Holiday Greetings from Materi
Trip Start
Sep 22, 2003
1
15
62
Trip End
Dec 13, 2005
Natitengou,
Benin
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Well I guess we should go in cronological order starting from our trip up to Materi.
All the PCVs tell you that you should savor your trip up to your site because it's the only time you a provided a bush taxi all to yourself. So Rebecca and I had a station wagon cramed with all of our stuff (far less than some of the taxis with just one person) and we headed up to Materi. Along the way we occasionally ran into another PCV going to post. You could always spot the taxi by the specific layoring on top of the taxi. The order is as follows from bottom to top: A layer of lock boxes and the 3 large propane tanks that PC gives us for our stoves, next you have any kind of duffel bag type packed items, then mattrases (we had a double size that PC gave us and a twin for our day-bed/couch but we saw some cars with 3 and 4 tied to them), and top layer to this wedding cake is of course the pair of trek mountain bikes. This is all unbelievablely packed and layered by the skilled taxi drivers. So as you can imagine its quite a site with everything packed so high on the roof. We had it pretty nice because all of our stuff fit on the roof and in the back part of the wagon. We had the whole back seat to ourselves and the front seat looked so empty that we kept thinking about having the driver stop and pick up people to make a little extra money on the way up.
So after leaving at 6:30am we make it into Materi at 6:30pm. Not too bad considering the taxi driver stopped several times to bribe the local sherrif and the occasional bite to eat. The ride in didn't feel quite the same as our first ride in on the back of a moto. This time we felt a lot more like turists because you never ever see a taxi with just two people and I'm sure people were wondering who were these rich white people. But once we got to our house, kids showed up out of nowhere and quickly wisked all of our stuff into our house and we were "moved in" before we knew it.
Our house is layed out like the picture below
______________
| Bed |Kitchen |
|room | ____ |
| living room |
|_____ _____ |
| \ |
|_Shaded patio_ |
The first night we cooked a nice spegetti dinner and ate out on our patio underneath the most beautiful starlite sky. We don't think we've ever been that far from street lights and the night sky was just amazing. (since then we've continued our nightly meal underneath the stars and it's just so nice to eat by candel light and then once the meals over to blow out the candel and turn the stars on and watch the "big show". We've seen many many shooting stars, both Mars and Venus are out and the prodominent constellations now are orion, taurus, casiopea, and the milky-way. Fortunately we remembered to bring our little constellation book, but it's slightly off because we are so close to the equator that we don't see the stars you guys would see on the horizon (ie. big dipper or the north star). After that great meal and long journey we slept soooo goooood!
The several days we spent cleaning and cleaning. Franci (the gal we replaced) had left us a lot of useful kitchen stuff, tons of spices, and some really cool floor mats. Unfortunately from the time she had moved out and the time we arrived a ton of spiders, a few lizards, and a family of mice had claimed it as their own. Therefore we had to pretty much steralize the kitchen from all the droppings as well as the rest of the house. Probably the funniest story of this whole mess was when Rebecca went to clean off the floor mats which had been nicely rolled and stood up in a corner of the living room (I was on the other side of the room sweeping underneath the couch). She gently taps each one before picking it up and laying it on the floor and when she gets to the very last one (and the largest) she taps it and out pops this mouse. This wasn't too bad (just a little startling) because it quickly runs into the bedroom. Then she proceeds to pick up the mat to lay it out with all the others. As soon as she picks up the mat out pop 3 more mice. Because of the quantity, proximity, and roman candel effect, Rebecca screams bloody hell, I see all of these mice spewing out all over the room so I jump up on the couch (broom in hand) performing my best imitation of the lady in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. For those of you not familar with Tom and Jerry, its when a mouse runs in and the lady of the house jumps up and dances on a chair, swatting at the mouse (Jerry), and calling for the cat (Tom) to get it. Quite the specticle!!!!
The nights and days following this incident were so mouse filled that we broke down and got a CAT. Now I know most of you are thinking that Jason must have been writing this and just mispelled DOG, but in fact we got a kitten from Rebecca's work partner. She is the same lady that we stayed with during the prior week long visit to Materi. She heard about our mouse problem and that night a student boarding at her house shows up with a back pack and inside it the most FREAKED OUT kitten you've ever seen. When he pulls her out of the bag, he grabs the string tied around the neck and the cat pretty much turns into the tazmanian devil for about 5 minutes until it's too exhausted to fight anymore. He then tells us that this kitten had been living wild (aka no human contact) in an abandoned house before they cornered it, wrapped the string around it's neck and stuffed it in the bag. He then told us that we should keep it tied up for 3-4 days until it mellows out and gets used to us. So from the beginning this poor kitten is super scared of anything and especially anyone. We feed it some milk and make a quick litter box hopeing that it'll figure it out. Throughout the night it meows like crazy and the only positive thing we could thing of was that hopefully the mice weren't getting any sleep either. The next couple of days go fairly well and we finally get to pet it and show him that we're not mean and really are trying to be friendly. On the 2nd or 3rd night, it gets adventureous and decideds to enter the living room as far as the string will let him. He then jumps up through the couch and back down in a way that pretty much has him dangling in the air choking. Rebecca wakes up and realizes that this isn't his normal sounds and rescues him. For a good 30 mins he just sits in her lap and allows himself to be comforted. It is then, that we finally get the first purr out of him. And it is the loudest purr that you've ever heard. From that moment on everything kinda meshed and he started actually would approch us to be rubbed and he realized that we give really good ear and back rubs. On the 4th day we had his liberation party and we released him from his string. Throughout the whole day he did really well and he liked to either hang around us or explore all the dark corners of the house. That night he got so bold that he poked his head out the screen door and realized that that's a big scarry world out there and that he'd better stay in. Right before we get ready to go to bed he does this once more and this time he goes out and never comes back. For some reason (Jason like to think it was "the call of the wild") he takes off in to the field behind the house and we couldn't find him. At 3am he gets up the nerve to meow below our window but we think the family across the way's dog scared it off and then he was too freaked out to come to us when we went out looking for him. The next day we kept hoping he'd come back and we searched and searched and that night we stayed up till around 1 reading outside hopeing he'd come to us. He meowed again around 4 that night but by that time there was no getting him back and that was the last we saw or heard from him. So our adventure in cats sadly ended after 4 days and we were both pretty bumbed and really really exhausted after 2 sleepless nights.
Fortunately, our integration into Materi was going a lot better than our cat sitting during this period or we might have lost it. A lot of people that we had met during our week visit stopped by to say hi and see how everything was going. One guy in particular is named Dassibou and he is really great. The previous year he worked with Franci on project panther which is an AIDS information/education. So he's really motivated to help us and get us aquainted with everything and everyone in the community. We've really been able to get a feel for the community thanks to him.
On Christmas Eve we began digging our garden. The minute we came out with the hoes, the kids across the way immediately came over and offered to help. So we had this plot cleared in no time and now after several hard days work we have nicely plowed plots ready to be planted with the seeds that a friend found for us (Eggplant, tomatoes, basil, lettuce, cucumbers, okra, and papaya). The fence around the garden is almost finished as well (one cannot have a garden without a fence due to the goats and pigs and cows that will sabotage everything). The fence is made of millet stalks that are weaved with some natural cord of bark or something like that. So we feel like this has been a big accomplishment that we couldn't have done without the help of the neighborhood kids and Dassibou.
Rebecca has done 3 baby weighings with the health center in local small villages. This is one of the services that the center provides in order to help with malnutrition. I'll comment on that in other travelpods, as I've just realized how long this thing is.
We had a great Christmas, including a mass on Christmas Eve with a childrens play and local singing. On Christmas Day everything was still up and running (except government offices like the mayor) so that was weird. It was market day so we went and it wasn't much different from any other market day. Christmas is a time to go around the village and greet your friends and maybe share a little food or drink, but there were no decorations or gift giving. We went and greeted Charlotte and she fed us a huge meal despite our appeals, including rice with a red sauce of pork and cabbage. It was delicious. Later that day, we did a little cooking, but no baked ham or turkey for us! We made a sweet potato pie and some rice pudding. Both were delicious and a good use of the vegetables that are available here. (In case anyone's wondering, we also had lentils as our main course...) So we ate well, which was nice. That night we went with Dassibou to a dance event. Unfortunately, it wasn't local African dancing like we thought it'd be, it was a younger crowd and the music was hip hop African stuff (it felt like we were at a high school talent show). So we hung around there and chatted with people and it was good to be seen by everyone. Today is New Years Eve and we're in Nati hanging out with other volunteers. We hope everyone is having a great holiday season. We have truly missed the comforts of being home for the holidays, but its been a great experience being here!
Hopefully we'll be emailing about once a month when we come to Nati to check mail.
GREAT NEWS!!!! Pictures are now available to be viewed thanks to Eric, Jasons brother who developed them and posted them for us. We did our best with the captions although the order and some have yet to be titled due to technical difficulties on this end. So we'll let you know when they are complete and hopefully you guys can understand them as they are. You can view them at one of the below webpages hope this works!!!!
http://pak01.pictures.aol.com/NASApp/ygp/GuestLogin?event=DirectView&shareInfo=qehO4z9cYlmDF1l5YLLo%2f0QU2QYbS850tGhq%2bBNXLRi%2fjFCnkV3ciA%3d%3d&pageName=AlbumViewFromEmails
http://aolsvc.pictures.aol.com/NASApp/ygp/Start?event=DirectView&shareInfo=qehO4z9cYlmDF1l5YLLo%2f0QU2QYbS850tGhq%2bBNXLRi%2fjFCnkV3ciA%3d%3d&pageName=AlbumViewFromEmails
Enjoy!!!
Love,
Rebecca and Jason
