Holy Broken Toe, Batman!

So happened since last time. I actually had to look at my personal journal to get a little refreshed. I guess I’ll back it up to last Saturday. So it’s become a tradition now (since it’s happened twice) that the SED and TEFL volunteers meet up on Saturdays at the Cactus Bar to hang out for a while. Some of the posted pictures are from that event. After that I headed home to meet up with my brother. The plan was originally to go to “Panama”, which is a “nightclub” in Benin. In reality, it’s just kinda some dude’s porch. I had originally invited my friends to come out with us as well, but on my bike ride home, by brother had sent me a text saying that he was too tired to go out and had apparently informed the entire neighborhood of this, so nobody was ready to go. Long story short, I temporarily forgot French and couldn’t convey the message that I needed to tell my friends that we weren’t coming anymore. The more I asked if I should tell my friends that we weren’t coming, the more my brother delayed my answer. After about an hour and a half of waiting, we met up with my friends at Panama porch.

The club was quite an event. First off, there are hardly any women there, and those that are there are apparently of the “women of the night” (at least from the local crowd, I’m about to get beat up by the Peace Corps girls :P) So it’s a whole bunch of dudes, my group of American friends, and me. The club had its fair share of creepy guys too. I don’t think I’ve ever pulled the “sorority girl save” so many times in one night. If you’re wondering what that is, it’s what you see at bars back in the states when a guy tries to dance with an uninterested girl. The difference is, in the states, the guy will stop chasing her, while here he thinks he’s invited. In addition, with the giant lack of women at the bar, it’s a little weird seeing all these guys dance with each other. Homosexuality is a big no-no here, but apparently dudes dancing up on each other and holding hands while walking down the street is totally normal. Go figure. So after a sweaty night that I’m pretty sure got me this cold I’m getting over, I headed off to bed. The next morning, my brother woke me up at like 8, bear in mind we got home at 230, and then proceeded to instruct me on how to deal with the day after going out…in general. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t my first rodeo, but they don’t have rodeo’s here so he kept knocking on my door. Apparently, the drill is: eat, shower, eat, sleep again. TIA.

I did make it out to mass again, which was nice this time because it was only 1:45 long, but unfortunately, I showed up about an hour early. Apparently that’s what you get for asking what the Catholic mass times are from your Muslim friends. No biggie though, I just ended up praying for a bit.

Monday was French…all day. I think it was about 6 hours total, and even though I love speaking French, 6 hours of any type of instruction can make anyone bored. Tuesdays are “administrative” days, which can equal tic-tac-toe, hangman, or a new one called stix that I just learned. Most the time I’m listening, but sometimes I get a little bit frustrated with having to be told how to avoid malaria (ie: keep mosquitoes away, take your pills, etc). I guess that’s part of the red tape of being in the Peace Corps.

Kinda random, but the pic to the left is my neighborhood.

Wednesday was the fateful day of the broken toe. After class we headed over to the soccer field at the other school. Now my papa had told me to make sure I played with shoes wherever I went…but nobody else was so I figured I’d take my chances. What I thought was sand ended up being up being just really hard, red earth and what I thought was a very stubbed toe ended up being a broken toe. It wasn’t until a chunk of skin came outta my other toe that I stopped playing. Oddly enough, neither of the injuries ended up being painful at all, at any point, and are currently healing well.

I figured I’d wait it out for a day, but when I saw how swollen it was the next morning (check the pic), I figured it might be a good idea to talk to the doctor. Before I did, I wanted to get a chance to make our presentation that was planned for the next day called Accounting for Illiterates.

The first of August was the Beninese Independence Day. 'The first of August, proud to be Beninese

So the deal is, in Benin (and most countries where the Peace Corps is), there is a big problem with small businesses not accounting for their expenditures and income. Another common problem that goes along with this also includes not knowing how to read or write. Luckily, the Peace Corps has devised a system which allows people who are illiterate to accomplish this seemingly simple task.

So the first picture is how money is represented. The left column represents the symbol for the money, and then the right indicates the value. Now I put together a little exercise for those of you who want to keep you minds fresh during syllabus week. Try to calculate what each of the values are, I flipped the answer and put it a little further down. Keep in mind, if you can’t figure it out, the only excuse you should have is that you are below the age of 3. Just wait, I bet I got one of them wrong. And, yes, I do have too much time on my hands….and Microsoft paint on my computer. So anyways, if you got the numbers right, you can then see a little further down how we represent numbers with tick marks. Basically, the way the actual accounting book works is that there are a series of columns, each column has a denomination at the top, and the top left corner has the month. Each respective row has the day of the week, and with each day, depending on whether or not it’s the income or expenses sheet, each purchase is accounted for and then summed at the end of the week. .

The experience itself was great. We had to present in French, but luckily, the people that we were presenting to didn’t know French either so we had a translator translate everything into Gun (Goon), which is certainly a language that I should learn before I leave . That made us seem a lot smarter than we actually were. Neat. They asked a lot of questions, and by then end seemed really interested in having another class. One of our volunteers will be posted there, so hopefully he’ll be able to get them some supplies and follow up on that.

One might ask, “why not just teach them basic math?”. I too have asked that question…and quite honestly I will probably give that a shot when I get to post. Apparently this method is able to at least get someone in the habit of keeping track of where their money is going because there are some businesses that frequently run in the red without even knowing about it. In addition, this is something that is really easy to pass on since its just tick marks and colors, where as numbers can be a little intimidating. Either way, this was a blast and I hope I’ll be able to continue to do stuff like this when I get to post.

That day, I also found out about my post assignment. Though I can’t say where it is on the blog, if you want to know, email me rich.pasquesi@gmail.com and I’ll send you my generic email about it. The work that I’ll be doing will be with an organization called CLCAM which does a lot of microfinance and savings. In addition, I’ll be working with women’s artisan groups to help them to get organized as best I can. I’ll give more details on this as my work comes at post.

After we left accounting for illiterates, I made a call to the doctor to let him know about my foot issue. He told me that I needed to immediately get on the shuttle to Cotonou, which kind of upset me considering we were all going to celebrate finding out our post. What it did mean was air conditioning and a quite room to sleep in, so I guess it was a nice consolation prize. Overall, a great night still, and I got to use my laptop with the internet, which was a fine break.

The next day, I headed downstairs to the doctor’s office in my PJ’s and he had a look at my toe. After telling me that he didn’t think it was broken, he sent me off to the X-ray clinic just to be sure. After going into 2 different waiting rooms and then waiting another hour for my x-rays, it came back that the top of my big left toe was indeed broken. Still, it didn’t hurt, but it was weird to look at the x-ray of my toe and see crack. The doctor ended up sending me to another doctor, who ended up using the athletic tape I just happened to have to tape my toes together. I’ll be riding the bench for 3 weeks as a result, but luckily it’s half as long as a normal break and even better, it doesn’t hurt. It was just really swollen…goo. After hitching a ride back to Porto Novo, I kinda fudged the truth about playing without my shoes on to my Papa, and then headed off to some sweaty sleep.

Saturday with SED TEFL was fun again. We made banana pancakes and hashbrowns. Delicious. The pic to the left is me going through pancake withdrawal.

Sunday was a crazy church day (again). JUST THE MASS, was 3 hours and 30 minutes. I left at 3 hours, which was well after communion. Apparently that’s not normal for it to be this long, but because there were 2 new priests and Marys assumption, they felt the need for an hour long homily in 2 languages and like a 30 minute jamfest in the middle. I’m all about church, but I had about 4 hours of washing my clothes to take care of later. Speaking of which, I don’t know if its that there isn’t as much dust or stuff in the US, but my family makes me clean my clothes until they are literally perfect here. Somehow all of the dirt comes out in the States with a weakly rotating spiraled plastic blade. I think it’s more that our thought of clean is “not smelly”, whereas theirs is “new”.

Overall, I’m still really happy about my experience here. My French gets better every day and I’ve actually moved up a level in my classes. Next Wednesday is our tech visit where we get to visit a SED volunteer and see how everyday life is for him/her. Life is pretty stress free so far and I’ve been working pretty hard on everything. Not really feeling the whole “tons of free time” thing I’ve been hearing about, but apparently that starts when we get to post. I hope not, I like being busy. Alright, I’m gonna get out of here. Take it easy!’

Prayer requests: That my big toe heals quick, that French improves, and that I can start to focus more of my energy on preparing for next month’s move to post. Also, my older brother, Fauzi, has malaria, so a quick recovery for him (don’t worry, he’s had it before and the family doesn’t seem too scared) God bless!