February 15 - Month 6 Work Post

The month the heat began.  Here in Benin, they don’t say “the hot season” – they say “the heat,” as if the heat is an entity unto itself.  It really is.  It defines your schedule – work is done in the morning, until around noon, and again in the afternoon, after four or five.  But nothing in the middle of the day.  Since this is meant to be a work post, here’s what I’ve been doing in my mornings and evenings:

Gardening

The garden has continued to grow well.  I’m really spoiled, gardening in Africa – plants grow at breakneck speed.  I’m sure to be disappointed and impatient when I garden back at home.  During the month I continued to tend to my bed in the women’s garden, eating my first lettuce, summer squash, and amaranth in early March.  I prepared natural insecticides several times out of leaves from the neem tree, hot pepper, and tobacco leaves, and these seemed to work well for keeping bugs at bay.

On an organizational level, my counterpart and I established an official meeting day for our gardening group – Tuesdays.  Women work in the garden throughout the week, but on Tuesdays everyone has to come to help with any collective work that needs doing and to take part in a short meeting to discuss any issues we may have.  They also hand in their dues, 100f per woman.  As a member of the group and a gardener with my own bed, I’ve been paying dues too! I work with my counterpart to plan the meeting and bring up points I want to discuss.

This month, I met a man who is in charge of coordinating adult literacy classes in our area for an NGO.  He mentioned they are looking for new villages, and thought that our gardening groups might be a good partner for them.  Most of the women don’t read, write, or speak French, and the literacy classes could also include basic accounting and bookkeeping so women can track their garden sales.  We plan to meet with SELF/ADESKA, the project that supports the gardens, to see if a partnership can be worked out.

Progress has been moving forward nicely on the elementary school garden.  The students have finished building their fence out of corn stalks.  The next step will be to make the raised beds, and then start planting!

Mud Stoves

I made another foray to Boa Gando this month to build stoves.  I built 4 in total while I was there, and checked on ones that I’d built earlier.  This was probably my favorite trip to Boa Gando.  One of the people who wanted a stove was a young woman, probably younger than me, who speaks very good French.  She had started high school, but dropped out when she married and had a baby.  She was very eager to learn how to build the stove, and mentioned that she wants to be able to build them when I’m not there.  I suggested that she could even build them for other women and earn money!  With the help of another French speaker who was there, I asked several women for feedback about their stoves.  I was told that they’re using the new stoves every day, and have noticed that their meals cook quicker, and use less wood.  Success!

I also “built” part of a house while I was in Boa Gando.  This is house-building season, people have a little extra money from selling their cotton harvest and the dry season is best for building with mud.  While I was waiting for women to collect mud for their stoves, I watched a man smearing a final coat of soupy mud over the walls of a house he was working on.  “Come over and learn how to do this,” he said, and  I did!  It was really fun.  We took big handfuls of wet mud and threw them at the wall, splattering our faces and clothes, and then smeared the mud into a smooth coat with our hands.  He got such a kick out of my working with him that he sent someone to find a photographer in the village, and paid him to take a photo of us doing the work.  We both got teased for that.  The women sitting around said he’s my husband now, and asked him teasingly “We’ve been here forever, and you’ve never taken a picture with us – and she comes today and you take a picture with her?  Why?” 

Other

During the second week of March, I traveled to Porto Novo to attend a training about nutrition.  This was my first trip to the south since I swore in as a volunteer in September, and it was nice to see my host family again.  The training was more focused on pre-natal and young child health than most of us were expecting, but parts of it will still be useful.  I invited a woman who works at my health center to attend with me.

While in Porto Novo, I took some time to learn about SRI (system of rice intensification), a new way of growing rice that many people have found effective.  I’m hoping to work with my counterpart and a farmer here in Peonga to set up a test plot of this system; more details about it when our plot gets started.  I visited a farm north of Porto Novo run by a man who is doing his PhD on SRI.  I plan to attend a three-day training at his site in April.

I held an essay contest at our secondary school to choose a girl to accompany me to Cotonou in April, to spend three days shadowing a professional woman there as part of Peace Corp’s “Take Our Daughters to Work” event.  The essay assignment was to write about their career goals.  One girl wrote about wanting to become a student leader in her class, and another wrote about wanting to be the first lady of Benin, married to the President – I think these girls could certainly use more Beninese woman role models to give them examples of what women who have finished school are capable of.  I’ve submitted a grant request to invite professional women in our area to speak with the girls at our secondary school – I’m planning to have two panel discussions in May.  More on this later!

And in other news…

Work aside, this was a fun month because during the first week of March I took my first vacation, to Pendjari  National Park with other Environment volunteers.  We spent three days there, seeing lots of animals (around 90 elephants and lots of hippos!), spending hours in the hotel pool when it was too hot to drive around on safari, and swimming in a beautiful waterfall.  And on my way back from the nutrition training, I stopped in Parakou to attend the GAD soiree, sort of like Peace Corps prom.  It’s a “formal” dinner/dance that raises money for Gender and Development projects, like the grant I’m applying for to invite women to speak in Peonga.  Lots of us had western-style dresses made with Beninese fabric.  When will the next time be that I get to have a personally-tailored dress made to go to a dance?  Lots of fun.