26 june 2008: I am sitting in a small room in a cheap hostel at Tanguiéta. It is raining cats and dogs (or better lions and hyenas) and I am thinking about arriving... Here my first hypothesis: To arrive in whatever place is much more a psychological question as it is physical.
To arrive physically seams to be easy in Benin: You sweat as if you were in a hot country. When it rains you get wet as if you were in the tropics and your digestion tells you - more or less gently - that you are not eating the same things than in Europe. When the electricity shuts down you have to look for your torch or wait for it to came back. The body doesn´t ask the question if you accept all this. he tells you very explicitly if he likes what you are experiencing or not.
To arrive psychologically seams much more complex: You do not understand why people answer "yes" when you ask if it is "A" or "B". You are curious about the way things work and you try to compare with what you know in order to understand. When you want to buy something you still expect a fix price indicated on the merchandise. At 3 pm you still say "bonjour" and people answer "bonsoir". When people shake hands they have a special manner to snap their fingers mutually when they leave the hand of the other. If you can´t do like they do you feel like a stranger (although everybody tries to let you feel very welcome).
Especially this last example shows that my hypothesis is somewhat mistaken. What you do with your body influences what you perceive with your mind. Every movement I do is a movement in a new and unknown environment. My steps are like walking on eggs because I do not (not yet) know how to move. Both parts, body and mind, are connected, are part of one unit. To arrive, both have to walk hand in hand: The mind has to accept and the body has to accustom, then you can feel having arrived and start to understand better how things work.
Thursday 31 July 2008
Wednesday 16 July 2008
first impressions - premières impressions
I’m in Africa! This was clear from the very first moment when we went by bus from the airplane to the customs. This is what we do in many airports in Europe you will think – but not if the distance between the plane and the customs are about 20 meters and the bus ride takes 50 meters… Some things have different meanings in different worlds.
Today, I went out to get a mobile phone chip and some money. The idea to do this be feed gave me the possibility to learn about tropical rainfall (and it became a strong TROPICAL RAINFALL). Streets turned into streams and there were plenty of passages which became impossible to take. Sometimes I just lifted my trousers, sometimes I had to go back and try a different way. Cotonou looked a little like Venice – just without boats and a slightly different architecture. But it was nice to feel the warm rain, stop under a small roof to get some rice fish and a spicy sauce to eat.
To get the money and the chip took almost the whole day. Especially it wasn’t easy to find a way to get money with a Visa card that has no PIN. I went from one banc to the next and there was always at least one reason why they couldn’t give me money: no machine, machine out of order, the responsible absent, not responsible for these problems… But this way you get in contact with many people and most of them are really friendly. A street seller I talked to was asked by a mixed African-European couple if he knows Roger (a quite common name in Benin). The answer was that Roger is his brother and that he moved to France recently. So the conservation started… The ways people meet are so different.
As distances from one bank to the next became too large I took the famous Semi-Djan Motorcycle-Taxis. The streets are full of small motorcycles which fly around like bees - I am writing quantity-wise AND organisation-wise. They have to take care of puddles of holes and the other vehicles… always a little adventure – luckily they never get that fast…
The evening I eat in a restaurant a steak for the price of a Döner-Sandwich in Europe. Thinking about the day I realised: It was a really nice day, a welcoming à la Africa. I arrived…
Today, I went out to get a mobile phone chip and some money. The idea to do this be feed gave me the possibility to learn about tropical rainfall (and it became a strong TROPICAL RAINFALL). Streets turned into streams and there were plenty of passages which became impossible to take. Sometimes I just lifted my trousers, sometimes I had to go back and try a different way. Cotonou looked a little like Venice – just without boats and a slightly different architecture. But it was nice to feel the warm rain, stop under a small roof to get some rice fish and a spicy sauce to eat.
To get the money and the chip took almost the whole day. Especially it wasn’t easy to find a way to get money with a Visa card that has no PIN. I went from one banc to the next and there was always at least one reason why they couldn’t give me money: no machine, machine out of order, the responsible absent, not responsible for these problems… But this way you get in contact with many people and most of them are really friendly. A street seller I talked to was asked by a mixed African-European couple if he knows Roger (a quite common name in Benin). The answer was that Roger is his brother and that he moved to France recently. So the conservation started… The ways people meet are so different.
As distances from one bank to the next became too large I took the famous Semi-Djan Motorcycle-Taxis. The streets are full of small motorcycles which fly around like bees - I am writing quantity-wise AND organisation-wise. They have to take care of puddles of holes and the other vehicles… always a little adventure – luckily they never get that fast…
The evening I eat in a restaurant a steak for the price of a Döner-Sandwich in Europe. Thinking about the day I realised: It was a really nice day, a welcoming à la Africa. I arrived…
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