Merigoesaround

Being vegetarian for the last 6 months I've received all kinds of comments and complaints:"Oh, is it because you love animals?", "Religious reasons", "dietary restrictions?", "stop being strange and difficult and ate the beef steak I bought for you" (the latter, my mum) There is no other reason behind my vegetarianism other than the fact that I simply do not appreciate food that much, I hate blood and I put on weight even under full days of pineapple and papaya diet as my Beninese hips visibly confirm. Before a friend who is now living in Singapore tells me that I sound like Paris Hilton again, let me clarify the purpose of this posting: I want to love food and I think I found the way to achieve that. Some people close their eyes out of pleasure when they put something delicious in their mouths. I know some of those. Anna, Michael, Hugo. Probably you do that too. Well, I don't. I eat because I have to eat but I am not able of appreciating...

Some people say that twin brothers or sisters are specially connected. Mentally. They can feel what the other feels, advance what the other thinks. There is no chance of my sister and I being twins, she is 3 years older...but when we were kids our capacity to want the same thing at the same time, have the same reaction simultaneously and wish the same thing was extraordinary. We even had urgent urinary needs at the same time, the run to the bathroom was very competitive. We used to wake up with the fixation of wearing the same dress or shoes (I was three years younger but had her size), we wanted to eat the same amount of soup, we would complain if my steak was bigger or her piece of chicken was smaller. It had to be the same amount. One chicken breast did not equal a chicken leg plus a wing. No. My poor father started eating chicken breast (his favorite part) when we left home. So today, when my sister called saying that she is bringing me a little gift from San Francisco and that she...

Abdel is a Muslim friend from Northern Benin who refuses to open a restaurant with another friend if he has to serve alcohol. He does not want to serve alcohol, drink it or be involved in anything related to beers and whiskies. However he knows opening a restaurant could be a good business in Northern Nattitangou. Adbel lives in conflict. He did not finish school. Abdel’s little brother helps him reading the emails he occasionally receives from a Belgium girl who volunteered in Nattitangou some years back. He would like to learn how to read and write and spare himself the embarrassment of dictating emails to his brother. He told me that he knows "why blacks are still black"!: they know what they should be doing but they just don’t do it. His reasoning shocked me but at the same time I admire Adbel for taking own responsibility for the highs and lows of his life.

When visiting the Portuguese fort of Elmina in Ghana you expect to smell the splendor and the misery of Ghana's colonial past. It turns out that this week one could also smell the future of African-American relations if Obama gets elected tonight. The guy in the picture works as a guide and also as an unofficial Obama ambassador in Ghana, trying to reach undecided Americans while they tour West Africa. His efforts together with Beninese Voodoo ceremonies invoking an Obama victory are folkloric and anecdotal. However, I would like to think that if an Afro-American president governs the United States for the next years maybe millions of African children here and there could imagine that what seems difficult is indeed feasible and achievable. That one day, maybe not that far away, change could start with themselves. The next pre-results hours are exciting and full of chocolate chip cookies, popcorn and French cheese, isn't this already a signal of change and "Entente"?