Merigoesaround

Mr. Sachs is in Benin. When I learnt he was coming to Cotonou I fantasized of going to the airport wearing my Harvard hoodie and a banner saying "Sachs Sucks, Harvard Rocks!"...but then a) I discoverd that he was coming by road from Lome and b) I do not dislike the guy so much and enjoyed his writings (and work) on Poland. Now Jeff, as my KSG teachers call him, is trying to sell the world his Millenium Villages project. According to UN info the idea behind this is that impoverished villages can transform themselves and meet the MDGs provided they are supported with powerful, practical, proven technologies. "By investing in health, food production, education, access to clean water, and essential infrastructure, these community-led interventions will enable impoverished villages to escape extreme poverty, something that currently confines over 1 billion people worldwide". Sachs' stuff Hum... As much as I believe in microprojects and subsidiarity...Jeff, I do not s...

I understand modern nomadic life. Isn't my life kind of nomadic? peripatetic? (as my friend Sophie Brown would say) Traditional nomadism is another thing. No Samsonites. Peuhls are nomads. Strong herders and shepherds. Peuhl girls and boys do not go to school. Some donors are currently considering how to provide education to the Peuhl minority in Benin (and in other Western African countries). I find these shocks between western and traditional mentalities/customs very annoying. Maybe annoying is not the word. It is just such a difficult issue to tackle that I lose fuel from the beginning. Here a picture of a Peuhl cheese seller. Peuhls only marry among themselves, Beninese think the people of this minority are probably one of the most beautiful in Western Africa.

Have you ever seen a cameleon!? I saw my first ever cameleon the other day. In Bembereke. The driver suddenly stopped the car and said: Cameleon! I am going to have good luck today. At first, I did not want to get off the car to take a picture...somehow I thought a cameleon was as big as a crocodile. And as dangerous. Then the courageous side of me opened the door and saw this: Good luck.

Last week I went up north. We left with 4 long hours of delay. Just to stick to the African tempo. Benin has surprisingly average-to-good roads and arriving to Djogou was not as painful as I'd expected. Once 700km away from Cotonou the adventure started. The purpose of the mission was for me to understand UNICEFs educational interventions in Benin. I am not sure if I understand the program yet...but I am positive I now understand the constraints much better. I was totally unprepared for this mission. Mentally and in terms of equipment (chocolate bars I missed you!?! I missed sugar in general). This is the kind of menu that filled my stomach during five days... Igname (kind of enormous potato) puree and meat in a spicy peanut sauce. You normally eat this in little restaurants called 'maquis'. It feels tremendously selfish to say that I did not like that food...most of the people in the regions I visited cannot afford eating that. It was the first time I noticed people were h...

In Benin there is a very high percentage of children that work or/and trafficked to neighboring Nigeria. Another reason why Beninese hate Nigerians. The stats do not come as a surprise to me. Just visually, the first time I visited Benin I was amazed by the amount of children you can find e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e*. Condoms, where are you?? You see those little human bodies with (often) swollen stomach and shaved heads on every corner. I love when they smile to me, those shining teeth faces. Sadly, I see 5 of these little creatures treated as slaves every morning. Just in front of my front door. They are building a garage for a neighbor. The image of a 6-year old wearing a XXL rapper t-shirt and old plastic flip-flops carrying a piece of stone too big for him to carry is dramatic, specially when I am leaving the house to go to work with UNICEF!! Childhood is not fun. Adolescence inexistent. Adulthood is too hard. Life is too short. *Fertility rate...around 6 kids per woman, average!!

In Benin there are multiple local languages. Among them, Fon is the most commonly used. Especially in Cotonou. My colleagues at work speak something like Fonçais…Fon and Français. It sounds really musical. ‘A fon fandia’ for good morning. ‘Kunao’ for thank you. ‘Orabo’ means bye. And seems impossible to learn. There is one word that I now very well though…Yoboba. White girl. I am the Yoboba of the office. There are some other Yobos, but not many (6 out of 60?). This is being a great multicultural experience. Today I went to a Chinese restaurant with my Beninese colleagues to sing karaoke (pictures with Nadine, Estelle and Olga). I am eating willy and tibi with a sort of Tabasco sauce for breakfast, one is like sweet potatoe the other a very fibrous, hard to chew potatoe with absolutely no taste. Both fried. Healthy breakfast, right? The worst was when I found myself singing religious songs in the office with my colleague Nadine. Benineses are very religious, they have it all, animistic...

It is June. Excuse me all those born the month of June, the ones that fall in love for the first time during a hot June and remember it vividly, the ones that consider June the kick off of the holiday season, those that like the weather changes that start in June...summer in the Northern hemisphere, tropical storms in Benin...apologies for the next posting but me and June do not get along. First, I have a sinus infection and I am over worried. The image of me, myself and I doing eucalyptus inhalations over a pan (again…I spent the whole of last June doing that twice per day) mixed the steam with my tears. This is about the health reason that justifies my June’s aversion. Dummy me I have probably been doing all the wrong things to maintain my sinuses clean and in perfect functioning: I have been to Msebo and Dantokpa, two markets that do not comply with any, ANY, public health standard. Indeed they are sources of public unhealthiness. Dusty, muddy, messy, urine-infested, insect-invaded…...

I am having a terrible week.7 useless days of my life. One of those that you want to pass by fast. But...eeeinnn....it is still Tuesday. Let me count, I have two more hours of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The new week, happy one, will start on Saturday. Seen like this it does not look that bad. 3 more days and I'll be in a happy mood again. My friend Ursula has recommended me to discover new things that might make me happy again, she just discovered the soja latte and despite its price ($6, she is in NYC) she is paying that ridiculous amount because soja lattes make her day happier. All it makes me happy right now makes me unhappy one hour later. I would eat a whole bar of Lindt 76% cacao chocolate, a croissant dipped in Nuttella, I would sleep 12 hours per day and lay by the pool the other 12 reading books... Trying to analyze the origin of this terrible week...mmm...not easy. Nothing bad has happened. Ah! it is monotony that is killing this week.

If it weren't for the rain...life in Benin would be almost perfect. I am not exaggerating on the weather issue...this is almost as grey as Brussels every second day. Crazy amounts of rain. Pouring. Dark sky. See the picture of the car's front wheel to imagine the amount of water accumulated in some (mud-paved!) streets. This is a road, not a river! I do not clean, I do not iron, I do nothing but eat, read and relax. The house is soo nice. Job is interesting. I learn at a pace of one new thing per minute...you do not learn that much at the Kennedy. I am in bed right now and it is only 9.00pm. I try to go to bed quite early because getting up at 7.30am every day to go and save the children with UNICEF it is being very painful...But today I am not in bed because I need to sleep 10 hours in order to be able to wake up early (which is totally true)...no, today I am sick. I have all the symptoms of malaria but one, the most important one apparently in terms of indicating whether you...

Americans will never forgive us for withdrawing the Spanish troops from Irak. We chickened out! The craddle of bullfighting...could not make it with those shias! Who needs their forgiveness? It was the right thing to do in any case. Only Aznar and other Spanish neocons and their imperialist dreams of 'grandeur' were supporting the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq. Wrong..at least not under an US-only-led-mandate. Helloooou United Nations, wake up!?! 3 years later Condi Rice landed in Madrid. First meeting of the Spanish-American diplomacy since the withdrawal. Jezz..they must be really mad at us those American rightwingers. Apparently, Zapi Zapatero has asked Bush to meet him 5 or 6 times...with no answer. Our polyglot King Juanca, skillful as he is in dealing with the female world, greeted Condi in Zarzuela. Bush prefers to go to other places than Spain. Albania, for instance. He'll be there the 10th of June...YOU STUPID monkey, why didn't you come one year ago when ...

...can have such an arsenal of black gold in the fridge...

This crazy, messy city has: Lions and leeches in the clubs... Lizzards and snails on the roads... And GIRAFFES over the drinking tables!! See the pictures, those are Beninese giraffes. Empty baby giraffe below!

Cotonou saw this week the opening of its first Rasta Resto and the owners happen to be friends of friends. Yesterday I had the chance to speak with the owner and I reckon this is a powerful religion!...the hippie in me felt like converting to Rastafarism after 30 short minutes of conversing with the Rasta lady. Can you imagine living in Guadalupe up in the mountains for 15 years, semi-naked, with no money, eating whatever nature produces, producing whatever nature allows...isn't this freedom? However, the capitalist in me told the hippie Meri that I have a too expensive, way too materialistic kind of life, difficult to change after a late-at-night conversation with a Rasta.

This is what I can cook: This is what my roommate can cook: Click on the picture to enjoy Yue Man's beef sirloin with 'sauce a la truffe' and mushroomy fresh linguini...

Blaise is Togolese. He is the gardener. Emmanuel is Beninese and a devout evangelist. I think he prays when he cooks. He recently changed religion, which is common in Benin. Blaise and Emmanuel make my life in Benin very easy. So easy that I reckon you could get use to new-colonialism in a matter of days. I can not get used to Emmanuel’s buttery cooking though, another remnant of French colonialism. I am too young and too independent to be served but the other option is to fire them. If I am having any impact on Africa (well, Hugo, he pays, it is his house…etc) is on those two people. Blaise and Emmanuel have a fixed salary, social benefits and like their jobs. The former recently brought his wife from Togo and it seems they are starting a new life in Benin. Emmanuel sends his kids to school (and certainly to church) and might be using condoms, even if his evangelist peers think that a miracle and loads of good math are controlling Emmanuel's family size. Blaise has a cell phone Hu...

It's me. I am totally jet-lagged. It is terrible per se…but it is even more terrible when you try to read documents full of tables with suspicious numbers and funky names such as Beroubouay, Djassin-Zoume, Mounon Koussou… So, here I am, sitting in the office, checking the clock every 10 minutes and thinking, ‘pls, pls, tell me that it is already 5.45pm’..The timetable of this office is worse than the jet lag. I have to wake up at 7.20am. Let me write this again to build self-esteem…7.20AM. After a Harvard-year waking up at 9.30am I am in shock. I hate working. ‘Why not doing a PhD?’ I fantasize. And don’t miss that…I have a 1-hour lunch break. This is slavery. I am overwhelmed with documentation. Debordee, qu’on dit in French. I don’t trust a single line I am reading. The French language in those documents is so rococo that I bet nobody but me has ever read these evaluation reports. “La recherche de solution au probleme de la scolarisation des filles ou au probleme de l’ecole tout ...

Today I slept in the sofa's living room for two reasons (and not because my boyfriend and I argued precisely) 1- Fleas. Those little bitchy insects. My legs seem to have acute chicken pox. They are everywhere I sit. They are in the mantress. I know fleas and mosquitos are different beasts...but if Malarone, the anti-malaria profilaxys thingy I am religiously taking is to do something againts tropical diseases, pls, pls, pls, make my blood bitter so those little creatures stop devouring me. 2- My first tropical storm. Some Europeans say the first time they visit New York that 'it looks like in the movies'. Well, yes, a tropical storm is also like in the movies. I was hoping for the prince of the movies to come and save me from the storm when I saw the gardener covered with a plastic bag entering the house. I shut my eyes and hoped that what I'd seen was the gardener and not a giant dribbling snail coming to eat me.

I came to Africa with Malaika. She was only 17 but looked my age (add 10 to that). Malaika hold Beninese passport but was as white as myself. Her origins were very exotic: half Lebanese, a quarter French and a quarter tuareg. Lebanese dad payed her high school studies in London and now will pay 2 years of jewelry studies in Florence. Not bad. Malaika is part of one of the first Lebanese settlers in West Africa, she is the fifth generation. I knew about Lebanese dominance all over Africa (now the Chinese dangerously gaining ground) but I'd never imagined that the dominance started so long ago. Malaika and I met in Casablanca, while waiting for the connection to Cotonou. Mohammed was also sitting besides me waiting for his flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle. He adviced me to stick to my purse..."the airport is not safe, don't accept to surveille any packet or hold any bag to somebody when crossing customs", he whispers to me. He is going back home. Home is France. He wen...