INTERVIEW: Juste and Solanje Egoulety Age: 36 and 40 Juste Egoulety is a high school biology professor in Ouidah, the site of my group's training period, and he is also the host father of one of my fellow trainees, Shelley Sams. He and his wife, Solanje have now invited trainees into their home three times during this first stage of the Peace Corps experience. They have also been instrumental in helping the Peace Corps Benin train staff local and evaluate other host families here in Ouidah. In addition to all of this, Mr. Egoulety is my neighbor here in Ouidah, is extremely amiable and consistently makes it as clear as possible that his door is always open to people seeking his advice or assistance. I interviewed Mr. Egoulety about the role of the host family in this crucial pre-service learning process, his experiences with past trainees and what motivates local families to participate in the integration phase of our service. Words to the World: "help, and help as often as possible."
Volunteer O'Keefe (VO): How many children do you have? Juste Egoulety (JE): One. VO: Just one girl. How old is she? JE: 10 years, two months. VO: 10 years, two months. OK I see that you prefer the more complicated sort of response. How many times have you had a Peace Corps trainee stay with you? JE: This is the third time. VO: Who was the best so far? Solanje Egoulety (SE): Shelley. VO: Shelley, huh. I bet it's always the trainee who is there at the moment. This is the third time you have had an American stay with you. What types of experiences have you had with the Americans who have stayed with you? JE: The experiences, well there is always the level of change between the two cultures. We have a type of culture here in Benin that we try to explain to them and the other side as well, where we try to find out how things work where they are from. VO: Like what, for example? What have you found out about our culture from Shelley? JE: Well, Shelley hasn't been with us for very long yet but we've learned something about ourselves from the others. For example here in Benin we spend a lot of time with our families, but in your country, around the age of 18 or so, it depends on when you go to college, but young people move away from their families and become very independent. The family life ends. Maybe you are obligated to move to or from the country but you don't live with your parents any more. But here in Benin at 19 and much older people live at home. I know families with very old children still in the home. VO: And do you think that is a very big difference or a simple thing between the two ways of living? JE: That makes a very big difference.... VO: Because people are always very welcome here with their families? JE: Yes, here.... VO: There but in America you must move out? JE: Yes you must go and here with your father and your mother, even if you're 40 years old you are still considered a child. And it must be that way. This tends to cause problems between the family, the large family and the small family. You see, for example, if you were our child, we know that you are Sean, and we know that you must always respect your mother and your father. Now, you get married and you bring your wife into our home and you see now that we must treat your wife like one of our children. And you know that she is not going to accept that and it is for this reason that people often have problems between their families and their spouses. VO: Because you are already in a situation where you are an adult but for the parents you are still a child. JE: That's it and the wife has received another upbringing somewhere else and then comes here with you and there are often problems. OK, do you have that situation in America? When you leave at 18 you return only once in a while to say hello, but here in Benin it's not like that. OK there you have an example of the difference between us. Do you need another one or is that enough? VO: No, that's fine. What do you think are the personal benefits to your family to having Americans staying with you? JE: For me personally it's all about the cultural change because when the youths come to this house we take them in as if they were our own children. That's what we did with the first two and that's what we are doing with Shelley now. We take them in like our children, like our brothers, or our sisters. Every time we talk to them. If they have things they have to do for the training I help them. And when they return to the United States they don't forget about us. They keep in touch and send us letters. I don't know, but one trainee's family came to visit her here in Benin and she brought them to meet us. We set them up with a place to stay the night, and the next morning they came and had breakfast with us and we all sat around and talked and when they went back to the United States they understood us and thought of us as a good family. That is all I want. I don't want anything material or anything like that but when a person comes to me I take them in. And it's not just the Whites or the Americans. It's the same if they are Beninese. That's my philosophy. I really like to help people. I try to foster a relationship. I don't always know if it's going to work but that's what I try to do. VO: What do you think are the benefits to the volunteer? JE: OK me personally I really like to talk. I'm an educator, therefore with the volunteers, within the plan, I can really help them learn to speak French. Because when they arrive the first day we are speaking with our hands. Shelley is a bit more advanced than that but one of the others -- can I say his name, the name of the trainee VO: Yes, sure. JE: His name is Douglas Erickson. He has finished his service already. His level was very, very, very low. He wasn't at all strong in French but when he arrived he had his dictionary at his side and it was with our hands that we spoke. He pointed and gestured but in one week or two weeks, a bit more maybe we were able to have a conversation. After three months he was a champion in French. That really made me happy. I was very content because it was in this family that he learned. Every night I helped him with his tasks, each time I helped him to learn, and each time we made mistakes I corrected him and he learned. It made me very happy. VO: So you think the Peace Corps Benin system works very well? JE: It works very well, correctly. If it didn't work, the people who come here would leave. It works well because here in Benin, the people are not just average. The people here are champions when it comes to having ideas in our heads. VO: I understand you and your wife have been instrumental in recruiting other families to participate in the program. What difficulties have you encountered in getting people to participate? JE: For the choice of families, I don't just look for any family. You see, first of all, I look at the way each family presents itself. How they present themselves and how they represent our society. I am only going to put trainees in families where they are going to get along with the children. That's the first thing I look for, families that are going to be truly helpful. Of course, I can only do as much as I can. I don't live with these families myself, so it could change but with the families I often choose for the Peace Corps we have more than 80 percent success. You see, we don't have 100 percent but the families that don't work aren't very many. There are others who refuse. I can't give you their names because that wouldn't be normal. When I go into one of these families with one of your facilitators they some times say, "We don't understand Americans and we don't really know what they want when they come here. Is it to help us, or is it for other reasons?" Therefore they are scared that they can't handle someone like this in their families and the responsibility of all that could happen. If the volunteer goes off in the night alone and something happens it could be a scandal on the family name, and they say, "Really, it won't work at our house." Here at my house, this is the third time, and the facilitators say they've never seen anything like it. They are very pleased with the way this family handles the trainees and it's great because we really believe that these people are coming here to help us and our country. VO: You said that you like to find families that represent Benin well. What types of things do you think describe a typical Beninese family? Is it a big family, a small family...? JE: No, no, no. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the family. My family here is small. Your family is big. The big family allows the trainee to better integrate, and to better understand our life here in Benin, and all of Africa, because here in Africa we are often in very large families. My family, on the other hand, is much more like a European family or an American family. VO: Much smaller? JE: Yes, much smaller. VO: So it's not typically African? JE: No, not typically African. VO: And do you think the Beninese families are typical of normal African families? JE: Yes, it's that experience that makes a person want to come here. Do you understand? VO: Yes. JE: Now when someone is well integrated in a large family, he is then living the true African lifestyle. And in the large family everyone has his ideas and that allows you to receive a lot of information. You have people who are younger on up, until the parents, the aunts, and uncles, that allows the trainees to learn a lot of things from their integration. VO: What do you think the motivation is for the families who want to participate in the program? JE: The motivation, the motivation is definitely to see the chance. The chance, for example, the last time, for the promotion, your group, when I went to a family and I explained the situation directly. I said would you like to have an American in your family. But the mother wasn't there, in fact, neither parent was there. I saw only the daughter, the daughter was one of my students and I said well, when your parents come home ask them the question. The daughter, she wanted to have an American in the house and that's all I had to do. When I went back to the house the mother sent out the daughter with a letter that said the family was very pleased to have the opportunity and that every time she talked with someone who had an American stay with them she wanted to have the same as experience as her friends. She was very happy, the whole family was extremely pleased to have the chance to have a trainee in the family. You see, every time someone learns about this they want to do it because it's a really neat experience. VO: Therefore it's the experiences of the past that are the true motivations for the new families? JE: That's it, that's it. VO: And what is the motivation for the families who have already had an American, to have more experience? JE: To have more experience, because each trainee arrives with his own ideas, and that way the family has a better idea about how to handle the situation. You see, I am on my third experience and now after two previous experiences I know how to live this experience. When a situation arises with the trainee, I can look back on the previous two and very quickly I can see the solution, and I can say this is the way it must be handled for this thing to work out as a success. And situations do arise. Sometimes the exact same situation arises with more than one person, and after the first two experiences when I see something that is holding the trainee back I can quickly give them the solution. In the same thought, it is always to have more experience. VO: Tell me about your opinions of the Peace Corps program, how it has changed your lives personally, how it has changed the lives of the people of Benin JE: Well really the program is not bad, it's very good, you see because we are the people who are in need. We have the need and really it's great because the Peace Corps has been here in Benin for 30 (?) years. This is the 30th year and if it didn't work you wouldn't be here, you see. Therefore it's a very good program, and it's not only the education aspect. There are other programs, development and all of that. Of course, it's the education part that I know the best, but it's really a great service the Peace Corps is doing us. The United States has created the Peace Corps for the world and it's a great service to us all. That is my opinion and now for the people of Benin, it's practically the same thing because we can have this education. You see, we have a lot of problems here and I'm going to give you two small examples. OK, now we're talking about volunteers here, not about trainees, but volunteers who have helped here in our country. There was a volunteer who came to my school when I was in 10th and 11th grade (American equivalent) and if he wasn't there my school would have had to find a teacher and pay him. Therefore you see this volunteer was teaching between three and five classes and if the government had to pay someone to teach five classes for 30 years.... So you see what it has done for our country. These American volunteers are participating in the development of our country. They are contributing, are they not, to our evolution? OK now for my second example. During my public education, in the course of my studies, I came in contact with two volunteers. In my final year, when studying for my BAC (SAT equivalent) I had a volunteer teaching me. And in the beginning he wasn't too great with his French, but after two months he was much better. You must understand back then they didn't put the trainees in families, they just stayed in a school during training and they really only spoke English when they started their service. But one or two months later he had learned enough and he really did a good job teaching us. And you see, of those who were in that class with me today they are professors, doctors, engineers and everything. Therefore because of the participation of this volunteer we are where we are today. And again when I was in the university there was an American volunteer who taught me physics. At the university, a volunteer. The game was, we used to kid him, we asked him how old he was. Do you know how old he was? He told us he was 24 years old, and we said, "What, you are 24! Do you know how old the youngest person in this class is? 26 years old, and the oldest is around 40!" After that day we used to tell him he was the professor of his big brothers. We used to joke with him about it but you can see from this example that this American creation, the Peace Corps, has really participated in our plans here, economically, a great deal in the development of our country. You see on my road it has touched me personally three times. VO: Is that the reason you like having the trainees here at your house? JE: Yes, because of the Peace Corps presence in my life, giving me this service, why wouldn't I want to give something back if I can? I would do it, I have already done it, and I'll continue to do it. If nobody would be helpful in this way that I can, your time here in Benin would be a lot harder. VO: OK. That's the end. JE: That's the end, really? VO: Yes. Thank you Mr. Egoulety.
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