The Rat

I found a rat in my house the other day and have begun my process of eliminating his occupation of my house. I’m about to build, what I like to call, the West African Peace Corps rattrap. Basically, you get a bucket and fill it a quarter full of water. Then you attach a string between each of the handles and hang another piece of string in the middle with a piece of cheese tied to the end. Rats can climb up buckets, but the art of reaching, capturing, and eating the cheese without falling into the bucket, is a little beyond them.

The funny thing is, the journey of the rat does not end there. From my bush taxi vantage point I can see people holding up giant rat carcasses to sell. Why you ask? To eat, of course! It’s called agouti, I haven’t tried it yet because I’m scared of eating rats. But the point is, that’s probably what I’ll end up doing.

I’m currently in the process of grading upwards of 450 quizzes and tests prior to grades being due. On Monday, we start calculating the grades for all of our students and I hope to be done by Tuesday.

Next week I’ll be in Natitingou for the first meeting organizing a boys camp in Bassila. I’ll be one of the counselor’s for the camp in June or July. That means I’ll have to practice my French more prior to the camp. In village I speak a fair amount of English, at school and with my students for instance; and enough French and Aja and Fon to get by in the market and around town.

I’ve reached what I would call a fluency in Franglais, which is what we call our amalgamated cross language of French and English. It’s so hard to turn it off. Whenever I talk to people in the states, asking questions like “How are things la bas?” are a real challenge to avoid. It’s nice to have a couple different languages to work with to explain the more inexplicable experiences to other volunteers here. Talking to the states though….it’s a little more difficult. I struggle to get the point across with a lot of things that go on over here.

I guess that’s how experiences in countries like Benin become to romanticized, because I become so indifferent to the everyday differences between here and America and have to rely on words that don’t really do it justice. So I and others fill in the gaps with less applicable descriptions and expressions and construct a different reality than the one I have here. That’s probably just more of a general problem with trying to relate an encounter with a, in some regards, incomprehensible, experience through text and pictures. It would be better for people to just come here and experience it for themselves. I can’t fill in all the gaps of what people want or need to hear through this blog. And seeing firsthand is much different than reading and imagining.

That seems to be all the news that’s fit to print, so this is Erik English signing off.

You stay classy America.