a new year

feb 10, 2015
Now that I am finally in village, i have the chance to write about my experiences this past month.
I started feeling sick around the middle of last month, and when it started to turn for the worst, i visited my friend in the Donga region. Then when it got really bad i went on a 13 hour trip to cotonou(the big city).
Before I fell into the expected bacterial infection that every volunteer experiences, I got into sort of routine here in village. I woke up everyday feeling like today would be a long day, but it would be productive. the start of every week i would basically set the mood for the end of the week. I would spend most mornings, lesson planning and meeting up with my counterpart for the various activities we would conduct at the end of the week. Bc it was the season of interrogations (quizzes) I was busy most nights grading papers under my little light.
Girl's club has gone well. There have only been 2 meetings but I can tell people are interested. Perhaps when I get back to village after IST things will pick back up.
anyway,  i would rather tell you a story about how i went to kara(togo). Just like benin, I had no prior info about Togo. I knew that the small country has a similar history to benin. So we had to take a zem and a taxi to get to the mountainous city. During the voyage, my mouth would be agape. The mountains were not like anything i had ever laid eyes upon in benin. So caught by this unexpected view, I was struck by this realization: i choose the wrong country. well, before 2013, volunteers didnt really have a choice in selecting their new country.  Now that ive seen Togo-a country that resembles benin culturally-i mean to visit there more often. It seems to be drastically cheaper than benin--according to our trip to the marche. People seem to speak french better--according to my 2 minute conversations with the vendors. perhaps I am just more or less enrapturd by the steep mountains and ruch rivers but volunteers in Togo must be living the good life.

sweetness

It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don’t go with the skin. It’s different—straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she’s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother; she passed for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day—if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty per cent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people’s hands. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible.