"Do you wear shoes over there?"

It's been over 10 months since I arrived in Benin and I finally just took my first vacation. To everyone's surprise (myself especially) I went home to the U.S. to see some friends and family. I say surprising because when I left for Peace Corps, I had absolutely no plans to visit home, instead fully embracing a goodbye-everyone-I-am-GONE-for-27-months-type of attitude. A flight home would be long and expensive, and besides I wasn't someone who really got homesick...

(Let's all laugh together.)

Clearly Pre-Peace Corps Allison was awfully idealistic about her capacity for adventure, and did not anticipate that after just 7 months, she'd call her mom to abruptly announce that she needed to come home. I told mom I planned on a two week trip, but if I was being honest with myself, I wasn't completely sure I would be coming back after.

(For the sake of even more honesty, here's the quick & ugly: it had been months and I still didn't have a house; I was struggling to work effectively and collaboratively with my counterpart; my dog almost died; a good friend had just Early Terminated his service; violent protests were interrupting the projects we wanted to develop in my village; and to top it off, I was sick...again.)

Peace Corps is far from sunshine and rainbows. This shit is hard, and these past few months have required a lot of readjustment of my expectations of service. But alas, je suis là. I'm glad I got to go home and see a lot of people I love, and soak up the comfort of American culture. The trip home helped me get past the lowest low of my service so far, plus my situation has since drastically improved-- protests have died down, projects are taking off, I now have a lovely house, my pup & I are healthy.

Since I've come back to Benin, I've had a lot of thoughts that I've been meaning to get out of my head and onto paper (or more accurately, the notepad on my phone). My trip home felt like a teaser trailer for what's to come next December when I go home for good and will need to further confront the ways I've changed, and experience the mundane challenges of adjusting back to my American life-- feeling overwhelmed at grocery stores; getting sick from air conditioning; wanting to wear pants all the time because it looks way too weird to see my knees out in the open.

But mostly, one of the greatest and most constant challenges I found myself struggling with was how to respond to casual questions about Benin and my life here in a concise and articulate way. How do you sum up something like this? The space that exists between over-romanticizing my experiences as one big noble adventure and getting too far into the nitty gritty, God-are-you-sure-you're-okay area was hard to navigate. I tried to prepare with a few stories in my pocket that I felt captured my experience best, but in reality, I spent more time than anything fielding questions like this:

"How's Africa?"

"So do you live in a hut?"

"Do you even wear shoes over there?"

"What's it like seeing all those starving children?"

Questions like these quickly reminded me I wasn't in Benin anymore, and burst the Peace Corps bubble that we volunteers grow to live in as like-minded individuals in a shared experience. The truth, however, is we experience the daily reality of our work and the lifestyle & culture in a country that many Americans couldn't place on a map. Trying to reconcile the fact that most people I encountered in the US had never heard of Benin with the daily experiences I'd had for almost a year felt strange and disconcerting. And though Peace Corp's third goal tells me to promote a better understanding of Beninese culture with Americans, it doesn't tell me how to do that respectfully and effectively.

Culture is a tricky thing to talk about. The words we use matter, especially in how we choose to represent our experiences with other cultures. 10 months of living in a rural village in Benin has absolutely challenged me to become more intentional about the words and stories I use to share what I've experienced in Benin. It's changed the way I feel about international service trips, and given me a lot to think about in terms of the way we interact with and present the people of other cultures.

(During our three months of Pre-Service Training, we received multiple sessions on cultural sensitivity training, where we discussed approaches and challenges to integration. One of the things that really stuck with me was a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called "The Danger of a Single Story," that offers an enlightening perspective on the stereotypes we have of other cultures, especially in African countries. The problem, Adichie explains, is not that these stereotypes are untrue, but rather that they are incomplete. So when we visit these other cultures, we have the power, and duty, to challenge existing stereotypes by sharing a more complete picture via the stories and photos we choose to share.)

*The talk is linked here & I highly recommend giving it a watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

Recently, I've stumbled across several posts by different social media friends, keen on sharing their experiences of recent service trips. They post about how wonderful the trip was, how much they learned & grew as a person after experiencing just 10 days in a developing country, how eye opening it was to see people so happy with so little.

And you know what-- that's great. Truly. Cultural exchange is so important in building greater understanding of one another and creating more compassion in this world. Especially coming from the U.S., it's important to recognize that the way we Americans live is extremely different privileged compared to how the rest of the world lives.

The thing is, while these posts are well-meaning, many of them lack context and tend to reaffirm the beliefs people already have about that particular culture. Since service trips are so short and often lack technical training & skilled labor from volunteers, the real service comes from sharing your stories and expanding intercultural awareness. Sharing knowledge from an experience is a service in itself-- a service to yourself, to those with whom you share the stories, and to those whose stories you help share.

Anyway, I've been keeping a running list of my thoughts/reactions on how to talk about my experiences in a developing country, all jotted down very messily in my notebook where, of course, no one can read it. So here it is below, cleaned up and more coherent for your viewing pleasure:

• Africa is a continent, not a country. I serve and live in Benin, a small country between Togo and Nigeria in West Africa. The country of Benin is comparatively about the size of Pennsylvania. Asking me "how is Africa?" is like asking someone who has only ever lived in a small, rural town in Pennsylvania to speak on behalf of all Americans throughout the United States. I'm not sure how the rest of Africa is doing, I can only tell you about Benin (and even then, only my unique, individual experiences as a yovo).

• In the same vein, when talking about serving in African countries, we do a disservice to the country we're in when we fail to use its name, and instead sum our experience up as "serving in Africa." There are 54 countries in Africa, and we should be able to name other countries besides Nigeria and South Africa. Bring awareness to the existence of the country you serve in, and correct your friends and family when they ask how ~Africa~ is. (Be better than me, who'd never heard of Benin when I received my invitation to serve, and had to go look it up on a map.) 

• People are people and it's not great to talk about them as if they are otherworldly. Using language like "those people" and "them over there" further emphasizes the us versus them mentality that only serves to heighten the barriers against intercultural understanding. This mentality is why the person who asked me if people wore shoes in Benin was so surprised when I responded that yes, in fact we do! As if it wasn't a perfectly normal human behavior to do so. Remembering how similar us humans are to each other is so important, especially when you consider how one of the cool things about culture is that human values actually tend to be more similar, than different across cultures. Rather than clinging to cultural relativism as a beacon for our differences (there's a lot of problems with cultural relativism as a theory), consider instead that people, regardless of their culture, tend to universally exhibit the importance of caring for children and showing respect for the dead. Ultimately, differences between cultures stem not from differences in our values, but rather in the beliefs and manifestation of these values. (This article by James Rachels gets more into this point, and also offers a more developed response to culture relativism : https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Rachels1.pdf)

• A picture is worth a thousand words, and even more so when you post it without a caption. Not only does it feed into the white savior stereotype when (typically white) volunteers post pictures of small, black children, but it's also weird and misses the opportunity to challenge the existing stories that people already have about Africa. I rarely post pictures of people, but my rule of thumb for myself is: 

1. I must know their name and they must know mine.

2. We must be able to talk and have a conversation in one language or another.

3. Making a social media post of this person would benefit or challenge the perspectives of people back home. 

4. I would make a similar post if I was working with similar people in similar circumstances in the U.S.  

To me, that means providing a caption about my host brother (who is also a bit older) to explain how much he studies every night because he dreams of being a professor one day, or to share a cool tomato preservation business that my summer camp kids are starting themselves. My point is that there is a side of Africa that needs to be photographed to break down stereotypes, but sharing photos of you holding malnourished, half-naked children is not it.

• I've noticed several posts now that make this weird conclusion seemingly rooted in two general observations: 

1) Many people in developing countries live on and get by with very simple means, referred in some posts as a more "pure lifestyle." 

2) Despite these simple means, people in that developing country looked quite happy, and were even seen singing and dancing at times. 

Consequently, these people observed must not truly be ~less fortunate~ than us. Or alternatively, perhaps they are just simply happier with "less materialistic things." 

As if the people in these developing countries are making a lifestyle choice to live without electricity or running water. 

As if an insufficient living standard and meager human development index is a noble decision, rather than the direct result of exploitative history and corrupt conditions. 

Yes, of course, people in developing countries are capable of experiencing joy (people are people!). But we need to be careful that we aren't romanticizing the very real hardships they face. Our work is supposed to be empowering people to help reduce their hardship, NOT leering at their hardship and dressing it up as an exotic life choice. 

• Similarly, denying that people of developing countries are ~truly~ disadvantaged/less fortunate/etc. (because they seemed happy...?) is problematic in the same way as saying one is "color blind" to race. It *sounds* woke, but actually fails to recognize and validate the inequality that exists, and the privileges that that one group gets to experience over another. Less developed countries ARE at a disadvantage and less fortunate because of an array of reasons, and that's why volunteers are there, to help address those disadvantages. We need to recognize this if we wanna fix the inequality.

• Spending a week in a developing country does not make one an expert, or even well-informed on the culture & challenges of that country. It’s hard to relate to the hardships of a country when you’re most likely staying at facilities nicer than what most of the population lives with, even though it still might be quite different from the standard you’re used to in America. In fact, spending two years in that country through peace corps STILL doesn’t make one an expert. There is no X amount of time that could negate the fact that I was born and raised in a different culture and context, and therefore will always see Beninese culture through different lenses.

Alright, I'll get down from my soap box now. A lot was said here and I might update this as I continue to think about it, so if you made it this far then kudos to you.
To wrap it up, here's a picture of my favorite road by my house, where I walk with my pup almost every morning, all while wearing shoes! I’ve also attached a reading we got during training to reflect on the lenses we use to ~see~ other cultures. I'd love to hear your thoughts.