Damn, I had a couple of articles and a bunch of pictures I was going to to post but I lost my USB key with some work including a project for a grant to build an adult education center that I had been working on for days. But nothing I can't do over again, and I was able to salvage a couple of pics that I wanted to post.

I had written an article on the cultural diversity of Africa, on how many different languages, and the cultures that can be found in West Africa and the different types of scarifications and tattoos that they use to distinguish each other or to represent what tribe they are from.

Since I have arrived to Africa nothing has fascinated more than the faces I have seen, and these pictures are only but a few examples. The pictures will tell the story.

Voodoo 101

First off, forget about everything you ever learned about voodoo from Hollywood, sorry to disappoint and let you down but no zombies and living dead here. Benin is the region where Voodoo was born, during the slave trade many of the slaves that went to the New World such as Brazil, Haiti and the United States came from what is now known as Benin. Since Christianity was forced down their throats by Western colonizers, slaves merged their native believes and traditions with Christianity and along the way somethings changed and voodoo was born. From what I have learned, I am going to try to do the best to explain what voodoo is, I am sure I am going to get somethings wrong but it is hard to get this correct since there is no written history and stories change from region and according to people, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The best way I can explain voodoo is to compare it to the Native American religious believes, that the world is alive, that spirits are all around us, our dead ancestors are not dead but they are among us in different forms. Those spirits can protect us, bring good fortune and prosperity or the spirits can be vengeful and bring bad luck and hardship. We can contact the spirits through certain actions and rituals and there are certain people who have been given the gift of talking to spirits. These people will go into a trance and communicate with the spirits. There is a national holiday in January that celebrates voodoo and people gather in Ouida, the cradle of voodoo, where people dance in a trance and slash themselves with knives and brake bottles on their heads to prove that their body is in this world but their spirits are in another world.

Voodoo in Benin is known as Grigri. Grigri is very present in the everyday lives and the people still hold a very strong believe that grigri plays a part of their lives, a large portion of Africans are animist and have combined Islam or Christianity to their believes but grigri is seen in the biggest to smallest details of their lives. For example certain hospitals in rural and medium size town will have grigri as a cause of death on their death certificate. It is common to see mud statues that represent deceased members of the family and depending the size and accessories that the statue has, you can tell how important the person was, but the actual purpose of the statue is to represent that the person is still among the living. Sweeping after sundown is seen as taboo, cause the spirits come out at night and sweeping might anger the spirits. Going to the outdoor markets is a very interesting experience, there are grigri sections where you can find monkey bones, animal skins, dried animals potions made of god knows what, and various types of strange roots and herbs, there are also markets that sell nothing but grigri objects.

Peace Corps pays Benin volunteers more or less 220 dollars a month, this is practically nothing to the average American, but in contrast to the average Beninese salary we are making big money. We get paid every three months, and if you’re anything like me who loves to travel, blow money and have a good time, you will find yourself broke very soon and anxiously awaiting next pay check. When we were in Ghana and Togo I went all out and made sure I had a great time but as a consequence after our trip, I was broke and running on fumes.




Back in my town, a couple of days when a good friend; Sarah, calls me telling me that her parents are in Benin visiting her for a couple of days, and they want to go on safari at the national park Pendjari which is about 2 hours from my town, people from across the world come to go on safari, and I have not had the chance to go because its too expensive and I am always broke or we have also tried to go but for one reason or another things never workout. When Peace Corps Volunteers go on safari it is usually for half-a-day because rooms and guides are ridiculously expensive, since it is catered to tourist who can afford it. Sarah tells me that they are going to spend two nights and three day at the park, she offers that they will pay for everything all I have to pay is the entrance fee, which is around 20 dollars. How could I say no to that?
How lucky am I? Very.

Parc National de la Pendjari is a 275,000-hectare national wildlife park is par excellence in this part of West Africa for spotting lions, elephants, baboons, leopards and hippos. The best time to go is around the end of the dry season from November till April when animals start to hover around the water holes, but in May the rainy season starts and everything starts to get green, trees, shrubs and the vegetation starts to grow and animals are less likely venture out and be seen, so we were told that we might not get to see as many animals and at first we did not see too many but after a couple of hours of riding around on top of an uncomfortable Toyota 4-Runner that soon changed. We were also fortunate to spend three days in the park so we were able to see lions, elephants, warthogs, hippos, monkeys and baboons, various types of deer, caribou, antelope and birds of all sizes and colors. Since it is the beginning of the raining season, food and water are abundant so it is also the birth season for animals; we got the chance to see just about everything baby, baby warthogs, baby hippos, baby monkeys etc and no matter how fat and ugly the animals are as adults, as babies they are all cute. It was interesting to see baby monkeys come close to the car and look at us with such curiosity and then runaway. I was amazed by the diversity of birds there are, small birds to huge birds that were easily up to 5 feet tall, birds of all colors, from dull brown to the brightest blue and red with shades and combinations of various colors. The elephants were the highlight of the safari, African elephant are huge and fearless, while other animals ran or flew at our sight the elephants would walk right by us or continue what they were doing without even bothering to acknowledge us, we saw a herd of 4 elephants playing on a puddle and wrestling.

The third and last day of our trip, we were all tired and ready to head back so we spent half the day on safari and then in the African heat of the afternoon we went swimming in the waterfalls that are at the entrance of the park. None of the pictures that I have posted or taken can justify actually seeing the animals and scenery of Africa.

I would like to thank Mike and Fran Haskins for making this adventure possible.

The life of an African is hard, but the life of African women is very tough.
Since I arrived to Africa one of the first things that I noticed was that the life of African women is very difficult, burdensome and faces many obstacles at any age. At a young age African girls have a hard life, around the age of 5, young girls are responsible for taking care of their younger siblings, cooking cleaning doing laundry or selling water or fruit on the streets. It is typical to see young girls with babies strapped to their back, while doing chores or walking down the street with a large heavy tray filled with fruit. The chores they do are not as simple as the chores we have in the States or the developed world. For example, most houses do not have running water, therefore the girls have to go to wells or water pumps that are usually far and carry large basins of water on their head on a daily basis. There are no supermarkets or refrigerators so everything they cook has to be made from scratch, if the family wants to eat chicken, they are going to buy it, kill it, clean it and cook it. Houses are made of mud that easily crumb, so sweeping and cleaning the house can taking all day, washing machines do not exist here, and washing cloths by hand is a tedious job that wears down your hands, people are too poor to afford gas stoves, so just getting a fire started with wood or charcoal takes effort and time, these are just a few examples of daily chores that girls are expected to do.

Education is not an option for most girls. Predominately families in villages do not send their daughters to school, because spending money and time on their education is seen as a waste since girls are usually married off at a young age and start having children. Parents think that girls are more valuable working at home and learning the skills of a wife, mother and caretaker. Schools in the cities or bigger towns are more likely to have more girls go to school, but as the grade level goes up there are fewer girls present. For example from 1st grade to 5th grade there are likely to be an equal number of boys to girls but, from 6th grade to 10th grade there are a couple of girls and beyond that there is only a handful. Then girls also face problems like teachers sleeping with them, getting them pregnant and leaving them, I was very surprised to find out that this is a common occurrence throughout schools in Africa.

Life only gets harder for women, they marry willingly or by force by their early to late teens, and then they start having children. In villages men have up to 4 wives; usually the fourth is a young adolescent girl. Health volunteers have told me that African women cannot refuse their husbands, and their husbands do not want them on birth control so the consequence is that they will have one child after another and this takes a heavy toll on their bodies, but not even childbirth slows them down, they can have a baby one night and be back to cooking, chopping wood, doing chores and tending to their husband the next day. African women are incredibly strong in so many ways, they have the strength to strap a baby to their back and carry up to half their weight in coal, tree branches, logs, water, and other things on their head for long distances. On market days you can the parade of women with bright colourful clothing with incredible amounts of weight on their head to sale at the market. In bigger towns and cities girls can only find jobs at bars that pay minimum wage which is practically not a damn thing, tipping does not exist in Africa so they turn to prostitution or have to put up with the shit of stupid drunks hitting on them, because this is the only source of income to feed their children or family.

Since I arrived to Africa, I have heard everybody say that Ghana is the promised land of Africa. Peace Corps Volunteers always talk about how nice and developed it is, how you can find all the modern luxuries that the States has to offer, sports bars, malls, fast food, American television show etc. Honestly when I heard this, it was a turn off, because when I came to Africa I wanted to see Timbuktu, villages made of mud huts, safari, the Sahara desert, jungles and wild animals, things that Africa is about, if I wanted sports bars and malls I would have stayed back in the States. But I still wanted to know what see the country for myself and like I previously said, I am going to travel and visit as many countries as I can. So Ben, a good friend and I got together and just decided to go, we picked the dates but made no plans, we were going to improvise the whole trip. After a Peace Corps event in the pseudo capitol of Cotonou, Ben and I embarked on our trip. We started North of Togo in the town of Kara. We stayed a day exploring the city, following day we took a 5 hour bus ride to the capital Lome, where we met some other Peace Corps Volunteers who invited us to go to a hip-hop concert that turned out to be a really fun time and after a couple rounds of beers we were lit. Next day we spent the morning at the beach and then in a motorized rickshaw exploring the city of Lome. Togo is a small country that has gone through a lot shit, civil unrest and fighting among themselves so Lome is not as big and developed as other cities, but the highlight of the Lome had to be Al Donalds a one arched fake-me-out McDonald's.

A couple of minutes on the road to Accra, we started seeing differences between Ghana and Togo. Cars were newer American models, unlike 30 year old beat-up Peugeots that are falling apart and surprisingly that are still running, village houses in Ghana where made of concrete bricks, tin roofs, electricity and the houses were bigger compared to the village houses that I have seen in Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso that are made out of mud, hay roofs, no electricity and consist of a single big room. At first the road was filled with giant potholes and crumbling apart, but after an hour the road was a new perfectly smoothed highway with six lanes, which is a rare sight in West Africa. When we were nearing Accra we started seeing huge house with backyards and pools, billboards for malls, brand spanking new Mercedes, Ford trucks, it felt like in an half hour we went from Africa to suburban town USA and after about a year in being in Africa that’s a hell of a change.

After getting ripped off by the taxi driver we found a hotel had a couple Ghanaian beers that were better than anything I had in Africa and in the States for that matter. I am not joking; I have had some good beers in the States at micro breweries, or regional beers, but when I tasted a Castle Milk Stout, Golden Arrow beer and Club beer, I was in love. For mass produced beers these are some good freaking beers, and I am not even a big drinker.

Like I said we did not come to Ghana to enjoy the American lifestyle, we came to Ghana to see Africa so early next day we set out to the old colonial capital of Cape Coast, about 2 hours from Accra. Cape Coast was the main port for the gold trade that then was replace by the slave trade so throughout the coastline you can see old forts and castles that date back over 500 years that were used for defense, for gold trade and then converted to dungeons for slaves that were going to be transported to the New World. We got a cheap shitty hostel room that was just fine for us, and for the next two days Ben and I visited the castles in the area. The best one was Cape Coast Castle that is now a huge tourist attraction and was used by just about every European power at the time, the castle was originally a small fort and throughout the years extended and converted to a castle for the slave trade. The castle is huge, filled with cannons, solders’ lodgings and slave dungeons. Walking into these dark, hot slave dungeons you get a chill just thinking thousands of African slaves that had to endure the horrible treatment and living conditions. After Cape Coast Castle we visited some other minor forts and castles that now serve as lighthouses or monuments that local people have invaded and turned them into make shift homes. My only qualm with Cape Coast was the ubiquitous smell of shit, from the open sewer system they use and the locals shit everywhere and throw trash to the ocean.

After the castles tour, we went to Kakum National Park, which is a rain forest were jungle elephants, monkeys, rhinos and other exotic animals live, it is also one out of four parks in the world that has a canopy walkway over the rain forest.

We had done everything we wanted to see and do in Cape Coast, so Ben and I decided to head back to Accra and explore the big city. The next day and a half we spent the time walking around Accra seeing the sights, aside from a couple of monuments and tourist attractions there is not too much to say about it, exploring Accra was just like walking down town Main Street USA. Yea, there are malls, bars, food courts and stores but that did not interest us, we were also running low on cash so we decided to head back to Benin. So we spend the next day in taxis, from Accra, to Lome, then Cotonou. When we arrived to Cotonou it was about 10 at night, and upon arriving to Cotonou I said a couple of times “I fucking hate Cotonou” I really do, out of all the places I have seen in Africa so far, by far Cotonou is the most dirty, polluted, crowded and dangerous place I have been in. The water and electricity is almost always cut, the roads are small and in horrible deteriorating condition filled with massive cargo trucks and hundreds of motorbikes swarming like roaches in and out of cars, the gasoline is not regulated so they throw out huge puffs of dark smog, Cotonou is a cluster fuck of a town. Back to my story, Ben and I got on a taxi-moto or zemijons like there called in Benin and Ben’s taxi supposedly broke down on a busy bridge and was mugged at knife point. Two robbers took his wallet, his iPod, passport, backpack, his digital camera with all the pics he had taken. I was lucky to have a taxi that was not in sync so I was not robbed but Ben lost everything. Ben was actually calm through it all and was not mad; after all like he said the important thing was that he was safe, everything else is replaceable. Aside Ben being robbed, everything else went great.