The night I ate three dinners

The first was at my tailor’s. I was there to try on the skirt she made for me, and while we were waiting for her daughter to come back with buttons, a plate of fried yams appeared in front of me. At 5:45 and with the Benin culture of eating dinner when the work gets down and dinner gets made, usually between 8-9 p.m., this was intended as a snack. I ate a few, hoping to pass this off as part of my dinner.

However, the first taste of fried food in a week only served to make me want more fried food. I biked home with the intention of making a pit stop at the Mama who sometimes sell fried yam puffs by the taxi stand. Five minutes later, I was in possession of 200 CFAs less but significantly more fried food than I was before. At my house, I dumped the contents of the black plastic sachet onto a plate and prepared to eat the second half of my dinner in the company of the next episode of the West Wing.

You may have noticed that I’ve been watching a lot of West Wing recently. I would say that is a correct assessment. The past three days, I’ve allowed myself to slide into a little hermit-like existence. I still leave my house once a day, but I have lost a little the effort to become part of this community. For the past three days, I’ve allowed myself to fall a little into the belief that I can spend the majority of the next two years watching the West Wing in my house, as long as I make an appearance outside it once during the day.

The past three days wouldn’t have been wasted if nothing had happened during those three days. But things did happen when I wanted them not to, as kicks in the ass usually do.

The father of my village host family came back about five days ago. He had been traveling in order to bring home his brother who had fallen gravely ill in Contonou.

This I knew. I spent the first two days that he was home at his house.

But in the three days that I had decided I wanted to pretend like I wasn’t part of a collective society, the brother died. Because I didn’t really talk to anyone for three days, I didn’t know until three days after the fact when my colleague knocked on my door in the middle of my episode of the West Wing to see if I had stopped by to give my condolences yet.

I hadn’t.

“I’ve been trying to call you the past three days,” my host father told me as we were sitting outside his house with his family. I honestly hadn’t received the call, which is not unusual, but I also cursed myself for not having stopped by the past three days.

After 10 minutes, my colleague said to my host father in Ife that we were leaving. When my host father responded in Ife, my colleague turned to me and said to me in English that my host father was asking me to stay to eat dinner with them.

I nodded.

I wanted to stay, but also a little as my penance for the past three days, a half hour later, I sat with my host father and ate my third dinner, and third helping of yams, of the evening.