Leighton Chen | Lougba, Benin
PEACE CORPS BENIN
Welcome to the telling of my PC experience in Benin
The website is divided into blogs, shorts, and a photo gallery. Blogs will consist of longer posts related to events, experiences, and emotions. They will be organized by the date posted. In shorts, you can find abnormal things that I have experienced, weird things I have heard, and any thing else worth sharing, but not needing a full post. I’ll have pictures with each post, but my favorites will be put in the photo gallery. If you have any questions, or anything you want to read about, that can be left in the final questions tab. Enjoy
Why I Joined the Peace Corps
I can’t speak for anyone else’s service but mine. I think the Peace Corps is an incredibly unique opportunity, and being able to serve out of college makes it so much more attractive. However, I don’t think I’ll come to understand most of the external benefits until after I return home, go back to school, and get started with my career.
It was not a difficult decision to make. Peace Corps was the only option where I would have felt satisfied. I looked at going straight to grad school. However, I was tired of school, and I wasn’t sure of the direction I’d want to take my career. I also did some job searching, but I wasn’t sold on engineering, and I certainly wasn’t confident in getting a job I enjoyed. Even within the Peace Corps, the options were limited. I only wanted to be in a French speaking country, and just as importantly I wanted to work in the health sector. There were maybe four or five French speaking countries, and only two of those had openings to do health work. There was Benin, and the second was essentially the same position but in Togo. In Benin the job description said that I would work more with the youth and their caregivers, and this became the difference that led to me choosing Benin.
There was a lot more that went into the decision than just the work I’d be doing. Having grown up and gone to college in Atlanta, I wanted to get another perspective of the world. I felt there was no better way of doing this than going to an environment very much the opposite to what I had at home. I wouldn’t necessarily say I was tired of my lifestyle in Atlanta, but perhaps it was just the curiosity that drove me to make such an extreme decision. The biggest curiosity was that of becoming integrated and truly knowing a different culture, and there was a second much more faint curiosity of whether or not I was capable of living in a rural village in Africa with pretty much none of the comforts of back home. It has already been an incredible experience, and I look forward to making the most out of each day here.
Overall Structure
Peace Corps Benin is based out of Cotonou, not the capital but the largest and most developed city. The training center is located about directly west near the Togo border in a city called Lokossa. It is the capital of its department/state but it leaves much to be desired when it comes to amenities.
This is where we were for the first three months during pre service training (PST)/TECH1, besides the one week visiting site a month and a half in during on the job 1 (OTJ1). This is also where the majority of the trainings are hosted, such as TECH2, where after the first three months at site (OTJ2), we went to the training center for two weeks with our counterparts. This marks the start of your professional service at site. Throughout the year there are trainings for sector specific work, Peace Corps related committees, and workshops for members in your community.
There are currently 33 volunteers in Benin, 16 in cohort 33 and 17 in my cohort (34). They are spread between three sectors: Agriculture, Education, and Health. Everyone is located in a village somewhere south of Parakou, the line we aren’t allowed to cross due to terrorism along the northern border with Burkina Faso, and now political instability in Niger. The proximity to other volunteers is based on a couple factors. The first one being if the volunteer requests to be close to someone else or in one circumstance the same village. This is done at the beginning of training on a form with a bunch of criteria. We ranked on a scale how comfortable we were or weren’t with each criteria e.g. closeness to other volunteers, running water, electricity, etc. The second factor is what villages have requested a volunteer. It isn’t like we just show up in random villages. Villages fill out a volunteer request form, and then go through the process with Peace Corps to ensure the potential volunteers safety, and what their work environment will be. Agriculture volunteers are paired with local NGOs, education volunteers with their local middle school, and health volunteers usually with the health center, but sometimes an NGO. The local community must provide housing to the volunteer free of charge, and select two counterparts that’ll do the majority of the work with the volunteer.
For health volunteers there are three baseline, mandatory activities that the volunteer must do: a health club at the middle school, a womens group, and a team for sex education. The womens group is meant to teach women healthy childcare practices, and how the women can go on and teach these practices to other mothers in the village. These activities are based on the four global Peace Corps objectives (in fancier words): improving maternal and newborn health, educating caregivers on the care of children younger than five years old, improving the health and life skills of youth, and improving community health workers skills. There are similar goals related to gender and youth empowerment for the other two sectors. Outside of these three activities you can really do whatever you’d like, as long as it is with the participation of the community. These would fall under secondary goals, and there’s pretty much no end to what you can do.
Lougba
Lougba, Benin. What a place to be. I thought it was a small village, but apparently 10,000 is considered decently sized. It is maybe a third of the way up the country on the border of Togo, in the region of the Collines (named after the monoliths you find everywhere). My village is one of the several villages of the city/town of Bantè, and within my village there are four neighborhoods. Two where I live (Kotakpa and Agongni), and two more 9 miles (Gotcha) and 12 miles away (Aletan). The village itself is about 10 hilly miles away from Bantè by a bumpy, sandy road in the dry season, and a pot hole-ridden, flooded road in the rainy season. I can find just enough in Lougba, where I convince myself that I don’t need to make the trek to Bantè, though I have been to a couple of the market days.
Lougba is quite like what I thought it was going to be when I heard rural community in Benin. It is a village carved out of the bush. The majority of houses are constructed out of mud with wooden supports, and a tin roof. If the family is better off they’ll have the mud layer covered in cement, or if they are even better off they’ll have their entire house built out of cement. I’ll get more into housing later. The land surrounding the village is used for farming, as a large majority of the residents rely on cultivating a combination of corn, tomatoes, soy, peanuts, cassava, or yams to live. Then you have a few common trades like tailors, barbers, and resellers (people buying anything, mostly food stuffs in larger cities and then selling in village). The majority of men work in the fields, and then women take care of the house, sell things here and there, and of course help in the fields. Most of the community is younger than 21 years old, so you have a lot of children that are used as laborers around the house, as well as in the fields during breaks from school and on the weekends. This could be as early as 7-8 years old, but I’ve seen younger walk off with their parents carrying something on their head.
About 20% of all females gave birth last year, so the population is definitely growing. It took a while to get used to seeing pregnant women come into the health center for prenatal consultations at 15-16 years old, and it was equally as shocking to see women in their 30s giving birth to their seventh or eighth child. Unfortunately, a lot of these kids won’t get more than a partial middle school education. The unemployment rate is so high for skilled jobs in the country that going to university is a waste of time and money (an opinion that I share with the locals). This means that a lot of the population; mostly women, who go to school for less than their male counterparts, haven’t learned French, and they speak in the local language, Tcha. One of fifty or so languages in the small country of Benin, Tcha is a dialect of the larger Yoruba langauge which is spoken almost solely in Nigeria. You have a lot of culturally Yoruba people whose claim to the region predates modern borders, but then there are also a lot of Nigerian immigrants that have come in search of land to farm. You don’t find many people in Lougba outside of the Tcha ethnicity group, and there definitely are not a lot of visitors. The closest volunteer to me is about 50 miles away, so, depending on how quickly I can find a taxi, it’ll take at least an hour and a half. However, everything feels equally far away, and I am happy hanging out in my village, Louga.
