As I look back over my 11 years in Benin, many of my memories have to do with fabric. Here, fabric is usually sold in two-meter lengths and is used for many things. One of my first fabric memories is the wrap-around skirt my teammate Uli bought for me a few months after I arrived in Benin. It was reddish purple with spots and squares.

Most Otammari people get one set of clothing per year for the New Year celebration. Women often receive a new set of clothes when they give birth so they can cut their old outfits into diapers. Since I see people in the same print patterns day after day, I come to associate each pattern with the person who wears it. When I see these fabrics elsewhere, it brings back memories of my friends.

Here are some fabrics I remember well:

A girl who stayed with us for a while often changed into a purple leopard-print wrap-around skirt when she returned each day from her apprenticeship.

When a woman I knew died of cancer, her family gave me her wrap-around skirt of blue fabric with black swirls filled with yellow and a black dot in the middle of each swirl. Since the woman’s body was so wasted, they asked me to place the fabric over the front of her under her burial dress so she wouldn’t look so thin for her viewing.

This lady had another larger skirt that was brownish yellow with speckles. When she died, her son kept it and used it as his shower towel. When he married and had a baby son, he cut it up for diapers.

A white piece of fabric printed with rows of red and blue elephants hangs in my house as a curtain. Whenever I see it, I remember a friend who has a shirt of the same fabric.

I’ve had one piece of fabric, a blue background with yellow roosters, hens, chicks and eggs, for a long time. It hangs in my kitchen covering some shelves. Uli and I picked out this fabric about 11 years ago.

A red piece of fabric printed with big black and white apples and a blue piece printed with white shells bring back memories of when Uli and I visited a fabric market in Bamako, Mali. As we stepped into the market, the vendors grabbed us and pulled us towards their stalls. We had to literally pull ourselves out of their grasp. When they figured out we were not going to buy if they grabbed us, they left us alone to shop in peace.

Then there was the bright pink and purple piece of polyester fabric the neighbor kids sewed into two shirts for themselves. One shirt was in good shape but wouldn’t stay buttoned. The other had been used as a pot holder and had a hole burned in the side.

I remember another youngster’s shirt that was torn into strips to tie poles onto a hospital bed so a mother and baby could sleep under a mosquito net.

I remember Toussiant’s shirt soaked with blood as he wrapped a man’s face with it after a motorcycle accident. It served to slow the bleeding and keep dust out of the wounds as the victim was driven by motorcycle to the hospital. Thanks to OMO, a good local brand of laundry soap, all the blood came out in the wash.

Over the years, I have collected scraps of fabric from old clothes and from seamstress shops. Years ago, I started sewing them into a quilt on a treadle sewing machine, but I ended up spending more time fixing the machine than sewing. So I continued sewing blocks by hand while sitting at the cyber café waiting for very slow Internet service. Five years ago, I got a sewing machine and sewed a lot of squares during two furloughs. This year, I took the blocks to a neighbor lady who wanted to see what I had been doing. She helped me finally finish the quilt—a tapestry of the colors of Benin filled with years of memories.

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