Starving for fun

I have made it nearly a year into post, and 14+ months in Benin. One of the new volunteers asked me the other day, “so it went fast right?” I responded, “looking back, everything seems as if it went fast, but this last year was one of the slowest I can remember.” Now with time to reflect, I will still say that’s true. Yes, there have been busy times, and I can’t believe I have already hosted 3 visitors (one twice), but going through training feeling like a 12yr old with nagging parents, and then like a 1yr old with all of the languages was not an expeditious process. Then we have post, which for me (cannot generalize here) could be compared to middle school summer vacation. It is the first summer you are left alone by your parents, which inherently means much open time to figure out what to do. The analogy goes further when most of the people I interact with daily don’t act older than 14, and the amount of gossip here is at times sickening. You have very little capital, and you know even less of the microcosm you have arrived into. Let class begin.

Despite the slowness at moments of this past year, I have learned a great deal about myself, Benin, building, books, languages, etc... I am currently sweating into this journal at 13:00 on the first day of Ramadan. I was woken this morning at 4:50 just in time for the morning prayer and our last meal until sundown, 19:30. As Abu was banging on my screen door telling me to come outside, I hazily remembered myself saying I would try Ramadan (they call it le Carême here) for 4 days with the family. I didn’t know, however, that I had also invited myself to the prayers at the mosque as well. I stumbled outside into the courtyard which should have been black except for the two light bulbs dangling from the mango tree pulsating to the thieved Nigerian gas inside the knockoff Chinese generator. Yes, I commonly had the chance to enjoy this sonorous luminosity along with a blaring Yoruba video most nights of the week, but this, at 4:50am, was a privilege. We did our prayers and I ate my pate and gumbo sauce and went back to bed until 8:30am. Today, this is the quietest I have ever heard this concession. Nothing better to quiet the family than a little starvation for Allah where 65% of children are already malnourished.

Thinking back to my arrival, I actually thought about trying to fast, thinking in some way my asceticism would change the way I think about life. Now, after reading what I have, I know how foolish this was, that starving the body (in addition to all other forms of denial) are not gateways to a higher existence. So even though my opinions have changed, I am still here, starving myself. As I attempt this sacrifice for the next 4 days, I will be reading Nietzsche’s attack on religion and demand that richness, excess, cruelty and sensuality must be brought back in replace of poverty, godliness, suffering, and spirituality. Cheers, Nietzsche. I’m doing it however for the comradery, and just purely to see what my body feels like after 15 hours without food or water. Less than 6 hours left and all I can say is that I’m hungry - just like every other day here when the only produce I can find is onions and okra.

I have to go back to the middle school here. In a book I just finished, the author was talking about refugees from Cambodia, all living together in the states after years of torture, and the only conversations happening were about the new people they met on the voyage, love, and general gossip that you hear anywhere. For those of us traveling to other countries to see, or help change ‘extreme poverty’ (however that phrase is defined today) we learn like from this book, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over throughout history: How much do you love me and who’s in charge?”

A year has gone by in Benin. Really? I guess things have changed. The reasons I came over here are still the reasons I am here, though altered, slightly. But that’s what situations do, they alter your perceptions. I feel very different about development, money, architecture, and relationships than I did before, but when you think about it, don’t you always ask yourself, “I knew I always thought that.”? Its very strange maybe only since I’ve been here long enough, but I can’t remember how I was before Benin, and yet, I know how little I understood about this experience: PC, Africa, my role here as a volunteer... I think what I want to say is its hard to see another person’s perspective, even your own from another time. Its as if all unknown is out there, waiting to be explored, and afterwards you see that the unknown was already known. Maybe within a frame of time or maybe one’s subconscious, but can you ever look back and know what would have happened if you did it differently? The question is the answer. Just the usual destiny and choice melting pot conundrum.

So going into year 2 yes, it will be different. The ride isn’t over, but it will be downhill. My expectations and dreams have either become realities, or its too late and now I am able to let go and move on. I will be more free without the pressure of 2 years of potential on my shoulders, as things are falling where they should. I am beginning to feel a great thing, and that is that I do not fantasize about other places, and experiences as I once did. Call it an inner peace if you will, but I feel more comfortable where I am and I am beginning to feel content with the world as is.

As I write this, three little boys from my concession are 5 feet from my door, all naked taking a bucket shower, and from the small amount of Baatonu that I know, are covering themselves with soap singing, “Baatooreey Baatooreey!” (Aka Whitey/foreigner). Ha, I can always count on someone here to break any over philosophizing I may be doing and bring me a fresh glass of reality (whatever that is).

I suppose in the end here I want to say that I’m exactly where I want to be. I may not be using my architectural skills, or saving lives here, but I still have a purpose internally, just as everyone does, and I have found mine clearer here perhaps due to the lack of outer purpose, when at the beginning my dreams of developing Africa overnight all by myself seemed only too easy. Sometimes we need to derail to see what train we’re riding on. Ok, now I’m hungry. Going to return to this simple life, complex in so many ways.

“Time triumphs over Space, and it is time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of culture, on this planet in the incident of man - a form wherein the incident of life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.” -Oswald Spengler


Oh, and before I forget, I will be posting some new photos also. My graffiti in village has begun!