes, onions, and peanuts. Occasionally you find some meat, if you are bold enough to eat it, and since there hasn’t been any rain, the cheese and eggs have nearly all dried up. In my town you can’t even find tomatoes anymore. Bring on the rain! So in addition to that situation, I go up and down with gastrointestinal issues weekly. It has been 2 weeks without a solid stool, and it is horribly depleting. I feel (and probably am) malnourished, since what little I can eat doesn’t get absorbed into my body due to whatever kind of evil parasites are in there. At night I have been waking up feeling like someone kicked me in the balls (guys, I know you know that gassy feeling that creeps up into your guts). I’m very used to all this by now, since it started for me back in August, but there have been periods, maybe even a month in time, where I felt better. I am really discouraged since you can never pinpoint the cause of all this. So I bleach and boil my water, try to cook most my food myself, wash my hands constantly, but still no luck. I have decided that I just have a weak stomach, since there are other volunteers that still haven’t fallen ill since arriving here. Unbelievable. So as miserable as this sounds, its really more of an annoyance at this point, and I am doing everything I can to get better- and I will. So worry not. I plan to put on the 20lbs I have lost within the first week back to the states. Taco Bell beware.
Alright, this blog feels like I hardly scratched the surface of the life here, but at least its a morsel. Its back to this house for me… getting what I came here for, some gritty construction work. Hope all is well with you, and send me some updates. I’ll get to them eventually! Nkwa sosi…
