Riots all over town last night. The President arrested the head of the opposition when he found out that his party had lost seats in the legislature. I couldn't get to my house because they were burning row upon row of tires in the street, and police were clashing with mobs. At least at the part I saw neither side was very well armed -- just some sticks for the police -- but elsewhere teargas and supposedly bullets fired.

5/5/2015 5:25:17 AM

That doesn't sound good... is the president staging a coup?

5/5/2015 10:55:51 AM

This is your opportunity, GrumpyGOP. This is your moment. Seize control during the unrest and rule Benin with an iron fist.

5/5/2015 1:26:21 PM

Not a coup, exactly, or at least not yet.

So President Yayi is winding down his second term in office, which ends next year. According to the Constitution, he can't run again. He swears up and down that he has no intention of running again. He does say he wants enough seats to change the constitution, though he claims it's just to create some new government job to fight corruption. But exactly nobody in Benin believes this, and nobody wants him to get a third term (at least, nobody in the south - Yayi is from the north and it may be different there).

To change the constitution requires 4/5 of the 83 national assembly votes. Yayi's party fell from 41 to 32, which is tied with the opposition coalition. Those results were announced over the weekend; the vote took place the previous Sunday.

There's a little more detail now about what happened Monday, although a lot of the information is still conflicting. The official line is that the gendarmes brought the opposition leader in for questioning about "insults" during the campaign, and was not arrested, and that any claim that he was arrested is a lie.

The opposition line is that a "horde" of gendarmes and police in riot gear surrounded the guy's house. Supporters, who had somehow been alerted, then surrounded the gendarmes and police; they keep saying they heard "shots fired," but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that, and they also claim tear gas was used. I'm not sure I buy this; I was in the thick of things Monday night, trying to get to my house. The situation was bad. If you were going to use tear gas, you'd use it here. I've been tear gassed in riots before; it had clearly not been used in this one. Anyway, they claim the guy was arrested and trundled off to jail in spite of having legislator immunity to most crimes, and that his subsequent release was Yayi backing down.

No doubt the truth is less violent than the opposition claims and more sinister than the government says (though dragging a guy in for questioning about "insults" is already sinister, to an American).

5/6/2015 4:27:47 AM

Things calmed down yesterday, but today there was a demonstration marching through town -- started off calmly enough, but I guess they caused a traffic bottleneck and the police responded by launching tear gas. Word is there's another round of riots tonight. Most foreign organizations are sending people home early so they can buy stuff and get home before it gets unpleasant again.

5/6/2015 11:30:33 AM

Just wanted to say I've been reading this thread the last few days and really enjoyed it. Not sure why BigMan had to troll the whole damn thing. that really got annoying after a while. but thanks for doing this Grumpy.

5/7/2015 1:45:52 PM

The price of gasoline has nearly doubled in the past week. Zemidjans are always claiming that "gas is expensive now" to try to justify high white people prices, but the streetside gas vendors print their price per liter in chalk on scrap wood or cardboard by their stands, so it's pretty easy to know what's really going on. And unfortunately, this time they're telling the truth. A week ago Saturday, it was 300-350 a liter. Fifty cents or a little more. Ever since, it's been 550-600. The problem is, nobody seems to be sure why. The following theories are put forward:

1) The new President of Nigeria is threatening to cut off gas subsidies, so Nigerians have started hoarding.
2) The new President of Nigeria is cracking down on smuggling. He's notoriously anti-corruption, so this is believable.
3) My observation is that the gas vanished during the civil unrest and has been slow to return. The initial disappearance makes sense, because so much of the protesting involved fire, but no Beninese person thinks the domestic situation has had an effect.

What's weird is how inconsistently this price increase is reflected in my transportation costs. With both taxis and zems, only around 50% seem to have raised their rates -- and they have done so significantly. But the others remain flat.

But then, Zem pricing is based on some arcane calculus that defies my understanding. A lot of people think that zem drivers have an imaginary meter in their head, and that the "real price" is based pretty much on distance. Anything higher than what the estimated distance calls for must be a yovo upcharge.

But there's more to it than that. Where are we in the zemidjan's shift? If he's getting ready to head home, he doesn't want a fare that will take him far in the opposite direction. If he even agrees to take you, he'll charge more. How likely is he to find a return fare at the destination? If you're heading to some dim outskirt of town, he might have to drive a fair distance back before he finds anyone. Same goes for if you're heading to the nice expat areas, where everybody drives a car and nobody takes a moto. Head to either of these places, he'll charge more to compensate for the expected dead time. How is the road where you are going? Dirt or flooded roads (mine is both) cost extra. Then, after all of these (and probably other) factors are taken into account, yeah, there's probably an extra charge because you look rich.

What doesn't seem to make much difference is what you are carrying, within reason. If I have to ask a zem to hold a big piece of luggage on the handlebars, he doesn't generally charge me extra. They don't ask for more when I'm carrying my dog.

There are a couple of things you can do to reduce the price, depending on the zem. Speaking to them in Fon usually helps reduce or eliminate the yovo charge.

5/12/2015 8:32:04 AM

You should just go around asking "WHERE ALL DA WHITE WOMEN AT?"

5/14/2015 10:12:28 AM

So the same time the riot shit was happening, my workplace was having some serious drama -- shit which was, for me, worse than being trapped out of my house by riots.

Part of what my partner organization does (the place where I actually go every day, not Peace Corps) is provide what's called a "guarantee fund" to Benin's micro-lending agency, FECECAM. I share the name because it still makes me laugh because it sounds like a camera that watches doo-doo. Anyway, FECECAM is normally unwilling to give loans to small vegetable farmers, because they view vegetable farming as being too risky. This is unfortunate given that the actual majority of Beninese adults are involved in some way with small-scale vegetable farming.

Anyway, we put up this "guarantee fund" on the understanding that FECECAM will give out loans, and if people fail to repay them, FECECAM can take the balance out of it. This way they can give out micro-loans at basically no risk to themselves, the idea being that they will see that vegetable farmers pay back loans at the same rate as anyone else.

This has been working, to the extent that anything works in West Africa. But of course there are folks who have refused to repay their loans, and this, combined with a really stupid contract with FECECAM, has put my partner organization into dire straits. It was decided that we needed to do something to encourage the defaulters to make with the money, and suddenly we were on the verge of being the goddamn mafia.

The plan was to send a "collections specialist," who everyone just calls "the thug," to the defaulters' homes. He'd be accompanied by a couple of off-duty but still uniformed gendarmes. They would say he needed to pay. If he didn't pay, they would take him to the local courthouse and put him in jail for 48 hours. Except oh wait, it turns out that failure to repay loans is a civil rather than criminal matter in Benin, because even this country has figured out that loan repayment from behind bars is difficult. So we were going to pay substantial bribes to the DA to hold these people without charges for as long as one can do under habeas corpus as understood by Benin (48 hours).

Now, I get that this is Africa, and sometimes you need to spend a little money to "grease the wheels." It's common to throw a few thousand francs to an official to encourage them to do their job, and even American law (namely the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) allows for that. But what my organization was proposing was not that. They were proposing subverting the justice system of a country that desperately needs to develop rule of law.

I ducked out of the office and went to Peace Corps to talk about this, because I don't want any part of this mess. Our director, who has the bedside manner of zombie, told me, "I guess your only choice is to quit and go home." This was not really what I wanted to hear. Quitting Peace Corps early wouldn't make me go home and eat a shotgun shell, but it'd come close. Fortunately my more immediate superior and favorite person, Beninese or otherwise, came and calmed things down. I went into the office the next morning and was able to convince my supervisor to abort her plan. She still says the plan was both legally and morally acceptable, but she thinks it would be hard to explain during our next audit.

---

At the same time I was trying to avoid participating in a criminal conspiracy, my brother allegedly was waltzing into one. Developmentally my brother is about eleven years old so even if he was involved, he's the patsy. Hopefully the police and courts will acknowledge this and he will be spared jailtime, because another consequence of his mental state is that a prison sentence and a death sentence are pretty much indistinguishable for him. The detectives are moving with about the same speed and efficiency they showed when my uncle was murdered in December 2013 (they don't even have any suspects for thatcrime), so the process is tortuously slow, and probably driving my mom off the deep end. Since we're still pretty early in the process I'm not going to post details.

5/19/2015 4:02:55 AM

I guess this thread's glory days are long since past.

Some gun-wielding bandits tried to rob a bus that a volunteer was on yesterday. This happens from time to time, particularly in the north where the country spreads out and the population density goes down, so there are long stretches of road with no witnesses or military police. Apparently the driver handled it OK: he threw the bus in reverse and high-tailed it back to the nearest city, where they acquired a police escort. A little strange that it happened in the day, though. Bandits usually go for the night buses. From what I understand they aren't usually very successful in either case.

The weather has been all fucked up. We should be a couple of months into the rainy season by now, but it hasn't materialized. There's a lot of discontent in the villages, which will get hit hard by shortages soon when the first harvest time comes and goes without anything worth harvesting. Obviously this drought is a matter of life and death for subsistence farmers; for us, it mostly means that the unbearable heat of February/March just kept going and going and going.

5/20/2015 8:11:52 AM

have the riots settled?

5/20/2015 8:48:12 AM

How is Bea? Have people stopped trying to eat her, now that you live in the city?

5/20/2015 8:52:30 AM

The threat of eating has gone down somewhat but overall I'd say her standard of living has decreased. In village, I was around the house most of the time, and she had company; when I did leave, she had her favorite spot on the porch, and the kids in my compound would play with her. Now there's no place outside I can leave her safely, and I'm at work 8-5, almost invariably with some social or girlfriend thing after that lasts much later. So other than the morning and evening walks, and of course sleep time itself, she doesn't get much time to socialize.

Bringing her to the girlfriend's house is a pain, first of all because carrying a dog on a motorcycle is stressful for all parties, second of all because the girlfriend has a cat. The cat desperately wants to be friends with the dog. The dog does not want to be friends with the cat. Meanwhile businesses in the city are a lot less laissez-faire about letting dogs into their establishments.

I've tried to socialize her with other dogs, but she doesn't take to it too well. That's my fault, and Africa's. When she was a puppy I'd never let her near village dogs, who were generally vicious and even when polite had all manner of parasites and diseases. She growls a lot at other dogs and tries to avoid them, but she's never been outright aggressive, thank God. As for people...she likes me. She likes my girlfriend. Otherwise, she'd just as soon curl up in a corner and let other people be social.

---

The riots ended, then flared up again a couple of days later, then went away. The last unrest was two weeks ago. We were worried there might be more, when the government announced that local elections were being delayed (for the second time) because they don't have enough money to hold them. It'll have to beg real hard to get the money, too. The Netherlands just pulled all of its development money out of the country because it found that $4.5 million dollars had just vanished.

5/20/2015 11:07:26 AM

Her standard of living is still great; think what it would be like for her if not for you!

5/20/2015 2:22:59 PM

hooray for microfinance!

5/21/2015 12:56:51 AM

^^Fair enough. I do wish she'd eat more. The shitty French dog food I can get here is not real appealing, and I can't afford to buy her fish or meat every day.

^Yeah, it didn't take long for Benin to do away with some illusions about how useful microfinance is. I remember reading about it back home, everybody thought it was some kind of game-changer in development. I'm sure that when it is properly implemented, it does do some real good (though not as much as advertised). In Benin, though, it isn't properly implemented.

Let's examine the poster child for microfinance, the Grameen bank, and compare it to FECECAM. First of all, Grameen operates in Bangladesh, and though I don't know the country very well I will assert based on its history that it has a good deal more experience with the idea of loans than does Benin, most of which has only had any kind of banks for thirty or forty years.

Second, Grameen bank isn't just a microfinance institution, it's a full-blown social development engine. The "16 Decisions" loan recipients are asked to abide by cover basically everything Peace Corps Benin loves: latrine use, nutrition, women's rights, family planning, the environment, education. The Doo-Doo Camera does none of that. It just makes small loans.

Third, Grameen is pretty open-handed with the money. FECECAM won't give out loans to operations it considers "risky," which, as I pointed out in the previous post, includes all smallholder farming, which is the primary economic activity in Benin.

Fourth, Grameen only lends to people who join mutual-guarantee groups designed to peer pressure members into following the decisions and, of course, repaying their loans in a timely fashion. FECECAM doesn't bother with this among the small percentage of recipients who didn't pay a bribe to get a loan, or who aren't close relations with the loan officer.

The problem is that Benin and West Africa are very good at figuring out what the develop aid buzzword du jour is, and trying to capitalize on it -- not by implementing it, but by seeming to implement it in order to get aid money. Fifteen, twenty years ago, microfinance was all the rage. So Benin hastily set up FECECAM, called it a "microfinance institution," filled it with bozos, and tacked "microfinance" onto the portfolio of one of its innumerable ministries. Then it said, "See? See how we're doing microfinance now? But boy, we sure could do it a lot better if we had some money to build capacity..."

Now the king of buzzwords is "sustainability," and so it is every other word out of every mouth at the development table -- both aid supplicants and providers. I see very few projects that will outlive their grant funding. Certainly the program at the office where I work will shut down the day after the money runs out.

5/21/2015 4:04:05 AM

I've had this very apocalyptic feeling for a while now, as we come into the last few months of my time in Benin. In a very real way, it feels like "the world" is coming apart. The riots certainly had an "end of days" aesthetic to them, but it's also other things. Departures, to begin with. A lot of my friends and longstanding Peace Corps staff are departing for various reasons. The Country Director, essentially my boss of bosses, leaves next month. His son, who is a close friend, left Sunday. The Peace Corps doctor, who has been working in that capacity for decades, left last week. Some of the last holdouts from the 2012 class are wrapping up their service now (they not having signed on for a full third year).

We'll get a new director and doctor, of course, but I'm not gonna know them, and in the last four months I'm not going to get to know them. They're going to be strangers who are unaccountably sitting in the seats of people that I'm very used to. The friends, realistically, are lost forever. Even if we end up in the same town (and an enormous number of us end up in DC), by the time I get there they'll already have their own social thing going.

The class after mine is having their end-of-service conference this week. These are the people I still think of as "the new kids," but really they're the hardened vets now. The latest class has been here almost a year, and yet another will arrive next month.

Speaking of this latest class, the idea that this program is soon to be out of my hands and wholly into theirs...it's disheartening. They have had an enormous number of dropouts. Their work ethic is weak and their professionalism is nonexistent. They've recently started responding to every perceived slight by sending out mass e-mails to everybody in the program, usually forwarding what had been private e-mails. They have serious racial problems and are split into several mutually opposed camps. All of them have smart phones and spend most of their living allowance on internet to stay tethered to their people back home. The sense of camaraderie and solidarity that was my favorite thing about PC service just isn't there.

On top of this there's the lingering sense of impending crisis for Benin itself. Municipal elections were delayed for a second time. Nigerian gas shenanigans mean that prices are up. Beninese incompetence means that power and water outages, once a regular annoyance, are now the order of the day. The past week has been dark more often than lit. That kind of tension, combined with political discord, can easily flare into another (and more violent) round of unrest. And I'll point you to Burundi as merely the latest example of an African country that went all to shit because its president wanted to hang around for a third term.

5/26/2015 7:12:05 AM

That would be a tough feeling.

Maybe all of this will make it easier for you to come home and start a new chapter.

5/26/2015 11:00:28 AM

Going back fills me with dread. Not because I think I'll miss Benin -- that feeling will take time to arrive. Nor because I think I'll have trouble readjusting to the states. I've already done it once, during my 44-day home leave, and it was manageable.

No, the dread is about work, and trying to find it -- fast. My class (minus a few extenders like me) has now been home for 9-10 months, and are only just now starting to find actual paying work. It's encouraging that this work they've found usually sounds awesome and well-suited to the people involved. It's disheartening that it took them this long. And of course that's not counting the many, many returned PCVs who went straight into grad school, and others who moved on to other Peace Corps-like jobs -- things that are rewarding, yes, but won't do much to keep the student loan man at bay.

I'm fortunate in that my loan debt is relatively modest (~$15k). I'm unfortunate in that I've got next to no savings. My family is pouring all their resources into keeping their other son out of jail, so I'm less willing than ever to impose upon them.

I'll land in the states with around $5,000. Could add around $2,200 to that if I opted not to take the post-Peace Corps trip with my girlfriend, but it's a dream trip the likes of which I may not ever get to take again. So I say fuck it. I've already got a car, and health insurance for three months.

5/26/2015 11:47:59 AM

What type of job are you looking for/where?

5/26/2015 11:53:50 AM

International development and/or diplomacy, which pretty much means DC, at least as a home base. USAID is good work if you can get into it. Probably take the Foreign Service exam again, and the Diplomatic Security exam. NGO jobs are constantly popping up and disappearing as well, but I'm picky about them now after having worked with this bunch of morons since August. CRS, MSF, and Care all do solid work. Peace Corps itself may have jobs.

To a certain extent I'm tied to the girlfriend's location. She still needs to get her masters (pretty much essential in any international work like this), but once she's accomplished that...she's smarter than I am, and her degrees will be a lot more attractive than mine, and generally speaking I think she's going to be the big money maker. In DC or even New York that's no problem, plenty of respectable work for everybody. When/if we start doing significant work abroad it would probably mean me taking slightly less "prestigious" assignments, whatever happens to be available to Americans in the country in question.

5/26/2015 12:24:40 PM

You really must be hanging out with the RSO/ARSO on a regular basis if you're now considering taking the DS exam next go round. I'm sure your buddy will give you the good, bad, and ugly but let me know if you have any questions about life in DS.

I can completely relate to all of your job prospects/concerns either directly or through my wife's experiences. Hopefully you find something solid soon after returning (or perhaps before) and then can focus on getting what you really want. Where is your GF planning to go to grad school?

[Edited on May 26, 2015 at 1:24 PM. Reason : o]

5/26/2015 1:21:31 PM

I get beers with the RSO on a weekly basis. His wife is the social one, but she's out of the country for school, and his natural inclination is to stay home and play video games. But, in an effort to get out of the house (and because he likes beer), he meets me at the main expat watering hole.

The girlfriend's graduate school plans aren't firm yet, because we won't get back to the states in time to start this fall. So she'll have ~10 months. The program I've heard her talk about most is MPH from Colombia.

5/27/2015 4:02:31 AM

They're finally wrapping up construction on the new embassy. The old one is a shit heap. The sign identifying it as the US embassy is small because we're embarrassed by it.

The new one is not a shit heap. It is the most imposing goddamn building in Cotonou. It looks like the headquarters of some kind of Bond villain. The sign is not small. My friends who worked on building the thing tell me it is built to stand for a hundred years before it needs replacing.

The end of construction means two shifts in the expat demographic. All of the embassy construction guys are leaving. Most of these are former military, they're either single or here alone, and they work weird hours. Most of the younger ones are pretty cool and several have become good friends.

One of the top guys is an exception to the "single" rule and came with his long-term girlfriend. The kind of couple that's almost intimidating in their coolness. They're in their mid thirties but he still looks like a quarterback and she's almost painfully hot. They're loaded, they love beer, they're involved in activities I didn't even know existed. They live in one of about two buildings in Benin with an elevator. I basically didn't even bother trying to hang out with these guys, partly because I have the unfortunate character flaw of wanting to be one of the cooler guys in the room, mostly because I didn't think I could actually afford to hang with them, monetarily-speaking.

But then something happened that made everyone equal. My friend, the construction boss, was introduced to strategy board games.

How he grew to be 36 or whatever without playing so much as a game of Risk, I don't know. Probably too busy playing football and banging models. Doesn't matter. As his work wound down, he had a lot of free time at work, so when a mutual friend suggested an online game of Axis and Allies, he said he was willing to try. It has been like watching Marion Barry discover crack. The game is suddenly his obsession. The same thing happened with one of the Lebanese guys, who previously had only had one conversation with me -- it was about going to the gym, which I don't do, so he stopped talking to me. Now, he absolutely will not shut up about how our strategy for A&A. Every time we meet in any context, the first and last conversation is about the game. I wake up to facebook messages about it. It is absurd, and awesome.

Sadly these guys are leaving. Instead, we're getting United States Marines.

I have nothing against Marines in principle. The people that brought us Iwo Jima are alright. But the Marines we are getting are all 19-23 years old, and I'm on the wrong side of 30. Not sure how that'll play out for our potential camaraderie. I AM sure that female PCVs are going to go through them like shit through a goose. Not the other way around. These poor jarheads don't know what's about to hit them.

5/27/2015 12:01:18 PM

Just realized that there's a lot about Ghana that I meant to mention here but forgot. The strangest thing wasn't even about Ghana itself, but a volunteer there that I stayed with. She went to NCSU around the time I was in graduate school, which is a strange enough coincidence -- the school doesn't have a reputation for producing a lot of volunteers -- but then it got even weirder when, in a conversation about the university area, she said

"I lived for two years in this house that was really skinny and weird looking."
"The skinny house?"
"I guess."
"On Method Road?"
"Yes...you know it?"
"I had better. I lived there for a year."

700 Method Road was the site of most of my college debauchery, and the first place I lived outside of a dorm. We fairly destroyed the place, though I understand the subsequent landlord fixed it back up. Two very different groups -- I lived with a lumberjack and an IT guy and we were all drunk morons, they were a fairly respectable group of female professional dancers and singers. And yet that house produced two West Africa PCVs.

---

Ghanaian food was pretty much all-around better than Beninese food.

For one thing, there's more available. KFC in Accra was the first meal I went to, as much to say I had as anything else, but really my better experience came a few days later. I had finally arrived in Dad's village after a grueling morning of travel. It was the heat of the day. I should have rested then, but felt hurried -- the last taxi home was leaving in a couple of hours, and I wanted to make sure i got some pictures and saw the sites, hopefully talk to some people. So I started walking.

I got pictures of dad's old school -- his house and other haunts were lost in the intervening 40 years as the town doubled and then quadrupled in size. It could no longer properly be called a village. Electricity and pavement had arrived, as had full cell coverage and multiple solar panel stores. But having gotten the pictures, I was hot and exhausted. I came upon a hotel/restaurant/bar and decided to avail myself of the latter services.

"Can I have a coke and...what do you have to eat?"
"We do NOT have any food."
"Oh...I thought I saw some in the window..."
"...except for fried chicken."

What the fuck do you mean, "except for fried chicken?" Fried chicken is my favorite food and the one I miss most in Benin. I had thought all of West Africa ignorant of the delights of fried chicken, but I guess it's just my country. At any rate, woman, bring me some goddamn fried chicken! "Except," nothing. If you had said you had all the food in the world, I would have ordered fried chicken anyway. It was delicious.

Moreover, the hotel owner turned out to remember my dad. Some of the details he offered weren't helpful ("tall, with a beard" he might have guessed from me) but others supported his claim (dad had a motorbike, he taught at the high school, and the man's effort at pronouncing our last name was no worse than any other African's). All in all a fine meal.

For quality, though, it was topped a few days later. I was at a little beach hotel, relaxing in a hammock after my morning body surf -- phenomenal body surfing in Ghana, FYI, a lesson imparted to me by Dad and reinforced now by experience -- and a toothless old man came up to me. He had, the day before, done my laundry for I think 20 cedis (~$4.50)

He said he had two lobsters. I didn't believe him, but he produced them for inspection -- fresh enough that they were still unhappily moving around. OK, old man. How much?

He thought for a minute. "15 cedis."

Obviously I wanted these things, pronto. But first I had to figure out how to cook them. The hotel manager said they would, but added, in ominous tones, "But there will be a fee."

"How much?"

He tilted his head back and looked gravely down upon me. "5 cedis."

And thus it was that I ate two fresh, well-prepared lobsters (with a side of rice) for the same amount it costs to get a load of laundry done.

---

It's not just that Ghana has more stuff available. Their African food is better, too. Rice and beans is a staple of the developing world because they have complementary amino acids. In Benin, the beans are few and far between. In Ghana, the ratio is about 1:1 rice grain:bean. Meat was more widely available in every context. Even their staple starch mush, fufu, is superior in texture and taste, and the peanut sauce they serve it with is something I would eat even in America. Street food was cleaner and more consistently good.

---

Aside from the skinny house lady, I met one other white person in Ghana. He was in his forties or fifties and had the longest dreadlocks I've ever seen on anyone, let alone a honky. He was hanging out at the beach town where I ate the lobsters and where, I guess, he lives. He saw me wandering confused looking for lunch and offered to show me his favorite spot. On the walk, he asked where I was from. I said NC. He said, "No shit, I'm from Greensboro." I went to Grimsley and he went to Page.

6/15/2015 6:31:41 AM

haha i don't think i could even lay down in one direction in this house http://raleighudo.com/blog/narrow-long-houses-exist-raleigh

6/15/2015 9:11:02 AM

Eh, I'm 6'6" or so and I could lie down in any direction I wanted. I think it's 9'5" from one interior wall to the other. But I take your point.

It's actually a very liveable house overall. The only place it gets tight is the kitchen, which has to share width with the indoor stairs and which doubles as the hallway to the upstairs bedroom. The rooms themselves were all comparable to what I had in Bagwell or Syme, but with just one person. It was comfortable enough for the three official residents, a live-in girlfriend, and frequent guests/people too drunk to get home.

6/15/2015 10:06:52 AM

I got malaria last week. I suppose it was inevitable, given how long I've been here and how often I've talked about it...and given that I'd quit taking my prophylaxis weeks ago. In retrospect I realize how stupid all of this sounds, but here was my reasoning:

1) The pro they had me on is doxycycline, which in its usual life is just an antibiotic but also interferes with malaria's ability to reproduce. It worked fine for me all this time, but it dawned on me that taking an antibiotic every day for years on end had to do some weird stuff to your system. Also, it takes a toll on your esophagus.
2) I've got a lot of American friends here who have never been on malaria pro and who have never had malaria
3) I myself miss my pill pretty often (if I were a lady, I'd be pregnant as shit), and had never gotten malaria
4) Mosquitos don't really like me. I get very few bites relative to those around me.

So I thought maybe I was resistant. It's been known to happen. Or, if I wasn't, the number of malarial mosquitos was quite low, and since so few bite me anyway my odds were in the basement. Or maybe my liver (an organ where the parasite lives out a large part of its life cycle) was so pickled that every time a plasmodium shows up there it just gets drunk and dies. Something like that.

These are things I thought, because I'm not a goddamn doctor or epidemiologist, and suddenly I thought it was a good idea to take over my own medication. Jesus. This kind of thing is how anti-vaccine movements start. I'm so ashamed. But I learned my lesson, painfully.

Started Wednesday afternoon with a 102.5 degree fever, which is the highest I recorded -- actually pretty mild for a first case of malaria. I didn't have any of the other symptoms, but it seemed wise to check myself out, so I used one of the self-test kits Peace Corps gives us. It came out negative. (Of course, I had forgotten the first rule of Peace Corps provided medical supplies: they're expired. Almost invariably, stuff PC gives us is set to expire three or four months after they give it to us, and most of this stuff, I got in June 2012.)

Well, then the headache set in, and I spent a miserable night in some sort of situational hallucination in which I was convinced that my body was Southeast Asia and the disease was the Vietcong, and I needed to coordinate strategy with General Westmoreland to chase them out of Laos/my torso and down into my legs where I could finish them off. It was a long night.

Next day I felt quite a bit better, because malaria is cyclical - the fever comes and goes. I even took a real nap. Then I woke up and felt 1000x worse and dragged myself, sweating, droop-eyed, and barely-coherent to the doctor.

The Peace Corps doctors are notorious for judging their patients harshly, and mine was no exception. He said that this was serious and they needed to get me down to testing right away, before he could even check my vitals -- but not before he could take a minute to say, "Why did you come in so late? You should have come in earlier. It would have been better if you came in earlier."

Lo and behold, I had malaria, the test was wrong. He gave me the magic pills -- coartem. Six doses of four pills each, spread out over three days. These killed the malaria with a quickness. Unfortunately, their side effects were as bad or worse. I was so weak and exhausted that I needed to take a pause halfway through walking down the stairs, and so dizzy that I couldn't sit up straight on a stool. Nor could I sleep or eat. Another long night.

Then the next day, I felt better, and the day after that, I felt fine. My body is cleared of the dread plasmodia and tonight I get to go home and get drunk in celebration. Scorched Earth policy of my liver, sort of.

6/23/2015 11:05:41 AM

After three years I'm finally having someone come to visit me in Benin -- literally the last week I'm here. Dude will fly out the day before I do. But hey, better late than never.

Tomorrow the girlfriend and I start buying plane tickets for the post-Peace Corps circumnavigation extravaganza. Not sure if I've posted the itinerary in this thread already, but the basic plan is three weeks India, 2.5 weeks in Vietnam, like this:

Goa
Mumbai
Udaipur
Agra
Varanasi
Kolkata
Darjeeling
Back to Kolkata

Hanoi
Ha Long Bay
A bunch of sites in northern Vietnam that are part of the tour we're doing
Hoi An
Ho Chi Minh City

Then flying into San Diego, where my girlfriend's family lives and where my parents will fly out to greet us, and so all of the principals can finally meet in person. It's really one of the last few steps before proposal. Meet the parents. Find a job that can keep at least one of us from starving. Cohabitate to make sure we aren't going to murder each other over toothbrush placement or DVR control.

7/2/2015 4:58:49 AM

I don't care how dead this thread is, I'm going to keep flogging it until I fly home.

Spent the last few weeks house/dog-sitting for an expat friend. That was a trippy experience. First time I've ever had a housekeeper -- two, in fact -- and that made the white guilt kick into high gear. (I got over it. Having new sheets on the bed every day is awesome) It was also unnerving to think of two people just having keys to enter your house when you're not in it. I don't let ANYBODY into my house here for fear of stuff going missing. The lights in half my house haven't worked for months because I don't want to let in an electrician.

A friend recently told me a good story of why that position isn't so paranoid. He had a local work partner into his house a couple of times, and on both occasions, something was stolen (a smart phone and later an MP3 player). He went to the guy's workplace to confront him, but his colleagues said he wasn't around. Five minutes after my friend left, the thief called his coworkers to ask if my friend was around. When they said no, he said he was coming in. They immediately called the police, who ambushed him as soon as he arrived. The phone had been sold to someone in another community, but they tracked it down, and they found the MP3 player in his ceiling after some "interrogation." In the Beninese justice system, "interrogation" means you sit on the floor with your back straight against the wall while they hit the bottoms of your bare feet with the flat of a machete.

I was impressed. It never occurred to me that the cops here would actually do their job rather than shake people down for money.

Theft here is paradoxical to me. On the one hand, I understand why somebody who is very, very poor would steal. On the other hand, not in fucking Benin. They take it seriously here. This guy is lucky they called the police instead of the usual mob, because feet-whacking beats getting necklaced. (For those who aren't familiar, this means you take a tire and put it over a person so it pins their arms to their sides, then you set it on fire. We also call it a "Beninese necktie," and it's a common punishment for thieves, especially in the west)

7/22/2015 10:06:17 AM

goddamn

going in a different direction, what are you planning on doing with your dog when you go on your trip and head home?

7/22/2015 10:26:40 AM

What kind of jobs are you and the lady thinking about getting?

7/22/2015 10:27:57 AM

I also wonder about the dog?

7/22/2015 10:50:18 AM

The dog presents a difficulty, but not an insurmountable one. Right now the plan is to have her stay with another Cotonou PCV, who will ship her as cargo to me (or more likely, to a place where Air France delivers, probably DC). It's a little more expensive than sending her with a person, but at this point I don't know how to avoid it. The only PCVs who will be flying to destinations in my vicinity during that time will be flying on the Peace Corps' dime, which means they don't get any say in their flights.

If for some reason cargo fails, I can wait longer and another PCV will be able to bring her eventually.

As for jobs, the lady is pretty clearly on the development track, and wants to get her MPH and work in that general line. I'm more flexible. Development stuff is good and interesting, so there's options: USAID, NGOs, lots of corporations have development programs of varying degrees of sincerity. I tend to lean more towards the government side of things just for the job security, but again, flexible. Also not ruling out non-development government stuff. The idea I've been toying with lately is the diplomatic security service. The head DSS guy in Benin is a friend of mine and his description of the job sounds like something I could find interesting, and something which I could conceivable be hired as.

7/27/2015 4:37:44 AM

Quote :

"I don't care how dead this thread is, I'm going to keep flogging it until I fly home."

For the record, I read every post in this thread and enjoy the shit out of your stories, I just usually don't have anything to contribute so I don't respond much. If this were facebook or reddit I would at least leave you likes/upvotes to let you know I'm enjoying your stuff. But yeah, keep posting.

7/27/2015 6:09:23 PM

spoiler

thread ends with OP committing suicide

7/27/2015 9:52:51 PM

I too read this shit whenever it is updated, just usually have nothing worthwhile to add. Thanks for keeping it up, even for us lurkers.

7/27/2015 10:17:46 PM

Quote :

" The idea I've been toying with lately is the diplomatic security service. The head DSS guy in Benin is a friend of mine and his description of the job sounds like something I could find interesting, and something which I could conceivable be hired as."

DSS? Is that like a fancy security guard type role?

7/27/2015 10:21:35 PM

Has Jennifer Love Hewitt visited the area since you've been over there?

7/27/2015 10:22:40 PM

^^ haha, something like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_Security_Service

7/28/2015 12:18:27 AM

Glad to know some people still read.

Quote :

"DSS? Is that like a fancy security guard type role?"

They do a lot of stuff, as the wikipedia entry explains. The guy I know is currently in charge of all security-related stuff in Benin, including the US embassy Marines, cooperation with local law enforcement on trafficking and terrorism stuff, and, yes, the security guards. But in previous jobs within DSS he has worked on the security detail for various foreign bigwigs (including the Dali Lama) and passport/visa fraud investigation.

My favorite story of his -- they're working on the security detail for some big shot from South Korea. One of the cars in his motorcade is driven by a DSS guy of Korean heritage, who accidentally bumps into the big shot's car. Everybody freaks out, worried that it's part of a plot or that the big shot is going to be outraged. But apparently when he found out what happened, he said, "You guys let a Korean drive? What's wrong with you?"

Quote :

"Has Jennifer Love Hewitt visited the area since you've been over there?"

Huh? And, no, unfortunately.

---

At this point I've only got two months of actual work left, followed by a few days of bureaucratic stuff before I finish my service on October 7. On October 15, we fly to India. And as though that period won't be hectic enough, what with packing, getting rid of most of our worldly possessions, emptying houses, installing pets with friends, etc. during that last week, the fates have ordained that of course it is during this week that a friend will finally come to visit me. My last actual week in country.

I guess it doesn't need to be that stressful. There's only so much packing you can do when you're relying entirely on carry-on baggage, and it's not as though I were going to just sit down and obsessively re-check all my paperwork the whole week. But still.

The cramped and unfortunate timeframe means that a lot of the traditional "show-your-guests-around" activities aren't really an option. The National Park is a day's drive from Cotonou, and nobody wants to spend 2/7 days of their vacation on an African bus. As much as I'd love to show off how I lived in village, by then my old digs in Ikpinle will be occupied by a new PCV (more on that later). The slave road in Ouidah was interesting enough for me, but not really up my friend's street -- and besides, as much as they claim to have "English-speaking tour guides," I've never seen real evidence of it.

About the best I can do is a day trip to the village to at least show him around, maybe point to one of my projects, eat at my favorite goat-and-coke shack. Then a couple of days on the beach in Grand Popo, all surrounded by days hanging around "experiencing" Cotonou, to the extent that it can be experienced.

---

Last year when I moved to Cotonou, I got replaced by a white girl who didn't drink or have a facebook account, both of which features instantly make me distrustful of a person. Also, she talked incessantly about her mother and was very concerned that she might not have internet fast enough to skype her every week. She lasted about two months.

This year I have been replaced by a black girl who doesn't have a facebook account (no word on whether she drinks). She is very concerned that she won't have running water, which she needs for her hair. What the fuck kind of people are joining Peace Corps these days? In three years, I've known exactly one PCV in our sector who had running water.

"Do you think it would be feasible to install a system?"
"A system?"
"For water."
"Nope. You'd have to dig a well, the well would have to hit adequate and safe water, you'd have to install a pump, and connect it to your house, which, whoops, doesn't have any kind of pipes, because your town doesn't have running water. It has a bunch of other PCVs nearby, electricity, the best work partners in Benin, a great market, and easy access to the capital whenever you need it."
"But no running water?"
[sound of rope going taut as Grumpy hangs himself in frustration]

7/28/2015 5:01:19 AM

called it

7/28/2015 6:41:19 AM

it's only been three years and you're already in "back in my day" mode

7/28/2015 9:05:37 AM

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article29445496.html

Short version: NC State grad -> Raleigh PD -> Diplomatic Security Service -> Director of State Department's Office of Foreign Missions

A career arc like that gives me some hope at a time where I once again feel acutely unemployable.

---

Planning the India/Vietnam trip from Benin is a goddamn nightmare. The shitty internet provides a backdrop of annoyance for all of the bureaucratic bullshit and byzantine regulations that surround even the simplest activities in those countries.

Let's take buying a train ticket in India. India has the largest passenger rail service in the world, but it also has 1.3 billion people, so those trains fill up fast. You want to book them as soon as possible, but "as soon as possible" with the Indian rail service varies. They keep changing it -- 30 days in advance, 120 days in advance, 90 days, back to 30, back to 120. But OK, fine, you finally get into whatever the window du jour is. You can't buy tickets directly from the Indian rail authority's website, but there are a couple of authorized online sellers. But wait! Even though you never actually do anything with the rail authority's site, you have to register with them. Fine, whatever. But wait again! For reasons that passeth the understanding of the western mind, the rail authority is VERY concerned about online security. E-mail confirmation is not enough for them. You also need to receive an SMS confirmation code. Jesus, OK, OK. But wait AGAIN! They'll only send the text to an Indian phone number.

So the official suggestion -- hand to God, the official thing the website tells you to do -- is enter a fake Indian phone number, then immediately e-mail them saying that you gave them a fake phone number and request that they just e-mail you the confirmation. For which purpose they evidently need a scan of your passport, even though at no other juncture in this process is a passport involved.

So I do all of that first, because I'd read it was necessary, only to find out that if you do it first, it won't let you buy tickets. You have to do all of it through the portal on the ticket vendor site. So I did it twice, at which point I could buy tickets...but wait! You can only buy ten tickets in any given calendar month. We needed twelve. So my girlfriend/travel companion had to go through the process to buy the last two.

The visa process is, supposedly, much more streamlined. Except you can't apply for an Indian online tourist visa until 34 days before you expect to arrive, because fuck you, that's why.

Vietnam has been easier, in spite of being a communist dictatorship. With them I just had to send a couple of passport scans to get an authorization letter (in which I was lumped in with other visitors from China, Austria, New Zealand, Canada, and Christ only knows where all else). You bring that, a form, and $45 in crisp US bills (yeah, we "lost" the war), and they let you in, or maybe not. It would be more sure if I went to the Vietnamese consulate but, oh wait, they don't have one in Benin.

In spite of all these issues and more besides, I think everything is purchased now that can be - planes, trains, boats, and hotel (well, airbnb) rooms. A large portion of this trip is brought to you by an inexplicable but fortuitous change in Peace Corps policy. When I signed up, the deal was simple: at the end of your service, PC either gives you a one-way ticket home, or money equal to the cost of said ticket. Virtually everybody took the money. Some were taking a trip rather than going straight home. Others realized that, since government rules force PC to buy tickets on American carriers for "the most direct and expeditious route," they are typically paying a lot more than they should for a flight. The PCVs took the money, bought a much cheaper flight (usually through Royal Air Maroc), and pocketed the difference. The system was good. Everybody I talked to got between $1300-1700, depending on where in the states they live.

But for some reason -- complexity? actual generosity towards PCVs? -- the policy changed. Now you have a choice between ticket home or a check for $2000, regardless of where you live. Coming from Benin, nobody's ticket home costs that much. I cannot fathom why anybody would take the ticket instead of the money, and to my knowledge, nobody has.

For me it's a godsend. $2000 covers all my flights as far as the US -- Cotonou to Mumbai, Kolkata to Hanoi, Saigon to San Diego -- as well as the aforementioned dozen train tickets.

---

Sorry, I guess this didn't have much to do with Benin and TWW is not a blog and so forth. So let me throw in some Benin stuff at the end:

Tomorrow is Beninese independence day. Every year they pick a different city to hold the big celebration in; nobody seems to know which city it is this year, which at least tells me that it is not Cotonou. Benin is very proud of its independence and has several memorials to "The children of Benin who died for freedom." I also just recently found the headquarters of the "Beninese Office for War Wounded Veterans."

Benin has never been in a war (though it is conceivable that there are one or two wounded veterans of the World Wars who were conscripted to fight back when the country was a French possession called Dahomey; 12,000 died in WWI). It did not fight for independence; the French basically jettisoned it along with the rest of French West Africa in the wake of WWII, because it couldn't afford to prop up unprofitable colonies while trying to rebuild itself. You could make the case that the "children of Benin who died for freedom" were the original Dahomeyan kingdom that resisted French entry into the colony 150-some years ago, but then, the statues on those monuments always show a soldier in modern fatigues holding a Kalashnikov.

7/31/2015 8:50:25 AM

It's very easy to buy train tickets from the stations in India, but glad you got it resolved. Hope you enjoy your trip.

[Edited on July 31, 2015 at 9:41 AM. Reason : a]

7/31/2015 9:40:59 AM

It sucks you couldn't be there to protect Cecil.

7/31/2015 1:53:23 PM

Nobody wants to shoot Benin's lions. For some reason the males here (and by "here" I mean the little national park up north) don't have manes.

I've never quite understood the fascination with lions. I've never seen them do anything other than sleep, and that includes the ones I saw in the park. By contrast elephants always seem to be doing something -- one charged us, another was in the process of knocking down a very tall palm tree, they're always doing dust baths and whatnot. Hippos manage to be perfectly terrifying while stationary, particularly when you are in a (prolifically leaking) balsa wood canoe paddling through their midst. Even the most mundane movement of a hyena was fascinating for its odd, disjointed nature. But lions just fucking sit there.

8/3/2015 4:12:04 AM

Quote :

"I too read this shit whenever it is updated, just usually have nothing worthwhile to add. Thanks for keeping it up, even for us lurkers."

8/3/2015 10:20:30 AM

I remember reading something in National Geographic once about maneless lions. but i think they were in kenya. I think they were the same lions from that val kilmer movie the ghost and the darkness.

But yeah, lions are just big ass cats. They lay around all day and don't do shit.

8/3/2015 3:17:43 PM

The organization I work with just got awarded a massive USDA grant to develop the pineapple industry in Benin. I have mixed feelings on the subject.

On the one hand, I'm proud, because I did no small amount of the support work on the application. I won't say I was indispensable, although they would have had a rough go of it without me. The translation alone took several days, and the only other person who speaks English is my harried Canadian boss.

On the other hand, I think this organization is the most addled, incompetent bunch of beggars and whores I've ever worked with, and the grant itself strikes me as morally indefensible. (As described a couple of pages ago, the USDA grant process works like this: USDA uses your tax dollars to buy American rice at inflated prices to prop up American rice farmers, who have no business existing -- rice doesn't grow so well in the states and everybody except the government-teat-suckling US farmers would be better off if we just bought our rice cheaper from Asia. The USDA then gives that rice to grant winners, who have to sell the rice in the countries they work in to "monetize" the grant. Meanwhile, rice actually does grow OK in Benin, and Peace Corps devotes a lot of time to developing that sector. But here comes a bunch of American government rice, being unloaded in bulk at now deflated prices, making it harder for local farmers to compete. Aside from that qualm, it seems to me ridiculous to that aid organizations that want USDA grants must also develop international shipping and wholesale units, neither of which have fuck all to do with development, in order to process this rice)

For a while pride was winning, because I think this project actually has some chance of helping Benin. The government has a single-minded fixation on the cotton crop, control of which is the main interest of Benin's various competing factions and which does represent the lion's share of Benin's export revenues. But Benin is kind of shitty at growing cotton. Meanwhile the government pays no attention to the agricultural areas in which Benin has a major comparative advantage. These are pineapples and shea nuts. Benin has absolutely phenomenal pineapples, better even than Ghana, and they are ideally suited to a European market that is far from America's traditional pineappling grounds, Hawaii and Central America. But the industry is a joke. The airport doesn't have the facilities to load pallets of pineapples (note that in this case "facilities" basically just means "forklift"), so they export only a few, and many of those are damaged by hand-loading. The packaging and marketing look so low-rent that nobody in Europe wants to buy them in the supermarket.

Or, if airports aren't your thing, there's the extremely high regional demand for pineapple juice, particularly in Burkina Faso and Nigeria. But we can't export, despite having a number of juicemaking firms, because none of them meet Nigerian hygiene standards.. I was shocked to hear that Nigeria had hygiene standards, let alone that they enforced them.

This project was supposed to fix all that, by picking a couple of the most promising juice firms and getting them certified in various things so they could export. It was going to improve pineapple marketing and fix stuff at the airport so that we could really start moving fruits to Europe. And it was going to do the usual, helping farmers in the fields to grow consistently better fruits.

Now, come to find out, HQ and USDA want us to dramatically cut back the scope of our project. Originally we had 16 activities. Now it's at 4, and I don't yet know which 4. But it's disheartening.

8/4/2015 4:57:53 AM