I’m in Africa

I’ve been in Benin in West Africa for a bit over a week. It’s a crazy place, bewildering at first and just completely different from the States in every imaginable way. You realize even at the airport that things are different here, as a huge mob rushes the rolling baggage tray, and suitcases roll by alongside taped plastic bags, large rice sacs, broken cardboard boxes, and all kinds of improvised packaging. My own bags would arrive three days later on the next flight from Paris.

Alphonse, the driver for Villa Karo, took me to a hotel in Cotonou (the capital) that first night, and the next morning we drove to Villa Karo in the village of Grand Popo where I'll be staying. The weeks preceding this trip were exhausting, and the trip itself was long, so I spent the first days here just sleeping and taking a few small walks in the village. I was unshaven, wearing the same clothes, it rained a lot, and morale was low.

Since then I’ve had time to explore the village, get to know people a bit, get on my feet as it were and finally start to paint. So, before I post another blog I want to give you a little tour of Benin, and Grand Popo in particular:

In Benin, there are no stores like there are in the US. Instead, just about every household along any main road has a shaded stall -- typically some tree branches covered by a thatched or corrugated steel roof—where they sell anything from a few fruits and vegetables to rice, batteries, toothpaste, paper, and even gasoline, which amazingly comes in recycled glass bottles. This means it takes a really long time to gather ingredients for a meal, and it also means the “highway” and roads are in constant activity, with people coming and going and buying and selling all the time, from morning until late at night. There are few sidewalks, so pedestrians share the streets with run-down and overloaded “mopos,” (mopeds), cars, and burly trucks. Even areas away from the roads seem active, as fishermen ply rivers, farmers tend fields, and people gather coconuts or just stroll about. It's hot like Maryland in August with no air conditioning, so people mostly hang out outside, and walk slowly, you could say it's laid back and active at the same time.

The only traffic “rule” I have discerned is a general preference for the right side of the road. There are no seatbelts for cars or helmets for mopos; there are no speed limit signs and few traffic signals (none in Grand Popo); you make left turns across heavy traffic by inching forward until that traffic is forced to abruptly stop; at night there are few streetlights, and headlights on vehicles are common but apparently optional, so you walk with great care.

People are really colourful here. The women wear dresses and wraps of brightly-patterned fabrics, and wear their hair in any number of fashions, often with braided extensions or headscarves. One of the most beautiful - and common - sights is to see women walking down the street carrying baskets on their heads – surprisingly big baskets and buckets filled with coconuts, bananas, dishes, anything at all. The men also wear colorful and patterned fabrics, sewn into loose pants and shirts, as well as western-style dress. Sandals and flip-flops are the main footwear. Dressing well seems to be important, and only children wear shorts or raggedy t-shirts, and only farmers in the field will go bare-chested.

Grand Popo, where I will stay for the next several weeks, is a village of a few thousand people on the coast of Benin. It’s two hours west of Cotonou and an hour east of the border with Togo, and squeezed between the Atlantic to the south and a river and wetlands to the north. It’s about three miles long and maybe half a mile wide, with most of the commerce and activity along a mostly-paved road that leads to the highway. Grand Popo is on a coastal plain, so it’s sandy and in some places marshy, with lots of coconut trees, banana trees, papaya trees, and other short-but-lush vegetation. People live in small cinderblock houses, mud huts, and improvised structures, often with thatched or corrugated roofs and fenced-off gardens and courtyards. Instead of glass windows, they use wooden shutters. Colorful lizards scamper about and you see small, colorful songbirds, but there are no big animals, only lots of really small goats, some really small pigs, chickens, and sad-looking and also very small and often-pregnant dogs.

People here are really friendly, sometimes just to sell you something, but often genuinely so. It’s a relatively poor place, with fishing, subsistence farming, commerce, and some tourism making up the economy.

I’m staying in Villa Karo, a “Finnish-African Cultural Center” in a large house on the main road. I’m here as one of six resident artists, all of them Finnish except me, their annual international artist. A Finnish intern, a Columbian spouse, and a large African staff make up the rest of this place. We get along well in a cacophony of languages: Finnish, Swedish, English, French, Spanish, Mina (the local African language), and when that fails, hand-gestures usually work.

Besides hosting artists, Villa Karo has classes and cultural events for the village, things like dance performances, movie night, and an annual boat race I saw which was just absolutely fantastic: fishermen from four villages competed to launch their 8-man dugout canoes into the ocean in a terrible surf, then around a buoy a kilometre offshore and back again through the surf. Three flipped over either on the launch or return, while a beautiful, colorful, roaring crowd of at least a thousand cheered wildly from the beach.

That’s all for now, I’ll write more about life in Grand Popo soon, but I hope this gives you a rough image of what things are like here. Unfortunately there’s no chance of uploading photos (including video of the boat race), as just connecting to the internet can take 20 minutes if it works at all, and then it’s painstakingly slow. But when I get back to the States I’ll get some pictures up.