I mentioned to someone a few months ago that life in Africa is simple but never easy. These last few days have highlighted that fact quite a bit – my trials and tribulations in getting three documents printed, signed, scanned, and emailed to Cotonou… Something which would take just a few minutes in America, as easy as a stop to a friend with a scanner or to the nearest Office Max, took way too many hours and headaches here in Africa. Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of my life!
Monday was just another day in paradise. In the evening I went for a bike ride, which I do almost every day but as it is getting hotter, my determination may taper off. :) But anyway, I was out there on a short ride, only 30 minutes, when on my way back I came up to a family who had just finished their day in the cashew orchards, were carrying full bins of cashews on their heads. Now, I’m not a very quiet biker, and I always ding my little bell if it seems as though they don’t know I am coming, and the little kid in the family saw me and started waving, so I continued on kind of through the family, there were two kids that stepped to one side of the road and the rest on the other. Well, I was flying by relatively quickly and apparently one of the girls did not realize I was coming, got scared, and turned right into me. I hit her really hard, straight on. SO scary. She was probably 12 or 13 so not a little girl but definitely smaller than me. She went flying into the bushes on the side of the road, her cashews flung every which direction, while I went over the handlebars into the dirt road. I laid there for a second, wondering what the heck just happened, then got up to make sure she was okay. I just scraped up my hands and got pretty dirty, and she seemed alright, too, so we cleaned up her cashews and I got on my way. One of the shifters on my bike was broken worse than either of us, so I guess that’s a good thing.
So anyway, I got home, cleaned up, made dinner, and settled in to watch a movie when I was overcome with agonizing abdominal pain. This was bad, worse than I have ever had. I wondered at what I should do; it was late and dark. I decided to just ride it out for a while and see what happens. This is one thing that Africa will do for you – I actually hoped the floodgates would open and I would have me some raging diarrhea, as that would mean it was nothing more serious! Of course, I watch House, so I had images of my tumble off my bike tweaking something funny in my little pinky and that causing something bizarre which caused something else bizarre and all kinds of randomness happened to lead me into my pancreas failing or my kidneys shriveling up or something crazy like you only see on TV. Anyway, I never got the hoped-for diarrhea, but fell asleep in the fetal position and woke up just fine the next morning. SO weird!
So the next morning, Tuesday, I decided I was going to just take it easy. I was nervous from the night before and hesitant to eat anything, so I was just going to chill at home all day and make sure everything was in proper working order. Well, that got shot out of the water. Around 10am I got a call from the person at Peace Corps who was in charge of my grant application for the latrine project. She said she was going to get it approved and I needed to send in the signed community forms right away, and could I please do it in the next few hours? Yeah, right! Now, I apparently didn’t understand her before because I didn’t realize these forms would be needed at this stage, or I would have had them printed and signed long ago! Okay, so my quiet morning at home is no longer. I called the health center director – he is the only person in my community with a printer. He said sure I could use it so I headed out. It’s about a 20 minute walk to get there and it is nearly noon at this point, getting hot! Anyway, I set it up and dink around with it for about twenty minutes and come to the conclusion that it is NOT working, I think it is out of ink. Now, I told him I needed to print and he said come on over… he would KNOW if he was out of ink, right? Grr. Well, anyway, I packed up my computer and was going to go to Bante to use a printer at the mayor’s office, when he (the health center director) walked in. He couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working so he wanted to fire up his whole computer (ancient and takes forever, as I had just hooked his printer into my computer) and figure it out. He is nearly computer illiterate and every time I have to work with him it really tries my patience. Anyway, he tries all these ridiculous things that have nothing to do with a printer, and I sat there irritated for about a half an hour before we finally found the place where it told us he was completely out of black ink. Not low… completely out. seriously?? You have warning with these things! So frustrating. So there goes an hour wasted.
Anyway, I called my homologue who works at the mayor’s office in Bante to see if he had a printer (I thought so) and if he was there. Yes, he has a printer and yes, he was there. Great. I wasn’t at all looking forward to finding a taxi at this time of day, it’s hot, gross, and can take a while. But as I was exiting the health center to walk back to my house, here came a zemidjan from Bante! Fabulous. He took me back to my house where I grabbed my helmet and left my computer, and we headed up to Bante.
It’s about a 30 minute zem ride to Bante and so I arrived about 40 minutes after I had called my homologue to see if he was there (yes!). He wasn’t. By “yes I am here at the office” he meant “yes I am here in Bante and plan on going back to the office sometime this afternoon”. Great. I called him and he seemed surprised that I was there already (didn’t I call you 40 minutes ago?) and said he’s was on his way. After sitting there for 45 minutes (did I mention it is HOT here?) he finally pulls in. Yay! So we go into his office where he actually has a really nice printer and I get them printed out and explain them to him and he and I both sign them. They’re just papers saying we’re not going to steal the money we are receiving for the latrine project. They are all in English, though, which is ridiculous considering the community members are expected to sign them, and why wouldn’t we want them to understand what they are signing? Lame. Anyway, that’s a different bone to pick with the Peace Corps.
Great, so the forms are finally printed and signed. Now, there is one guy in Bante with a scanner, so my homologue calls him to see if he is home and he doesn’t get any answer. Well, it’s getting to midafternoon so we must go get some food and drinks, as all good Beninese do at this time. I had yet to eat since the night before so I was happy about this turn of events, though turned down the first offer of Yam Pilee in favor of something a little easier to digest, like rice. We found some yummy rice and Fulani cheese and sat down to eat with some other random people from the community that my homologue was talking with. Well, after sitting there for nearly two hours, I was getting a bit antsy to get this thing scanned and emailed back to Peace Corps, and started making that fact a bit more obvious.
So we decided to just go over to the guys place with the scanner, and he of course wasn’t there but his wife said he would be back around 5pm. Okay. So instead of sitting there we went back to the Mayor’s office and my homologue did some work while I sweated around, bored. “We’ll come back at 5” of course doesn’t at all mean we’ll go back at 5, but about 5:30 I started making it clear I was getting very irritated. It had also started getting very windy while I was sitting around at the mayor’s office. Well, we got back to the scanner guy’s house around 5:45, and yay, he was there… and literally thirty seconds after we got there, the power went out, the temperature dropped twenty degrees and the skies opened up.
It is dry, hot season right now so to have the heavens start dumping rain in that magnitude was WEIRD! We sat around at this guy’s house for like an hour and a half to see if it would stop raining/the power would come back on… but alas, it was not to be. Finally my homologue brought me home around 8pm, it was dark, rainy, and I hadn’t accomplished a thing that day. Cheers. He told me we would try again tomorrow (today) and he would come by and pick me up at 9am. Great.
Well, by 9am I knew not to actually expect him at 9, but knew he wouldn’t be here before that, so I slept in a bit and got myself ready to go at 9. Then I sat down and started going through piles of paper I had accumulated over the last 19 months, cards, letters, peace corps stuff, everything I needed to go through had been piled on my table when I cleaned my house last week. So I started going through it and ended up reading a lot of old letters from my mom – she’s awesome. She still, 19 months into my service, sends me a letter every single week. And I’ve kept them all.
Anyway, the power was still out this morning so I didn’t expect him at 9, but the power came back on around 10:30 (Yay, my phone was nearly dead!) I sent him a text message at 11:15, saying “Hey, how’s it going, I’ve been waiting since 9am” but got no response. At 12:30 he finally pulls in, when I had just about given up on his ever coming and we headed back to Bante to see if we could get the papers scanned, finally! When we got there, the guy was home and the power was on, but the computer was in about fifteen pieces all over his living room. Ugh. Are you kidding me?
We sat around in this guy’s living room for an hour while he put his computer back together and FINALLY I got my forms scanned. Then I came back home and truly expected, after all that, to find out that the scans didn’t work or the files wouldn’t open or some other problem. Thankfully, they seem to work fine, and I just emailed them off, 28 hours later, to PC in Cotonou. Hopefully they were done correctly and I can FINALLY get the project off the ground!!
Sigh. Now I am going to try to post this… and then need to haul some water and do some laundry. It’s cooler today, thanks to the rain yesterday. Oh, that was such a glorious thing! And I’m happy because it means that it is less likely that wells will run dry this year! Simple things. I will probably go on a bike ride later, if I can fix the gear shifter thingy on my bike. We shall see.
Peace. k
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