En famille à Porto Novo

Thursday 7/22/10

My neck hurts every time we take a bus somewhere because there’s so much to see I’m glued to the window the entire time.  It’s hard to know where to start.  We met our host families yesterday - my maman (mom) came to get me and I met the rest of the family once we got home.  I have a mom (a midwife), dad (professor in Cotonou), sister (Marlyse, who’s studying medical marketing and is around my age), a brother (Serge, who I haven’t met yet), a sister-in-law (Serge’s wife Elise), and two little nephews (Precieux (Precious) and Junior) who are both under 2 years old.  I have my own room with a big bed and my very own mosquito net, and there are a few little lizards that come and hang out in the bathroom whenever I take a shower.  My maman refers to me as her daughter et elle appelle Marlyse ma soeur alors que je me sens comme une membre de la famille, alors je lui appelle maman.  

             I’ve been eating a lot better here than in Cotonou. Vegetables! Fruit! We had to fill out a form with our likes and dislikes to give to our family and my maman has been stickin to it.  I helped her cook dinner tonight, which actually meant standing around and watching her cook.  She takes the must-clean-food-sensitive-American-stomach thing seriously. Case in point, she washed the lettuce six times and let it sit in water with bleach in it for an hour.  She doesn’t want me to get sick and I am not complaining, because so far so good.  We had salad with carrots and egg and peppers, pate (pronounced like pat as in pat the bunny) blanche, which is sorta like glutinous grits and doesn’t have much flavor, and sauce which was tomatoes, onions, spices, smoked fish (watch out for bones), and something spinach-like which is called boma in Fon.  Sugarcane for dessert which is pretty fun to eat. Fon is a local language and an ethnic group, one of the more common ones in Benin.

            I’m in Porto Novo now, which is the capital but is actually a smaller city than Cotonou.  There are some paved roads but most are red dirt.  Not flat, smooth roads with lanes though.  No, no, bumpy, pitted, crazily uneven, muddy, unnamed roads.  Today was our first day of class and Marlyse drove me to school on her zemi.  Riding on a zemi is SOO FUN if you ignore the life-shortening fumes you’re inhaling the whole time. Again, there’s so much to look at it’s like a movie and I just hold onto the back and try to take it in.  We started this morning by having a ‘host family debriefing’, yes they actually called it that, during which everyone just talked about what their night was like.  We had language class after that for a few hours, ate lunch, and then went to introduce ourselves to the mayor of Porto Novo in a 60s era bus with a door that didn’t shut all the way.  A bus full of white people is understandably an oddity in Benin, and it was entertaining to look out the window and see everyone completely stop whatever they were doing to just stare.  Hair cuts, meals, conversations all came to a halt.  Lots of little kids jumping up and down yelling yovo, yovo! too.  Yovo means foreigner/whitey. 

I miss you all TONS and I will try to keep this updated as best I can.  I’m planning to buy a cell phone sometime soon too so I may even be able to call!         

p.s. I'm posting both of these today even though I wrote them earlier because we're at Centre Songhai and can get wireless here!