We celebrated New Years Day a week after our arrival here in Benin. As we were exchanging New Years greetings with relatives and friends, we were able to introduce ourselves to neighbors we hadn’t met yet.

The practice of visiting acquaintances on the first day of the year is common in French-speaking West African countries. The custom gives meaning and cohesiveness to relationships and strengthens community ties. People celebrate New Year’s Eve at home. On January 1, after lunch with family members, people spend the rest of the day visiting. Hosts entertain visitors with food and drink, honored by their friends’ presence. Everyone expects at least a few people to visit, so they prepare a lot of food and drink. The feasting can border on gluttony.

Having just arrived in town the week before, we expected only two New Years visitors—the owner of the small store where we’d been going for supplies and the manager of the telephone center we’d been using to make calls. These two men actually helped us find our house, too. Later in the day, they both did come to visit. This low number of New Years visitors was quite a change for Elmire and me. Over the past four years, we had become accustomed to hosting many visitors during holidays.

We went out that afternoon to visit our neighbors. We were offered food in each home, which we accepted since it would have been impolite not to. Since our stomachs had a finite capacity, we had to limit our visiting to four homes. However, the four visits turned out to be very rich and exciting. They were four distinct families—a native Dendi family, a family of a neighboring northern tribe, a family from the south of Benin working in the north on government administration, and a business-owner family originally from Nigeria that has been living in Benin for three generations.

Since one of our primary assignments during our first term of service is to complete a Dendi cultural scrapbook, we paid close attention to any cultural facts we could gather from the Dendi family we visited. At the front door, a woman welcomed us in and introduced us to two men who were eating. We soon received our plates of food and joined them. As we went through the introduction process, one of the two men asked the woman to get us some soft drinks, which we politely declined, postponing them for the next visit since we already had water to drink.

Noticing a baby, I asked who the happy father was. The woman pointed at one of the men. I asked him how many children he had. He looked at me blankly, and the woman and the other man. He then explained to us that the other man was the woman’s husband and the father of the baby. He went on to explain that, in Dendi culture, a woman doesn’t directly introduce her husband. Knowing we are new in town and unfamiliar with Dendi culture, everyone laughed off my confusion. Elmire and I had gained a valuable cultural insight.

We know that we are just beginning our journey of discovery. Many more feasts are to come, and we will have many more opportunities for us to learn Dendi culture and language. We thank God for His enabling, and we thank you for being with us in this endeavor.

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