by Randall Wood

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the West African nation formerly known as Dahomey: it is infrequently mentioned by the international press in a continent where no news is good news. A French colony until the 1960s, Benin is a tiny nation tucked under the Elephant Ear of West Africa, and is best known for being one of the continent’s stronger democracies.

I live in the city of Cotonou, whose name in the local language (Fon) means “River of Death.” And regardless of what Cotonou is today, it will forever retain the soul of a slaving hub at the mouth of a river that carried an unfortunate cargo down to the waiting slave ships.

For the moment, Cotonou is my home, and this message comes to you live from the River of Death.

In the three years I’ve lived here I’ve drunk whiskey with kings, been the victim of a mob throwing coconuts, surfed a couple of decent waves, and rubbed elbows with a culture that three years later, I still barely know and perhaps never will.  This is, of course, the thrill of travel and of living in a foreign country.

The expat life in Cotonou isn’t bad. Benin is essentially a safe country, especially compared to Nigeria, our neighbor to the east.  Here, you are at constant risk of annoyance, hassle, and occasional petty theft, but physical aggression is rare, very rare and frankly, I’m safer here than I would be in any large American city (see exception at end of article).

Cotonou is less a city than a large village; large parts of the streets off the principal arteries are sandy and potholed. “Downtown” is little more than a few dozen shops and a traffic jam, and most Africans do their shopping in the sprawling, chaotic Dantokpa Market, at whose heart lies a vibrant Voodoo fetish market.  We can get better tasting croissants and pastries here than in Washington DC, but we’ll wait for weeks before one of the local supermarkets has cream cheese.  We’ve got talented leather workers, tailors, and artists, but can’t get the parts to fix the air conditioner. And though we successfully dodge the bullet of the European winter, it’s frequently so hot outside that we sweat while toweling off from the shower.

Cost of living

Benin is expensive. The country produces little in the way of agricultural products, and as a result, most of what we consume has been imported at great expense. I’m speaking about expat staples like milk, wheat flour, jam, butter, breakfast cereal, cookies, and such: they’re not cheap. The dependence on imports makes just about everything expensive, from gasoline to bread to shoelaces to butter: it all comes in on ships.

We also have the option of the local food.  The Beninese diet is similar to the cuisine across much of the continent: starchy pâte, a sticky, doughy blob usually made of pounded yam, corn, or manioc, over which a spicy vegetable or meat sauce is poured.  It’s spicy, and too heavy for every day, but not bad when I do eat it.

Dinner parties, orange sand beaches, and infinite minor hassles

Cotonou’s two biggest defects are that (a) everything is harder to accomplish than it should be, and (b) there’s not a whole lot to do.  We don’t even have a movie theater (and never will, given the thriving market for pirated DVDs).  As a result, the expat community takes care of itself in the old way: endless dinner parties, cocktail hours, and invitations.  I’m not complaining, and it’s a healthy reminder of how communities behaved in the days before everyone sequestered themselves in their personal pleasure palaces with their video game consoles, broadband Internet, and other toys.  It’s a revolving community as the expats rotate through, but participating in such a diverse and friendly community is pleasant.

Weekends I’m at the beach surfing (there’s a halfway decent bar break along the coast), or relaxing on the orange sand beach. Evenings I walk the dogs around the neighborhood’s sandy streets, read and write. It’s a simpler lifestyle than the one I lived back in the States, but it has its advantages, and I personally find elegance in simplicity. I also experienced the Harmattan for the first time here, an awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon born in the Sahara desert: the wind turns 180 degrees during two months and comes from the Sahara, bearing a fine sand that settles everywhere and darkens the afternoon skies.  I sometimes think that experiencing things like this are why I travel, although putting down a shot of whiskey with a king is a pretty cool reason too.

The fact that everything is harder than it should be, though, is the one that slowly eats at your soul: parking, driving through chaotic traffic, arguing with the same people over the same prices every single time, dealing with lousy service, bureaucratic processes that seem both pointless and endless, and the infinite minor hassles that accompany every single transaction is tiring.

Tiring, too, are the repeated power outages, water outages, cell phone outages, the system resets at the Internet provider, the fast broadband that’s actually slow, the saturated cell phone networks, and the phone lines that don’t permit easy calls.  I think back to the days before these services and remember I should be grateful.  But the constant outages are wearing, and in sum lead to the only remedy possible: travel to someplace else once every 4 months.

Benin: birthplace of Voodoo (aka Voudoun)

I mentioned Voodoo. It’s Vaudoun, actually, but yes, Benin is the birthplace of the world’s most misunderstood religion.  Haitians are the second most populous followers of Vaudoun, but it’s because the slave trade carried Beninese to the Caribbean island that Haiti gained the religion.  If you’re thinking “Serpent and the Rainbow,” you are way off; Vaudoun at its roots is an animist religion with strong ties to the natural earth, and a belief in good and bad forces that would be recognizable by anyone who ever watched a Star Wars movie.  Large parts of Benin believe in Vaudoun, but there are lots of Christians and Muslims as well, and everyone seems to live together in a peace much of Africa (not to mention the Balkans!) should envy.

Legacy of the slave trade and modern-day slavery

But there’s no escaping the legacy of slavery here.  You see it in the disorganization, the mistrust, the difficulty with which the Beninese work together toward common goals.  As a white American who experienced the story of the slave trade in middle school textbooks and who thought of the whole story as ancient history, it is eye-opening to see the impacts of slavery in the 21^st century, and to learn that slavery is in no way ancient history in one of the countries that experienced it first hand.

In fact, slavery continues to this day, and not just in Benin.  Throughout Africa, families “lend” their children – sometimes permanently – to construction projects in the city.  These children are poorly paid, sleep on the ground, and remain uneducated for their entire lives.  Call it what you like, but slavery in some form remains a real part of life here.

An elegant austerity

But let’s go back to the fact that three religions and a half dozen ethnic groups have been able to live in relative harmony in one of Africa’s stronger democracies. Benin: quiet, mostly unnoticed, little understood.  It has suffered mightily, and never makes the headlines. Life as an expat here can be frustrating, but not necessarily dangerous. It’s expensive and somewhat boring, but in its simplicity and sparseness it brings elegance to austerity. And from the point of view of a foreigner trying to get a job done, I’d say that being at the center of such a whirling, swirling mass of humanity trying to better its situation is amazing. Life at the mouth of the River of Death is actually pretty peaceful.

Will we next see vacation home for swarms of winter-evading European retirees?  Not likely.  It’s the kind of place that sends you eventually on your way with more questions than answers, and the conviction you understand less of the world than you did when you arrived. In short, Benin will change you, as it has changed me.

——-

(1) There’s one notable, horrible exception.  Peace Corps Volunteer Katie Puzey was assassinated in her sleep in March, 2009.  A stellar volunteer, well-loved by her community and extremely well integrated into the village where she lived, the motives for this atrocious murder are not yet known, and to date, justice has not been rendered.  We will not forget!

Randall Wood is the co-author of Moon Handbook Nicaragua and Moon: Living Abroad in Nicaragua.  He currently manages a $300M development program in Benin and has lived overseas for over a decade.  This article appeared simultaneously at www.therandymon.com).

On Feb 7th Costa Ricans went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Laura Chinchilla president for the next 4 years. Chinchilla, who was Vice President in the current administration of Oscar Arias, resigned that post so she could run for president.

She ran a campaign that declared her “firme y honesta” — firm and honest — and promised more doctors in the state-run medical clinics and more police officers on the streets. She is a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortions, though she favors civil rights for gays and birth control.

Chinchilla, 50, is married with one teenaged son. She will take office in May, becoming Costa Rica’s first female president and Latin America’s fifth in the last two decades. The other four are Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who was elected in 2007, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama’s Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Interesting that Costa Rica, a supposedly “third world” and  “macho” country, elected a woman president, while a first world country where the sky’s supposedly the limit (the US of A) lags behind in the gender equity department. Speaking of third world, Chinchilla recently asked, “Who gets to decide if a country is deemed “developing” or “developed?” Interesting question. Chinchilla thinks Costa Rica qualifies as the latter.

Click here for election photos and here for a truly bizarre campaign video from one of Chinchilla’s competitors in the Presidential race. A middle-aged man naked except for a diaper cavorts among pregnant women singing a takeoff on the 60s classic, “I will follow him.”

Here’s a new twist on outsourcing: housing U.S. inmates in Mexican prisons.

This week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state might outsource incarceration by opening prisons in Mexico in order to house jailed undocumented immigrants.

Sfgate.com reports the governor saying, “We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.”

Of the state’s 171,000 prisoners, approximately 19,000 are illegal immigrants. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system. Schwarzenegger predicted housing prisoners in Mexico instead of California would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

The idea has a certain logic: Under the terms of the 1977 Prisoner Transfer Treaty between the United States and Mexico, United States prisoners in Mexican jails and Mexican prisoners in United States jails may choose to serve their sentences in their home countries.

But there’s a definite taint of “let’s send the illegals back where they came from” anti-immigrant sentiment in the governor’s comment. Beyond that, it’s just a very odd idea. When one breaks the law within a given set of borders, it makes sense to be punished within the limits of that same country. Each country has its own philosophy of crime and punishment. Mexico tends to have longer waits for sentencing, for instance, but shorter prison terms.

And though there’s no yelp.com for prisons around the world, it’s pretty clear that Mexican prisons aren’t known to be models of modern and humane incarceration.

An analysis of Mexican prison conditions (drawing from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook) concludes that “overcrowding of prisons is chronic. Mistreatment of prisoners, the lack of trained guards, and inadequate sanitary facilities compound the problem. The United States Department of State’s country reports on human rights practices for 1992 and 1993 state that an entrenched system of corruption undermines prison authority and contributes to abuses. Authority frequently is exercised by prisoners, displacing prison officials. Violent confrontations, often linked to drug trafficking, are common between rival prison groups.

In fact, just this week, a prison riot in the Mexican state of Durango left 23 inmates dead.

Female inmates in Mexican prisons are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. Photo: Caroline Bennett

Not that Mexico suffers in every prison-related comparison. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. And Mexico has some prison policies that are more humane than those in the U.S. For example, women inmates are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. The Huffington Post recently published a photo essay on Mexican Prison Life: Babies Behind Bars.

Even if the prisons in Mexico were built and run by the U.S., Schwarzenegger ‘s idea would still be problematic. Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, said it “would be like the state of California having a separate island of its own government in Mexico. It just seems like that would be impossible.”

The not-so-sweet spot where privatization meets outsourcing

Schwarzenegger’s suggestion sits at the intersection of privatization and outsourcing. Earlier this month, our my-governor-can-beat-up-your-governor called for allowing private companies to compete with state-run prisons, which he claims would save billions of dollars.

And beyond privatization, it seems that in this era of free trade in a global economy, everything’s on the table for possible outsourcing: manufacturing, telephone help centers, retirement, medical care, and now, imprisonment.

What’s next—the outsourcing of education? Maybe public school would be more viable if you only had to pay teachers a few dollars an hour. And how about outsourcing funeral services? We could send our loved ones abroad for cut-rate embalming, Fed Ex them back to the local cemetery, then hire illegal immigrants to help us mourn.

In an interview about a new study that finds that living abroad stimulates creative thinking, William Maddux draws a connection between time abroad and entrepreneurial activity.

“These days,” he says, “with companies having more of an incentive for creative thinking–to find their way out of the financial crisis–any company that’s interested in creativity should be looking at people who have had these [live abroad] experiences.”

Scientific American reports briefly on the link between living abroad and creativity, but if you want the real deal, download the 15-page paper, Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity, wade through the academic language, and revel in yet another reason to head for Croatia or Chad or Costa Rica.

Many artists do their best work abroad
The paper cites 5 separate studies, and mentions that “living abroad is often seen as a necessary experience for aspiring artists” and that “some creative individuals produce their best known masterworks during or following a stint abroad (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Lolita, Ernest Hemingway and his The Sun Also Rises). In fact, all four winners of the Nobel Prize in literature who are from Ireland (Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney) spent significant portions of their lives abroad. In addition to writers, many famous painters, (e.g., Gauguin and Picasso) and composers (e.g., Handel, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg) created many of their most admired works while living in foreign countries.”

Three ways living abroad stimulates creativity

According to the paper,
1. Living abroad gives you access to a greater number of novel ideas and concepts, which then act as inputs for the creative process.

2. Living abroad allows people to approach problems from different perspectives. For example, in some cultures (e.g., China), leaving food on one’s plate is an implicit sign of appreciation, implying that the host has provided enough to eat. In other countries (e.g., the United States) the same behavior may often be taken as an insult, a condemnation of the quality of the meal.

3. Experiences in foreign cultures can increase the psychological readiness to accept and recruit ideas from unfamiliar sources, thus facilitating the processes of unconscious idea recombination and conceptual expansion.

And while I agree with all of that, the ponderous language of the study makes me want to blurt out, Yeah, and living abroad is also good FUN!

Speaking of The Geography of Bliss (in which author Eric Weiner travels the world to see where people are happiest), I was reminded of the world map of happiness (scroll down in the BBC’s article to download map). First created in 2006 by Adrian White of the UK’s University of Leicester, the map used responses from 80,000 people worldwide to map out world happiness, or as they say in the field, subjective well being.

White noted,  “There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per capita, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy. The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the world.”

While happiness levels may have shifted in the last 3 years, it’s interesting to note that in 2006, Western European countries garnered most of the top spots, though two nations in Latin American and the Caribbean made it into the top 15–the Bahamas at number 5 and Costa Rica at number 13. The USA didn’t do too badly, weighing in at number 23.

The 20 happiest nations in the World were:

1 – Denmark
2 – Switzerland
3 – Austria
4 – Iceland
5 – The Bahamas
6 – Finland
7 – Sweden
8 – Bhutan
9 – Brunei
10 – Canada
11 – Ireland
12 – Luxembourg
13 – Costa Rica
14 – Malta
15 – The Netherlands
16 – Antigua and Barbuda
17 – Malaysia
18 – New Zealand
19 – Norway
20 – The Seychelles

Other notable results included:
23 – USA
35 – Germany
41 – UK
62 – France
82 – China
90 – Japan
125 – India
167 – Russia

The three least happy countries were:

176 – Democratic Republic of the Congo
177 – Zimbabwe
178 – Burundi

Method
The 2006 world map of happiness used data from he Veenhoven Database of World Happiness (which Eric Weiner visits while researching The Geography of Bliss), along with UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the United Nations Development Program.

Photo: Godwentsurfing.com

When you think of Gaza, surfing probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. But there are, it turns out, surfers in Gaza, young Palestinians sharing waves and battered boards that they managed to get into the country before Israel shut down the borders in 2006 after the election of Hamas.

This unlikely situation inspired Alexander Klein, 27, to make God Went Surfing with the Devil, a film–premiering this summer–about trying to bring 23 donated surfboards into Gaza.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Klein from Surfer Magazine:

How did you decide to call the film “God Went Surfing with the Devil”?

Klein: It’s actually a quote from Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz who is an 87-year-old surf legend in Israel and one of the co-founders of Surfing 4 Peace. He said, “God will surf with the Devil if the waves are good.” And I thought it was a good metaphor for how surfing can bring people together.

What was the most difficult part of getting boards to Gaza?

Klein: Israel has a policy right now that says only humanitarian goods are allowed into Gaza. Obviously, that was a problem because surfboards aren’t necessary to live. But the guys from Surfing 4 Peace argued that recreation is a huge part of people’s lives, and it’s a wonderful, peaceful activity that not only helps people, it also poses no risk to others. It was a huge battle trying to convince a room full of generals that these surfboards did not pose a military risk to them.

So did you eventually get the boards into Gaza?

Klein: You’ve got to see the film to find out.

The movie Outsourced features a relationship between an American man and an Indian woman

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all tabloid on you, but South Carolina governor Sanford and his Argentine honey’s high-profile affair shines a light on something most travelers and live-abroaders already know: that cross-cultural romance can be more than tricky, even if you’re not a governor.

Sanford and Belen Chaper should head over to the web site Expatwomen for some cautionary tales (and success stories). Take, for example, the Danish woman and her Japanese boyfriend who met while he was working in Denmark. The woman writes that when the couple moved to Japan, everything changed—and not for the better.

‘It seems that the man I fell in love with has transformed into a different person. He acts differently, he dresses differently and worst of all; he treats me in a different way. I feel I have been put in a different role since we got here, and somehow it seems I don’t fit into his life anymore. To make matters worse, I am not working here and feel completely disempowered about the whole situation.”

The move abroad stories are all from a woman’s point of view,  and are often set up in advice-column format, from My teenagers aren’t adapting to the move to Pregnant in Vietnam, who’s worried about the medical system there.

The Alice heading for Venice. Photo by Tod Seelie.

Don’t know how to get there from here? Feel like you’re not invited to the party? Low on raw materials?

Do what Brooklyn artist Swoon is doing: crashing the Venice Biennale (a major contemporary art exhibition) on boats made entirely of trash. Swoon and her proudly motley crew of dumpster-diving anarchist artists landed in Slovenia with a container of New York garbage, raw ingredients for the boats that will take them across the Adriatic to Venice. Think Water World meets Mad Max.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/57181/

The crew cools off on the way to Venice. Photo by Tod Seelie.