Expat Africa: At the Benin Marina Hotel

Sitting by the pool under a palm tree, on a cloudless day, cooled by the ocean breeze, you can't help but think, This is the life. And it is.

In a country where a person is lucky to earn more than $1000 a year, a $200 night stay at Cotonou's Benin Marina Hotel is, generally speaking, more than just a special weekend getaway; it's an impossibility - but for the expats living here the hotel is a weekend hot-spot.

For a surprisingly reasonable annual fee when compared to the room prices (though still much more than the average Beninese could afford), you get access to the most beautiful pool in the country, a small handful of tennis courts and a few other hotel facilities. In addition, circling the hotel is the most compact 9-hole golf course you could ever imagine, saved from it's size only by the fact that it's probably the lone golf course in the country.

Weekends are busy. As long as it's not raining, the kiddie pool is teeming with toddlers; the large, circular, adult pool is overrun by unruly pre-teens; and parents chase their children with bottles of sunscreen. When you arrive at the pool you flash your membership card and you're escorted to the umbrella of your choice (if there are any left to choose from) where you're given a fresh towel and a cushion for your chair. You can buy crêpes, ice cream and cocktails. You can even get a green coconut with a straw inserted for drinking the juice. Every Friday night the hotel hosts a themed buffet dinner by the pool for the outrageous sum of 14500 CFA (~ $30) per person.



For me, the Benin Marina is a great place to swim laps. The pool is round, but on weekday mornings it's deserted and you can swim along the buoy line that floats the diameter. I slather on sunscreen, put on my swimsuit, pack my beach bag, and trot down the "Marina road" to the pool. In less than 10 minutes, I'm in the water. On my way home, I give the same guards I passed earlier another round of hellos, this time with wet hair and goggle-marked, raccoon eyes.

On the weekends, the Marina stands in for the garden T and I don't have. When we're too lazy to drive all the way to the beach we walk to the Marina with our books and bottled water and precede to get sunburned. Once, I tried to write my thesis by the pool, but even under the shadiest umbrella the glare from the sun made it difficult to see the words on my laptop screen and I didn't end up working on much more than my tan.

As much as I'm thankful to have the Marina so close, I always feel as though I've sneaked into someplace I'm not supposed to be when I'm there - like it's a secret club and I'm only pretending to be a member. The excess of such surroundings, of the African expat life in general, is something I'll never quite get used to and somehow I feel thankful for that. A strange mix of awe and guilt sets in as you admire your surroundings and realize how lucky you are. Outside the Marina, construction workers toil in the heat, mixing cement and digging foundations to build government-funded housing units for politicians visiting Benin during an international African conference next year. A little further down the road, children walk through rows of vegetables with metal watering cans that are probably twice their weight. Polio victims hobble between parked cars at traffic lights, tapping on windows for a spare franc. As you float in that giant pool, you know there are people in the north dying from drinking dirty water.

Once, someone asked me if it wasn't hard to live with poverty right outside my door. To be honest, yes, it is. But the reality is that poverty has always been right there, it's just harder to ignore when you're in a place like Benin. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe everyone who's ever been lucky enough to float in a pool ought to be forced to witness real poverty first-hand. Maybe then at least we would finally realize just how fortunate we really are.