Where & What

Almost five months have passed since I first arrived here in Benin, and while I am anxious to post all about my life and the crazy things that have happened since then, I also have come to realize that many people do not know where I am in the world, or what it is exactly that I am even supposed to be doing here.

So before I get started, I need to do some clarifying. 

Where is Benin? This country that you probably never heard of and probably are unsure of how to pronounce (*full disclosure: when I got my invitation to serve the first thing I did was look up Benin on a map and ask a RPCV how she pronounced it. For the record, it’s Beh-nin with emphasis on the second syllable*). 
What is Peace Corps, and how on earth did *I* end up working in agriculture when I have no experience there?

I have also noticed the tendency for people to say that I am “volunteering in Africa,” which is true, but also is a vague simplification that doesn’t do much to promote Benin nor give proper dignity to the Beninese people here. Since part of my role as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to empower the people and promote understanding, I challenge my friends and family to tell people that I am in Benin, a country that is the birthplace of voodoo and that had some of the largest slave ports, and not just ~Africa~. 

Where am I?
Benin is a small country in West Africa, roughly the size of Pennsylvania, located between Nigeria and Togo. It is divided into 12 different departments (similar to states), and though I cannot share the name or exact location of my village, I can say that I am somewhere in the middle of the country in the Collines department, living in a rather cosmopolitan village. “Colline” means “hill” in French, and so my department is aptly named after the small, lumps of earth that sprawl throughout our department and that volunteers love to climb. 

What is Peace Corps?
Peace Corps is a federal volunteer organization that trains Americans in providing a grassroots approach to international development. It was started by President Kennedy in 1961 to provide other countries with technical assistance and to promote mutual understanding between the U.S. and the countries served. Peace Corps only serves in countries where it is invited, and has currently served in 141 countries. The overall mission has three goals, which in short are:

1. To provide training to people of the host country
2. To promote understanding of American culture within the country served
3. To promote understanding of the country served within the United States

Even though Peace Corps is a volunteer program, it is highly competitive and involves a rigorous medical and legal clearance process. Last year, over 24,000 individuals applied for less than 4,000 open spots. When I applied almost a full year before my start of service, I didn’t realize I would spend almost 6 months getting interviewed, accepted, cleared before being officially approved to come to Benin.

Each Peace Corps country program is different (I have a friend in the DR and another in Thailand whose experiences are wildly different), but in general volunteers receive roughly 3 months of training in preparation for two years of service in their respective country. 

During those two years, we essentially help people help themselves. Besides the length of service, this is what drew me most greatly to Peace Corps because volunteers aren’t there to give handouts or take over communities. Our work is slow and challenging, but ultimately we seek to empower and provide training to interested individuals so as to make a sustainable impact long after we are gone. 

“Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. But teach a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life.” 

We are here to teach people how to fish. 

Peace Corps just celebrated 50 years of uninterrupted service in Benin in 2018. This is a big deal because it’s one of the longest continuous relationships in Peace Corps, and it is not uncommon for Peace Corps to temporarily suspend or close a program because of safety threats to volunteer safety.

What makes Peace Corps Benin unique?

• We were recently ranked holistically as the number one Peace Corps program. From training to med staff to people reached to volunteer satisfaction, our program had the highest score.

• We are one of two countries in Africa that provides workstations for its volunteers. Workstations are places located throughout major cities in the country where volunteers can go to do work, especially on computers, have wifi, take hot showers, find books and produce and things otherwise not found in village, and enjoy a little American time. We get three nights each month, and as a new volunteer, they feel like a sanctuary to the grind of village life. 
• We are one of the few countries that allows its volunteers to use moto-taxi services (called “zems”). This isn’t because the zems here are particularly safer than anywhere else, but actually because it would be nearly impossible to go anywhere without them. For our safety, each volunteer is issued a motorcycle helmet and given training during the first week where we practice mounting, dismounting, and negotiating the price of zems. Failure to wear your helmet results in end of service and a one-way ticket home.
• Pre-service training of any Peace Corps program lasts from 8 to 12 weeks, and so ours is one of the longest at 12 weeks. This is because ours is one of the most intense, where we learn not one, but two languages (French and our local language), and are required to have a high standard of proficiency. By the end of PST, each volunteer must be at intermediate high for French, and by one year of service, we need to be at intermediate low for local language (On a scale of 1-10, intermediate high is a 6 and intermediate low is 4).
• Each volunteer is placed in their own house to live in during their two years of service. Some programs keep volunteers with host families the entire time, and others allow volunteers to find a place of their own after so many months, but in Benin each volunteer lives on their own. This is a big contributor to volunteer satisfaction (personal privacy is an American ideal), and also a large part of our training because it’s not so easy cooking and doing laundry on your own.
• We have one of the highest thresholds of medical clearance to become a volunteer. This is because medical care throughout Benin is still very much developing and it takes hours to travel cross country to the medical office.

What am I doing?
My official title is a Sustainable Agriculture Systems Extension Agent, but within the volunteer community we are generally referred to “SAS” or “sass-ers.” I could explain the different goals and objectives and sub-objectives that my sector has, but frankly that’s a lot of words and they are still working on clarifying that information anyway.

You see, my cohort is only the second SAS cohort ever in Benin. Before SAS, there were two separate sectors, Community Economic Development (CED) and Environmental Action (EA), but a few years ago administration decided to combine CED and EA into one program that focuses on agribusiness and food security, and voila SAS was born.

My work has a wide net. We work with gardening, nutrition, money management, business development, VSLAs, and more. It's been said that Peace Corps Volunteers plant seeds for trees that they will never sit under, and SAS volunteers are literally doing that.

SAS doesn’t have the same level of structure as TEFL volunteers who go to the schools every day or the health volunteers who work at the health centers. We have a lot of freedom to ffind work where we are needed, often wandering our village to seek out community and individual gardens and businesses based in agriculture so that we can help with their development. Our target groups are women and children, and so we also work with schools to lead different types of clubs to aid in youth development and education on nutrition, gardening, entrepreneurship, leadership, English, and sports (the type of club formed depends on the interests on the school).

To provide some structure, each SAS volunteer is assigned to a host organization to help develop the organization and work in the community. Each host org does a different activity, from rice making to beekeeping, and also has a very different structure and level of development.

My host organization is a group of roughly 20 women who alternate making rice and shea products. Some SAS volunteers work 9-5 at places with offices, and some even have computers. My group, however, meets outside under a mango tree on Tuesday mornings. We grab some chairs & benches and sit in a circle to make rice, talk about work, and exchange the village gossip.


OK, what am I *really* doing?
Honestly, I’m still figuring this out. My first three months at site are focused on community integration and relationship building with the people in village. I’m learning their norms and ways of life, and also figuring out how I can live on my own in this new environment. A lot of time is dedicated to cleaning my house (Beninese culture expects you to sweep your house every day), fetching & preparing water (gotta boil then filter before you can drink it), figuring out how/what to cook, searching for fruits and vegetables, ordering furniture, and frankly just sitting around because it’s too damn hot to do anything else.

Mondays are market days, where I go to get the bulk of my food for the week, and wander around practicing Tchabé, drinking bissap (hibiscus juice), and hanging out with mamans.

I get one of hour local language tutoring on Wednesdays and Fridays, and try to still study French in my free time.

Throughout the rest of the week, I see different women’s groups in the communities, so far mostly to observe their meetings and try to learn their strengths, opportunities, and needs. I also visit my community garden at least once a week and am currently working on setting up a schedule to visit the school by my house. A few weeks ago, I gave my first sensibilization, explaining to 14 gardeners the various methods one can use to create organic insecticide and the different insects they combat.

Each day is different, and admittedly I spend a lot of time hanging out in my hammock with my dog. I'm trying to find a good balance between work and personal life, but that's a constant effort. That's the life of a volunteer.

Collines aka Small Hills aka Lumps of Earth