After continual prodding from friends - and procrastination on my part - I have finally given in and created a blog. Whether I will be able to keep it up is an entirely different question, however, and for the moment I will try to content myself with just adding tidbits here and there and hoping that I can somehow transform myself into a dedicated blogger who actually keeps the reader interested in what they are going on about. And thus, it begins:
I arrived at the airport in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire and was immediately thrown into what everyone here calls the African Jungle…aka crazy disorganization. People grab your bags and start walking away with them and you just have to follow and hope they aren’t going to make a sudden run for it and that someone is actually waiting for you at the airport. I was lucky on both counts and ended up with all of my bags and a ride back to one of my coworkers friend’s house where we stayed for a few days in the capital. First impression: POLLUTION. Everywhere. Trash on the sides of the road, smog that makes it hard to breathe without a scarf. We took the “highway” from the airport and as you merge onto this two lane road and all you see on the sides of the street are shacks thrown up haphazardly and people EVERYWHERE. The cars and people are like one entity on the road. Giving someone a berth of more than two inches when you pass them in the car is unheard of. The worst is when the kids run out in the street.
Abidjan itself was interesting though. I met up with my boss and got my long term visa (which included making a fake professional invitation to Cote d’Ivoire document and stamping some bogus label I copied off the internet on it) and then started getting everything I would need for my house at the market. The market is exactly like what you see in pictures of Africa…long rows of food and materials and all the Walmart rejects that have accumulated over the years. You can find absolutely everything in this market. Nails, cow tongue, stingrays, bras, school supplies, etc. I swear that all those shirts I thought ended up in Goodwill are actually somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire. The best is seeing guys walking around wearing shirts that say “Tri Delt 2004” or some such thing. I made some guy wearing a Michigan shirt stop and take a picture with me – he had no idea what I was going on about…”GO BLUE!” does not translate well…
The weirdest part of it all is having what Rose (one of my IFESH colleagues) calls “Rockstar status.” White skin is a novelty here and because they usually come with Govt organizations that have a lot of money people are under the impression that they can always get something from them. When you walk down the street people ask for money or shout “Gift! Gift!” thinking you will give them something. And they always want your phone number, people come up to me on the street and hand me pieces of paper with their phone number without introducing themselves. EVERYONE has a cell phone here which is actually quite odd considering how expensive it is to make calls. The vast majority of people usually have two or three phones– each one with a different network so that when they make their calls they are cheaper. Did anyone see that article in the Economist “The Power of Mobile Money”? I read it on the plane over and it’s a perfect description of Cote d’Ivoire. Those that don’t have phones use these little stands on the side of the road to make calls for about 20 cents. When we went into the village there was one stand in the only place you could get service in the entire village and you had to crouch down close to the ground and shout to make sure the person could hear you (my poor mom probably went deaf from that call).
After Abidjan we headed to the village of Bieby where Rose had started literacy classes last April. They took adults with some level of education in the village and then train them to be teachers in the community. They then start their own classes for illiterate adults. We go back and do trainings and monitoring and evaluation and provide support. It was really cool to see these women and men starting to write and understand basic addition and subtraction (and health/sanitation). Our main target group is cacao planters (main crop here and Cote d’Ivoire is actually the number one supplier in the world) and as they are not usually able to do basic calculations they get cheated when selling their cacao. Anyway that is one aspect of what I am supposed to be doing here but the rockstar status was upped 10x in the village. Kids would run up and touch me on a dare or shout “ah the auntie is white! The auntie is white!” The only other white woman I saw was the Spirit woman who had painted herself in white with what looked like flour paste.
From Bieby I headed to my city of Abengourou where I have now been for, wow, almost four months already. The city of about 100,000 is quiet but nice and fairly clean in comparison with many of the other larger cities. I am living on the bottom floor of a three story house with a Haitian woman, Shandra, who runs the Montessori school on the second floor of the building (imagine 20 three years olds screaming and running around, I don’t know how she does it.) I’ve been working with the local schools and teachers here in the city, however, the focus of my work has been on the villages surrounding Abengourou where we have literacy centers similar to those in Bieby.
At night is almost always volleyball game going at the Lebanese club and I just passed their ability test and so I have been allowed to play with them as long as I don’t suck too much. They are super serious about all of their games and spend the whole time yelling at each other in Arabic…I am learning words like “Out!” and “Net! Net!” but other than that I try to imagine what they are shouting about – until I hear my name in the conversation and then I know that I did something wrong.
And the food is all really good – I think I have gained 10 pounds – at the beginning every time I met someone new they would just keep making me eat. I ate escargot (NOT the same as in France) these little buggers were huge and tasted like dirt but the village chief’s wife had made them and was watching me as I ate so I just smiled and chewed. The best is fish with atchieke and something called foutu which involves smashing cassava and bananas together into a paste-like bread. And yams. I LOVE yams. SO GOOD. I am still waiting to try stuffed bat…
