Ganni Festival, Semester Grades, and Aired-up Tires

Feb 16

4 min read

I had an experience last week that writes itself into a metaphor. Remember a few weeks ago when I complained about how difficult I was finding biking? It turns out that my tires were fatally low on air. The second I invested in getting them pumped up, I was shocked to find my bike ride required far less energy and that it was even- enjoyable? Go figure. When you air up your tires, you can go a lot further. Today, I went to go get groceries in the nearby city, and even returning with 10 kilograms of supplies on my back, my ride was less effortful than a ten minute escapade on my deinflated tires. Fill up your tires! Literally and metaphorically! I’ve learned intimately that flat tires won’t take you far.

Last week, I attended the Ganni festival in Tchatchou, a village in Northern Benin. It was a treat to see my fellow volunteers and to take in a new aspect of Beninese culture. Here, I’ll share the knowledge of another volunteer who lives up North:

“Ganni celebrations are held throughout the year in parts of Benin, Nigeria, and Togo where Bariba communities are found. They celebrate the shared language, culture, and destiny of the ethnic group. The celebrations are a commemoration of peace returning to Bariba communities after a failed attack by armed militant groups more than 600 years ago. The name ‘Ganni’ signifies joy and victory.

These days of celebration are marked by presentations of dancing horses and groups of men (or women or children) dancing for the kings, accompanied by the songs of tam-tams (our local drums). I was recenrly told that the rhythyms played on the tam-tams are a way of communicating.”

This week was spent calculating student grades for the first semester of work. It took the entire week because along with our students, we pulled out calculators to manually sum up student performance. It was exhausting and asinine to me with my American sensibilities and Microsoft Excel sheets, but as the week wore on, I realized that though my formulas and sheets were indeed far more effective, there was some real community building going on amidst the calculation. Without the relentless pressure of lessons and the national curriculum, for a week, students and teachers joked together and enjoyed one another’s company. It was delightful and human when I looked at it that way instead. Nonetheless, I will be seeking to facilitate some digital literacy trainings in the future, because if the more laid back week is part of calculating grades, I want that to be by choice rather than out of necessity.

The book club continues! The book of the week is How Beautiful We Were Imbolo Mbue. First of all, I just want to pitch this book to anyone who hasn’t yet experienced it. Mbue crafts a narrative in which a fictional town called Kosawa in a fictional African nation reels from the ongoing effects of an American company called Pexton drilling for oil on their land. Children grow sick and die. Crops fail. The water turns to sludge. But it isn’t the story of a people who simply accept what is happening to them. They fight. A small village already abandoned by their government as a necessary sacrifice to parake in the riches of Pexton fight on for weeks, months, years, lifetimes.

Reading How Beautiful We Were is a dance that never ends until hours later, you look up stupified to realize the music has been turned off. Mbue is a real word weaver, a persistent and honest crafter of a world all too recognizable as our own. This book made me laugh, cry, set butterflies off in my stomach, ponder my own role as an actor of foreign aid and what I can and cannot offer to my community. It reminded me of the ways in which I’ll never understand, but showed me that those differences are nothing to be frightened of. We can love through and learn from them. As the main character Thula reflects, “We might not live to see the day Kosawa or our country comes out of its darkness into the light, but we’ll forge forward believing, because there’s no other way to live” (Mbue 279). It’s hard to watch from afar as the light flickers in my own country, but I am comforted by everyone at home who carries candles within them. It is a small source of light, but it brightens lives. It matters.

And what I love about this book is that it isn’t naive in its hope, it earns its deep seated conviction through music and blood and triumph. Busrides and sweat. Goats slain and songs sung and bottle water and men who change. Lives lived and lost. Despite it all, Mbue insists, there’s no other way to live. The book’s ending was not the triumphant finale that I expected after growing to know and love Kosawa. It was a disappointment. Mbue implores us to bear our dissapointments, though: “Change may come when it’s ready to come, he says, or it may never,” and nonetheless, we must be ready to greet it when it calls out to us (Mbue 274). I’ll never stop living with kindness and connection as my first priority, with a hope for a brighter world. There’s no other way to live.