First Camp GLOW meeting

You’ve lived here almost two years. You know that finding Beninese people to get excited about working on projects is hard. You know the horror stories. Every volunteer has one. You know about waiting for things to happen and getting someone to do something for free and how the daily three-hour siesta sometimes marks the end of the workday.

You know that it is hard, but necessary if you want to be able to remotely label your project as “sustainable,” you’ve got to work to find one person in the community who will follow your project through to the end.

So, when you call the first meeting of your organizational committee for the girls’ camp that you’re holding this summer, and you don’t have to say anything after making introductions, you don’t say anything.

Hold tough

In my second year at my school, the most controversial thing I’ve proposed since starting continues to be my girls club. What other teacher and students say, though, doesn’t stop me. What I fear is that it will stop the girls.

I’ve started to dread 4 p.m. on Wednesdays, an hour after we start our meetings. All of the 5eme students show up around that time for their PE class, the teacher of which tends to be especially not understanding about the point of a girls club. During weeks when we’re having discussions, it means that I have to chase some students away from eavesdropping. During weeks when the girls play soccer, it means fielding constant demands from boys to let them play, a gathering of hecklers on the sidelines and the occasional degrading comment from the professor himself.

This week, the girls were in the second half of their scrimmage when the PE teacher called for the 5eme students to assemble under the cashew trees. He told them to line up and start running the perimeter of the field where the girls were playing. The game was soon interrupted by 86 5eme students walking two-by-two through the middle of the game to the other side of the field.

I was pissed at this interruption, but didn’t feel like starting an argument. All the girls got out of the way, except one.

Esther, who was goaltending on the far side planting herself in the middle of the goal and forced the two lines to fork around all four feet of her.

When another student caught me laughing at the situation, I’m pretty sure he thought I was laughing at the absurdness of Esther’s actions. I wasn’t.

I was laughing with joy to watch her stand her ground.

On listening to Beyonce in Benin

I don’t really know why I never got into Beyonce. I know the “Single Ladies” dance, but I don’t know any woman who was born between 1980-2003 who doesn’t know the “Single Ladies” dance. I am generally aware of her presence as an artist and her as a member of what you can call a music mogul family, but the surprise drop of an album last December was not high on my list of priorities.

However, it was high on the list of priorities for one of my best friends here.

So, last week, when we acquired a copy of Beyonce, almost all the music that I listened to for the rest of week was Beyonce.

I don’t know if it was because we were in the middle of a secondary training for a community health project in which we (the Americans) had to defend the right for a woman to seek pleasure out of sex to the other participants (the Beninese men and women).

Or if it was because I’ve spent a double-digit amount of months living a country where it’s hard to still call myself a feminist and not feel like I’m lying to myself a little.

Or if it was because I wonder everyday if the girls that I teach will ever realize that they are allowed to want more from their life than what they have been told is an acceptable amount to want out of life.

Of if the songs are just really that catchy.

But last week Beyonce really seemed to know what she was talking about. 

I'm waiting to be surprised how easy it is to forget.

The film was Hotel Rwanda. My friends and I went to a screening of it tonight at the American Cultural Center in Cotonou. Not particularly because we wanted to see the movie again, but because it was something to do at an unfamiliar place in a city with which we were trying to become more familiar.

My first interaction with Hotel Rwanda was, like most people who lived in the western world in 1994, one of guilt. And this was in my living room in the United States. In a room full of Beninese, it was more familiar. 

There is a scene when all of the western citizens are being evacuated from the hotel, and the staff has just realized that no one is coming to help them and the thousand refugees staying at the hotel. A British cameraman is ashamed at his ability to leave and the Rwandans’ inability to do so. It is raining, and as he turns to walk out on the people he has just lived with for the last week with the knowledge that they may not survive after he goes, a hotel porter opens an umbrella and walks him to the bus.  The cameraman scoffs at the porter and sends him back under the awning, out of the rain.

It is with this feeling that I’ve become more familiar in the past year.

The respect with which I am treated in this country I have done little to earn. And is so much more than the respect given to a woman who was born into this society. I can work as hard as I can to empower those women for the next 12 months and teach those women about how they deserve what they want and how these unspoken rules about what they accept as an acceptable form of treatment are false. But one day (and it’s a day that is approaching faster and faster) I am going to disappear into the rain and back to a country that recognizes equality between the sexes and has seen waves of feminism and the unspoken rules that run the society allow for women to be unsatisfied with what they have been given. Where I can go back to pretending that the rest of the world must also be like this.

Not what they want to hear

The most controversial project that I’ve started here so far has been my Girls Club. At eleven weeks in, the boys still ask me when I’m going to start my Boys Club when I show up at school at 17:00. The controversy only worsened this week when the t-shirts I ordered for the club arrived. The question changed from when the Boys Club would start to when I would be making them t-shirts. 

In the US, my usual response to questions such as those would be that the entire rest of the country is a Boys Club, every other month is White History Month and the Men’s Center is the entire rest of campus. Those responses don’t really translate here.

My general observation about men here, both my students and those older, is that they are not used to hearing the word, “No.” No you cannot join my club. No you cannot play with my iPod. No you cannot take my bicycle. Chauvinism is not just an underlying part of the culture. Chauvinism is the culture.

When I started the club, I was tentative. I could feel myself bending under the incessant questioning, by students and other teachers. But then the girls took hold of the club. It became their place. Their one place where they held dominion. The one place where they could say no boys allowed.