10. 1. Voodoo Festival in Ouidah

January 10th is the worldwide "Day of Voodoo", and there are festivals everywhere in the country. One big international voodoo festival is every year on a different place in Benin.

We went to Ouidah, a place on the beach where slaves used to be shipped abroad. There is a huge "Gate of no return".

Out of the car, we saw some wonderful voodoo masks made out of trash. They hung on the public toilet to be sold, and the artists were beside. We asked for their phone numbers and decided to visit them the next day in Cotonou.

9. 1. Voodoo Festival of the King of Allada

What would voodoo trash look like? We went to the annual big voodoo festival of the King of Alladah, a small village near Cotonou. This king is at the moment head of all Benin Kings, he is mostly living in Germany and studied at the Sorbonne.

The festival was ecstatic. After the official speaches, a woman took a chicken that was walking there to pick some corn, bit its neck and swallowed it slowly.

The feathers were collected carefully, we could only find one at the end of the festival. Joachim found a water sachet, saying "Jesus", but trash-wise this was no real success: everything was perfectly cleaned up.

8. 1. Waste disposal site of the City of Porto Novo, Benin

Starting early in the morning to find the big waste disposal site the German guy in the beach bar had talked about. We went out of Cotonou direction Porto Novo, the capital of Benin and looked for waste. There was only the usual amount of garbage around, no big deal. We could not find anything, and then we arrived in Porto Novo. What to do?

After a drink, we asked a zemidjan-driver, if there was aluminium-recycling here. We had heard before, that all the waste metal in Benin goes to Porto Novo for recycling. The zemidjan driver brought us to some small booths, where people offered the pots we knew so well for sale. This was not enough, so we asked for the city´s waste disposal site.

The zemidjan brought us to a small place in the middle of a residential area, with the sign saying, that the site belonged to the City of Porto Novo.

A school class with teacher was standing on the other side, and suddenly somebody started to burn the trash. All of a sudden, we were in the middle of smoke, and on a place nearby the same thing seemed to happen.

We went to the teacher to ask, what he was doing there, and he told, that he was educating the children about waste and hygiene: Waste should not be near the house but brought to a dump site and burned or buried. The teacher was talking, and the children listened carefully and wrote on their blackboards. Stefan made an interview, and we exchanged email-addresses.

The man who burned the waste was paid by the City of Porto Novo to care for the waste, burning is the usual practice. There were lots of houses and people living in the neighborhood.

Porto Novo has about 250.000 inhabitants, divided into districts. Each of them has their own dump site, but there was still too much waste on the streets: many people prefer to simply throw their waste out to the streets instead of bringing it to the dump site or paying the people who collect it with their carts and bring it there.

We found some nice dividends for our shareholders, one of it was a water bottle re-used for traditional medication. It has the package insert glued on it, typed with typewriter.

FOTOS t.o.y.s.-team

maryam durchbricht die rauchmauer..

voller einsatz mit material und körper
stefan hat wieder sicht..

die beste position zum fotografieren ist nicht die gesündeste..

t.o.y.s. on tour TEAM: stefan, maryam, igore, eva, joachim, manuel

FOTOSTORY - burntrash and the childs of porto novo -

our simidjan-guide broght us to the right place:
the official dump site of a district of porto-novo / benin
(sheeps and goats, our old trashy friends.)


children pass by with short disturbance of everydays air pollution..

ibrahim - lives as a neighbour and gardian of the dump site. he regularly burnes the waste down, no matter what it contains..

"it´s my job to clean up this area and before the pest comes to us, i burn it down, whatever it is.."

ibrahim, 52.
(is there any connnection between voodoo and waste, i ask myself once again)

wastefire vs. burntrash in the palm grove..

..meanwhile..

..a schoolclass in the background is learning about botany, ecology, sustainability, and how not to deal with waste..

"don´t burn trash!"

"the air pollution harms you and all the people around you!" underlines the teacher.

but they burn..
..and burn..
..and burn all the waste, not knowing about the value and the toxic of it..

ibrahim is going home to watch his granddoughter playing with plastik toys from china.
..till the job is finished and the waste gone with the wind.



but:

there are a lot of possibilities to make jobs, make money, make sustainable developments for the society - out of trash of your society. the lack of information transFair to these people is leaving them not knowing better. the lack of financial transFair is not even offering alternatives.
we where the first speaking with this people about the global value of waste.
so there is a lot of potential for T.O.Y.S. company limited by waste to develope an ongoing global business with secondary raw material from africa.
our sustainable trash stocks are still available.
invest in global fairness for global waste.

for the better future..

7. 1. Temple Voodoun de la lumière

Joachim and Maryam were sick, they stayed in their room all day. Igor asked for Manuel´s moped to make his own trash research in town.

We wanted to get an invitation to the Voodoo festival of the King of Allada, so Manuel, Stefan and me were going to visit prince Bokpe at his Voodoo Temple of Light. We waited in a room decorated with photographs showing the prince with different politicians, e.g. Bundeskanzler Schröder of Germany.

The prince was not there, but his mother gave us a warm welcome and made a voodoo ceremony of protection for us. After water, cola nut, local schnaps and coca cola we felt a bit dizzy and went to a beach bar nearby to have a drink. The place was owned by a woman from Switzerland, and there were some European guests. A man from Germany told us about a big dump site out of Cotonou, on the way to Porto Novo, the capital of Benin. About 20 people were living there. We had our plan for the next day.

FOTOS dividenden cotonou / port novo

(westliche) schablonen am müll in port novo
(eine metapher auf so manche denkmodelle, die ich in afrika deponieren mußte..)



chinese yellow turbokapitalism plastic trash

no bills without electronic calculators!


coffee with milk ensemble
(only nestle-cafe in these coffee protucing countries)




epperle: big impact on small pupils

joachim and eva always on the topic