Boukoumbe

The rain. It’s raining now. It started about 10 minutes ago. At home, they would call these daily spurts ‘flash floods’, but here it’s seen as both ‘the rainy season’, and ‘free water’.
There are 3 seasons here in Benin: You have a rainy and dry season, and then you have the Harmattan Season. I could be wrong about when these all occur, but I think I've got it right: The Harmattan is a dessert wind that is very strong and carries a lot of dust, and apparently it comes during the night and it brings the cool dessert morning air. This is the coldest part of the year. The dust is going to be fun, I hear. You could sweep it up, but more is scheduled to arrive on the early wind the next day, but then again if you don’t sweep it up then it accumulates to a filth-ridden pigsty…. But I’m not there yet. The dry season is right before that, and it's the season that's the hardest to handle. It's the hottest part of the year. They say you’re just miserable for the middle 3 to 4 hours of the day in the dry season. I guess a lot of people sleep outside because it’s so bad. No, I still have a whole rainy season to enjoy...well technically it should be ending soon, but it owes us some time for starting late. It just began… It is possible that the dust won't be so bad for me in the Harmattan though, because Boukoumbe is in the hills...
Ahhhh, Boukoumbé. I’m miserably excited about it. It’s a little bit of a tease…. Only 45k away, yet so very, very far away. In my placement interviews with Jacque, my ACPD (Assistant Country PC Director), I remember he asked me, “Do you have any preferences for your placement?” … My only response was as honest as it gets, “I just want to be somewhere beautiful where I can show my shoulders.” … looking back, that seems like a very funny answer, but the pressure was on, and I wanted the truth to be out there…. And for some reason it really bothers me to always have to worry about weather my shoulders are covered enough to be culturally acceptable. Well, I got what I asked for. Boukoumbé is almost completely an animist (voodoo) society, and it is in the middle of this beautiful valley surrounded by rolling, beautiful, green, lush, mystical hills. Only in the last 30 years have these people began to be affected by the western world, and even in my brief visit there I saw plenty of topless old women working in the fields. Don’t worry though… I definitely won’t be as liberal as they are. I just want to wear my spaghetti strap shirts again!
After my response to his question, Jacque continued with another question; “How would you feel about working on eco-tourism?”…. My first thought, which was also inadvertently voiced immediately as well: “Oh my god, is that possible!!!! How come I never knew this???!!! YES. I would love that.” The rest is history. Boukoumbé is my new home, and I’m ecstatic. You guys should see these Tata Somba’s that people live in there.
Okay, so I also just read the description of Boukoumbé in my book “Benin: The Guide to Benin”… they didn’t mess around much with that title, eh…. Anyway, after reading about Boukoumbé I have this vivid image painted in my head of these people.
First of all, it said that the Somba people, who speak Betammaribé, built their Tata Somba’s actually as forts that usually don’t have front doors. Instead there is a ladder that you have to use to climb over the wall to get inside. The one I saw had a front door, but I think the design might actually be a regional thing.
Because of this fortification the Somba people weren’t affected at all by the slave traders, because the slave traders quickly learned that it would take one strong and harsh attack just to capture one family, so the Somba’s were left alone. About 30 years ago some French person discovered these Somba people, and wrote an article about them and the fact that they had been, “…completely uninfluenced by western society…”…. And so of course, after that the western society did it’s best to find them. Now, Boukoumbé is one of the only touristy spots in Northern Benin, but by ‘touristy’, I mean that probably 5 people role in a day to check the place out, if even that. That’s completely a guess though. Anyway, these people don’t always live in their Tata Somba’s so much any more, but some do, and they’ve added a little more clothing into their diet, from what I understand…. You know that mental image of Africans in loin clothes living in mud huts? … that’s what I imagine these people might have been like 30 years ago. I also hear that they love their festivities and their culture, and it's really intense. To give you another idea, this is one of the tribes that practices (yes, that’s present tense) FGM. Oh yeah, they also have a market there where people still come to trade things like bows and arrows and a lot of voodoo fetish stuff, but I’m sure they have other things as well. Okay, it really should be remembered that these are all just my mental images trying to grasp hold of the itty bitty inklings of information I’ve been given. I do know that they definitely have been affected by the western world though in a big way. A true sign of this; I will have electricity at my post.

I just got done playing Duck Duck Goose with all the kids in my family. It cracked me up, they were saying “dutch” instead of “duck” and “goo” for “goose”. They wanted me to remember more, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of any. I struggled with remembering what you did after someone started chasing you in Duck Duck goose! Now they want me to remember more as well! I never saw my childhood as being that far in the past till I tried to remember all the games I played. They already know and play a lot of the same ones, actually. They already play all of the hand slap games…. The only difference is the songs we sing, and some of those are the same but with words in french. They also already know and play tug-of-war and London bridges. What else is there to play? Hmmmm… I’m going to have to ponder this one. Where’s the old Nintendo when you need it? Hahaha.
It just occurred to me that it’s pretty odd to have kids around that are looking for entertainment that doesn’t involve a tv. This just seems like it is really how kids should grow up. You should see these kids. They’re rugged. These kids run and fall all the time, and there’s no crying about it. They just get up and run some more. Was I that durable at some point? Could I still be now? The even crazier thing about it all is that there’s no one telling them what’s safe and what’s not. You want to go play in the street? GO! Go play in the street! If they get hurt they’ll be more careful the next time…. At least, that seems to be the logic. Who knows, I could be wrong on this, but I just seem to catch a lot of this kids right in the middle of the ‘trial’ phase of most of their trials and errors.
These kids get along together so well, too…. I’m really amazed at how good they are to each other. They’re always sharing and helping each other…. It’s so odd. Shouldn’t they be screaming at each other and saying, “that’s mine!!!” … Maybe I just don’t understand enough Dendi… or French for that matter. Even if you watch them though, they are always considerate of each other. Damn you ‘collective societies’ and your ‘non-individualism’!!! What fun is childhood without the daily yelling, screaming fight (or 5) of “he said… she said” and “he took my toy!!!”… Ya know, it’s the subtle cultural differences that are really mind-boggling. I thought all kids acted the way I did when I was little. Now, I see that even that was a backlash of my culture. Could the fact that I was an only child have something to do with it?
.........I stopped here.... I probably fell asleep.