Reflections - Personal Understandings of My Position in a New Place

It isn’t all in French! Just this first part :)

“A Letter of Gratitude and Advice for Myself”

Une Lettre de Gratitude et Conseils pour Moi-Meme

Chère Lena

Vivre dans un pays étrangere, c’est très difficile! Il y a beaucoup de choses à apprendre. Même si, ne t'inquiètes pas. Tu apprends peu à peu. C’est normal. Les choses difficiles font partie de la vie! C’est pas toujours amusant… mais je promets que les bonnes choses vallait la peine. Souviens les couchers de soleil, les livres qui font un monde illimité, les amis chaleureux qui ont beaucoup du courage pour continuer. N’oublies pas les moments quand tu sais que tu as grandi, les petits rires, le pouvoir dans ta voix. Quelque fois, ça va mal. C’est la réalité.

Les conseils d'amélioration:

• Prends un repose tout de suite

• Bois de l’eau

• Manges quelque chose

• Tu te laves

• Si tu peux, écrire, lire, ou fais les deux!!!

Penses, combien des heures as-tu passé sur les réseaux sociaux. N’oublies pas que c'est important de respirer. Cherches les belles choses. Elles se trouvent dans tous. Je suis déjà fière de toi. Tu peux le faire, peu à peu.

Avec amour, 

Lena

I reached level intermediate high! This is the level I need to be at to be sworn in. I’m very gratified to have reached this milestone. That said, I have much further to go with French. While I am more comfortable communicating myself, if you’re a French speaker, you’ve doubtless noted some of my patterns of errors. Luckily, as a TEFL volunteer, I’ll be remaining in French classes as the bulk of my work outside of teaching English class will be conducted in French. I’m aiming to reach at least level advanced low by swear-in to give me a goal to aim for.

This week was SO focused on language it wasn’t even funny. On Wednesday, we found out we’d be leading a training for Beninese students… all in French! With the way our groups split up, it turned out that all the intermediate speakers ended up in one group and all the advanced speakers in the other. This was terrifying to realize. The wide-eyed looks the advanced speakers gave our group when we understood the task sealed my feeling.

When it was time to settle into working time, my group rallied together. This wasn’t going to be perfect, we reasoned, but with the French copy of the activity we were going to present, we had the language we needed to carry this out. We spent the rest of the afternoon making plans and writing out potential strains of conversation in French. We wrote scripts for the instructions. We practiced responding to questions and discussing with our teacher.

I was impossibly nervous on Thursday morning. I put on very professional clothing to remind myself that I was prepared. Language class, the block before the presentation, was drudgery as I mentally rehearsed the following session in my mind.

Finally, it was time. About ten students clambered into our class. We started delivering instructions. Near the end of our schpiel, about ten more students joined the group, so we started over. We started small group work time. Elizabeth and I worked with the girls and Henri with the boys. The task was to create a schedule for the average Beninese student. The ultimate goal is to help participants think of possible similarities and differences between two average students in terms of gendered roles and jobs as well as means that could reduce the overall workload, as often, female students end up helping with more domestic chores. The idea is to help students identify that (providing the pattern that exists within the audience-generated evidence) and brainstorm possible solutions.

When the groups came back together to discuss, it was frustrating to not really grasp the points being made. I had to rely a lot on the gender and tone of the speaker, as well as the reactions of the group. I believe that we accomplished our goal of helping our participants think about their schedules critically based on small conversations I had with individuals throughout the session, but I don’t know what the overarching group narrative ended as and that’s bothersome to me, especially when I care so much about interpersonal exploration, especially in terms of gender. Overall, it wasn’t the most graceful thing, but it was validating to realize that this task was nearly within my grasp. More motivation to improve!

This Saturday, we took our long-awaited field trip to Ouidah in the Atlantique district. It was primarily a cultural field trip. We visited a sacred forest, light filtering softly through the branches, exploring the deities of a religion older than recorded history. Our guide was deeply connected with the history of Ouidah. She told us stories about her grandfather, a mayor of Ouidah who was thrown in jail when he refused to tear down the sacred forest in the 1970s. She recounted his sentiment: “no one knows when Voudun began. I’m not going to be the one to end it.” It was humbling and rewarding to learn more about a religion with such deep roots.

We also visited the Python Temple. I held a snake! In the temple, they don’t feed the pythons because the pythons won’t eat if they don’t get to constrict their prey themselves, and the temple facilitators don’t want to let live mice loose in the temple. Once a month, they set the pythons loose. The facilitators told us they crop up in peoples’ kitchens, bedrooms, yards, and more. Because the pythons are sacred, Ouidah residents never hurt the pythons. They call the temple to take them back. The pythons are sacred because, in the past, they have helped the crops to grow. 

After the temple, we turned our minds towards a darker part of Ouidah’s past: the slave market and the door of no return. We started at the market. I turned off my camera and listened quietly as the guide explained the city’s complicated relationship with Francisco Felix de Souza, a Portuguese man who is considered a father of the city, but at once, was one of the “largest slave merchants in the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade” (Sieff, 2018, “An African Country Reckons with its History of Selling Slaves”).

From the market, we followed the same path the slaves walked in chains to the ocean. We stopped at the site of the mass grave where those too sick or elderly to go on were left, without any respect. Now, the site is commemorated by a monument that beautifully renders the harrowing history of enslavement that, for many, began in Ouidah.

We continued down the path, ending at the beach and the door of no return. It was sobering to stand in the place where so many Africans left behind the world they knew. The power of the Atlantic Ocean behind the gates stunned me. The massive surf and powerful tides washed in higher than I could stand. I took in the vastness of the ocean, the crash of the waves, and the endless expanse of gray blue. It didn’t have any answers for me.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to grapple with a wide breadth of Beninese history. I’m planning to continue researching and learning more about Benin, the United States, and the slave trade. It’s a complicated, painful knot, but ignoring it will not make things better.

This has been a good week. I’m gaining confidence with the tools I’ve been cultivating to better understand and integrate into Beninese culture. Next week is the counterpart workshop! I’m about to meet two of my biggest pillars of support for the next two years. I’m going to bring out all the Beninese tissue I own. It’s important to make a good impression! The week after that is on-the-job training, where I’ll get to go stay at my site for a week! I’m impossibly excited to see my house and school and start making connections in the community. My next blog post will come from my new home!

Write me! It made me so happy to hear from many of you last week.

Love,

Lena

The content of this blog post is mine alone and does not reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Benin Government.