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Chris Starace left college with a desire for adventure, wanting to see and live in other places in the world. He had a cousin in the Peace Corps from the United States, and this sounded like a really worthwhile thing to do. Chris applied and was accepted.
Chris studied French in high school and had been on a student exchange in Limoges, France. A political science major in college, he worked summers with a company which taught employees how to set up and operate their own small painting businesses. Because of his fluent French and business background, the Peace Corps assigned Chris to Benin, West Africa in 1995, and after three months of training, he worked on his own. He was on a Peace Corps assignment there for an additional two years.
Benin
According to information from the Wordatlas.com, the country known today as the
Republic of Benin, 
with a population of over 6,000,000 people,
was once the powerful Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. It was eventually nicknamed the
Slave Coast because of the significant slave trafficking through Dahomey of Africans to
the Americas, the slave markets of Brazil and the Caribbean.
It became a French Colony in the late 1800s, gaining its full independence from France in 1960. The country’s current name of Benin was adopted in 1975. It since has seen a series of military coups and has the health and infrastructure problems of its neighbors and of most West African countries.
A very poor African country, much of the interior population is still dependent
on subsistence farming; growing beans, corn and yams. Significant cash crops
include cotton, cocoa and coffee.
Many inhabitants of Benin worked in small, rural cooperatives which typically raised animals;
grew corn, pineapples and peanuts for their own consumption or for sale at the market or made soap.
Nearly everyone raised their own goats, chickens and sometimes pigs, and they supplemented
the meat with squirrels and bush rats (like opossums). Men took care of the animals; woman made
and sold things at the market and did a lot of buying for resale at the markets, as well.
Roads were dirt and full of pot holes-muddy and highly difficult to travel in the rainy
season, and the countryside was densely vegetated. One main, paved road would typically
wend through the center of town, and a lot of people, including Chris, had to go from place
to place via bicycle.
Allada, where Chris lived and worked, was a town of about 10,000 people about one hour and a half by "bush taxi" from the main port city and commercial capital of Benin, Cotonou. Local residents lived in mud or cinder-block houses. Water was from cisterns and could be in very short supply in the dry season.
Peace Corps
In Chris’ own words that he wrote while in the Peace Corps, “The unique concept behind Peace Corps is to live near the same economic level of the local people so the volunteer can better understand the culture and lives of the people they’re trying to help. I live in a small three-room cement house with a tin roof, which is down a long narrow dirt path on the outskirts of town. I have electricity and a fan (thank the Lord) but no running water. I pay my neighbor to fetch me water every day out of the cistern in front of my house. I take refreshingly cool bucket showers and do my business in a pit latrine in my front yard. I don’t have a TV or phone, and I get news from short wave radio. My sole means of transportation is my Peace Corps issued Trek mountain bike, which I use for short trips, and I must take bush taxis for out of town trips.”
Bush taxis were taxis in very poor repair, as the drivers couldn’t afford maintenance. They didn’t run on regular schedules and frequently broke down in transit. To obtain a ride, you waited by the side of the road until one came through and then negotiated a price for the fare with the driver. Rides were crowded, and Chris said, “If everyone inhaled at once, the doors would pop open.”
The language spoken in the rural areas was Fon, and Chris frequently had to hunt up the one or two folks in the cooperative who could translate what he wanted to say and what was said to him into French.
Chris worked within a five to six mile radius of Allada, teaching grass-roots small business planning and cooperative development, such as how to manage finances, bookkeeping, cash flow and basic marketing.
One of the frustrations of working there, according to Chris, was a sort of fatalism. The residents seemed to figure that their ancestors had been doing things this way for hundreds of years, there was nothing they could do to change the grinding poverty of their lives and they had little motivation to change any of their practices. After a year, Chris stopped working with village cooperatives for this reason. During his second year he worked with individual small business owners in town such as the weaver, sculptor, carpenter, electrician, seamstress, shoe repairman, etc., because they tended to be more educated and more willing to change.
Health care was very primitive, and folks only went to the doctor if seriously ill. The doctors had no modern equipment with which to treat patients. Animals seldom received veterinary care, and the veterinarian had no office and did only home visits.
Chris Gets a Basenji
Chris had been there for nearly ten months when someone offered to sell him a little red and
white male puppy from a litter of Basenjis for $1.
He didn’t really know anything about Basenjis, as Basenjis were pretty much
considered to be vermin in Benin. They messed all over, were pesky, ate human
and animal excrement and garbage, just like pet Basenjis snacking on the cat box—it’s
"processed food."
To Chris’s knowledge, there were no other types of dogs in residence in the area of Benin where he worked other than the Basenjis. Basenjis ran loose in the villages; in fact, no animals were tied or fenced, and no one fed the Basenjis. They foraged the best they could and were frequently thin and worm-laden. The only time farmers tied up any animal was to keep goats from chewing the young corn.
Finding indigenous Basenjis in Benin is very interesting for the Basenji community, as Basenjis have so far been primarily identified in the Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) — see article on Basenji Companions web site: Living with Basenjis in Zaire. Peace Corps worker Ann Roche found indigenous Basenjis in the northern, central, and western parts of Zaire, but they didn’t appear to be in the Eastern part. She had also seen them in the Congo near Brazzaville.
Affection was never given to Basenjis, as they were not considered pets. Pets were a luxury that could not be sustained in such a poor country. Folks considered Chris weird when he petted and kissed his dog, saying, “He eats excrement - how can you kiss him and let him lick you!!!"
Basenjis were used only minimally for hunting squirrels and bush rats, as the resources of "kill" animals had been greatly diminished by the growing incursion of population. Basenjis were valued about the same as a chicken—about $1. Although crime was not a serious issue there, folks used the dogs as guard dogs, feeling just a bit more secure if they were around.
Chris named his Basenji puppy Wafi, which means “Come here” in Fon.
He wanted to neuter him but found that they do neutering without anesthetic,
and decided against it. Veterinary care was also very primitive, and the
veterinarian came to Chris’s home to give rabies shots and worming once
a year. About 99% of the Basenjis received no veterinary care at all.
When Chis would call, “Wafi Wafi” or yell, “Chuku,” (meaning dog) Wafi would come running and would be very happy to see him. When Chris had to leave the village, he would pay a neighbor to watch out for and feed Wafi.
Wafi was a small Basenji and slept in the bed with Chris. He was affectionate, and he loved to run and be wild. Chris fed him food that the folks in the region ate: Akassa, a fermented, gelatinous cornstarch wrapped in teak leaves; Klui Klui, which was fried peanut butter sticks, and Chris bought smoked fish for him, as well.
In true Basenji fashion, Wafi chewed everything in sight, and Chris still has books that bear his tooth marks. He also was a problem to housebreak, but finally became much better about it.
One endearing story about Wafi was when Chris had to go to a
doctor’s appointment in the American Embassy in the main port city of
Cotonou. Wafi followed Chris on his bicycle the one mile to the center of
town to catch a bush taxi for the remainder of the trip. He kept telling
Wafi, “Go home!!!”
After travelling a short way in the bush taxi, Chris looked back, and there was Wafi, running as fast as his little legs would go to follow the taxi. Chris stopped the taxi, and, holding Wafi in his arms, arranged for a motorcycle taxi ride back home where he gave Wafi to the neighbor to hold while he resumed his original trip.
Because it was not done in the area, Chris tried not to domesticate Wafi very much, and never tied him up or put a leash on him. He didn’t teach him tricks or obedience commands. Although he cared for Wafi a great deal, when he completed his assignment, Chris went to live with his parents in the United States and couldn’t bring Wafi with him. Chris gave him to the next Peace Corps volunteer who was assigned to the area. After that, Wafi was left with a subsequent Peace Corps volunteer and then with Chris’s neighbor in Benin. Wafi lived to be about nine years old, but, ironically, ran off just about two months before Chris visited the country this year in July, 2004.
About Wafi, Chris wrote in his journal, “I bought a very small puppy
when I was in Benin after having been there almost a year. While I was
observing and admiring him after bringing him home for the first time,
I saw that he was disoriented, clumsy, curious, always exploring everything,
naive, and ill at ease. I realized that I too acted just like him when I
first arrived in Benin. Now that I had been in Benin for a year, my puppy
showed me how far I had come in understanding my surroundings, how I was
more at ease, and how I was more confident living in Benin because I no
longer acted like him.”
A man named Robert Dean from the United States heard about Chris’s stay in Benin,
contacted Chris and arranged to have Chris ship six Basenjis from Benin in July of
2004. These Basenjis will be shown in the 2004 Basenji Club of America Nationals
in the African Exhibition in September.
Currently, Chris teaches Spanish to high school students in the Bronx, New York, and is is attending school nights to earn a Masters' Degree. He lives with his wife, Cara, in Ossining, New York, about 45 minutes north of New York City.
For more information on the Peace Corps, Benin and Basenjis, contact
Chris and see Chris’s web sites:
http://www.geocities.com/fon_is_fun/
http://www.geocities.com/fon_is_fun/short_stories_from_my_peace_corp.htm
Article copyright © 2004 by Betsy Polglase.
Photos copyright © 2004 by Chris Starace.
All rights reserved.