Amazons, slaves and Voodoo
By Robert Kaeding February 22, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Lecture
Peace Corps service
Robert Kaeding
Fri, Feb 22, 3pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25

The years 2004 to 2007 found me in Benin, West Africa as a SED (small enterprise development) volunteer.

My service there included teaching business fundamentals, the use of microcredit and entrepreneurship. A former US naval officer, I also had experience in corporate business, college and university teaching and a private legal practice.

My first task after arriving in Lokassa, my assigned village, was successful acclimation to a very harsh environment, something for which my life in the US could not have prepared me.

Benin, on the southern coast of West Africa between Togo and Nigeria, is a small country with a significant history. Before the arrival of the French, Benin (then the kingdom of Dahomey) ruled much of West Africa. They included female warriors in their army and had the largest wholesale port for slavery in Africa. Quida, the second largest city in Benin, is the Vatican for Voodoo. Benin is very close to the equator; the African sun is like a blowtorch at midday and the heat can cause dangerous dehydration. Water is scarce. I had been taught to consume only boiled or distilled bottled water, but the latter was not readily available in the bush.

The official language of Benin was French, a residue of its colonial past. The Peace Corps gave me great training which supplemented the classes I had taken at Alliance Français in Chicago. However, the surprising truth was that most people in the bush spoke only tribal languages; French was reserved for the educated and connected. Over 50 tribal languages are spoken in a country of 6.5 million people in a land mass the size of Illinois and Indiana combined. Hence basic communication skills included hand gestures, eye contact and endless repetition.

Food, of course, was a fundamental need. I had been provided with a propane stove, but until I could find a propane tank and a frying pan, I had no way to cook. Basic foodstuffs had to be purchased from the marché mamas who sold their wares from small wooden stands that they carried the inventory in a basin on their heads. I would stop them in the street and purchase small golf-ball sized tomatoes, fruit, rice and beans. The essential food for all the Africans was pot. Not what you think! Pot is boiled corn mush. Protein was available from eggs, salt fish and smoked fish. The problem, however, was currency. I was paid in large bills, but the economy ran on small-denomination coins. Without the right change one could not do business. Survival depended upon intégré, that is, becoming part of the village life and learning from the Africans.

The program will include stories of fêtes, encounters with rhinoceroses and animal intrusions. I will address the cultural relationships between African countries and the US, the economics of West Africa, the religions of sub-Saharan Africa, the future promise of Africa, AIDS and malaria, and the life-changing result of service. Lastly, I will address the need and purpose of joining the Peace Corps in geo-political terms.

The Arctic before global warming
By Ernesto de la Pena

Lecture and Slide Show
Yellowknife in the 1950s
Robin Luxmoore
Mon, Feb 25, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

Robin Luxmoore spent many years in the Arctic and in the gold boomtown of Yellowknife in the 1950s.

In one of the most thinly populated and harshest climates in the world, he spent time with the Eskimos, now called Inuit, and became an expert in handling dog teams. Partly because of the harshness of the environment, the Inuit shared everything, even their wives. He calls that lifestyle, “communism without tyrants.” 

The Arctic is undergoing immense changes through global warming and the Inuit will never return to the lifestyle of the 1950s. Dog teams are no longer the chief means of transportation and igloos are seldom built. The Inuit are finding it harder to live off the land and sea and the polar bear might soon become extinct.

Far removed from the southerner’s vision of cold and dark throughout a dismal winter in the high Arctic, Luxmoore found warmth and very often more light than in the south. The warmth came from the ever-cheerful natives and he never felt the cold in a caribou parka or lying naked in an igloo at night covered with furs. Light came from the moon reflecting off an endless spread of snow-covered terrain, the brilliance of the Northern Lights, and the radiance and intimacy of the seal oil lamp that lit the igloo. 

Luxmoore suggests we imagine a world, like another planet, without familiar features or sound or smell; an endless landscape of grey snow constantly moving over the surface; a world where the sky is the deepest blue and the stars seem to come close to Earth. That would be the Arctic.

His slide show includes the gold rush town of Yellowknife, then a town of 3,000 people and now the capital of the Northwest Territories. His experiences in that remote area are exceptional. No roads led to the town and supplies were brought in by caterpillar tractors pulling giant sledges across 200 miles of lake ice in winter. The first two cars brought in collided head-on the next day! Accommodation was so limited during the gold rush that police cells were left open to anyone in need, and in spite of the merciless weather and the relentlessly tough life leading to high consumption of alcohol, they were seldom filled with lawbreakers. Hostesses who had running water would throw a coffee-and-bath party.

Admission price will go toward a projector for seminars, lectures and Cine Club.

Ernesto de la Pena is the director of Bellas Artes.