I am here to satisfy all your senses, my friends! I gave you pictures yesterday (with many more on facebook) and today, I give you something for your ears. But first, a non-story story.
So as you know my village is not electrified, but Benin would not be the Benin it is today without cell phones. (Not so much in my village, but everywhere, regardless of what you eat or what you wear or where you live, you have a cell phone.) And naturally, they must be charged! So I take my cell phone to the only place in village with a generator, and pay 100 francs to charge my phone. C'est facile. Conveniently, the charging station is very close to my house, just across the street. And to advertise their business (they also provide the services of hair cuts, a small television which might show occasional soccer matches, and the only working fan in village) they play INCREDIBLY loud music, at all hours of the day and night. But, because they are Beninese above all else, they tend to play the same song on repeat. For hours. They really like Nigerian music. This is one of the songs they particularly love:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grPJ8DemVrE
What's particularly amazing is that this tends to be a hub for the young men of village to come and, I don't know, gossip? Watch football only occasionally? Glory in the breeze of that one, hard-working fan? I really only hang out with old women so I have no idea what the young men do. But every once in a while, when I come back from taking my evening jog, there is a group of teen-ish boys all dancing in the middle of the road to some simultaneous, boy band dance routine. It just warms my heart. And then I come slogging through, sweating my face off, breathing hard, and hating life because I just went on a run in Africa, and everyone laughs at me and dances. It's cute.
So as you know my village is not electrified, but Benin would not be the Benin it is today without cell phones. (Not so much in my village, but everywhere, regardless of what you eat or what you wear or where you live, you have a cell phone.) And naturally, they must be charged! So I take my cell phone to the only place in village with a generator, and pay 100 francs to charge my phone. C'est facile. Conveniently, the charging station is very close to my house, just across the street. And to advertise their business (they also provide the services of hair cuts, a small television which might show occasional soccer matches, and the only working fan in village) they play INCREDIBLY loud music, at all hours of the day and night. But, because they are Beninese above all else, they tend to play the same song on repeat. For hours. They really like Nigerian music. This is one of the songs they particularly love:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grPJ8DemVrE
What's particularly amazing is that this tends to be a hub for the young men of village to come and, I don't know, gossip? Watch football only occasionally? Glory in the breeze of that one, hard-working fan? I really only hang out with old women so I have no idea what the young men do. But every once in a while, when I come back from taking my evening jog, there is a group of teen-ish boys all dancing in the middle of the road to some simultaneous, boy band dance routine. It just warms my heart. And then I come slogging through, sweating my face off, breathing hard, and hating life because I just went on a run in Africa, and everyone laughs at me and dances. It's cute.
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