Bad Things

So this blog is meant to give you dear reader a look at life here in West Africa and our experiences therein. To date it has been a lot of “super happy fun time” pictures and stories that we’ve eagerly wanted to share, and in doing so this blog has doubled as our collective journal of what has been largely a “super happy fun time” living here.

However, in the interest of fairly presenting our subject matter and paying respect to the cathartic power of journal writing, it is sometimes necessary to present some sad or unpleasant things as well. I’m sad too say this is one of those posts, but I hope that if presented right it can give a better appreciation of life – and the value of life – here in Benin.

The following story may be considered graphic and upsetting. If you don’t want to read it and skip to the next post we promise we won’t hold it against you. Trust us, we wish we didn’t have to go through it either.

Narrative by Steve:

“Coming back from Nattitangou last week I took a bus to Parakou, from where he then grabbed a taxi south to Tchaourou. Nothing about the situation was unusual about the trip – the taxi drivers yelled “5500” at me as a greeting (story for another time), there was a lot of waiting before departure, and too many people were crammed into the cars.

As it goes with bush taxis, every person in the car seems to be going somewhere different and so the 49km drive that should take half an hour takes twice that long. The ride was entirely uneventful for the first 3/4, so much so that I got lost in a Newsweek article about Alan Greenspan and barely noticed the car had stopped to let out yet another passenger in Gbebe. Gbebe, for those who don’t know (read: just about everyone on the planet), is a small farming village straddling the two-lane highway no more than 10km north of Tchaourou. There are literally hundreds of towns just like it on the highway here, places where -- despite the installation of asphalt -- daily life takes place on the side of the road. People are all over the shoulders selling stuff, drying food on the exposed blacktop or just walking a straight line as the fastest way between two points.

Well, as the woman sitting next to me was about to start wailing, today was the day. In the middle of a sentence about Greenspan’s affinity for Regan’s conservatism, I heard a sickening thud, screeching brakes and the shrieks of hundreds of onlookers. In the time it took me to get out of the car and look back up the road, the whole town started running full speed toward where the two boys had been hit by a taxi coming up over the hill at full speed.

One was hit full on and was not much more than a pile of formerly attached limbs by the time the crowd reached him. The other it seemed was relatively better off in that the car had not hit him square on, instead throwing him some distance and – at least from what I could tell – into the side of a parked cargo truck.

As he surveyed the scene trying to make sense of what he had been witness to, I was amazed to find that for every person wailing in despair, there was another who was relatively unfazed by the happening. The man to his immediate left was even greeting an old friend he had run into in the fracas, a bit surprising to me given the way Americans generally perceive tragedy as, well, sad.

Before this really had a chance to sink in, the crowd started moving in mass toward me and the car. The second boy was apparently still alive enough that the crowd thought it worth getting him to the hospital, and the car closest was ours. The man carrying the boy got in the back seat, along with two of the other passengers, and in the front were the driver, me (sitting on the console) and two others. I got the navigator’s seat because he was the only one who knew where the hospital was in Tchaourou, and in turn was given the secondary task of keeping the driver calm and focused on driving.

The boy was mangled pretty bad, face pretty much shattered and while there was still something resembling respiration going on (audible by the gurgling), it was pretty obvious there wasn’t much hope. In retrospect, I am thankful for all the violent television/ movies/video games I took in over the years as the gruesomeness of partially crushed skull was not so overwhelming I couldn’t keep my wits about me (take that Tipper and the rest of the Parents Television Advisory Council!) and talk the driver to the hospital.

Remember the guy who greeted his friend back in Gbebe? Well, reflecting the general attitudes to trauma and death here, he decided it was more important the taxi drop him off before going to the hospital even though he lived only a few hundred yards away, as did another woman. When we did get the kid to the hospital the doc took a quick look at him and told my driver he could take him up back up to the surgery center in Parakou but doubted the kid would make it. I gave him my driver some money to take the kid back up, but I don’t know if he ever did. I walked the short walk back to our house through grandmere’s garden where I ran into Isabelle getting water. She ran up to me smiling, grabbed my zemi helmet and started telling me about the coloring she had done while I was gone. It was only then the gravity of the whole afternoon hit me, and the hug from Jaren was much needed.

The next day Jaren was talking with her boss Nicole about the incident, and Nicole confirmed that the second boy had died at some point. For the next couple of days I thought a lot about what had happened (obviously), trying to put everything into perspective.

Mostly I thought about the way death is treated here. In Azove I had seen some of the funerals, festive processions we would confuse as parades in which the dead were celebrated. But those were old folks who had lived long lives and were being celebrated by their surviving families for what they had done, where as these kids who hadn’t done a whole lot and would be buried without much fanfare. Kids are not raised thinking they can be and do anything, and without that “what might have been” remorse the loss of a child here doesn’t seem to be a terribly sad thing outside the immediate family.

The emotions that do seem to surface are anger and conflict between those still living a traditional life and the proponents of progress. People in the village complain constantly about cars driving fast on the highways and often times on market day the townsfolk will use trees and other debris to create a sort of slalom course to slow cars down. To be in a car going through one of these, you can understand why the villagers do it but also why it’s a huge problem – they’re trying to change the entire world around them instead of changing anything about the way they conduct their own affairs.

Instead of calling for speed impediments (official or otherwise) that would slow traffic on the country’s most important commercial road, it would seem more logical to promote safety by making the villagers recognize that this is not like the red dirt road they’re used to, that it’s not okay to dry their tomatoes on the shoulder and that they do need to be absolutely vigilant when crossing.

The reason I can seem to be thinking about it so much (thus the journal entry) is not so much the grotesqueness of the accident or that children were involved. Its just the way it seemed so inevitable that something like this would happen while at the same time the actual incident seemed totally random, that these kids just sort of lost the highway lottery. In that sense, the indifferent reactions of some of the onlookers and absence of a sense of loss are more understandable -- life is valued facing backwards, by what was and not what the might be, and by judging those kids up to that random moment the sense of loss isn’t so great.

Or maybe I’m just rambling because this post doesn’t really have a neat ending, a moral or an outro. Sorry.”

While it was probably more important that this post was written than read, we hope for those of you who did read it that you got a little better understanding of life here.