How does your garden grow?

Okay, pop quiz: how do cashews grow? If you're thinking about peanuts - which is only logical - then you are very wrong. Yes indeed, they grow on trees. Alright, maybe I was the only one confused - I think almonds grow on trees too, but being from Georgia peanuts were the sensible comparison to make. Right now I am sure my dad is saying, 'yes, but peanuts are legumes, not nuts like cashews,' or something similarly explanatory, but still. It's just weird. There are a lot of cashew trees in my region of Benin, and in fact there are several large ones in my school yard. Cashew exports are a big business around here; they seem to be the main enterprise of the most successful people in my village. A lot of them apparently get exported to India. Anyway, the season is rolling around so I took a picture of the tree at school to share with my fellow Georgians who may be confused. The nuts actually grow under these little apple-ish fruits, which my friend says you can eat, but that people usually don't because the nuts aren't ready until the fruit is past ripe and falls. I haven't actually tasted any Beninese cashews yet, but I am dying to get my hands on some. The cashews have looked ready for weeks now, but people keep telling me to wait. The mangoes (which also grow on trees) seem to be in a similar state of misleading almost-ripeness, so I am waiting impatiently for those as well.

I finally took a picture of one of my classes. I had been waiting because I knew producing a camera during class would cause an uproar. My concerns were not unfounded, but I managed to get a couple of pictures without having the camera broken or causing a ruckus loud enough to get scolded by anyone. I am trying to correspond with a teacher in Atlanta and her class through this penpal program the Peace Corps has, which was the initial impetus for taking the pictures. It's actually pretty cool because the teacher is a recent college grad doing the Teach for America program. Anyway this is a class of my older students, around eighth grade. There are about fifty of them in the class, but I don't think you can see all of them in the picture. Also they usually sit in groups of three desks, so they're not all in rows like that, but this was just after test week and the desks were still lined up from that. The first picture was when I had threatened them in French with punishment if they didn't stay in their seats for the picture. The second was after I had shown them all the first picture on the camera and then let a student take a picture with me in it. Clearly they could no longer contain themselves, but it was pretty fun to get that picture.

I have also started my girls' club since Christmas, which is sort of exciting. Most TEFL volunteers do a girls' club, so it's not like out of the ordinary or anything. We have had three meetings so far, and our fourth is tomorrow. I have between 7 and 15 girls, though I hope a few more will start coming. It is mostly for the younger girls at the school (like 7th to 9th grade) and it is pretty educational - we deal with topics like time management, sexual health, leadership, hygiene, etc. I am not quite sure what I am doing yet, but there is a great club mentor in my village who has worked with all the three volunteers before me, and she is helping a lot. We visited the local health center a couple of weeks ago and talked to the midwife about family planning, which I thought went really well, and tomorrow a man from a local NGO is coming to do a little training on HIV/AIDS. Side note on HIV/AIDS in Benin: the national rate is like 1%, which is much lower than many countries in Africa, but it is still taken very seriously by the government and NGOs and such. It's common to see signs that say things like 'AIDS knows no borders' and they even talk about it in various classes in school - it will be one of my topics when I have 9th graders next year. Besides the obvious method of transmission, there is also concern here about shared razors, because ritual scarification (mostly of the face, I think) is pretty common. The man who is coming to talk with us tomorrow is actually doing a campaign right now where he does trainings specifically with traditional religious groups, since they do a lot of the scarification.

Anyway, girls have a lot of disadvantages in school here, which is why Peace Corps really encourages girls' clubs. Until recently it was very uncommon for girls to finish secondary school or even primary school. Now primary school is free for girls (and pretty cheap for boys) and there has been a big national campaign to get 'All girls to school.' But still, especially in villages, girls are much less likely to finish secondary school than boys. My classes are the first two years in secondary school, and girls make up only about one-third. I certainly wouldn't consider myself on the many and complex factors that explain this, but some of them are pretty clear: girls have more responsibilities at home (cooking, cleaning, caring for younger siblings, etc.) so they have less time to study and often fail out; boys are often dominant in the classroom and boys are expected by the teachers (who are almost all male) to be better students; early pregnancy is very common, and girls generally have to drop out of school permanently to care for the child; some parents don't make education a priority for their daughters; there is also an issue with some (certainly not all) teachers dating their students, which is pretty widely accepted around here, although there are definitely people working to change it (side note: Dad says Ms. June said that 30 years ago she knew teachers in the US who ended up marrying their students, so I try not to be too high and mighty about this issue); and the reasons could go on and on I'm sure. But I think things are slowly changing, and I hope that the few girls who come to my club will maybe have a better chance at finishing school, which of course opens up a lot of opportunities for them to do something than what their mothers do (which is generally sell things at the market, sell gas or food on the side of the road, work in the fields, or make clothes, all with a baby on their back). Even a few years in school is very valuable, because it means they learn French, which is important if they want to leave the village, because there are so many other local languages in Benin.

And that ends my girl power rant for the moment...

I had mentioned before that I was going to try to grow some vegetables, and even compost to feed them. But the reason there is no picture accompanying this is that I have found myself unable to grow even flowers, which is sort of demoralizing, and thus have not tried to grow vegetables, which seems like it would be harder. I had this cool flower box made for lots of money, and decorated it, and filled it with good dirt from a man I met in the village who does his own compost, and I planted flower seeds my grandma sent me. And then nothing grew. I am fairly certain this is because daily watering proved to be way too difficult to remember, but I am nonetheless putting that project on hold. So if you want to send me dried vegetables, I wouldn't send 'em back...

Ok, the connection here keeps cutting in and out so I'm going to post this before it's too late. A la prochaine...