And now for a little bit about voodoo. Yes, voodoo! Exciting right?! Magic, sorcery, witch doctors! (Now take all the movie nonsense out of your head, it’s nothing like that. Although there are drums and dancing ceremonies and weird crazy potions.) Yeah, as if there weren’t enough un-dull moments (actually, there are a ton of dull moments, hence the laying on my floor all the time and the 38 million books I’ve read since I’ve been here) but just to get things up and running a little bit more, Benin decided to throw some voodoo into the mix. Fun Fact #1: Benin is actually the birth place of voodoo! There are many names for it here (the french voudon, the fetish, and the names of all the different sects of voodoo, including Oro in the South. Fun Fact #2: Oro is serious business because if you look out your window or see it you get killed by the “fetish,” or spirit of the voodoo. Many of my fellow volunteers in the south have to leave their villages when Oro is happening because it is serious business.). But because I live in the highly Muslim north, it’s not something you see a ton of, and what you do see is very different from what you see in the south. Also it’s not quite exclusively religious, in the sense that my devoutly Muslim delegee has been dabbling in the voodoo magic lately. More on that later.
The first instance of outrageous voodoo didn’t happen in my village but in Devon’s village. She is a health volunteer so she spends most of her days in the health center, diagnosing malaria and delivering babies and generally just being awesome. So recently, one of the young girls in her village apparently got a little chubby (and here “a little chubby” is like gaining a pound or two, which can only mean that you are pregnant of course). Over the course of some small amount of time, she came to give birth to a can of Nescafe instant coffee. SHE WAS VOODOO CURSED AND GAVE BIRTH TO A CAN OF COFFEE. Oh, and it was wrapped cloth and twine with a little bit of blood smeared on top to make it more authentic. But everyone just accepted it immediately, that somewhere along the line she was gris gris’d (gris gris is the local nomenclature for a voodoo curse) and naturally, something bizarre and incredibly unlikely would come to pass with little to no doubt or disagreement. And that right there pretty much explains the sloppy attitude of voodoo here: it’s real, it’s unexplainable, it makes no sense, you should definitely steer clear of it but you should also take it a little bit seriously, if only because everybody else does.
Of course, when that story trickled down to me I laughed it off, haha what a silly village, crazy voodoo, haha that would never happen in my village, of Africa! (Oh what a young fool I was.) Naturally, and really only a week or two later, that would come right around and bite me in the village. So, what happened (is happening?) was that the delegee, who is basically my village papa and the only elected official in Angaradebou, brewed a voodoo tea that will make him rich and prosperous. However, the cost of his riches and prosperity is that it brings down death and destruction on the household, stealing the good fortune from others in the household to give to the drinker. (Kind of like the genie on the sims - remember how sometimes he would give you an expensive baby grand piano, or sometimes he would burn up your fancy expensive bed? You never really know what you are going get, essentially.) So then one of his many wives (I can’t even figure out how many wives he has, waaay too many is probably the only answer I will ever get) objected, terrified that he would die from it, or she would, or one of their sons would. Not only was she the treasurer and very influential member of my women’s gardening group, she is an amazing, generous, and affectionate woman, and my village mama who always made sure I was eating. Well, she raised up a fuss, very unlike the traditional Muslim wife, until he kicked her out and moved out all of her things, thus resulting in their Official Divorce. It is crazy and sad and very, very weird. Sandy just described it as “straight out of Harry Potter,” its more sorcery than voodoo. But still craycray. And of course all this went down as soon as I left village, which is just my luck. Although if thats the only bad luck I see from this whole business I will not mind it a bit.
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