Zebrafish

Sunday Dec 1

After a hot shower and a lazy breakfast I took a shared taxi about 3.5 hours to Parakou. On the way we stopped to buy red rind cheese from a girl at the roadside. The two women in the car were adamant about getting me a fair price. The girl selling the cheese was a beautiful teenager adorned with many rings, necklaces and traditional clothing. In Parakou I walked in the afternoon heat to Hotel Canarias. I took a mediocre Chicken salad and beer and retired to bed. In the evening went to a relatively expensive African restaurant and had really good fish in peanut sauce with chilli and fried cheese with Igname or Fufu which is Yam made into dumpling.

Thoughts on Poverty

These are thoughts that have been gathering in my mind for a while. Travelling here certainly requires an adventurous spirit but also a respect for the people whose lives you bare witness too. How often do you see lots of children walking around with empty bowls, one after the other along the road, I always try to finish my meal but when I’ve finished eating I give my empty my leftovers to the kids hanging around nearby. Along some streets it seems almost every woman and child I see would put out their hand and ask for a “cadeau”, a present in French. Near Djenné in Mali a boy watched me eat a banana, when I’d finished and threw away the empty skin he quickly picked it up and ate the small joining piece at the end while looking at me. His trick worked as I gave him and his friend bananas, they then seemed happy. Although sometimes you get the impression that some people just want something for free. They seem obsessed with money but I guess you would be if you had none.

It’s also very hard for educated intelligent people here. They feel so much frustration at Africa’s inability to organise itself and the corruption everywhere. It’s no surprise they want to qualify and move to Europe or the USA. They seemed resigned to the fact that things will not change. I can’t blame them for wanting to move to the developed world but these people are exactly what Africa needs to move forward.

Monday Dec 2

It’s getting noticeably humid again as I go further south and I’m starting to sweat again. In the north you don’t notice yourself sweat unless you for example rest your hand on your leg for 5 minutes and the see the wet perspiration where your hand had been. I took some coffee and bread in the auto gare; I had great difficulty here getting a fair fare price for a shared taxi to Bohicon. At first I was offered 8,000CFA (1000CFA = £1). I just walked straight away without bargaining.

Then another guy tried to make me pay 6-7,000 and bull-shiting me about it being direct. The price was clearly displayed inside the taxi 4,500CFA and so I threatened to take my bag elsewhere unless he sold me a ticket immediately at the correct price. Unfortunately my French gets most of its practice at these moments arguing over unfair prices because I’m white.

We wait about an hour as chickens are strapped onto the roof and in all ten of us are in this Peugeot 504. At the roadside all over the French West Africa that I’ve seen people sell petrol in old whiskey and wine bottles. There are modern petrol stations too in cities but quite commonly you see a simple glass filter pump on top of a petrol barrel. At Bohicon the prices were unclear but I got on a motorbike for the 10km to Abomey and the laid back Hotel La Lutta. Rested, washed clothes and ate beef in peanut sauce with rice.

Tuesday Dec 3

In the morning I walked over to the Royal Palace Museum of Dahomey. Unfortunately there are only French speaking guides available so I lost a lot of the detail. There are twelve thrones on display one for each of the Dahomey kings. Kings lived in the Royal Palace but had to build a palace for themselves nearby as well as expand the kingdom through conquest.

Each palace was surrounded by high mud walls and the entire area encompassed by a moat 60 metres deep and 4 metres wide stretching 44km in all. When the French took control the current king ordered all but the main palaces destroyed when the last king was a puppet leader of the French.

There were also some interesting items such as Portuguese cloth and swords, an elaborate decanter sent from the king of England and voodoo items like a decorated skull on a stick used in ceremonial dances. Apart from the living quarters there was one temple where blood from an enemy was mixed with mud into its construction. I had a beer and some local millet brew mixed with citrus and ginger and ate jelly like pasta mould with sardine like fish sauce in a spicy tomato and palm oil sauce.

In the afternoon there was a misunderstanding and we left on the moped tour without waiting for my English-speaking guide. We took a 1.25 tour of the palace ruins and voodoo temples. Again I missed a lot in translation. But it included Temple Zéwa, a voodoo temple where two women were covered in oil and left to be eaten by ants. Also in the village of Dozoéme there are blacksmiths fashioning implements in their crude forges as once they did exclusively for the Dahomey kings.

Wednesday Dec 4

I caught a taxi straightforwardly to Cotonou. As you arrive in this monstrous metropolis there are amongst other things, rows upon rows of people selling petrol in glass jars at the roadside. I got dropped off at Danktopa market auto gare; my first impressions were that there seemed absolute chaos all around me People and mopeds, stalls and taxis everywhere.

Blue petrol fumes billowed in the air with traffic all blowing their horns repeatedly. People carry things to sell and bang boxes on their heads to attract attention and groups of men shout at me in case I wanted a taxi or moped somewhere or to change money, buy a leather belt, lottery ticket or a kitchen clock.

With a small compass and map I found the hotel quite quickly. The humidity here is intense and I am socked in sweat. Inside I was shown a very large basic blue room, clean and cheap although next to a fairly busy road and with just broken shutters for windows so nights are noisy and very sweaty.

In the afternoon I walked down to Gerbe Do’r an air-conditioned patisserie to rest my body in the cool air and drink a large cold Béninoise beer with a huge plate of omelette and chips. Couldn’t find any bookshops but found a deaf man selling newspapers and a few cheap romantic novels. I picked up a seedy one to try and further my knowledge of French. There are bars everywhere here so I visited two opposite my hotel in the evening, I got a little drunk and ate some beef brochettes off a street vendor.

Thursday Dec 5

The last day of Ramadan means the banks and markets are closed. I took a taxi to Abomey Calavi on the outskirts of the city and hired a pirogue out to visit the town of Ganvie. 18,000 people here live out on bamboo stilt huts, several kilometres in the middle of the lake mostly through fish farming. The tour was a bit spoilt because the guide wanted almost the same again to show me around Ganvie, which is what I assumed I had already paid for.

I told him no thanks, we made a stop at a souvenir shop which I paid no attention to and then followed a route through the outskirts of Ganvie before heading back. The sight of people waving, shouting and asking for money in these suspended huts is quite amazing, trade is all by pirogue, while I was there a woman in one floated up to us to sell yoghurt, many others sell fruit as they would normally do on land.

The pirogue guide did sing on the way back but I was a bit annoyed at the additional cost for an additional tour that was out of proportion to normal costs in Benin. The guides here do seem to have become a little greedy and spoilt by a mismanaged tourism industry and a large number of foreigners coming through Cotonou.

In the Internet café I met an 18-year-old Liberian refugee called Fuad. He said he wanted to write a book on global terrorism that he could sell. So I asked him to take me somewhere where I could eat spaghetti and we could talk. We pretty much agreed on things but I helped him think about some wider issues and gave him some website links of writers such as Noam Chomsky.

His said his parents had both been killed in Liberia and he rented a mat to sleep on in the local park. He wanted to study Physics at University in Nigeria and thought selling this book would help him. He was on intelligent lad but and thought he might be wasting his time in Cotonou living like this. He wanted sponsorship, but I couldn’t offer this to him. Instead I gave him the 4,000CFA that I had in my pocket and swapped email addresses.

Friday Dec 6

Changed money and visited the Danktopa market and the crazy seething area around it. It was photogenic in a congested polluted, fragile human way. I waited about an hour for the taxi to fill up and had quite a nice journey west to the village of Grand Popo. I’m staying here in one of a group of small log cabins on the beach. It’s very tranquil here, golden sandy beaches and hardly anyone about.

I need a few days to relax because I notice I’m starting to lose patience with people who try to rip me off and I need to take a good rest from life on the road. I ate pasta steamed in half coconut shells with fried fish in a roadside palm shelter for 250CFA or about 25p and potato fries for 5p. Later went to a cheap tourist restaurant for a couple of beers and a plate of chips for 70p.

Went to one really friendly shop, the woman there Leyene spoke a little English and I waited as she cooked peanuts in sand. I also tried a piece of clay stone which people eat to aid indigestion. I took some peanuts and water for which she didn’t want any money for. Mentally I’m starting to feel better here, although it’s a shame there are no other travellers here to talk to and share a beer with.

Saturday Dec 7

I had a lazy morning reading while the villagers outside on the beach were chanting as they pulled in their nets. I went for a long walk in both directions along the beach allowing the surf to soak me but it was too dangerous to swim with the undercurrent. I walked for a couple of hours letting the waves crash and run over my feet legs. On one side of the beach was an upturned boat about 10 metres out allowing the surf to crash over it.

I went back to Leyene’s shop to buy a couple of items. I ended up meeting her brother Raymond and sharing fish chilli with rice, pineapple, mango and conversation for several hours and they wouldn’t accept any money for this. Raymond showed me around their dilapidating grandfather’s old house that is now split between the grandchildren.

They were both in the middle thirties and single, life seemed to have given both of them some bad luck with jobs but they hoped to one day build a hotel on their grandfather’s land on the beach, it certainly seems an ideal place to do so.

The welcome I received from them asked for nothing but friendship and it was so rewarding for me at that time. Travelling relatively quickly through northern Benin meant I spent a lot of time on my own dealing with mainly taxi drivers and contractual based relationships with people intent on ripping me off. Language barriers here have also prevented me from getting to know people better.

Sunday Dec 8

Went to speak and say goodbye to Raymond and Leyene then caught a motorbike up to the main road. White I waited here I bought and chewed some fresh sugar cane bought from a small impromptu roadside seller. It was a short trip by shared taxi to Ouidah. I’d arranged to meet Mireille here; I’d met her originally in Kakum Park in Ghana. I checked into Ermitage Buvette next door where the prices on my room door are also listed by the hour.

I paid the kids there to do some washing for me and asked for a plate of spaghetti, the fat, machoisitic late middle-aged manager walked into the bar wrapped only in an old towel and offered me a string of condoms. I don’t know how he could have got those two words mixed up but he did, he seemed offended that I didn’t want any meat with my spaghetti so I accepted a boiled egg on top.

Later Mireille and Maureen turned up next door and I decided to check out the hotel when they offered me a room. The manager next door refused to give me a refund on the second night’s accommodation that I’d paid in advance; instead he was incredibly rude and unfriendly. I told him I’d write a letter to the guidebooks about his rude service. As I hear later from Maureen he is always making a lot of noise shouting at his wife and hitting the children.

It was so nice to be a guest of my two new Canadian aid worker friends. To be able to talk English, relax on the porch and listen to good music on the stereo was a great luxury. Maureen cooked vegetarian curry that we shared with two refugees that came around and we had some great conversation about Africa, travel and refugees.

Monday Dec 9

Coffee and African popped rice for breakfast. Their United Nations CH 4x4 and driver turned up at 9am and we drove the 12km north to the refugee camp. Along the mud red road there are occasional white flags signalling voodoo practitioners. People wave as we pass. Once I am told the 4x4 broke down and children that normally wave run off scared until they build up the courage to shake your hand and then it’s hard to shake them off.

The camp was moved a couple of years ago and is now enclosed by a wall and situated 12km from Ouidah or any decently sized village. This site was probably chosen for security purposes and for ease of purchase but the isolation is only making it harder for the refugees to fully integrate.

You could easily drive straight past the camp but on entering you find an extremely well organised African village. A new village rather like an African version of Milton Keynes for exiled refugees. The semi detached one room homes are built with good space between them and there are separate toilet blocks and a central area with a wash area with taps and overhead street lighting during the evening.

First off Matthew a Togolese refugee on a handicap tricycle is waiting for us and asks for 3,000CFA or £3 to have his bicycle fixed. Which after I examine the trike Maureen gives him and requests a receipt. We visit a home where one of the men had been having prostrate cancer trouble. The tests have come through and appear okay but he is hiding the results from everyone and still asking for money. He has a nice room and has two broken TV sets in one corner; it looks like he’s using them as decorations. In another home I visit there is an old car seat inside, most rooms are divided in half by mosquito nets into sleeping areas.

Maureen takes me on a tour around the camp. First we visit the majority Togolese area. Unfortunately the groups have not been mixed together and English and French speakers only mix a certain amount. Next we visit the farm. This is mainly tended by Sam a Somalian man who is keen to teach himself farming and to eventually get himself out of here.

There are bananas, plantain, mango, papaya trees, pineapples, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes and courgette. You just plant seeds here and they grow into strong tall plants in a matter of weeks. There are also rat farms, fish farms, huge chicken pens, two large piggeries and turkey pens. The food is top class and cheap. Maureen can choose what she wants off the branch. She orders seeds from abroad and within weeks Sam has fruit forming. The small shop sells home made produce and great soya bean milk with lemon grass.

We visit the area for the Nigerian Ogoni people. I’m invited to talk with Manday their leader and ask him some questions. It goes something like this. “Why are the Ogoni people still not able to go back to Nigeria and what problems are there?”

I get a lot of tangential answers but the main problem is that pollution still exists where oil production is continuing and meanwhile their villages are without proper clean water or roads. They say that some of this money that is creating Nigeria’s wealth should be used to improve basic living conditions for the Ogoni communities instead they are suffering because of pollution and harassment by police and security guards.

They ultimately would like to return to Nigeria their homeland but some have been here ten years. They clearly suffered a lot in Nigeria and are understandably paranoid and scared of the Nigerian government. But in the camp they complain a lot even though they are given so much here that the ordinary African would not get. They make no real effort to integrate with the French speakers and do little work. I spoke to their secretary and several others in the shade of the giant mango tree during the afternoon.

They seem to be becoming institutionalised and expect volunteers and the United Nations to be finding answers for them, meanwhile most of them sit around all day and do nothing while their women work. The men I spoke to lay in the shade talking about how much they were suffering there. I understand that the United Nations who are responsible for them are soon going to stop providing them food and tell them to return to Nigeria; which is something they are too scared to consider and will not do.

Maureen and Mireille work with improving conditions for women and children and those that have special problems. Maureen refuses to work with African men whom she considers too machoistic, lazy and corrupt from her own personal experience.

A couple of us paint some concrete posts with which Mireille wants to create some walking and running routes. They work for Olympic Aid, now called “The right to play” which tries to help people through sporting activities. Afterwards we painted a white sheet to make a twister board for the children. I joined the end of Mireille’s art class where we learned to fold paper into swans with the children sitting around us.

Tuesday Dec 10

I went with Mireille and a Rwandan refugee into Ouidah to visit a small sign making business to learn how to print our own T-shirts. Mireille wanted to give him some self-confidence back. I didn’t know the exact circumstances but he must have been through a lot. He seemed a mild mannered person, gentle and friendly.

In the afternoon I came back to the house and made good progress with reading “The Viceroy of Ouidah” by Bruce Chatwin. Rich in prose and description it describes a poor Brazilian who makes his way to Ouidah to become close friends with the king of Dahomey Empire in Abomey.

The book is full of colour, deterioration and absurdity. It covers not only the horrific rule of the Dahomey kings but the trading of slaves and Brazilian influence on Ouidah that is still evident in local surnames such as De Souza, Da Silva and the remaining crumbling architecture; sometimes buildings with only a front wall remaining.

The house I’m staying in is like an open house to friends and while I was in during the day a guy called Sean from Canada knocked on the door. He had met Maureen in Cotonou and was returning from a similar trip to my own but done in the reverse direction and in half the time. We walked into town stopping for some citrus millet beer; we walked the 4km “route des esclaves” down to the beach. This is the old route that slaves would take in chains to the European ships awaiting them on the beach.

Along the way there are green fetish statues of animals, snakes and a three headed deformed human. There is an interesting mosaic depicting the passage of slaves to the Americas and a beautiful statue stands out in place of a special tree that no longer exists. Here slaves were made to walk around seven times if they were male and nine times if female in order to forget where they came from, and prepare themselves for their new lives.

There was a huge new gateway arch built as a memorial to slavery, the gate of no return at the beach. The beach was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen stretching flat for miles of golden sand and undisturbed tropical palm trees. Sean and I had a couple of beers and swapped travel experiences. We then each took a motorcycle taxi back to the house.

There was the usual assortment of people at the house. I took a shower and afterwards we headed out to the crossroads for street food. I had turkey, rice and salad with two large beers for £1.20. Children were presenting us with a display of Christmas nativity scenes they’d created, usually from a cardboard box with a candle inside and pictures of Jesus or nuns, some flowers, bric a brac and cassette tapes? We gave each one about 50CFA and showed them our appreciation and delight.

Wednesday Dec 11

We spent the morning at the T-shirt printers, waiting, reading, and experimenting by drawing designs on paper and learning how to print designs onto T-shirts. I left them in the afternoon to take the kids to a hotel pool. I finished my book on Ouidah and visited the Old Portuguese fort that is now a museum to slavery and voodoo culture. There were interesting photographs of voodoo practice in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil. I wondered around exploring Ouidah and its narrow timeless back streets, refreshing myself from the heat with fresh coconut milk, beer and frozen yoghurt. I also went onto the Casa do Brasil museum of contemporary voodoo painting and sculpture.

Thursday Dec 12

Maureen and Mireille have both gone to Cotonou mainly to arrange business sponsor prizes for their forthcoming refugee running race. They managed to get free internet time, camera film development and an equivalent of a £20 meal for two at a top Berlin restaurant in Cotonou which are all extremely good prizes to win here.

I spent the morning looking through a book written by Maurice Strong about the direction the world is going in. He was organiser of the first world summit in Rio; I then caught up on my diary and washed some of my clothes by hand. In the afternoon I borrowed the house mountain bike and cycled out through another market on the edge of Ouidah on a sandy track and out to a school for priests and a leper colony that my hosts had told me about.

Both places were down similar sandy tracks. The monastery was quiet; I could just hear a few men chanting in the church there. The leper colony was also quiet but was in the most beautifully serene area enclosed and shaded by tall palm trees and red flowering bushes. I returned to the road and cycled on through a village called Savé, I stopped here and took some bread, tonic water and a beer. I ate the bread plain as the only thing on offer was barbequed chicken feet and they didn’t look particularly good to eat.

This week there is a volleyball match on and Maureen and Mireille are also taking the kids to a hotel swimming pool. Maureen is retired; she is a big lady with a strong character and very involved in volunteer work and helping improve disadvantaged people’s lives. Mireille is an idealistic young woman and at just 20 years old she is far more mature than most human beings ever become. Its amazing to see so much motivation and caring in someone like her. I’m sure she’ll go on to lead a very important life and her strong passion will definitely lead her to a rewarding life. I’ve been very lucky this week to have been invited to stay in this unique household and also to have the time to appreciate being in Ouidah.

Friday Dec 13

Mireille’s 21^st birthday! We had a relaxing breakfast; Maureen stayed at home to organise the party, I shaved for the first time in six weeks and then the driver took us to the refugee camp. Mireille, I, Antoine and Roderick went around with concrete posts that we’d painted and dug into the ground creating walkways around the camp. Mireille ran back and I joined the volleyball team in the 4WD. For the evening chairs and plates were hired. Ice was placed in a large blue bucket and filled with beer; Aba cooked a fantastic fish curry with rice.

Only two of their closest refugee friends were invited and came along, the rest of the people there were local friends and people working with them. Among the guests were three Peace Corps volunteers and a Rasta called Rasiguevera. He didn’t have use of his legs but he was a lawyer and sang in a reggae band. We listened to Angelique Kidjo, Alpha Blondy and plenty of upbeat Congolese music most of the night. At one point a song came on from a popular TV show where viewers vote on big-breasted women that come on the show. One young lad shoved two balloons under his T-shirt and entertained us all by dancing about and shaking his booty. Afterwards to different music we all got up to dance, as everyone gradually left one by one each person went around the party shaking hands exactly the same as when guests arrived.

Saturday Dec 14

After a big communal breakfast with everyone who stayed over I eventually left about 12.30pm, this is Africa and things can take this long but I’m not complaining you adjust to the pace of life here. It was sad leaving as I appreciated being in one place and getting to know it and the people. I also enjoyed doing some work there and helping improve people lives.