A few months ago, a student at the local secondary school where I hold my English Club meetings approached me about working with him on an AIDS-awareness event at the school. Now, you might read that last sentence and think that things like that happen all the time in the Peace Corps. I mean, everyone knows that I’m the American volunteer, that I do things with health. So locals must be lining up on my porch every morning begging me to work on projects with them, right? Not so much.
I can only speak from a Beninese perspective – maybe volunteers in Tonga or Azerbaijan have to have a sign-up sheet on their door and some refreshments set up for all the people waiting in their front yard with awesome ideas for collaboration. This is not the case for (most of) the volunteers here. The very idea of Peace Corps is that locals identify the needs of their community and propose ideas to the volunteer, who serves as an overseer and advisor. In my experience, finding people with that level of motivation for the kinds of projects that volunteers do is a rare event, which tends to leave us out here without too many reinforcements.
All of this is to say that a local who honest-to-God comes to you with a good project in mind is like the Holy Grail of Peace Corps experiences.
So you can all picture me doing my little happy dance when I discovered that it was not only this one particular student that wanted my help with the project, but that he was part of a kind-of community-service club at the school that had done something similar with a Peace Corps Volunteer a few years ago. [WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST IN ORDER TO GIVE YOU A MOMENT TO IMAGINE OUR DASHING YOUNG PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER DOING A HAPPY DANCE.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. WE NOW RETURN YOU TO “PEACIN’ OUT”, ALREADY IN PROGRESS]
The idea was this: to invite musicians (read: rappers) from all around Benin to come to Zagnanado to perform in a huge AIDS-themed concert complete with education sessions, HIV testing, condom distribution, a presentation by a Person Living with AIDS, sketches by a theater group made up of students, and a competition between students to find the best rap/poem/song, etc. written on the theme of “AIDS-free Youth.”
I was in. So after Christmas vacation I met with the principal of the school, where we were to have the event, to set down a date. Originally, we had planned on having the event on Valentine’s Day because, of course, it’s la journée d’amour. I thought this would be perfect; the day before Valentine’s Day this year was on a Wednesday and because of an oldentimes agreement between French people wearing wigs and monocles, Beninese schools don’t operate after 10 a.m. on Wednesdays. However, our principal said he’d prefer the event to coincide with the week-long school break, which was to start on the following Thursday, the 21st. “D’accord,” I said, “it’s still around Valentine’s Day. Plus he is giving us a venue for free. The 21st it is.”
So I started filling out the funding request form, which is the most intense Excel spreadsheet that has ever been devised (seriously, I’ll show it to you when I’m back home). I also invited the mobile clinic from the NGO that also funds our Amour et Vie peer health education team to come do HIV testing. They said it was better for their schedule (they travel all over the country) to spend two days in Zagnanado. “D’accord,” I said, “Two days are better than one.” I also invited a Person Living with AIDS who does many presentations around Benin to come and talk to the students. “D’accord,” she said, “I’ll clear my schedule for the 21st.”
So everyone was d’accord. We met with people at the radio station in Covè (our market town) to talk about advertising. We met with the Social Services Center, the mayor’s office, the local health director, and even tried to meet with the King – he was on vacation. Things were happening. Happy dance.
Then about a week before the event I get a phone call. The administration of the school had been wrong about the dates for the break. You see, there had been a discrepancy between the schedules provided by the county education board and the Ministry of Education. We had to reschedule our event. Which of course meant that the Person Living with AIDS who was to give the presentation was unable to do so. Also, the date to which the event has been rescheduled contains a mandatory meeting of every teacher in every secondary school in the country. Which of course meant that the English-teaching volunteers (which constitute the bulk of those who have offered to help me out with the event) cannot come.
Approximately at this precise moment, I discovered that the funding that I had applied for was approved (Yay!) but would not arrive in time for the event (Oh…).
Okay. Nevermind. We would triage the event. Cut it down so that we could pay for it using the cash I had on hand and a series of very official-looking IOUs. I have some clout in Zagnanado so the IOUs were not a huge problem. We cut out a lot of the pre-event advertising to save money. Another volunteer had a bunch of condoms left over from her World AIDS Day event that she would be happy to give me. Things were happening. Less things, granted – but things nonetheless.
So we get to the day. A Wednesday morning. Like I had originally wanted to do on Valentine’s Day (ahem). But no matter. Let’s go!
DAY 1
9:00 a.m. – I arrive at the school and meet with the students who are organizing the event.
9:30 a.m. – I discover that the student group president whose house is being used as a base-of-operations for the invited musicians is missing.
9:45 a.m. – Said student arrives, having picked up the banners at the printers clear across town. Having no string, we tie up the banners with masking tape (this is to become a recurrent theme throughout the day).
10:00 a.m. – The bell rings to dismiss the students, who are now on break. Our event technically begins. The principal must officially open the event. He is in his office.
10:10 a.m. – The man who is there to promote the HIV testing (which is to begin the next day) explains to me that if we don’t begin right away the students are going to leave. He proceeds to get up on stage and start warming up the crowd.
10:15 a.m. – The principal asks to see me and the entire organizing crew in his office. “How is everything going,” he asks me. I proceed to laugh. “Sir, you are supposed to start off the event. We’re waiting for you.” “Ah, well give me ten minutes.”
10:30 a.m. – The student group president is, once again, missing. I proceed to search for any student organizer. I find none. The man on stage continues to deftly warm up the crowd, continually promising that we will start soon.
10:45 a.m. – I succeed in finding some of the organizers and ask them where the first musician is – the one to begin just after the principal’s opening words. They do not know. Who knows? The student group president.
11:00 a.m. – The student group president arrives, having gone back to the printers (I repeat, clear across town) to pick up the polo shirts he has ordered for the student organizers to wear during the event. Where are the musicians? At his house. “Mais ils viennent.” But they’re coming. He disappears again.
11:05 a.m. – The principal comes out and walks toward the stage to give his opening remarks. I say that if the musicians are not there that we should begin with the theater group just after the principal. I ask one of the organizers where the theater group is. They’re not here. Well, how about the dancing troupe? Nope.
11:10 a.m. – The principal and I go up on stage and give the opening words for the event. As we are speaking, the musicians show up. Laissons les bons temps rouler.
11:20 a.m. – I call the volunteer who is to bring the condoms. No answer. The banner (held up by masking tape) falls. Someone repairs it.
[This last entry repeats itself at least seven times throughout the rest of the day.]
11:30 a.m. – It becomes clear that the emcee that we have hired for the event has not arrived. One of my great friends in town, Carlos, a senior and member of the old Amour et Vie team at the school, volunteers to emcee in his absence.
11:45 a.m. – The teacher who serves as advisor to the student group organizing the event, and the judge for the creative HIV presentation contest that is to begin any moment, informs me that he has to leave. Carlos again saves the day by organizing an ad-hoc committee of student-judges.
12:40 p.m. – The emcee arrives.
[The event proceeds, though by the third performance we have entirely departed from the scheduled program].
6:00 p.m. – I order a beer at Chez Doodoo (my favorite bar in town) with the four other volunteers who have arrived, most of them having left directly from that all-important teacher’s meeting, to help me out. We all help ourselves to a dinner of akassa (boiled, fermented corn flour) and fish.
DAY 2
Day two proceeds as planned. The mobile clinic arrives at the school and tests over 100 people. We manage to get ahold of the volunteer who had planned on bringing condoms. After spending 9 hours in a taxi that didn’t even manage to leave greater Cotonou she realized that West Africa had won the day and gave up.
DAY 3
The mobile clinic set up shop at the Centre de Jeunes et de Loisirs, a kind-of civic center right next to the mayor’s office on the tarmac road. This civic center has recently been annexed by the gendarmerie (police) despite the fact that the actual gendarmerie building is three doors down the road. Because of this, we had been informed long ago that we would not be able to actually use the inside of the building, only the courtyard out front. “D’accord,” I had said, “That’s all the space we’ll need.”
The morning of Day 3 the mobile clinic staff asked me to ask the mayor’s office whether it would bother them if we used a sound system to play music for those waiting to get tested. My friend at the mayor’s office asked me to sit down. Uh-oh.
Last year there were floods throughout the region. Why, you may ask, is this relevant to my AIDS event? Well calm down and I’ll tell you. You see, the Ministry of the Family (you heard me right) called the mayor’s office the night before to inform them that the Minister herself was coming that day to distribute mosquito nets to the community. Because that’s what you do when a part of your country floods. You wait a year and give them mosquito nets. And where was she going to do this? Yes indeed – the gendarme-occupied Centre de Jeunes et de Loisirs de Zagnanado.
After I hyperventilated for about twenty minutes, the man at the mayor’s office decided that we could continue with the HIV testing, but that when the Minister arrived we would have to make ourselves scarce.
Another highlight from Day 3 was that the gendarmes, who had been present since the wee hours of the morning, all of a sudden decided around noon that they wanted to get tested, too. So they did what any grown men would do in such a situation – cutsies. I was so bewildered to see grown-ass men cutting teenaged girls in a line that it took me a while to realize what was going on. The nurse giving the tests finally put a stop to these shenanigans, but not before one of the gendarmes had pushed a sixteen year-old girl out of the way. This was when the Americans decided to take their leave for the afternoon, lest a slap- and/or tickle-fight break out.
The most important trait that a Peace Corps Volunteer can have is a sense of humor. I have, of course, focused on those things that I find funny to relate to you. However, I’ll take just a moment on the serious side to say that, despite all of the hair-pulling-out/maddening moments involved, we tested nearly 200 young people and reached almost twice that with HIV-prevention messages. So there.
Well, I’m off to Ghana and Togo on what should prove to be my last real vacation before leaving the Peace Corps. We are now T-minus one point five months away from Close of Service Conference, when I will get my official Close of Service date for August or September. Stay tuned.
FUN FACT: Sometimes you spend six hours in a dusty minibus on dirt roads and see a gruesome truck accident up ahead and your bus stops and a the nun that’s sitting behind you gets out and starts blessing people for a while and then you finally get to Natitingou and have yourself an antelope steak and fries with a Togolese beer while the sun sets behind the mountains. Sometimes.
THE PHOTOS:
Proof that people showed up:
A skit some students put on
One of our esteemed musical guests (also the banner fell)
One of my English Club kids entered into the poetry contest, and won!
Veronique and Jacques, my Amour et Vie team, organizing a game to demonstrate how HIV affects the body
Carlos and Estelle, the Amour et Vie team organized by the volunteer in Zagnanado before me, demonstrating how to use a condom. They are superstars and continue to help me out whenever I need it even though their volunteer left.
The organizing team – Ezekiel, Omer, Jiroux, Aymard, Donné, and Israël.
Peacin' Out 