Luckily, unlike the first person to use that line to open a literary manuscript, the only drug I was on was Imodium. When you’re on a 39-hour bus ride crossing over two international borders in the not-quite-as-developed part of the world, consistency and predictability are very good things to strive for. Of course, unpredictability will follow you everywhere in my part of the world, so when my companions and I realized that keeping to our original plan of going to Benin for a week before skipping back west to Togo would mean another six hours on a stiflingly hot (no A/C in an African Hot Season aperitif served flambé-style) and physically painful bus marathon, not to mention arriving in the most sinister hours of the morning, we stopped in Lovely Lomé. We dragged ourselves into the closest and cheapest hotel, thickly covered in sweat and grime, ankles and feet creepily swollen from sitting, sleep-deprived, and craving Fan Ice, the greatest combination of marketing and ice cream since Dippin’ Dots, and after eating and bathing, passed out.
But all that aside, I was in a good mood. I was on my first tour of the greater West Africa area with two other volunteers, Brooke and Dave, who live nearby Niantanso, and before the bus ride got to the point of excruciating, it was rather interesting. I met a few Israeli girls on the bus who, despite having just completed their requisite military service in combat-zones, still thought I was insane when I described my life in the Peace Corps (“You chose to live in a place like that??”) I also noticed a sharp contrast in scenery between the comparative starkness of the Mali/Burkina Faso landscape and the much more lush and dramatic views entering Togo. I’ve had enough training in PC etiquette that I feel comfortable saying Togo looks a lot more like “Africa” than anywhere I’ve seen before. Palm trees and thick green forests are everywhere, and the villages look much more like those seen in Africa movies from which I’m probably drawing my frames of reference, small huts sticking right out of the bush, rather than surrounded by burnt-out farmlands that I’m used to.
The first few days were spent in pure vacation mode, which mostly involved doing as little of anything as possible, save trying out some of the local dishes (Mali could learn a thing or two about how to make good toh, the staple grain-paste dish) and reveling in the variety of beer that a German-colonized country serves, as compared to the French and predominantly Muslim Mali. The trip only got better as we got lazier making our way to the lovely beach town of Aneho where we stayed at a tropical-themed but not-too-kitschy hotel right on the beach. That leg of the trip was amazing for three main reasons; We met an American couple who are in the Foreign Service and not only were staying at our hotel, not only knew that there were PCVs in the area to look out for, but actually came up to Brooke and I asking if we were the PCVs they had heard about who were on their way to Benin and where our third fellow was. I never did get a straight answer as to where their intel came from, and even as I write this, I worry that a little red laser sight is being trained at the back of my neck. The second reason for said amazingness of Aneho was that we could walk about 23 seconds outside our hotel room and be on the beach in the absolute warmest ocean water I’ve ever felt, and not a single annoying tourist in sight (other than us three). Thirdly, the hotel had a small zoo that included caged alligators, guinea pigs, and a chained monkey, who of course I felt an immediate affinity towards. The monkey clearly felt the same about me: as soon as I approached him coming off the beach, he started examining my toes; as I came closer, it climbed up my bathing suit, perched itself on my arm and started methodically and almost obsessively picking through my chest hairs looking for fleas, occasionally plucking a hair right out and chomping it down. When he climbed up to my shoulder to start giving my head a far-too-excited lice check, I decided that my new friend was getting a bit too close too quickly and I gently let him down to resume screeching at the hotel’s pet dog, while I took the longest shower of my life.
After a few days, we went to the Benin border, only to be told we had to return to the capital of Togo to get our visas at the Beninese Consulate, the location or existence of which was a mystery to literally every person we asked, including the passport and visa center. Finally, we made our way to the American Embassy with minimal assistance from a cabbie who had repeatedly insisted he knew where he was going and repeatedly failed to get anywhere until we gave up on him after an hour. Within 15 minutes on “American soil,” we had an Embassy car and security escort taking us exactly where we needed to go, renewing my faith in the US Government to get done what needs getting done, when major crises like ours emerge.
Finally in Benin, we first went to Cotonou, a generally uninteresting major African city, which is right near Ganvié, an incredibly interesting major African village, built literally over a lake. Ganvié could be considered the Venice of West Africa – it was originally settled and built about five hundred years ago by the Tofinu people who, to protect themselves from their enemies who were not allowed in the water for superstitious reasons, built the village on the water. In my head, I imagine Ganviens standing in the front doors of their houses, built upon stilts rising to a meter above the water level, and wagging their tongues at their hydrophobic adversaries. Going to the village required hiring a pirogue and tour guide, who took us around to see the houses, all of which are on stilts except for the areas with artificially filled-in land, and get a glimpse of how the people live. Their main income is from fishing, and even the town market was just an open area of water where venders paddled in circles with their goods. The only frustration of the trip was the general inhospitality of the locals, who are probably sick and tired of tourists and almost always refuse to allow their pictures to be taken, making it difficult to get good shots of the area.
And what trip to Benin would be complete without participating in two of the country’s most profound legacies, both in Ouidah: the Slave Trade and Vodun. The Africans that were sent to west to become slaves often were brought to the Beninese coast where a slave castle exists today as a museum, memorializing where countless Africans were kept waiting to be shipped off. From the castle, we took the same walk the slaves took down to the beach where the ships would be waiting, and where we saw the Point of No Return Memorial, one of Africa’s universal memorials to a terrible time in its history.
But vacation is no time for too much somberness, and since Ouidah is also a historical and still-surviving hubbub of the Vodun religion, the traditional form of what we know of as Voodoo, we decided to search out the real deal. After a surprisingly easy investigation, we found an old man to lead us across town to the house of a Vodun priest. We went into his shrine alone, which was a small dark room packed full of idols, animal (I hope) bones, paintings and eerie splatters on the wall, and dozens of assorted bizarre artifacts. Inspired by the Lonely Planet guidebook’s insistence that lizard heads and monkey testicles were aplenty, I was hoping to acquire an interesting assortment for myself more as an oddity than anything. But when the priest came into the room looking just like an black Hunter S. Thompson and wearing what may or may not be traditional Vodun garb of cargo shorts and a cell phone company’s polo shirt, and holding about half a dozen idols in his hand, I knew what I wanted to walk away with. When he asked what we were looking to accomplish, Dave said he wanted love and I, protection from harm. The idols Dave would need were two small white male and female figures who would be pegged and tied together to symbolize two people being joined. My idol was, for lack of a better word, a total badass: Ogu Aqboulekhan is the God of Iron and can be willed to protect travel or prevent that which the worshipper wishes to prevent. He is covered in locks, chains, horns, bones, and all the other things that make a real live Vodun idol really really cool. After paying to purchase the idols, the priest offered to demonstrate the ceremony needed to pass ownership and power of the idols to us. Not knowing when we would get to see anything like this ever again, we agreed. For the next two hours, the priest and we drank homemade spirits, tossed shells, poured baby powder and spat soda or gin on the idols and everywhere else (except for Ogu, who was spared the gin because neither the user nor idol is allowed to touch liquor), and recited unpronounceable incantations. But lest we would have gotten bored, at the end of the ceremony, the priest brings in a chicken and with little warning, he twists the chickens head around with a crunch (a “sickening crunch” is a fairly accurate way of putting it, evidenced by the involuntary sympathetic whimper I think I remember making), cuts it’s mouth all the way open and starts sprinkling blood and dropping plucked chicken feathers all over the shrine, the various fetishes, and our brand new soda-covered idols. Luckily for us, this was the grand finale of the ceremony, and before the priest had finished offering to let us remove our shirts to pray at his shrine, we politely declined and left as quickly as possible, Dave and I with our bloody, powdery, feathery and soda-y idols, and Brooke with what is apparently a very powerful marble-sized ball of string (local people have actually shrunk back from fear upon seeing it; I didn’t bother showing them my decidedly creepier and more powerful chain-man).
The trip came to a close and we embarked on what would be a 51-hour trip home, made longer by our bus arriving at all the borders after they had closed for the night and by getting stopped at every checkpoint to bribe the guards not to confiscate the undeclared goods being smuggled in by the merchants on board (don’t even get me started on the time and expense we would have saved by doing things the legal way rather than haggling over the bribe with every gendarmerie we passed). During the long journey (made actually easier by the bus having A/C and a DVD of the best of Jean-Claude Van Damm and Dolph Lundgren films), I had plenty of time to reflect on the differences between Benin, Togo and Mali. The major difference seems to be that the other two countries are, in many ways, nicer. There is clearly more money there, the reasons and results of that are far to lengthy to go into. But what I also noticed is the amazing amount of progress and variety in these countries as compared to Mali, which is very traditional in every sense of the word. Variety was everywhere in Benin and Togo, from the street food to the music. Malian street vendors all tend to sell the same foods and goods, people listen to the same (I think awful) Griot music that has existed forever (even the pop music sounds like Griot with a modern twist). Malians are, in my experience, generally adverse to take risks or trying new things, which are the two things most important to progress. Of course the issues at play are wide-ranging and complex, but it is beginning to occur to me that as much as people hate being one of the poorest countries in the world, the general societal mindset might be the major contributing factor to this stagnation. As far as my service here goes, I worry that I can educate my village all I want, but the actual change that occurs is entirely up to them, and the prospects are looking grim.
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