Branching Memories

I'm writing in the shadow of the birch, hemlock and maples that line the northern shore of the lake we’ve gone to every summer for as long as I can remember.

My mom’s mom had a camp here, a little white cottage with a red tin roof nestled under the white pines that, even now, tower above me and seem to tickle the clouds. When I was 15 or so, Oma sent me out with a ladder and a broom and told me not to come back until I had swept the needles from the roof. It was sunny and hot, and the tin burned the soles of my feet, but my reward at the end was a dip in the icy lake, clear as a summer sky.


Oma passed away some years back, but we still go to the lake. We stay somewhere else now—a cabin so small you have to eat your meals at the farmhouse up the hill—but even today, the smell of damp pine needles drying in the sun takes me back to those glorious teenage summers.


My—"obsession” is too strong a word, “appreciation” somehow not strong enough—for trees took root in earnest much later. Devon and I were back in DC after our stint in Korea. We were walking through the National Arboretum one weekend (a really lovely place to visit), when I suddenly got the eerie feeling that I was hiking again in the hills above Gwangju—a sort of déjà vu of the landscape. 


The path turned a bend and I realized why—we were walking through the park’s Asian Garden, shaded by the same red pine, gingko, Japanese maple and cherry trees that lined the streets and trails we had walked down in Korea. 


I began paying closer attention to the trees around me—at the way the afternoon sun filtered through the white oaks behind our house, at the smell of the boxwoods as I walked to work down Massachusetts Ave, at the smooth muscularity of the beech trees lining—uh—Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. 


And I realized how many of my own memories were tangled up with trees. The willow tree I used to climb in middle school, swaying from its crown in the wind. The chestnut trees that lined the trails of the Parc de Saint Cloud that I would run along in high school. The two sycamore trees that Devon and I got married under. 


And now Benin. 


I don’t have a West African tree book yet (recommendations accepted!), so I don’t know the name of all of the trees below. But here are some of the trees that, long after we’ve left, we’ll remember defining the landscape, serving as landmarks, and shading us from the tropical sun in Cotonou: 

Our neighborhood is named Cocotiers, which is the French name for the coconut palm. They aren’t the only, or most common, palm tree in the neighborhood, but it feels right to start with one. Unfortunately, I’m an idiot and don’t have any photos of the coconut trees in our neighborhood, so here’s one of some at the beach. 


 

Appropriately enough, we’re here because of trees—Devon’s project is dedicated to helping cashew farmers. This funky little tree is what cashew trees look like—this is a young one.


 

When we first sent Evie to daycare, they told us that they were located at the end of the road “under the mango tree.” This isn’t that mango tree, but it’s a really cool picture of a different one in the neighborhood, so I’m sharing with you. 


 

Kellan and I would cross this street every day on his way to school. I don’t know what kind of tree that is on the left, but it’s enormous and absolutely magnificent in person. 


 

This is a fan palm tree—they’re really cool. The leaves shoot up from the middle and as the tree grows, they fan out to the sides until they fall off. This photo was taken during the Harmattan—annual winds from the Sahara that smudge the sky with sand and dust.


 

I love this garden from up near Evie’s daycare—the bougainvillea tumbling over the wall and the giant royal palm (I think that’s what it is) framing everything on the right.


 

This oil palm is in our front yard and I love it. That big tuft right under the leaves spits out red nuts that Beninese press and use for cooking oil. 


 

This is the neighborhood middle school, which is shaded by a number of lovely trees. Not sure what kind this one in the middle is though.


 

That tall tree in the back is my favorite in the entire neighborhood. I don’t know what kind it is, but I love how it seems to stop growing up and starts growing out. 

 

* * *

 

Sign up to receive updates via email here.

Entry.grief.disposal

What3Words is basically a system of coordinates, only instead of using numbers to specify a particular point on the globe, it uses three words to specify a particular 3 meter square. (This is where my map nerd friends tell me I'm wrong since coordinates are in order--1 degree north is next to 2 degrees north, and so on--whereas the three words are assigned to a square more or less at random. But this is my blog, my rules!)

Entry.grief.disposal are the three words for the three meter square in front of our front gate. Properly, we live at 216 Rue 969A, Lot 11, Cocotiers, Cotonou, but if I’m giving directions to someone here, it’s easier to tell them “Take Airport Road until you pass the BSS supermarket. Take your first right, and then another right. We’re the blue gate on the corner.” Nobody uses street names here.

We moved into our house at the beginning of March. It’s an older two-story home, cement block walls and tile floors throughout. (Tile floors are surprisingly hard! We’ve broken like three glasses already…) We have a salon, with screen doors on two sides that we keep open most days for the breeze, a playroom downstairs for the kids, and three bedrooms upstairs. Our kitchen is small and utilitarian. There’s a patio out back where our laundry dries and a small garden out front where the kids like to play.

We live in Cocotiers, a neighborhood on the western side of Cotonou. It’s one of the more well-off neighborhoods in the city, which means there are a number of other foreigners who live here—mostly diplomats and other aid workers, it seems, though curiously few other Americans. (To be honest, we haven’t met very many other Americans and have no idea where they all live). The intersection we live on is quiet and the kids love riding bikes and scooters in the street after school. Some weekends, a group of older neighborhood kids set up a ramp and skateboard off it. The kids love to watch.

The houses here are generally large, and generally hidden behind walls, though the neighborhood itself is relatively green as many of the houses have large coconut, mango, and oil palm trees. Bougainvillea and other shrubs spill over the top of the fences, showering yellow, pink, and white flowers on the sidewalks.

Our streets are paved—though I gather that this is relatively recent, a project of the current Beninese President Patrice Talon—and they are well-lit by tall, LED streetlamps that are powered by solar panels which were installed shortly after we moved in.

To our north is Haie Vive, another well-off neighborhood where Evie’s daycare is located. The boundary between the two neighborhoods—at least in our mind—is Piste Amalco, which has a bunch of restaurants, as well as the market where we get our mangoes, avocados, pineapples, and other produce.

To the south is Airport Road which (appropriately) runs between the airport and what we consider to be more or less “downtown.” Continue south and you’ll arrive at Boulevard de la Marina which runs by the French school, the Nigerian School, the American, Chinese, French, and Russian embassies, and (also appropriately) the port before heading downtown.

The airport itself borders our neighborhood to the west, but it’s not that busy and planes are rare enough that it’s still exciting when we hear one. Beyond that is the neighborhood of Fidjrosse, and beyond that the city just sort of peters out into forest and scrubland and an expanse of beach that runs unbroken to the border with Togo at least.

The bulk of Cotonou lies to our east and our north. A paved two-lane road teeming with cars, scooters, and motorcycles heads north out of town before it catches the highway west towards Togo. Kellan and I cross this road every day to go to school. It’s rush hour, so we usually have to wait for a gap in the river of traffic to open up before dashing to the safety of the median (no crosswalks in this part of town).

Following this road the other direction—south/east—takes you to downtown and eventually the river that runs through the eastern part of the city.  Dantokpa market—said to be the largest outdoor market in West Africa—lies along the river, as does the Missebo fabric market. Two bridges cross it—the big new one and the tiny old one. Either one will lead you to a highway that takes you out of town, past the car park and, about an hour later, to the border with Nigeria.

And that’s basically it—the mental map we’ve conjured up to orient ourselves here in Benin’s biggest city. There’s still a lot of blank space that we have to fill in—both in Cotonou and in Benin as a whole—but part of the fun of living here is finding a new place and marking it down, situating it in relation to everything else, and expanding the edges of our known world bit by bit.

 * * *

 

Thanks for reading! Get these updates by email--including exclusive photos!--here.

 

Street Legal

It was one of the first lessons that we learned here: things always take longer than you expect.

Sometimes, it’s because as clueless foreigners with a shaky grasp of the language and complete ignorance of the normal ways of business, we have absolutely no clue what we are doing, and so the simplest things—like buying a trashcan—take weeks longer than they should as we figure out how and where to buy something (we lived with garbage bags on our kitchen floor for longer than I’d like to admit).

Sometimes it’s because, as a developing country, infrastructure in Benin hasn’t quite caught up to the standards we’re used to back home and things just take longer to get done.

Sometimes, it’s because the Beninese seem to have absorbed the French penchant for bureaucracy, and so there is always one more form to fill out or box to check before we can, say, get our passports back from the health authorities after our post-arrival COVID test.

And sometimes, like for example buying a car (and writing this update, which I wanted to do AFTER we got our car), it’s a combination of them all.

Our first attempt fell through when—after finding a suitable car and negotiating the price—we told the seller that we’d return the next day with the cash to pay for it. He sold it to someone else. (See item #1 above). This was in early February.

Just one corner of the car park. Anyone want a silver Toyota?

Our second attempt very nearly ended in disaster. I spent some 6 hours at the car park (essentially a collection of absolutely enormous used car lots outside of town—the cars sit in these duty-free lots after being imported until they can be sold either in Benin or, more frequently, throughout the region) negotiating with someone I thought was the seller’s representative. The deal fell through when, upon returning to the car park a couple of days later to pay for the car, I demanded to see the car title and noticed that it was very obviously fake (wrong location, misspellings, it even had several words written in the wrong language!). This was in mid-February.

(In retrospect, the fact that “representative” refused to meet me in person, told me that I couldn’t speak directly to the owner since he was out of the country recovering from surgery, wanted me to pay for the car at some office downtown instead of at the car park, and couldn’t promise that I’d have all the necessary documents upon payment should have probably tipped me off that it was a scam from the beginning. Also see item #1.)

How many mistakes can you find?

Finally, our third try. A colleague introduced us to a trusted intermediary to handle the purchase. We hired a customs agent to handle the paperwork and make sure everything was above board. And we carried the necessary cash (oh yeah, you have to pay cash for these things) to the car park to actually buy the thing once we made our decision.

Car bought—a 2012 Rav-4 from Rhode Island, some 180,000 miles on the odometer, and a little bit of rust here and there (there was no avoiding that). This was early March.

And then we waited.

Our customs agent told us it would likely take 3-4 weeks for the paperwork to get taken care of and our plates to be delivered. That stretched into 6+ weeks as (per Item #3 above) each week seemed to require a new piece of paper that needed to be written, procured, or otherwise stamped. Once we were told that things were slow at the government offices because of a bad internet connection (Item #2). Meanwhile, the car sat in the car park as it couldn’t be released until the paperwork had been approved.

We asked our agent when the car would be ready. “Let us just do the next step,” he would reply.

Finally, a week ago, we got a call. “Are you home? I can bring you the car.” Joy! “But you cannot drive it yet until you get the plates.”

“When will that be?”

“I do not know. There is a shortage of the materials they use for the plates. I will let you know.”

So our car sat in our driveway—so close!—for a week until we got another call. “Are you free today? The plates are ready.”

Our agent came. We drove to the DMV, picked up the plates, and got them riveted to the car. Sweet!

One more step—a safety inspection.

We drove to the inspection facility where a guy made sure we had all the necessary safety equipment. A front headlight was out, so another guy replaced it. And then I waited—three, four hours?—before I got the little sticker that said we passed. Free to go!

There she is!

It was a long process, and we learned a number of important lessons. First, have someone you trust show you the ropes—it’ll help speed things up. Second, be patient—“Let us just do the next step.” Third, don’t be too ambitious—we plan on taking care of one thing per day. And finally—always, always bring a book—it helps to pass the time.

 /# # #/

 Thanks for reading! Sign up for email updates here.

Happy New Year from Cotonou Benin!

I owe you all an explanation.

When I was in high school, I used to joke that my plan after graduation was to disappear for a few years. My friends would all wonder where I had gone until one day, they'd see me in the background of a photo of some dusty African border town that had been published on the front page of the New York Times. (This was back when people still got actual newspapers delivered to their homes).

"Is that…Jake?" they'd ask. They'd look closer and sure enough--a lanky dude with a spot on his head and a doofy grin on his face. "Huh, I always wondered what happened to him," they'd muse, before turning back to their morning coffee.

Well friends, this isn’t a New York Times cover photo (have you ever tried photobombing one of those?), but is probably as close as I’m going to get to that dream (and frankly a lot closer than I ever thought I’d get). Here I am, coming to you live from Cotonou, Benin.

We moved here two weeks ago, right before Christmas and just as a raging global pandemic was hitting its third, and highest, wave in the US.

(I know what you’re thinking—are they morons? And the answer is, quite possibly yes. But Santa found us all the same. The guy really is magic.)

My wife, Devon, had landed a job as Deputy Chief of Party for a USDA-funded project supporting cashew farmers and processors in Benin. And despite the fact that we had both been working remotely since mid-March, supporting cashew farmers and producers is not really the kind of thing that you can do via Zoom.

So, not 24 hours after helping my parents dig out from the nor’easter that had dumped over a foot of snow on their small Connecticut town, the four of us (me, Devon and the two kiddos, 5 and 2) stumbled off of Air France Flight 804 and onto the tarmac at the Cotonou Airport. It was 9:10pm local time, and I was already regretting the flannel and jeans I had been wearing when we left.

We boarded a shuttle which dropped us in front of a large white tent. Inside, the four of us had our brains swabbed (at least it felt that way) and our fingers pricked for our COVID tests. Another shuttle took us to the terminal—a large stuffy room with linoleum tiles and painted cinderblock walls—where we waited and got our passports stamped (immigration kept them pending the results of our COVID-tests). We collected our luggage, loaded it up onto a couple of carts (we had a lot of stuff! Our shipment doesn’t arrive until mid-February) and stepped out into the night.

 We had arrived.

 * * *

A Note: I'll be primarily sending these out as emails (but also posting here in case anyone wants to drop by). My goal here is to send them out once every week or so—to pick up the thread of writing that I dropped when Devon and I moved back from Korea and share a little bit about life with a family in Benin. Hopefully these notes won’t be too long and hopefully they’ll be at least mildly entertaining. If this isn’t your cup of tea, if you have no idea who I am, or if you just don’t care (which, fair enough and no hard feelings), feel free to unsubscribe. If you think you know someone who might be interested in this, they can sign up to receive updates here.

Thanks for reading! And Happy New Year!

All the best,
Jake