Davis Peace Project

The Story

I grew up in Benin, surrounded by family who spoke Adja. But I never learned the language. Like many in my generation, I was raised in French, the language of school and opportunity. Adja was what my grandparents spoke, what I heard but couldn't understand.

Years later, at Dartmouth, I decided to change that. I wanted to learn my own language. But when I searched for resources: apps, dictionaries, courses: I found nothing. Zero digital resources for Adja. A language spoken by over a million people, invisible to the internet.

That absence felt personal. And urgent. Languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Once they're gone, entire worldviews go with them. I realized that if I wanted to learn Adja, I would first have to help preserve it.

So I decided to do something about it.

The Vision

With funding from the Project for Peace through Dartmouth's Dickey Center, I set out to create the first large-scale digital resource for the Adja language. The goal was ambitious: build a sentence corpus that could eventually power translation tools, document oral traditions through video interviews, and lay the groundwork for a dictionary.

I assembled a small team: a videographer, community translators, and research assistants. We would work across the Mono and Couffo regions of Benin, where Adja is most commonly spoken. I gave myself one month.

Reality vs. Expectations

After one month, I hadn't even started the sentence corpus.

The first weeks were consumed by logistics, relationship building, and the slow, essential work of gaining community trust. Interviews happened on community time, not mine. One day I'd get a call: “There's an artist who can talk in 3 hours.” I had to be ready.

The translation process itself was humbling. Here's how it worked: a young team member would read a French sentence aloud. An elder, often someone who couldn't read, would translate it into Adja. Another person would write it down phonetically. Then someone else would digitize it. Four people for one sentence. It was slow, collaborative, and beautiful.

I learned that fieldwork doesn't follow timelines. You can't schedule spontaneity. You can only show up, again and again, and be ready when the moment comes.

The Moments That Mattered

One interview stays with me. We were speaking with a retired high school teacher, an elder who had spent his life teaching in French. When we finished recording, he paused, looked at me, and began to pray. He thanked God that someone was finally preserving Adja. That the language might live on.

I wasn't prepared for that. I came to do research. I left understanding that this work carries a weight I hadn't anticipated. For the community, this wasn't an academic exercise. It was hope: hope that their language might one day be taught in schools, that their grandchildren might understand them.

I also discovered my own country. I visited towns I'd never been to, met communities I didn't know existed. Benin became more real to me through this work.

On Peace

This was a “Peace Project” in a place with no war. But I've come to understand that peace is not just the absence of conflict. Peace is the presence of understanding.

When a grandmother can't communicate with her grandchild because they don't share a language, that's a kind of fracture. When a generation loses access to its own stories, its own way of seeing the world, something breaks.

Preserving a language is about more than words. It's about safeguarding an entire worldview. It's about ensuring that the knowledge, humor, and wisdom encoded in Adja doesn't disappear with the last generation that speaks it fluently.

What's Next

This summer was just the beginning. The corpus continues to grow. I'm working on a neural machine translation system for Adja as part of my Stamps Scholar research. The goal: a tool that can translate between French and Adja, making information accessible to speakers who were never included in the digital revolution.

Eventually, I want to build what I couldn't find: an app, a dictionary, resources that will help the next person who, like me, wants to learn their own language.