A day in the life of...

As most other days, I awoke at 7am. I never once managed to sleep past 8am in Benin – what with roosters crowing, goats baying and constant music playing it was impossible. This morning however it was the sounds of my host, Madame B, leaving for the Sunday morning church service which woke me. I hadn’t been invited this time – I had been jokingly condemned to hell (or perhaps to the voodoo gods?) long before.

When I emerged from under my mosquito net I found that Adele, the 16 year old Grade 9 student who often stayed at our house, had already prepared breakfast for her older brother, Amour, and myself. Unfortunately ‘amour’ was the last emotion I believe I could ever feel for her demanding, frustrating, sexist brother. I tucked in to the tapioca-like gel substance, known as ‘bouillie’, which I had grown to love, while attempting to suppress feelings of guilt for being just as big a burden on Adele as all the males in her life. As much as I hated the unequal division of labour in Benin (as I hate it here in Australia), I hadn’t managed to convince the women I lived with that they didn’t have to put me on the other side of the divide (or had I been placed somewhere on the fence?) simply because of my yovo status. I don’t, however, believe Adele classed me quite in the ranks of her brother – she enjoyed listening to our frequent arguments about whether I was to kiss/sleep with/marry Amour far too much for that.

I was ready to go half an hour too early – after 2 months on the ‘time-challenged’ continent, I still hadn’t managed to kick my punctuality habit. True to form, Madame B was half an hour late from church and what with the usual troubles organising a zemidjan we managed to leave Bopa at 10am – one hour behind schedule. We were off to Didehouen, a village about 25 kilometres away, to meet a women’s group who transformed palm nuts into oil and a men’s group who produced the local alcoholic drink, sodabi. Madame B explained I would be denied the luxury of my own zemidjan for the first half of the trip due to the NGOs financial constraints. Thus I perched on the back of the scooter with Madame B sandwiched between myself and the driver – quite a feat considering there are some taxi-moto drivers who refuse to even take Madame B alone because of her size. Sunday, who was our regular driver for NGO outings, was however very accustomed to both Madame’s size and temperament and negotiated the dirt road, complete with pot-holes, with ease. At a small village about 20 minutes down the road we hired the services of another zemidjan. From there we began the second leg of the journey along a path which wasn’t much more than one metre wide in parts and had a surface similar to corrugated iron. While we were driving along I realised I could have cycled a similar distance in an equivalent time back home – not that I would want to take my bike along this track.

Finally we reached the meeting point – a few wooden benches and chairs placed under a branch shelter next to the community’s water pump. After we sat ourselves down on a bench, several men from the village came and greeted us. Madame B declined the traditional offering of water on my behalf – she knew I didn’t want to tempt Giardia. I quickly ascertained that French skills were at a bare minimum here – we were too far out in the styx. It was to be another lesson in patience and incomprehension for me – not to forget a lot of smiling. Over the next hour more people slowly appeared, mostly women, and all the while Madame B carried on a tirade to those present. Even though my knowledge of the local language was limited to zemidjan, and basic greetings and responses, I could guess she was complaining about the group’s tardiness. I never could quite comprehend her anger considering I cannot remember having ever arrived on time to anything with Madame. Meanwhile the zemidjans made no attempt to hide their boredom, settling down on a mat to have a siesta.

Eventually some of the women began setting out their basins in preparation for the palm oil production. I took several photographs, as I knew was expected of me, and asked a few questions of the group. Although not immediately apparent, there were three men in this group of 21 members. They weren’t helping today in the production because, the women explained, the men did the difficult work such as the collection of nuts from the field. I found this dubious considering on my departure later in the day we drove past two women and one man all carrying machetes, with the women balancing basins of nuts on their heads. The feeble sex obviously found some strength to help their hard working brothers in the task. Besides, the nut crushing performed by the women seemed pretty labour intensive to me, and definitely no lower on the scale of effort exerted than nut collection.

After sitting back down again, Madame explained to me in French that she was going to lead the group in discussion of the proper behaviour of group members. She gave me a brief summary of the qualities expected in group members: humility, respect for leaders… It sounded more like a Sunday School lesson to me, but I wasn’t in a position to say anything. I sat quietly in ignorance for the next little while, immersed in the sounds of a foreign language, their local language which just a few kilometres down the road was sure to be a little different, sweating in the heat of midday, while staving off my hunger pangs knowing full well that the little bread and cheese I had in the morning was much more than most of the people around me had eaten. Indeed the majority would never have even tasted the cheese which I, as somebody who labels herself vegan in Australia, would normally disdain. Although I’m not sure if cheese-tasting is one of life’s necessities. I knew the discussion had come to an end when the group began their ‘praise clapping’: three short claps, another three and then pointing their palms towards whoever they wished to thank – who, in my experience, was usually either Madame or myself. I rarely did anything to deserve a group’s praise, but my presence as a white person seemed to be enough. I had been in Benin long enough to know that these people were pinning a lot of hopes on me – as a yovo I represented a link to the wider world of NGO partnerships and unlimited funding. I was glad that Madame had not asked me to speak at this gathering, so I wasn’t forced to make a choice between spinning half-empty promises or dashing their hopes with honest words.

From her PVC ‘Wallace and Grommit’ bag, Madame pulled out a set of pink bathroom scales, complete with a dancing frog on the front. She pressed them down into the black earth trying to create a reasonably flat surface. This was in stark contrast to the image I had conjured up of child weighing sessions after reading the volunteer program itinerary sent to me before departure from Australia – perhaps a small building with few to none facilities, where women and children would be queuing up, probably with nowhere to sit, waiting for their child(ren) to be weighed and for advice and support to be provided. At the same time I was haunted by memories of my science teacher father berating me for using our scales on uneven ground such as the carpeted lounge room. I kept quiet, telling myself the inaccuracies would somehow balance out after repeated weighings and besides, there was no concrete surface in sight. Before the weighing of the under-5s began, the long process of recording the full names and birth dates of the children had to be conducted. The group burst into laughter each time a mother had trouble remembering the French name of her child. The entertainment continued with several children bursting into tears when it came their turn to make the mighty step onto the foreign bathroom scales.

The weighing session over, we walked a short distance along a track where I found myself amongst some houses that I hadn’t been able to see from the shelter. It was the men’s turn to show me their working group’s activities. I was taken to the sodabi-production area: an arrangement of 4 barrels, the first full of the sap obtained from many palm trees. A tube travelled from it through 2 barrels of water that were there to cool the vapour obtained from the heating of the first barrel full of liquid. From out of the last barrel slowly dripped the finished product – sodabi, the local alcoholic drink.

I couldn’t help but notice that once again the men had managed to land themselves with the least labour-intensive activity. Admittedly, it may have taken some effort to perfect the production line, and they still had to collect the initial palm sap, but I suspected they would have more time to spend drinking the sodabi than their wives.