This week has been one wave after another of unwelcome news. I hadn’t laid my sandbags. I was a bit flooded, honestly. The water was cold, a shock to my system. The vastness of it clouded my brain, fuzziness. Does this impact my work? What counts as diverse? If the United States seems to be taking on an isolationist tilt, what does that mean for my mission here? Is the rug about to get pulled out from under me again?
the ins and outs of the simple present to my 6ème students. “Donald Trump has taken power?” my counterpart asks me. I get confused because the power in my village had been cut all day. Donald Trump took OUR power? No, of course not. After clarifying, I confirmed that it was true, Donald Trump now held the office of president.
I was actually grateful for the overwhelming amount of work Tuesday poses. Either/or and Neither/nor and the present perfect and affirmative, negative, interrogative sentences. In the evening, I spent time with the Adja language. Un fon nywida a. Ee, un fon nywide. How do I clean this up?
I settled for sorting my Google Drive files, creating microscopic tables of contents, calendars, budget trackers. No one can tell ME that my expenses are redundant because look! I now track them all! I made a LinkedIn. No one can tell ME that my work is actually divisive or a waste of tax payer money! Check out my skills for verification.
It’s funny that I took refuge in policy and papework against an utter upheval of business as usual. My primary work isn’t directly impacted because I’m cheap and my work here is already in the plans. My secondary work of Peer Support and Gender Equity actually could be threatened by the vague new orders of the day.
I’ve settled on a disposition, though. It’s business as usual until I get directly reprimanded. I’m in a great position here. I’m not an employee, I’m a volunteer. I’m going to use my individual autonomy to continue to celebrate and honor diverse perspectives and experiences.
After all,
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.
On Wednesday, I caught a taxi to Cotonou, the economic capitol of Benin, to prepare for a meeting to take place the following day. The meeting is for Young Professionals in Training (YPiT) a program designed to bring students from across Benin to Cotonou for training and job shadowing. I’m the first-year coordinatrice (coordinator). It’s so rewarding to get a close look at the process of brainstorming to grant application to planning details to eventual execution. It’s a tremendous amount of work for an eventual brilliantly qualitative experience for the 32 incoming students this April. It was a pleasure to sit in the conference room, my peers and my bosses bandying about ideas and necessary considerations. In that moment, I remembered that this is how the good work happens. Slowly, but steadily, and with great debate. Sweeping, under-considered changes often don’t stand. Not under scrutiny or even under basic examination. One week of news is hardly enough to make me lose hope. As if.
To clarify, I have a lot of worry, anxiety, and anger lurking under my surface, but I’m going to temper that with my hope for a better world. It’s how we’ll move forward. To quote Angela Davis in her quoting of Dr. Martin Luther King, “We should not capitulate to finite disappointments, but believing and work with infinite hope.” Watch the whole thing here.
After my meeting on Thursday, I was persuaded to stay in town by my friends, and I’m so glad that I stayed. I found my way to the Kennedy-King library in the American Center at the US Embassy, and I fell gratefully into the company of my loosely bound paper friends. The unorganized collection made me smile broadly. Maya Angelou next to Fifty Shades of Gray next to the Iliad next to The Fault in Our Stars next to James Baldwin, a mélange of French and English texts. As I waited to register for my card, I curled up with Lettre à ma Fille, the French translation of Angelou’s “Letter to my Daughter.” It was stunningly translucent and radically necessary to read her words, even though I didn’t read the text in its original language.
“Tu ne peux contrôler tous les événements qui t’arrivent, mais tu peux décider de ne pas être réduite à eux. Essaie d’être un arc-en-ciel dans le nuage d’autrui. Ne te plains pas. Fais tout ton possibile pour changer les choses qui te déplaisent et si tu ne peux opérer aucun changement, change ta façon de les appréhender. Tu vas trouver un solution.”
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”
Something I didn’t know: Maya Angelou doesn’t have any daughters. She’s talking to us, her millions of daughters. Her black, white, Jewish, Muslim, Asian, Latinx, Native American daughters. That love ties us together, and that can’t be taken away.
Reading in French made me so happy. I didn’t take the meaning of every word, but Angelou’s message of hope rang clear. Regardless of language, nationality, religion, we can stand together with love in common. I can tell you firsthand that it’s not always the easiest creed to live by. There are misunderstandings and occasions of overstepping. There’s lots of sweat and awkward apologies and moments where you doubt yourself and how you can align what you’ve seen with your values and the truth. But with love first, there’s a way. That’s what I’ve decided this week. I don’t say this frivolously. Love is beautiful, but I don’t see it as fragile as a flower. Love is the iron that’s going to support me for the rest of my service.
In other news, when I got home from Cotonou, the girls in my commune ran to me as if I’d been gone for weeks rather than days. They took my luggage and waited patiently for me to unlock my door. I swept and took stock of my house. There’s some unidentified feces on my back porch. I asked my resource father if he knew what might be doing that. I guess it’s the magouillards. The lizards! The same lizards that my cohort made our mascot when we first arrived to Benin. And now it’s shitting all over my back porch! I never would have guessed it was the lizards. The poop seems way too big for that. But nonetheless, that’s what it is. I think I’ll be curing these magouillards every time I see more, but as always, I’ll just keep sweeping it away.
With hope and 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.
Related Posts
