Bonjour Benin!

Support Girls Empowerment in Benin!

2010-11-07T01:24:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends and Family,
As I’m sure you’re all aware, I’ve been living in Benin for over a year serving with the Peace Corps. For the last few months, I’ve been working on a grant for a girl’s summer camp, called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). The camp started in Romania in the early 90’s and spread to Benin in 2000. Since then, it’s been held every year in various parts of the country.
To put it bluntly, Benin is a very male dominated society where unfortunately, women are not granted many of the same opportunities. Antiquated cultural norms and traditional beliefs still permeate the country, especially in the remote villages where many volunteers work. Girls often quit school at a young age to help take care of their multiple younger siblings at home. Many of them become market vendors, are forced into marriages, or even worse, become prostitutes. In extreme cases, those that do manage to stay in school but do not have the proper marks can advance by sleeping with their professors. Polygamy, although outlawed in Benin, still occurs and the numerous wives, unfortunately, must tolerate their husband’s actions as they lack the power or the education to do anything about it. On the grassroots level, many are still illiterate and do not even know French, their national language.
As for my own personal experiences, you know that I teach 7th and 8th grade English as well as doing tutoring with other students. I try to empower the girls that I work with on a daily basis as well as doing things like tutoring in the market on market days, when they must work for there mothers and had never thought of studying at the same time. I tell them that it is important for them to study all the time, when they can catch a few moments, because generally girls are given more work to do and therefore less time to study for school. The males outnumber the females by about three to one, and as the levels progress, the disparity increases. Last year’s 6eme class (5th grade level) of 400 students had about 100 females. In the 1er class (11th grade), there were only three females in a class of fifty students, and not one of them passed onto the final grade, terminale. I’m more than confident that this discrepancy is not a singular occurrence with just my community. In addition, after elementary school, there’s a fee to go to school, regardless of public or private institution. The price varies depending on location and size. At my high school for example, it costs 35,000 CFA/year (roughly $70 USD), which is more than many people make per month. With multiple children in the family, it’s often only the boys that get to continue with their studies, leaving the girls behind with just the bare minimum education.
As you can see, there is a great need in this country to educate women and young girls about the importance of staying in school. That’s what Camp GLOW strives to do. It’s a week long girls empowerment camp where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to become better students and more powerful leaders in their communities. Throughout the week, various topics are discussed including financial planning, sexual health, computer and Internet literacy, goal-setting, HIV/AIDS awareness, study and leaderships skills, and malaria prevention techniques. The girls also participate in arts and crafts, sports and games, and take excursions to national government institutions and museums. All sessions are held by respected successful Beninese women who serve as excellent role models for the girls. To illustrate how important this can be I will tell you about a conversation I had with some girls in 2nd (10th grade). I asked them how many girls were in their class of 63, they told me 9, which is about average in their grade. When I asked them why there were not more girls in their grade, and what had happened to their former classmates they told me, "Elles sont parents." "They are parents." When I think about this it makes me sick to think that if some of these girls had just had some education about sexual health and reproduction, they might still be in school. I know that in the US there is a lot of debate about teaching healthy sexual practices vs. abstinence only education, but here there is NO sex-ed at all, and many of these girls are taught by their culture that it is unacceptable to say no to men and even boys.
I know that many of you donated last year, and I thank you for your contribution. You can see what your money did in these pictures! These were all taken at our camp last year.
The budget for this year’s camp runs close to $6000, so I ask your support in please providing as little or as much as you can. Even a dollar in Benin will go a long way. The camp isn’t slated to start until June, but the sooner we have the money, the quicker we can start planning, organizing, and finalizing all the details. There are about 20 volunteers involved in this camp, and if we all ask our loved ones to donate a few dollars then we can reach our goal easily, so anything that you can spare will be very much appreciated! And don't forget that your donation is tax deductible!
If you are interested in donating, please go here: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.donatenow and search for projects in Benin. The grant was just recently sent to Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington D.C. for final approval, and should be online within the next week or two. Please continue to check periodically if you do not see anything. The project is called Camp GLOW – Porto Novo.
Thank you for your continued support and warm wishes. I hope all is well back home, as trust me when I tell you that there is no finer place on earth than the United States of America.

Thank you so much for all of your support!

An Extra-Ordinary Weekend

2010-10-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

SO I came to Cotonou this weekend really for one thing- my friend Kara's Halloween Party. So, I left my house Saturday morning and made a stop in Porto-Novo to visit my couturier, she has made me some really great dresses- 2, maybe 3 of which I can wear when I go home (as summer dresses anyway) so I was really excited about that- now I have cloths that fit me! Oh, it was really funny the last time I got my measurements retaken. I have been going to the same woman since about 2 months into my training in Porto-Novo so she has my measurements from then. I have lost about 10 cm, or around 4 inches all around my body, that was pretty telling, no wonder I'm swimming in the cloths that I had made last year! OK, so after I that I stopped and bought a dictionary for one of the kids in my class I headed to Cotonou. After a traffic jam and a nap, I was in Cotonou.

I lucked out this weekend because the wifi is actually working well and so I got to skype with my mom, who I talk to pretty regularly but I love getting to see. Then it was off to the party where I was dressed as a 'Marche Mama' meaning that I was wearing 4 pagnas (2m long pieces of fabric) and had a bucket full of cookies on my head. It was a really fun party which ended with most of us up on the roof of the building watching the stars and the clouds and the airplanes take off from the only airport in Benin. Also, its always a good idea to take cookies into a room of drunken PCVs.

So the next morning I was here at the PC office and realized that there is no school on Monday because it is All Saints Day and as I wasnt really feeling up to the taxi/moto ride back to post I decided to stay for another day. Sunday night was a much calmer affair. My friend Laura and I made this really great chili, which I bought a TON of veggies for. Because I dont get many different vegetables at post, when I am standing in front of all that produce my eyes get a little bigger than my stomach. So in the chili there were tomatoes, shallots, zucchini, carrots and eggplant. It ended up being more of a stew with beans than a chili, but with liberal amounts of chili powder and taco seasoning it did taste like a very tasty chili. Then we took our hot, spicy chili up to the TV room here and blasted the air conditioning to simulate winter while watching 'White Christmas'. This is how we pretend that it is winter in Benin and also how I will attempt to prepare myself for the cold this Christmas in London.

So this is Monday and I will head back to post. My APCD (the boss of the TEFL volunteers) is coming tomorrow on Post Visit and will see a class of mine and also inspect my house and ask me a bunch of questions so wish me luck!

A Week in the Life

2010-10-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2010

A Week in the Life

So I know that I have described a typical day for me here in Benin, but recently I have decided that there is not so much a typical day for me here so much as a typical week. So I decided to write about the week, day by day and maybe that will give you a better idea about my life here.

Monday.
Monday is one of my long days, I teach for 6 hours from 8-10, 10-12 and 3-5. Today I was totally exhausted because I didn’t teach last week so my sleep schedule went back to my more natural night-owl sleep pattern. It’s not that I am so tired when I am in class, but getting myself to leave the house can be difficult. This week I finally am teaching all of my classes, even if two of them are “les classes volantent”- “flying classes”, meaning that every time we met we have to search for an empty classroom. Finding empty classrooms has been pretty easy up to this point, but mostly just because many of my colleagues have not started teaching yet, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I can still find some empties in a few weeks. Usually, on Monday the whole school has the flag ceremony, at which we all stand around saluting the Beninese flag, singing the Beninese national anthem (I know it now too!) and then having announcements. Today though, by the time the ceremony was supposed to start it was raining cats and dogs so we all kept (mostly) dry in the classrooms. And I tried to keep my class busy even though they couldn’t hear me above the sound of the rain sheeting down onto the tin roof. I also wrote the word “write” up on the blackboard so many times (making a verb chart in 2 classes) that it did that weird thing where the word starts to loose meaning and I second-guess myself as to wither or not it is spelled right.

Tuesday.
Tuesday is my shortest day, I only teach from 8-10 and then I have the rest of the day free. Normally, I go home and do chores, but I promised my classes that I would let them know how much a French-English dictionary would cost, then they could bring me the money and I could by the dictionary on one of my fairly frequent trips to Porto-Novo or Cotonou. So I went straight from school to the bookstore in Porto-Novo and found out that they are between $4 and $5, which is a lot of money to most of my student’s families. That’s about a quarter of what it costs to send a kid to school for a year and about as much as a day laborer makes in a week. So last week I also offered to let the kids come and do chores for me to earn money, for their school fees, a dictionary or just if they want to make some money. While I was in Porto-Novo I also got myself the very healthy lunch of French-fries and Coke and then I got some Blackberry jam at the supermarket. Jam and peanut butter are two of the things that I spend money on because they make my life here so much more pleasant. When I am having a bad day I can have biscuits and jam or toast and pb and it makes life bearable sometimes. I know that seems terribly odd, but hey, it works for me so I keep it in stock. When I got back from P-N I found two of my students waiting on my porch, wanting to work for me. Unfortunately it had just started raining really hard so I had to find something for them to do in my house (at least until the rain stopped). So, they did my dished and swept my house for less than a dollar for both of them and when I gave them the money they looked at me like I was crazy. This was the first time that I have had students work for me and I think it went pretty well.

Wednesday.
Wednesday is another short day. I have one class from 8-10 and then an English department meeting from 10-12. Class was fairly uneventful, except that I noticed that some of the pencil wells in the desks in my classroom were still full of water after it rained so hard yesterday. Boy, am I glad I wasn’t teaching! It’s bad enough when the class can’t hear you, but when they start getting wet all hell breaks loose. The way they react to a little bit of water you would think that they would all melt like the Wicked Witch of the West! Department meetings are fairly pointless and frustrating. My principle is also the head of the English department and since he is busy being the principle and is always running out of the meeting or being called out of the meeting and nobody will continue on without him there tends to be very little that goes on at these meetings. Although today we all did get the chance to coordinate our classes within each grade and decide how far we want to get before the exam, which is scheduled for right before Christmas break. Last year I had one grade-level all to myself so I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, but now that I have two grades I share the 7th grade with one person and the 8th grade with two other people. It was interesting to see how the other 7th grade teacher was really anal about the whole thing- in a very Beninese way. He is making a chart of what we are going to teach week by week and then he will give me a copy of it. The two guys who are also teaching 8th grade were totally the opposite- they were super laid back and we just basically agreed that we would get all of our kids to the same point by the end of the quarter. Oh, that was the other thing that I found out today, the whole Beninese school system has switched from semesters to trimesters, just like that. The other profs don’t know what to think of this and I don’t really either, but I guess we’ll see. The principle told us that and then just moved on. I just thought it could be worse. Like in Rwanda where they switched the whole school system from being in French to being in English the same way- no phase out, no pilot program, nothing, one year school is in French and the next year school is in English, with no warning or anything. I know that cant have gone down so well there if only because I know that it wouldn’t go down so well here.

Thursday.
Thursday is my other long day, same class schedule as Monday, but it always seems longer than Monday does. In the morning I have one 7th grade class followed by an 8th grade class and I noticed for the first time how much bigger my 8th graders are all of a sudden. Last year I had all of the 7th grade, so most of the students (except repeaters and transfer students) in my 8th grade classes are kids I know. When did they get so huge?! Part of the reason I noticed was that I was in the same classroom for both classes and there were about as many kids, but the 8th graders took up way more space. For example, when 3 7th graders are sharing a desk built for 2, sometimes it takes me an hour or so into class (until I start counting them to write down in my notebook) because even thought there are 3 of them at a desk, they are still sitting comfortably. But when 3 8th graders are sharing that same desk they look very uncomfortable, the same way 3 adults would look, all elbows banging and butts hanging of the edge of the bench. When I walked home from school for lunch it was very hot, so hot I could feel the sun burning my skin on the short walk from school to my house (yes, Mom, I was wearing sunscreen!) but by the time it was time to go back to school it was thunder and lightening and raining buckets. I also was freaking out on the inside as I walked through the half-grown cornfields, praying that I wouldn’t get hit by lightening. To make matters worse, just what I predicted on Monday happened and it took about 10 minutes of running around the school to find a classroom. They are building 3 more classrooms at the moment, but I have no expectation that they will be finished before January, that way if they get done before then I will be pleasantly surprised. (I was told it would take 2 weeks- and those are my classrooms). I had one kid give me the $5 to buy him a dictionary- yay! I really think that all of my 8th graders should have dictionaries, this is their 3rd year of English and I have talked to the 9th grade English teachers and know that they need them even more next year, as a the end of 9th grade there is a huge nation-wide exam and if they don’t pass it they don’t move up to the upper school (I teach in the lower school). So if they have to have it for next year anyway, then why shouldn’t they buy it this year and get more use out of it? Especially when I’m offering to go and pick it up for them.

Friday.
I have no classes on Friday. So when 3 students of mine showed up to do my laundry I was still in my sweatpants. This was I think weird for them as they have never seen me in anything but teaching cloths, which are my nice cloths, mostly Western-style in an African “tussu” or printed fabric. They did a good job on my cloths though, but since today is overcast and not very hot my jeans are still out drying after 6 hours on the line. There was a bit of excitement in the capital of my commune (county) last night. As you may have heard, there has been some really bad flooding all over Benin, including in just the next village to the West of mine, which for 4-5 months out of the year is a stilt-village (there are pictures of it on facebook) but it has rained too much this year and that village and many like it as well as some that are usually just barely above the floodplain have flooded. Well, as you can imagine the government and also many of the NGOs in Benin have been really good about giving supplies (not money-they know it would just get stolen) to the mayors of the communes to disperse to the displaced. Things like rice, corn, condensed milk, tents, sleeping mats, mosquito nets, water purification tabs and the like. Most of these things are expensive, especially right now as the most fertile part of Benin in underwater and vegetables and fruits are hard to come by. Well the mayor of my commune gave out very little of what he was given and held back all the rest of the donations. One of the TV stations got a hold of this info and late last night the mayor and his cronies were caught sneaking out of city hall with carloads of things that were supposed to be given to people who have lost everything in the last few weeks. It’s kind of like if after Hurricane Katrina instead of FIFA not delivering trailers to the newly created homeless of Louisiana and Mississippi they were selling them on the black market. Of course this is a huge scandal and because our mayor is a member of the party of Yayi Boni, the President of Benin, this whole thing reflects really badly on him and could swing the election away from him in the next election. I was talking to my friend Sylvester about this and asked him why the mayor stealing these things was different from the president or any of the ministers or the mayors or even the principles of the schools stealing money everyday and the only answer that he could give me was that those people don’t get caught sneaking out of their offices with pocketfuls of cash by GOLFE TV. Moral of the story: if you are going to steal something in Benin, make sure you can just wire it into your off-shore bank account and you don’t have to load it into your car.

I know, I know, I have been remiss

2010-10-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

New pictures on facebook!

October 22, 2010

C’est Deja La Rentree

It has started again! The school year. This year is looking to be good. I get to go ahead with two of my classes from last year, and I get two new classes of the same grade that I taught last year. I got a week of class in last week, but then this week all the teachers are having a training. That makes sense right? Start school and then have the training. I’m sure I will hate that kind of training when I have to go to the same kind of thing in the US, but here if I can get out of it by saying the French is too hard (which it isn’t, even if it is difficult to keep it up for 6 hours) I will! Although it was very nice to have my new post mate Katie there to commiserate with me, and also very entertaining to teach a room full of grown men the ‘Hokey Pokey’.

More updates on the school year as things actually start to happen!

September 28, 2010

I Love Having Visitors

Last week I got to have visitors! Yay! My friend Alice, who I met on Medical Evacuation, and her husband Jesse came down from Niger and stopped by to see me for a few days. I took them to see most of the cool stuff in Cotonou (I forgot the Zinzu Museum, oops) and we spent a lot of time chilling at what the volunteers all call Sunset Bar, which is a bar on the beach. It was good to be reminded of how awesome Cotonou can be, as it seems like a poor man’s Dakar to me now, but they really liked it. (At least the food!)

Then we headed to my post. During this time of the year I have the distinction of living right next to a stilt village. During the rainy season the river floods its shallow plains up to around 3 or 4 feet and the people who live on the river, fishermen and farmers who farm the rich silt deposits when the water is down, have build ingenious houses that float above the water. So I got my friend Sylvestre to rent us a boat and a guy to guide it and we went out on the river. It is really pleasant to be out in a boat on the water cruising by everyone’s houses. We even stopped at a bar in the middle of the afternoon to have a cold Coke.

The main stilt village in Benin is Ganvie, which all the TEFL volunteers went to during stage. They call it ‘The Venice of Africa’, but the thing is that it is really overrun with tourists so you get called ‘yovo’ a lot and kids follow you around asking for money. Most people don’t know that there are many stilt villages in Benin and most of them are much more pleasant and more authentic than Ganvie, you just have to come during the rainy season!

September 1, 2010

Senegal - Where Oranges Are Orange

So my big summer vacation trip this year was to Senegal. This was a big deal for me because it was the first “vacation” that I have taken- meaning the first time I have used my vacation days thus far. I chose Senegal because I really wanted to see another side of West Africa and I also wanted to see my friend Camille, who is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal.

To get yonder, I decided to fly. This is always a big deal in Africa because while air travel is a little more regulated and timetabled than other forms of travel, this is still Africa and delays and cancellations are bound to happen, meaning that every African airline can be alternately called “Air Peutetre” (Maybe Air). I flew Air Ivoire, and I’m glad I didn’t have high expectations, because that means that I was pleasantly surprised when the plane was only 20 minutes late.

So anyway, I got to Senegal in one piece and was REALLY, REALLY excited to see Camille. I was mean and made Camille plan everything, which turned out great for me, because I got a great, stress-free vacation.

The first few days we spent in Dakar which is a weird mash-up of Africa and Mediterranean Europe and has a real character. We spent one day on Ile de Goree, an old Dutch slave trading post. It was really interesting to see a very well preserved Porto-Novo. It has a very European feel to it and is very colorful. We went to the slave museum and saw all thing things that you are supposed to see there, but mostly the exhibits were reading a bunch of stuff in French and instead of doing that I got distracted by the pretty view. I know a lot about slavery already, I don’t need to know it in French too. Although I thought it was interesting that they make a whole big deal out of Goree and that there weren’t really very many slaves that left from there- I mean the harbor isn’t really great for big ships and all that. Whereas in Benin, we have nothing like that left over from the slave-trading days but hundreds of thousands of slaves were sent from Ouhida and Cotonou and Porto-Novo all of which were slave trading posts owned and operated by different European Nations. Goes to show what marketing can do. The other day mostly we just wandered around Dakar and ate yummy things like ‘N’ice Cream’ and at the French Cultural Centre and it was amazing.

After Dakar we headed up to Saint Louis, the old colonial capital of Senegal and got a really great little bungalow on the beach. Unfortunately, it rained the two days we were there, but, undeterred we camped out in the shop of a silversmith. We sat there all day watched while he made us really pretty silver bracelets. He also bought us lunch, even though it was Ramadan, but he said he was “working” because being a silversmith is hard labor and the Koran says you can eat if you are working (this was his explanation).

After Saint Louis we went to Poppeungine (sp?) which is a resort town on the beach (and also a pilgrimage site because the Virgin Mary appeared there once in the 80s- Michael Jackson came). One of the Senegal volunteers lives there as an EcoTourism volunteer and he helped us rent a house with Camille’s friend Jessica and her two sisters that were visiting from the States. Unfortunately, by this time Camille was not feeling well and she didn’t really want to leave the house, so I ditched her (sorry :P ) and headed with the other girls on a long hike over the river and through the woods and into a monsoonal downpour. This little hike was amazing, unfortunately I am dumb and ended up ruining my camera in the downpour so I have no pictures L But trust me, it was amazing, even the rain that lead to us being stranded in an unfinished hotel hanging out with two of the workers was super cool. We ended up at a kind of Reggae bar/restaurant place where they gave us amazing (and hot! We were soaked!) food and then headed into the mangroves and ended a very good day with a ride on a donkey cart.

By the time we were ready to leave Camille knew something was really wrong with her so we went back to Dakar and stayed in the Med Hut there for 5 days. Camille was really apologetic about it, but I was absolutely fine with holing up for a few days to watch movies and read books in air-con comfort. That’s the life!

From there we headed to Tamba, Camille’s regional house and then to her village. It was really interesting to see another West African culture that is similar but not exactly the same as in Benin. And also to see how different volunteers live. For example, Camille lives in a hut, and I live in a house. Now, I could live in either, but why does Peace Corps vary so much from country to country? It was also just the beginning of Ramadan when I got there and while we were in Dakar and in beach towns it didn’t matter too much because those are fairly Westernized parts of Senegal, but Camille’s village is not like that. It was fun (for a day) to hid the fact that we were eating and then to break the fast with (really good) “village bread”- with just a touch of cinnamon and honey. Camille is really doing well with her Peace Corps service, as hard as I know it can be.

Mostly Senegal was super awesome because of Camille, it was so good to see someone from home. I feel like I have changed so much in the last year, and I know Camille has too, but it was good to be reminded that I am not a completely different person than I was when I left a year ago.

Here is a very long post

2010-08-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2010

Hard thing to deal with of the day…

What do you do when a girl is crying in the dark on your porch? Ask questions? Console? What if you don’t speak a common language? Sit there awkwardly? Give her back a gentle, hopefully commiserative and consoling, rub? Get her a peppermint stick?

The girl in question is Yvette, or “Yovo” as everyone else calls her, because her skin is a little lighter than most people. She is an “apprentice” to my neighbour, who sells alcohol. So apparently she is learning the business, but mostly, she is a slave. Not that this is at all unusual or illegal here, I just know how much work she does and how little anyone pays her any kindness at all. I attempt to be sympathetic, but when I don’t speak Gun and she doesn’t speak French how much can I do? Mostly I sneak her food, usually something tasty with some protein in it.

August 3, 2010

Hopefully the pictures upload with this…

So a lot has happened since my last post. Let’s start at the beginning.

The Peace Corps did eventually figure out what was wrong with me. It was my gall bladder. At the time I wondered what exactly my gall bladder was and why it made me think I was dying. Why did it make me up-chuck my very tasty (and expensive) lasagne all over the med unit? Well, it turns out that I had a very sizable stone hanging out in there. It took three days in what is (apparently) the best hospital in Benin to confirm what my friend Antonio diagnosed in about ten minutes. A note about Beninese hospitals: DON’T GO THERE! They don’t know how to put in an IV and as a result a month later I still have a bruise on my hand (that’s right- they put an IV in the back of my hand). You know how when you throw up a bunch you are supposed to get IV fluids? Well, they did that- but in Benin IV fluid comes in glass bottles. I thought that only happened in movies about the thirties, forties and fifties. The pain medication that they gave me (which didn’t work very well) also came in a glass bottle- but it was a powder that you had to add saline to and then shake up. I will say this, I did have round-the-clock observation, but with a few African twists. For example: one of the nurses that stayed overnight with me had some scrub pants. On the back pocket of these scrub pants it said “I danced my pants of at Alexandria’s Bat Mizpha”, oh Africa. I was also in the ‘Presidential’ Suite of the ER- it had a flat screen TV (that wasn’t plugged in) and an electric bed (also not plugged in). The Beninese doctors wanted to do surgery right there and then, but the Peace Corps doesn’t allow that (thank God!), so it was a question of where and when I would get medivaced (medically evacuated). I got sent to South Africa.

South Africa in the lead-up to the World Cup is a crazy thing. It’s also cold as hell (it’s winter in the southern hemisphere). My second thought (after damn its cold) was ‘Wow, this looks just like Southern California’. Not just the landscape, but also the highways and the houses and the shopping malls and, well, the first-worldliness of it. The Peace Corps puts medivacs in The Rose Guest House, which is pretty much the nicest place I’ve ever stayed in, even if there is a little too much chintz for my taste. One of the best things about being on medivac was that I got to meet and live with other PCVs from all over Africa. When I was there everyone was there for fairly urgent (read: surgical) things because the Peace Corps was holding back everyone else, if they could, because of the World Cup. It is so interesting to talk to everyone and compare and contrast the differences between region and country. For example it seems that West Africans are a lot more friendly and open than East Africans and that West Africa is a lot less developed than East Africa. Of course these are some gross generalizations, but from talking with the other girls that seems about right. It was also a happy accident that we all got along great (with one exception- and she wasn’t there long) and could break up into different groups whichever way and it was all good. This was also great when we did what little sightseeing that we could.

The most expensive (totally worth it!) thing that we did was go to Ukeltula (sp?) lion park. Since we were there a couple of weeks before the World Cup actually started, the 6 of us got our own (really adorable) tour guide and we got to get REALLY CLOSE to lions. We got to feed babies and pet adolescents and just generally see things that you could never see in the wild. There were tigers too. It was amazing. See the pictures they say everything. The other wild life thing that I got to do was go on a hike with Dr.Cedric (one of the Peace Crops docs). He took us all to a wildlife park, which reminded me of a big state park at home, and we hiked around and saw Zebras, Impala and Giraffes, which was really, really cool, again because we could get really close to the animals because we were on foot instead of in a car or even on a bike. The last thing that I got to see was the Apartide Museum, which was both sobering and really well done. We were there for about 5 hours and I probably could have spent another 5 there. I have known about apartide and what it was in an academic sense since I was in high school but to be there and really see what it meant to people in South Africa at that time and also just the absolute absurdity of all of it was really amazing. For example that everyone had an assigned race. Ok, not surprising but what is surprising is that there were over 60 racial classifications and a person could protest to a judge and have your race changed. I mean if that doesn’t tell you that race is a totally objective classification I don’t know what does. The section of the museum that I did scoff at was the part about “coloured” children’s education under apartide. 60 to 80 kids in a class, hardly trained and underpaid teachers, administrators who steal from the school funds, kids walking 30 miles to school, not enough desks/supplies/books/teachers/classrooms. I’m sure if you are a reader of my blog you can see why I scoffed. It pretty much sounds like the rest of Africa right now. The reason it is unacceptable in South Africa is that just a few mile away from these typically African schools there are American or European quality public schools where only the white kids were allowed to go. South Africa was an interesting place because even though aparthide is over now there is still that paradox of you can go from a place that looks like the US to a place that looks like Benin in about ten minutes. I mean I know that there are slums and projects and whatever at home, I’ve seen them, but I’ve never seen a true shanty town until I came to Benin and to think that there exists a country where all of that exists is really weird.

About the surgery: WARNING; NOT FOR THE WEAK STOMACHED Do you know what a gall bladder does? Yeah, I didn’t either. Here’s how my awesome doctor in South Africa explained it to me. So your liver makes bile (yeah- I didn’t know that either) to help you digest food. It squirts bile on food as it goes to your stomach. So, when your liver makes to much bile, it puts the extra in your gall bladder, so that when you eat something that is hard to digest (like something really greasy) both your gall bladder and you liver squirt bile all over it, the more bile the easier it is to go down. OK, so now that you know what it does I’m going to tell you what happened to mine. So the bile that was chillin’ in my gall bladder decided to crystallize. Now, everybody has some crystals in their gall bladder, but what happened to me was that the crystal got really, really big., mine was the size of a golf ball. I got to keep it. It’s pretty cool. I like to show it off. So when they took out the stone they also took out the whole gall bladder, because if you make a stone once then you will probably make another one, so…

South African hospitals (at least the private one that I was in) are awesome. I woke up from surgery and there was a tiny little woman with a tea trolley saying “Would you like some tea dear? And a biscuit?” (Me: “Yes, please!”) Of course she asked first in Afrikaans, which, when you are on morphine and also coming off anaesthetic can sound an awful lot like English with a funny accent. Pretoria, which is the capital of South Africa (not Johannesburg or Cape Town!), is in an Afrikaans part of South Africa, so the first language that everyone speaks to you is Afrikaans. I think that the Peace Corps should have a big rubber stamp to put on the forehead of every volunteer going into the hospital “I AM AMERICAN”, that way they know that you only speak English. Anyway, after my terrible 3 day stay in the hospital in Benin it was awesome to have a 2 day stay in the hospital in South Africa, with real beds that were comfortable and nurses in these crazy uniforms that make them look like flight attendants from the 80s and food that was actually good (and I got to pick what I wanted!). I’ve never stayed overnight in the hospital in America before but I suspect that it is similar.

I was very happy that even though I had a gastro-intestinal surgery that I could still pretty much eat whatever I wanted, because the food in South Africa was awesome. Not only did the guest house we stayed at have free (made to order) breakfast, but you can pretty much get any food that you can get in America in South Africa (with the exception of Mexican food). We ate well, everyday. I also went to 4 movies “Date Night”, which was hilarious, “Iron Man 2“, which I thought was better than the first one, “Sex and the City 2”, which had a negligible plot but I can forgive that because it was pretty, and “Killers”, which was far better than I expected it to be. I was really excited about the movies, because I love the movies. I love to watch movies in the theatre and have that connection, if only for a moment, of sharing laughter or sadness with total strangers. There is something wonderfully humanistic about it. Unfortunately, there is nary a movie theatre in Benin. I hear that there is one in Lagos, but I’m not allowed to go there so the closest movie theatre to me in in Ghana, on the other side of Togo. We also spent A LOT of time at the mall, like 13 year old girls. I didn’t buy much except a sweater, slippers that I could wear all the time, and a new hard drive because my other one was full, and groceries to bring back. One of my favourite things that I got was a full mani/pedi and a leg/bikini wax, I actually got down to the real colour of the skin on my feet! I’m not as tan as I think I am, it’s just that the dirt takes a while to come off (or in this case some paraffin wax).

For the third time in my life, I have “accidentally” found myself in a country that was having the World Cup, and once again, I did not go to any games. It was fun to be there for all the excitement though, even if I HATE those fucking vuvuzellas. (Those big horn things that they blow) I’m sure that I would be ok with them in a soccer stadium, but I was really no happy with people blowing them in enclosed spaced like shopping malls.

So, after 3 depressing weeks in Cotonou and 3 amazing weeks in South Africa I returned home, to Benin and to my village. I got back the week after my students had taken all their exams, so I had just enough time to calculate all of their grades before I took girls to Camp GLOW.

Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), as I think most of you know, is a camp for girls to encourage them to be leaders in their communities and also to stay in school, and all that good stuff. Girls here fight for so much. They are not as encouraged in their studies as boys, and when I say not encouraged, I mean that the moment they get home from school they are working taking care of their younger siblings, cooking, cleaning, carrying water, everything you can think of. By the time they have the opportunity to get to their homework they often cant do it because there is no electricity and their parents wont let them us the expensive kerosene lanterns. They get hit on and put down by boys at school and even their professors and are often sexually active as soon as they hit puberty, sometimes sooner. So, Camp GLOW is much more than a summer camp. Yes, it’s the chance that for the girls to be kids and have fun for a week, but they also are given the ideas and incentive that there is something outside their village, something to aspire to. We brought in professional women to talk to the girls both about staying in school and about how to succeed. There were sessions about sexual health, contraception, gender roles in society, fiscal planning, malaria, health issues, and computers but also sports, arts and crafts, a trip to a museum and just the time to play and laugh and be with other girls. I have to say that I also had a really good time, playing games and singing songs that I learned at camp and also watching the girls become more and more active as the week went on.

After a week back at post, doing nothing, as I am on summer break, I went to Cotonou to meet the new incoming soon-to-be volunteers. Granted, they were a little shell-shocked and apparently some of them see “pain in [our] eyes” but mostly they seem like a good bunch and I cant wait to get to know them more during their training. I am not actually a trainer, but as the 2-month training is taking place in Porto-Novo and I live not even an hour outside Porto-Novo I can safely say that I will be there a few times while they are there. Also, when they get their post assignments (the 6th of August) I will be really excited to get to know my new post-mate. I know that my current post-mate is being replaced and I also believe that I am getting at least one more from TEFL and maybe another from another sector as well.

As I am on vacation, I took a little (12 hour) trip to Kandi. Kandi is way up north in Benin, about 4 hours from Niger. There was an English Camp that one of the volunteers there organized and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to get up north without taking vacation time. Kandi was really nice. At this time of year it is cool and it is always dry (unlike my village is which is always wet and humid) and the workstation there was really cozy, like a family home. It was nice to relax and hang out with other volunteers. We watched movies and cooked and read a bunch of books. They tell me that Nattitangu is even better, so I have to get there sometime. Camp was really great too, because there were not too many kids in our classes and the kids that were there wanted to be there and were generally the best students from the different CEGs in Kandi. It was a day camp, so in the morning we did English class and then in the afternoon health and environment volunteers would do sessions in the afternoon and then arts and crafts and games.

That about brings you all up to date on my life in Benin. Other than yesterday I got some shelves delivered, one big one with lots of little shelves for all my odds and ends in the kitchen and then one just one shelf in my shower area. Woo Hoo. No, really, I’m really excited about the ones in the kitchen especially because there really wasn’t a place for storage for anything where I could really see it. So I would forget that I had all these amazing things that got sent to me (thank you very much everyone who sends things to me!) so I wouldn’t use them. So getting shelves was like getting packages over again.

Many Things and Some Future Plans

2010-04-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

Medical Update
Although there is nothing wrong with my tooth anymore, there is something very mysterious going on with my back. It keeps waking me up in middle of the night. This is why I have the internet and the time to write on a Monday morning, when I should by all rights be in class. I do hate missing class! Especially in the very, very short second semester. The semesters are not even at all. The first is October through February and the second is March through June. The reasoning is that because many teachers don't actually start teaching until mid or late November that the first one needs to be longer. This makes the second semester really stressful because there ends up being 2 exams that are only a month apart, because of the short semester and the week and a half Easter break. That means that it's really hard to teach the kids enough to put on a final exam in a month, especially when I am laid up in the med unit way too much.

School and Such
School is going really great. I have most of my kids' names down and I have gotten to know most of their families, those of them that live in my village anyway. One of my summer "maybes" is to go to some of the smaller villages around my larger village and meet the families of those students who board in town, but live in the "bush" or in many cases, the "valley", meaning the river valley that boarders the village. I am really looking forward to moving ahead with my students as they go to 4eme (8th grade) and I have been looking ahead to what is in that curricula. First, my mom is sending me a baby name book so that at the beginning of the year I can have them all pick out "American" names like I remember doing in French class. I am also very excited to continue corresponding with a French teacher and her students at home. I just got the letters that my students wrote and they were a riot to read. There is also a section about heath, and one about technology, both of which I want to do special projects about. I was thinking that because I am so close to Porto-Novo maybe I could take them (or some of them anyway) in to town just for a little bit of technology training. Just to show them. Many of them have never seen, much less touched a computer and I think that being computer literate is really important for students in an ever technology-saturated world. I know that I can't teach them to be really good at computers in one day, but I could give them some exposure to computers that they lack at the moment. I can also use the technology unit to get them to listen to the BBC World Service, which comes in very clearly in my village and listen to some honest to God British English for awhile. I also want to really hit on the health unit and I think I will have some of my friendly neighborhood health volunteers come to talk with them about things. This will also be good to get them hearing different American voices than mine (although they do still have problems with my accent from time to time).

General Notes...
I can't believe that the school year is almost over! It does not seem like I am winding down to the end of my first year. I will have Camp GLOW just after school finishes and then I have 3 months of, well, nothing. I don't know what I am going to do with myself! I will probably spend a lot of time traveling to other people's sights, as well as getting a visit to Camille in Senegal in sometime. I also what to work on a mural for the ugly wall that they just put up in front of my school. I should study for the GREs, which I think I will take during my February school break, and of course there are the new volunteers coming in!
All of us here are very, very excited about the new "stage" when we have internet, all of us are constantly stalking the internet trying to find out who is coming. And although it seems like most of them haven't gotten their invitations to Benin yet, we are sure that the flood will start soon and we can't wait to answer the endless questions about Benin (where is that anyway...?) and packing and what the first few months will be like here. Even though I am not working at stage, because I live near Porto-Novo I am really looking forward to getting to know the new stagiers before they get dispersed all over the country.

Easter Break
So because of my tooth issues I decided to spend my break in my village. I figured that out of the 3 weeks leading up to the break, I had been home for the grand total of 5 days- and I really just wanted to rest, hang out with my friends, and not spend any money. It is very easy to not spend money in village, because other than basic produce, there is not much to buy. It was also great to get to catch up on cleaning my house. You would not believe how dirty a house gets when you dont have windows, just wooden slats and screens. When I got back from GAD, there was so much dust on the floor that I left footprints. And that was only not sweeping for a week! I can't imagine what it will be like when I go to Senegal over the summer break or when I go to Europe for Christmas! It was really nice to be home, grade my exams, and not really do much else for a while. I did get a trip in to Porto-Novo and my friend Laura came to visit, so it was really enjoyable.

Parakou GAD Weekend

The GAD dinner is very amazing. It's basically an excuse for all the volunteers to get together, have more fun than should really be allowed, and spend way to much money for a good cause. I did the 10 hour trip to Parakou by my usual moto/taxi route to Cotonou plus an 8 hour bus ride from Cotonou up north. There were a bunch of us who took the same bus so it was as fun as an 8 hour bus ride can be, especially since there was air conditioning. We ended up staying with a PVC who lives in Parakou and has a huge house, there were probably about 20 of us staying there- others stayed at hotels, the Parakou workstation and with other volunteers who live in Parakou.

For me, one of the most fun things was getting ready with everyone. It very strongly reminded me of college, especially when I lived in the dorms, but later even at the Tower apartment, and we were getting ready to go out. Girls running all over the place, giving opinions, doing hair and makeup and borrowing everything that everyone else has. Then taking pictures of it all. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera with me, and it has been acting weird for awhile, so I dont have many pictures, but all of my friends do and I will try to get some from them.

The name "GAD Dinner" is a bit of a misnomer, as during the weekend there are actually 2 main events, and both include dinner. Friday night is the Date Auction and Talent Show. The talent show had a very small showing this year, which is planning on being remedied next year, but those who did perform were really great, there was one dance act and one singing act and we all thought they were great. The date auction, which is best kept toward the end of the evening when people are less attached to their living allowances, was very very interesting indeed. Basically, people auction themselves off and all the proceeds go to GAD. For example I bought 2 "dates"- one for an hour and a half of massage and one with a friend for a bike tour of Park W with a volunteer who lives right by it. I'm really looking forward to both, even if I did spend twice as much as I meant too... oops.

Saturday was the only real day that we had in Parakou and mostly it was great just to hang out with everyone, especially those who I dont get to see very often. And also, to eat. We made French toast that morning, and then in the afternoon we went to a place called Sunfoods and got cheeseburgers, milkshakes and fries. Umm. After all of that (and a nap) it was time to get ready for the GAD Dinner part of GAD weekend. This affair starts off as a very sedate (as sedate as PCVs get anyway) silent auction and dinner. I didn't have much money at this point, so even though I was in a little bit of a bidding war with another PCV over some little bronze giraffes, what I did end up winning were 2 woven bracelets and a huge number of seeds to plant. The seeds I am really excited to start with once I can afford to buy some planters for my porch. The dinner was very good, I had vegetarian lasagna, so good in fact that I felt the sting in the roof of my mouth for days after I tried to eat it too fast. Then, there was music and dancing, and the most important factor, a swimming pool. My memories get a little hazy here... I do remember being thrown in, some rather entertaining chicken fights and dancing until the wee smalls. Eventually though, I did get some sleep and then I did make it to the 6am bus back down to Cotonou. It was definitely some of the best times I have had thus far in Benin, and I can't wait to do it again next year!

To make up for my last post...

2010-03-25T05:44:00.001-07:00

Be sure to check out my new pictures on facebook!

In Cotonou on my way to GAD weekend! More about that later!

March 19, 2010
Lizard Wars
At about 2 am last night I woke up to this incredible noise coming from my ceiling. I’m pretty sure that there were two lizards having a turf war up there. I have seen this between lizards before. Mind you these are not the little house geckos that run up and down my walls, these are big, ugly lizards with orange, yellow or red heads and tails- if they have tails, many of them don’t (I assume battle wounds). The scratching, pounding noises made their own images to me in the dark. What happens is that both lizards do push-ups at each other, and then one of them lunges and either misses or grabs a hold of the neck of the other lizard and sakes, hard. This leads to a scuffle, until the unlucky lizard escapes and the process starts over again. Last night, this went on for about 2 hours, loud enough that even blasting my iPod I couldn’t block it out (not to mention with my iPod that loud I can’t sleep!). So it was a fun night.

The Rains Have Come!
In other news, the dry season is over! It has rained (REALLY RAINED, HARD) three times in the last week. The whole village and everything around has changed. My area is green year-round, but with the rain that green has gotten more lush and has added about 30 shades. The heavy rains have also increased my concern for the amount of erosion that is going on in my village. Because it is on a hill, slopping down to the river, every time it rains extreme amounts of water make all the “streets” into muddy rivers. Last week while I was walking to school after a rainstorm in the afternoon, I took a false step and ended up in a sink hole halfway to my knee. I had to fish for my sandal in the mud. Luckily, I found it! When I got to class my students told me “Madame, your foot is dirty!” I had tried to get most of the mud off at the pump at the school, but without something to scrub with, the tiny grains of dirt wouldn’t come out of my skin! Back to what I was actually talking about- erosion. The cure for erosion here is that after it rains, women go down to the river and put dirt in a huge basin (what they use to wash cloths and dishes and small children), then they carry the dirt back to where it had been before. I suppose this is better than doing nothing, but there has to be something more! So while I was stuck in Cotonou this week I talked to the APCD (department head- I forget what it stands for) for EA (Environmental Action) so that they can check out the situation here to get an EA volunteer when I leave. I thought about trying to get one for next year, but the more I think about it the more I want a PCV to end up with my awesome (and fully furnished) house. Also, I kind of like having my village to myself, even if during the first few months here I was dying for want of a post-mate.

Ironically, it just started raining again. Listening to the rain outside is so soothing, the sound, the smell, the cool, the wet, are all extremely comforting to me. The smell especially. You would think that Seattle rain and Benin rain would have a different smell, but they don’t. It still has that tinny smell that makes my teeth tingle and reminds me of eating caned tomatoes. I love to sit on my porch with a mug of tea and watch the rain, and to take a shower in it. The rain comes fast enough off the roof that it makes a real shower, even if it is freezing cold. And often now it also comes with thunder and lightening. When there is a storm at school it amazes me that my students here are also scared of thunder and lightening, just like kids at home. The reason this surprises me is that children here often seem so much like miniature adults. They work more than most of the adults around, as well as going to school. And because of how much they work it can be easy to forget that they really are children, until they show fear at a storm, or break into a joyous dance and song. That’s one of the reasons I love singing in class, it brings out the children that sometimes can disappear behind very adult eyes and faces.

To Future Benin Volunteers…
So I can’t help but remembering that at this time last year I was just learning that I was coming to Benin. Not only because its that time of year, but also because we have filled out our applications to work at the 2010 Stage (Training). I also very well remember the anxiety that went into planning, packing and saying good-by, especially the packing. Somewhere near the beginning of this blog there is an exhaustive packing list. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t worry about packing (I was told that and it was really frustrating), instead I am going to tell you the things that I packed that I use the most that are not immediately obvious.
1. My iPod speakers. I got Sonic Impact iF3, which are a little pricy but totally worth it. Basically you want some with 3 basic requirements: 1.Battery power, I mean that they charge on AC/DC- that way when the power goes out your alarm clock still works, 2. Radio-I listen to the BBC all the time, I’m listening to it right now, I do wish I could get VOA though, 3. Decent sound quality- you don’t want to not be able to hear what your playing over, its also really fun to put on Western music and then dance African style with your neighbours.
2. Computer- this was a big discussion on our facebook page, but really, you want it. A lot of people have cheap netbooks (including me) and have no problems with them. I am at post, writing my blog, right now. This means I can type a blog in advance and save myself a ton of money in internet time. I can also calculate grades a lot faster. Not to mention I can download movies, music, and books as well as get them from everyone else. You also need an external hard-drive of a decent size. And virus protection, because internet cafes are VERY viral.
3. Lesson Plan Book- obviously just for TEFL volunteers, you can also get it sent!
4. Sony Reader- I can get new books! Its also really great for when the electricity goes out, because it has a built-in light, and for long trips, because I read really quickly. Its preferable to the Kindle because as long as you register it at home you have no problem downloading, whereas I have heard that Kindle has issues.
5. A Real Pillow- the ones here really suck and I’m pretty sure I never would have slept during stage if I hadn’t had it. Get a Space Bag, it won’t take up that much space.
6. A Real Towel- I just brought a swim towel with me and after a month and a half of using just that I almost cried when I got one in the mail. I should have just brought one. Besides, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” advises it, so you can’t go wrong.
I think that’s about it. Cloths, keep it light, tank tops are really fine, just don’t show your bra straps (really- that’s what the Beninese will judge you for), at least that’s how it is in the south, where you will be training. By the end of stage you will have a better idea, and you will have had cloths made here anyway. Long shorts are fine too- but girls should keep is below the knee. Leather flip-flops (Rainbows) are fine too, that‘s all I wear. Just remember when your packing that you can get sent pretty much anything (except electronics) and you can also get stuff sent (or send it to yourself before you leave). This is especially true for any household items, as your host family will take care of you for the first 2 months.
HOT TIP: I got away with overweight luggage by telling the airline that I had a government-bought ticket getting to Philadelphia and it wasn’t a problem after that. Apparently they are not supposed to charge you over if you work for the federal government (in most cases the military) but mostly I think it has to do with how sympathetic the desk agent is.
We look forward to meeting you, really! If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment. And someone please start a facebook group!

The World is Going Crazy, except Benin
Recently, West Africa has been in the news a bunch, at least on the BBC. Nigeria is having all sorts of problems (were not allowed to go there), Niger just had a coup, and Togo is having trouble during their elections (we’re not allowed to go there temporarily too). And those are just the countries that share boarders with Benin! There are other things going on in Guinea, the Gambia, and probably others that I haven/t heard about. You’d think with all of that that Benin would be a little crazy too, but not here. Benin just marches along, to its own drummer you might say. As far as I have seen, Christians and Muslims get along well, because everyone is a traditional animalist anyway. The military is too busy trying to control the totally porous Nigerian boarder to stage a coup. And people are generally just happy to put pate on the nat (the Beninese version of bread on the table) to care too much what happens in Cotonou and Porto-Novo.

The Problem With My Tooth
I have a problem. Since I got here I have discovered that I love bone marrow, mostly of chickens, but goat is good too. So last Saturday I was in Cotonou, having dinner at a place popularly called (by PCVs) “Fish and Chips”, when I bit on a chicken bone in an attempt to get at the marrow. I popped a filling. Now I need a root canal, says the Beninese dentist who has the nicest office I’ve ever been in. The problem with that (other than it really hurts) is that to get a root canal I have to go to South Africa. Now, I know what your thinking‘,” oh… poor Glenna, she has to have a free vacation of South Africa, boo hoo.” The thing is that I don’t want to miss school. Especially this close to the end of the year I really need to be around, because if I spend even 3 days in South Africa that’s 5 days I’d miss of school (one day for travel both ways) , and that’s basically a whole unit that I would miss. However, if this had to happen eventually it could not have happened at a better time. If I can get it taken care of in the next two weeks, I’m golden, but I have to get approval from D.C. first, so hopefully that will go well. Wish me luck!

Update...

2010-03-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

Not so much going on here...
Its amazing how, well, normal and boring life is. In a good way. It's like home. I live my life, make food, go to work, hang out with my friends. The surroundings are different, but life is still life. I feel like I'm really hitting my stride with things and I feel really comfortable with my life here. Hope you all like the pictures of my kids! Next year, I think I am going to let them all pick out American names (now that I know there real names), I'm also laying the ground work to start a girl's club, so that girls can have a safe forum where they can talk about issues that are important to them, but can be a little taboo.

Anyway, all's well! And I'm excited for spring break when ill have some time to travel!

Love! -G

Pictures of my Kids!

2010-02-19T22:48:00.001-08:00

They are real hams!

The New Year...

2010-02-04T07:13:00.000-08:00

January 30, 2009
Is the Super Bowl this weekend? Or was it last? Who played? Why do I care? Who had the best commercial? I have no idea why I need to know this, but it suddenly occurred to me that I want to know- and I also have an intense craving for cream cheese bean dip.
First of all, I really want to thank all of you for your donations for Camp GLOW. I know that the economy is not the best and that extra money is always scarce after Christmas, but I really, really appreciate it, and the girls that will benefit from the camp thank you too!
Anyway, the posting of this blog (the 4th or 5th) marks the end of my longest continuous stay at post. During “lock down” (the first three months at post) I made the mistake of calling the doctors whenever any little something health-wise. If I lived further from Cotonou this would not be a problem, but because it’s only 2 hours from Cotonou they would make me come in for things that either could have waited or they could have told me what to do on the phone. So during “lock-down”, while I stayed every night at post, there were several harried and hurried trips to town, which I hate doing, FYI. It’s so much nicer to be able to even stay one night and then come back.
So the last month has been interesting. Because I spent Christmas at the Med-Unit in Cotonou, I am super broke this month. (We got paid on the 23rd, because of the holiday). So I have been doing my own laundry and hauling my own water this month (yes, I’m that broke) and I have decided that I kinda like it. Not to mention that if I pull my own well water for 2 years, my arms will look amazingly toned when I get home!
The Oweme Festival was not what I thought it was, but it was fun! For one thing, we didn’t miss class, which was a blessing. The festival lasted for 5 days (Wed-Sun), there were speeches, music and dancing and some little booths where I wished I had money to by things. Its always fun to hang out with my students too. Especially when they convince me to dance, pretty much so they can laugh at me. (I’m pretty glad that there’s no photographic evidence).
The first weekend of the New Year, I bought a new cat. My friend Kara went to the marche with me. We were at Marche Ouando in Porto-Novo, which I hate. Its too big and everybody just screams “yovo, yovo, yovo” at you. Kara decided that I was a bad person when I splashed water on a beggar with no feet because he grabbed my arm while I was opening a water bottle. (Sorry, Mom) I was just pissed off at Ouando already and being forcefully grabbed just really pushed the wrong button. So we got to the live animals section (cats, dogs, chickens, turtles) and a woman there actually TOOK my water bottle from me. I had to pry it out of her hands (I paid for cold, clean water, I’m not just gonna give it to some woman because she thinks that because I’m white I can afford it- did I mention I hate Ouando?). The lady charged me too much (1500 CFA) for a very tiny, emaciated kitten. I don’t know why I didn’t barter better, but I think it had something to do with this woman shoving tiny, starving, dehydrated kittens in my face. I asked for a girl, because boy kittens spray. Kara and I went to get some soy milk at Songhi (a kind of teaching farm that sells the best produce around, and also makes things like soy milk, honey, jam and organic soaps) and I promptly named her “Eleanor Rigby”. However, by the next day, when the kitten was less emaciated and had sprayed all my furniture, I decided it was a boy. My vet seconded this opinion. So, I renamed him Rocky Raccoon. Rocky even had rings around his tale! So we were getting along great, I spent the 10,000 CFA to get him vaccinated, and a week later, he died. Yep, that’s right, number 2. Why do the Pet Gods hate me? My vet’s reaction? “Again! What happened this time?” Glenna’s Response: “Um, he was real little?”
School has been going really well. I am finally getting the names of kids down, in large part I think because I made them all nametags out of cardstock. Not only that, but when they are working hard during work time or do something difficult (read aloud, answer a tough question) they get stickers, but I will only put stickers on their nametags. This has two awesome effects, (a) it means that they don’t loose their nametags and (b) they are really excited to participate (they love stickers). So I am finally starting to get good at names. This month has been pretty fun anyway, I got to do music vocabulary! Yay! I love music vocab! Last Thursday was a little nerve wracking for me, as my APCD (I cant remember what the acronym is but she’s the boss of all the Education volunteers, her only boss is the CD- the Country Director) came to one of my classes. The lesson I did was a Jeopardy review game as exams are next week. She really liked the lesson, but she says I use French too much in class (which is totally true, I’ve just gotten lazy, so my students have too- no worries, I quit French cold turkey in my next class and it went really well). She also talked to my worst class (that was the one she saw- they were unnaturally quiet, especially for playing a game) and I’m really glad she did. I feel like this class might be a lot easier to handle from now on.

Camp GLOW!

2010-01-08T06:11:00.000-08:00

Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a really great camp for girls that PCVs have every year. Each volunteer who participates brings 1-4 girls to the camp. The whole idea behind it is that we show the girls what they can be and where they can go with an education. We run sessions on things like health and study skills, as well as just being an old-fashioned summer camp. The one for the southern region (where I am) is held in Porto Novo and I am really excited about participating so I hope everyone can donate a little!

Even $5 helps. Here is the process:
1. go to www.peacecorps.gov and click on "Donations"
2. at this point, you can search by the last name, "Hurst"(the girl who set it up), OR click on "view all volunteer projects" on the right side of the page
3. you can then search under "Benin" or "Michigan" (her home state)
4. click on the Camp GLOW PCPP. They can then read a short description of the project, see how much of the total has been raised, and make a donation.

Remember, all donations are tax deductible! Thank you everyone!

Christmas and New Year

2010-01-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

January 8, 2009
OK. So… Lots to cover since the last post I wrote. Going in reverse chronological order (like the rest of the blog)…
New school semester started and the kids are being torturous, because it’s really hot and really humid and they just got off vacation. I guess I can understand, because I tend to get all hot and irritated with them because its hot and humid and I just got off vacation. And after one week of classes, apparently next week there is another holiday, the Oweme Fete (the Festival of Oweme, the region I live in), during which my school doesn’t have class for a week.

New Years at post was really fun. My family (my neighbors) had a party and all of the extended family came, so there were lots of kids with sparklers and fireworks all over the valley at midnight and 3 chickens and a goat with this sweet kind of bread stuff called ablko and pate rouge (pate is what they usually eat and pate rouge is the stuff that they make on special occasions because its better than regular pate, like way better, because it has tomatoes and spices in it). We decorated the whole concession (thanks Mom and Dad for the lights!) with lights and streamers and balloons. I got to play with babies all day, which was pretty great!

Christmas, although it didn’t start out great, was really fun. I ended up staying at the work station because I didn’t feel like I could make it home. So I ended up staying here. I had pretty good Lasagna on Christmas Eve and a Cheeseburger on Christmas. We were also invited to swim at the Ambassador’s pool on Christmas day, so why you were all sitting in freezing rain, I was sitting poolside, reading a good book.

December 21, 2009
Sick for Real.
So I have Strep. It’s not fun at home, but it’s really not fun in Benin. I did not go to school today, which means that I didn’t give my kids their over the break homework, which means that they don’t have any over the break homework. And the trip here, harrowing at the best of times, was enough to make my cry in a taxi. Anyway, here now, started on antibiotics a few hours ago and I’m already feeling better. A fine Christmas present for me! What really is a great Christmas present is that when I did get here I had five packages waiting for me! Thanks Mom and Barb!

Love and miss you!

PS Question of the day: What is the most depressing Christmas song ever? ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ or ‘Coventry Carol’?

December 12, 2009
Goodbye Sexy Sadie.
This morning I woke up at 8 am. This is very unusual, because usually Sadie, my cat, wakes me up at six so that I will get up and feed her. When I did wake up I of course went looking for my crazy cat. She was in a very strange place- under my desk, seemingly asleep. I bent to wake her up when she didn’t wake and give me a sleepy look. She was cold. Rigor Mortis had already set in. I cried. I called my friend Kara, she told me she was coming up immediately. Then I called my mom. I talked to my mom for 2 hours, in fact, until Kara got here, followed closely by Lou, fellow member of the Dead Pet Society, and Scott. Kara went with me to the vet, my friend Josef, who told me he would take care of her. He also seems to think that she ate a rat or something that had eaten poison, because she was fine last night. It was really great to have my friends here for support and just to be here today, but now that they have left my house just seems that much more lonely, sans friends and sans Sadie.

December 11, 2009
Thanksgiving! So I realize that I haven’t written about what we did on Thanksgiving, I forgot about it because I told so many people about it on the phone. Thanks for the Thanksgiving calls!! So I spent Thanksgiving in Parakou (in the North) at PSW (Personal Strategies Workshop). I know this sounds like a drag, but really, it was great. It was like a constructive bitch fest. We all got to bitch for awhile and then we got to talk about how to fix the things we were bitching about, it was amazing! We got fed well, there were showers and flush toilets and every night we got together and did amazing things. Monday we just sat at a bouvette and chatted and drank. Tuesday we had a party where we dressed up like each other. Wednesday is a blur because I stayed up til 4 making dessert. And then Thursday we had an amazing Thanksgiving! For one thing, just being with all the PSL 22 TEFLers again was really great. There aren’t any other teachers in my entire region, so I had only seen a couple of them since swear-in. Tuesday there was a communal amazing occurrence where we all drew each other’s names out of a hat and then had to dress like that person for the evening, I dressed up as Eric, complete with his actual Obama shirt, cigarette and black beard (done with magic marker, so glad that came off!). Wednesday was a prep night for Thursday, and as I was the head of Team Dessert that meant a lot of prep. Clayton, Erin and I wisely decided to make the desserts (two pumpkin pies, two apple pies and a double batch of cheese cake) the night before and then just heat them up on the Thursday while everyone else was still eating. We got out of our session at 5, got ingredients by 6 and started baking. The real kicker was that we had to make pumpkin puree by hand, which isn’t that hard but needs an oven. We did have an oven, but a teeny tiny one, so just making the pumpkin puree took 4 hours (one pumpkin at a time) and a lot of Erin‘s elbow grease. That got us to 10pm. In the interim time we had sliced apples and Clay had made some amazing butter crusts. I must mention the rolling pin. Clay started rolling out pie crusts and there were suddenly ants all over (not a totally unusual occurrence) and he couldn’t figure out where from. In the quasi delirium caused by working too late and realizing that your not even half done, he put out a feeler, “Are the ants coming from inside the rolling pin?” Me: “No Clay, they must be in the flour.” I check the flour, nope, no ants there. Clay: “No I really think they are coming from inside the rolling pin” Me: “No way, let me see.” I took the rolling pin and gave it an experimental whack against the sink, a shower of ants tumbles out. “Shit”. We then spend what seems like forever running the rolling pin under the kitchen sink (God Bless running water!) with varying degrees of hilarity, gross-out and mild hysteria. Then Clay gallantly rolls out the piecrust with a waterlogged rolling pin. The cheescake was the real dark horse of the night. Have you ever made cheesecake without sour cream and without cream cheese? I have, we used Vache Qui Rit and Crème Freshe, and then we figured out that somewhere along the line I had go really confused about math and had to sub what we were lacking in dairy products with extra pumpkin puree. (So what if it was more like a custard? It was still cheescake-ish! and it was still really good!) Then all that was left was the actual baking. While I was timing that I manically cleaned the Parakou Workstation Kitchen. If you have lived with me, you know that this is a pretty typical thing for me to start doing at 2am. Need to keep awake? Make some tea and clean/rearrange something. It’s Glenna’s Guide to Life. When things were baked and Clay had “made” some room for them in the fridge, we walked back to the place where the PSW was held. We could have stayed at the workstation, but we decided not to, I’m not really sure why. When we got there we discovered that not only were we locked out, oh no, there was also no guard at the gate to let us in (like there is supposed to be). Erin called Jamie, Jamie got a chair, I got uncomfortable bruises on the inside of my thighs. It was a fine way to start Thanksgiving. I should also mention that while we were making pastries, Team Meat was killing 3 (4?) birds, a Turkey(maybe 2), a Duck and a Pentard (that’s a Guinea Fowl, I think) and then shoving them all one inside the other, making the Beninese version of a TurDuckin, a TurDucktard, as Brandon branded it. Sarah found an egg in the Turkey, we used it in a pie. This next bit is going to be difficult for me, as I was so sleep deprived that I don’t remember so much of Thanksgiving Day (you know, the norm). And as I am totally crazy I also took responsibility for gravy. I made A LOT of gravy, but it was really freakin’ good. I can’t really take too much credit for that, because it was mostly amazing due to the duck drippings from the TurDucktard (and it was also orange). I however, feel justified in making so much because we had a crap load of mashed potatoes as well as a crap load of yam pille (pounded yams-which is the best of Beninese food), and most of it got eaten anyway. After dinner the desserts were all gone in approximately 20 minutes, as was the liter (!!!) of heavy cream that Obdin and Eric obligingly whipped up (by hand!) for me. I actually made it back shortly after 1 that night, only to find that I had lost my key (probably somewhere in the sand in the courtyard of the Workstation) and ended up staying the night with Melissa, one of the been-here-a-year volunteers, as her roommate had decided to stay the night at the workstation and then get up early to try and get into my room before the shuttle left for Cotonou at 8 Friday morning. I’m really, really glad that after no sleep I didn’t have to take a bus. Friday night I stayed in Cotonou, which was nice, and then I had Thanksgiving again on Saturday. This time I made mashed potatoes, they were really easy and the real butter in them made them amazing (see last blog post). Cotonou Thanksgiving was a potluck type thing at Mel’s apartment. Mel’s post is Cotouou so she has an apartment there, said apartment has an amazingly huge deck (huge like it’s twice the size of her apartment), which is why she gallantly volunteered it for Thanksgiving. It was much more laid-back (at least for me). However as it is still our “lockdown” (where we are supposed to stay at post for the first three months), Lu, Kara and I headed back to our posts way too early (in my opinion) so that we could make it back before nightfall. I spent all day Sunday recovering from an amazing week and my two Thanksgivings.

So two days ago I figured out how to get the BBC(it‘s only in French 3 hours a day!), this is HUGE news in the small world of Glenna, and has reminded me that Stuff Is Happening outside my village. And now I have formed opinions, and as I don’t have my usual outlet for said opinions (people who will understand me if I speak English, and a bottle of wine) my new outlet is my blog. Lucky You!
OK, so apparently there is a big UN conference on Climate Change or whatever and the focus of it seems to be giving money to the developing world so that the developing world can take care of its emerging environmental problems. Just to give my thoughts some context: 1) I live in a developing country. 2) I come from a developed country, so when I lay blame… 3) Someone’s mom sent them an article (from the Washington Post?) that mentioned Benin- to say that the Carbon Footprint of Benin is less than that of Washington D.C. 4) Having opinions here is like having opinions in a bubble. (That’s just a random thought really).
OK…here goes… I’m pretty sure that most of the pollution problems in the developing world are caused by the developed world. Case in point: Europe sends it’s old cars to places like Benin. When they don’t pass the ridiculously high (read:what everyone’s should be) emissions standards in Britain or France cars from there get sent to places like Benin where they carry a ridiculous number of goods and people for the next two decades, using gas that is so dirty that they strain it through an old cloth before putting it into a vehicle. When the cars finally die, they are cannibalized and then left to rust in a river, field, jungle etc. On the other hand, at least people here can use cars. What they cannot use- your garbage. The United States sends all of our trash to China, including very un-recyclable computer parts, and then Americans get their panties all in a twist when some of the toxins that we drag across the Pacific Ocean (none to carefully) come back in cheap plastic toys. In this case, Africa is the China of Europe, or to use standardized testing form China:United States::Africa:Europe. While I have not seen it here, before I left in my search to read everything ever published about Africa, I came across a few stories about old computer parts (especially the old, bulky glass monitors, which contain mercury) getting shipped here as well as China, complete with pictures of cute kids skipping barefoot across a trail of monitors through a field of burning microchips. While burning trash at all, much less computer trash, seemed totally barbaric to me at the time, I know that’s just what happens here. There are two ways to dispose of things here: 1) Just throw it on the ground- this is much less shocking in village, where half of everything comes wrapped in teak leaves 2) Burn it, yep everybody burns everything, it really bothers my allergies, probably because half of everyone’s trash seems to be the ubiquitous black sachets, I wonder what kind of crap that puts in the air?. So, Developed World, are you listening? STOP SENDING YOUR GARBAGE TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AND YOU CAN KEEP YOUR 100,000,000 EURO!

End of opinion, for today anyway.

Eats and Drinks

2009-12-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

Mom, as per your request- a picture of me with the kids in my concession. (I'm the white one! haha)

December 10, 2009
Water and Food
First of all, sorry. I had no idea it’s been so long since I’ve written! (hopefully the WiFi in Cotonou will be up and running Friday so that I can post this!) So here are some blog posts that have been stewing in my head for awhile. As far as recent developments, nothing much going on here except that it’s getting really hot, it so does not feel close to Christmas at all and my kids are having their first exams for my classes (*fingers crossed*). So here goes…

Waterlogged
Do you have any idea how much water you use? Really? I’m guessing not. I know that I only had a vague idea about an abstract number of gallons before I got here. But now I know (even if I know in kiloliters) I use over 200 kl a week! That’s around 100 gallons a week, just for drinking water, showering, washing dishes and washing my underwear. I don’t even do my laundry, I pay a girl to do it, so that number a lot bigger if I were to include that. I also don’t cart water all over (like from the well to my shower or from the pump to my kitchen), I pay the same girl to do that too. But even just seeing all that water carted through my house once a week is enough to make my head spin. (Side note- how strong are women’s necks here that they can cart 20 gallons of water on their head like it’s nothing?) So what do I do with my water? I cart it around some more. I don’t have running water, so I cart it from my back porch/shower area to do dishes and then I cart it back out again to dump it out. I usually dump the wash water in the concession because the chickens and the dog will usually eat the yukies and crumblies that are at the bottom. When I’m at the workstation in Cotonou, if I have some time (say while music and movies are downloading) I do the dishes there (not my dishes, you remember you communal kitchen in the college dorms? It’s like that) just for the joy of doing them with a sink. Yeah, I know, I’m weird. I also obsessively clean my house, so yeah. Can I just say for the record that I totally suck at washing my undies by hand? I can never seem to get the soap out so I end up doing 3 or 4 rinses.
Drinking water is a whole nother story. It originates from the pump (as opposed to the well, where my other water comes from). I don’t even know where the pump is, I should probably find it. Anyway, once it gets here and I pay for it, I filter it with the filter that my predecessor left me, then boil it in my biggest pot, then filter it into the filter that the Peace Corps gave me. Why filter it twice? There’s not really a need to filter the water twice (there are plenty of PCVs here that don’t filter or boil at all) I just do it because the filter that the PC gave me has a handy spigot at the bottom. It’s the stupidest thing in the world really. The doctors tell us to filter and then boil, but once you have gone through this process how are you supposed to get the water from the large pot to something you could actually drink out of, like a water bottle? So, I filter the second time so that I don’t have to dip my hand/water bottle into water that I just spent time and gas (we all have gas stoves) filtering and boiling. I do this everyday. Really, I drink that much water everyday (between 3 and 5 liters). I am also storing up some water for the day that I can’t go through this process but need water because I will inevitably get really sick at some point and not have the energy/patience/will/strength to get out of bed and make myself some water.

Cookery
Beninese food is great, in moderation. It’s full of hot peppers, gelatinous starches and sauces resembling both blood and snot. Yum! So I do most of my own cooking. I cook a lot of pasta. How I lost 30 pounds eating pasta and white bread at least once a day is up for scientific debate. I have no idea. I’m also sure that whoever invented Béchamel Sauce is bloody brilliant (and thanks Katrin for introducing me to it), you can add anything to it and make a pasta sauce. I will add anything to it: Taco Seasoning (so-so), Uncle Ben’s Ranch Dressing (good, but salty), a can of mushrooms (excellent), Herbes de Provence (also great). Beyond pasta I have made pan pizza, corn bread, chili, grilled cheese, and I plan on making more soon. I will say that it is a challenge to cook with just a 2 and a half burner gas stove, how I long for an oven! I mean, dutch ovens work great for baking, but are too small to make say, baked chicken, which all my former roommates and most of my friends know is one of my favorites. The other challenge is ingredients. I live in one of the best parts of Benin for produce and while I can get almost any type of fruit the only non-sweet produce I can get is onions, tomatoes, garlic and okra. See why I make a lot of pasta? I have also discovered that okra with vinaigrette dressing is pretty good. I can get other things, like avocado, green peppers and “jungle greens” if I can get to the market at 8 am, which is only possible on weekends, since 4 days a week I have class at that time. I really miss the American supermarket, where you can get anything that I would ever think of cooking. I also miss butter an inordinate amount. This is not helped by reading “Julie and Julia” at the moment, but the book is fun, how’s the movie? Anyway, I have a fridge at my house (which is pretty awesome) but when I try to get butter from Porto-Novo to here it always melts! (I love butter, just not melted all over the inside of my backpack) Cheese is also something I miss all the time. I eat about a wheel of Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow) a week, which (along with eggs) is my main source of protein. But Vache is just NOT cheese. You can get cheese here, but it’s pretty expensive, hard to get back to my house and always either Wagasi (an African cheese that’s pretty good, but doesn’t melt) or French, nothing wrong with that, except that my absolute favorite cheese is sharp Cheddar and there is absolutely none of that wandering around. Sometimes I even find myself craving Marie’s crazy good Norwegian brown cheese (mmm…creamy). There’s another thing I miss cooking with, cream, and milk. Or just drinking milk really, I do drink milk here but it’s of the powdered variety and although I do get separate sometimes and drink it straight, I mostly just cook with it and put it in my tea. Anyway I realize that talking about cooking has turned into complaining about things I don’t have here- but as an endnote I want to thank everyone who has sent me things (food things in particular), I’d be stuck with spaghetti every night if you didn’t!

Love and good eating,
Glenna

Several Blog Posts at once! Its like Christmas, early!

2009-11-17T00:23:00.000-08:00

This is the moon set from my back porch- you could see the moon better before I ran to get my camera ;)

This is the river-as seen from a little called a pirogue.

This is my Post Mama, in front of a beautiful sunrise over the valley.

This is Sadie, she sleeps in my mosquito net. She's so cute!

November 3, 2009
The Joys and Woes of Teaching in Benin
Woes-
1.The French System seeks to weed out the weaklings, rather than make sure everyone gets an education. Thus, when I give a quiz and 40% of my students pass, that’s totally normal.
2.My smallest class is 42, my largest is 52.
3.All the kids’s names are crazy! Some are straight-up French, which are the ones that are easy. Then there are the crazy African names, which are pronounced totally phonetically. Then there are the names that I think I know how to pronounce (Kevin, Geoffrey) that are totally NOT pronounced the way they look!
Joys-
1. The kids love to sing whatever dorky (in a good way) song I can think of and/or make up to go with my lesson. If it has motions or a dance, even better!
2. The kids are super interesting in me, which means I can do things like have them review asking questions about people “Where are you from?” etc by having them ask me any question they want- as long as its in English.
3. They have figured out that I only speak French in class when they are in trouble. Which means that the moment a French word comes out of my mouth, they are all dead silent. It’s a good trick.
4. I get to be totally goofy in class- the goofier I am the more they are interested and more likely to remember what I’m teaching them.
Both-
1. All of my classrooms only have walls on two sides, meaning that they both catch a lovely breeze, and that there is always something happening outside.
2. The kids don’t have textbooks, which means that what I write on the board becomes their textbooks. In general, I think this makes them get more out of things in class, but it also is really bad if they don’t copy things perfectly, because their copybooks aren’t correct so when they study its not correct.

Crazy Everyday Occurrences
-Chickens running through my classroom
-Dogs running through my classroom
-Rain coming in and soaking everyone, as well as erasing the board
-Rain coming down so hard on the tin roof that I just write things on the board and have the kids copy, to explain later, because nobody can hear me
-Fumes from burning garbage filling my classroom so that I have no recourse but to evacuate!
-Muddy soccer balls flying through my classroom
-The Principal coming into my class and kicking almost all (except 6) students out because they haven’t paid their school fees yet
That’s it for now… but there are sure to be more later!

October 21, 2009.
An Interesting Day All-Round
So today was one of my short days. They are nice. So I got home around 12 and had just changed out of a teaching outfit (one of the dresses I had made here, out of crazy local fabric) and two boys who are in 6th grade and I know by sight (I have 5th grade so I will have them next year- the grade numbers here go backwards) come and tell me that the Directrice (female principle) and “the other whites” want to invite me to lunch. And of course I’m all, sure, just let me change and off I go traipsing through the village. So I get there and I find out that there are indeed “les autres blanchs” and that they are a French couple who decided to retire to a small jungle/river village in Benin! Interesting right….So I stayed for lunch. They were very, very nice, which I figured out when I got used to their Frenchy-French accents and fast talking. I figured out that they had no idea that I am the 4th American to teach at the CEG (middle/high school), which honestly is really weird. I mean it’s not like the people here see a white person everyday. Its more like seeing an Oompa-Loompa, you know, that somewhere (in Loompaland) there are pleanty of Oompa-Loompas, but when one moves in next door all you and the neighbors want to talk about is those crazy Oompa-Loompas and the crazy things they do (not to mention go through their trash and scream “oomph-Loompa! Oompa-Loompa! Every time you do see them). This being the case I am really shocked that one of the other volunteers hasn’t figured out that there have been French people living here for the past 8 years. And for the record, I didn’t figure it out either- they found me.

Yesterday was also a good day. Again, it was one of my short days, and also a market day, so, of course, I went to the market. It was the market. Which is pretty sweet, but that’s a whole post in itself. Anyway a couple of weeks ago at the market I bought some popcorn. Yes, popcorn. And it was damn good! But I haven’t seen the popcorn mama since then so I decided to ask the other mamas in the vicinity of her stand where I might obtain some more popcorn. After a lot of explanation and gesticulation, because I have no idea what the word for popcorn is in French (still don’t) I figured out that here, they call popcorn “poof-poof.” Which is awesome. So I went in search of poof-poof (Wouldn’t you?) along the way I went past the mosque and a bunch of Muslim establishments, so I figured this must be the Muslim part of town. Sweet, I had been kind of wondering where the 5:30 call to prayer was coming from. Eventually I found what looked like a bouvette (a bar) with a popcorn, or poof-poof, machine displayed in the open door (I say door, but most businesses here have doors that open up all the way- so more like an open shop front). And what a popcorn machine it is! Its exactly like the one that they have at Swain’s, where my grandpa used to get my a 25 cent bag of popcorn every time we had to go in (and sometimes when we didn’t), which is, of course, why the popcorn is AMAZING! So I bought some of the incredible poof-poof and got to talking with the owners, I think. Anyway there was a youngish guy who sold me the popcorn and an older woman who was putting bisap (really good, really sweet hibiscus juice) into sachets (baggies) that sell for 25 francs. Anyway so I asked, “You sell bisap? I’ll have one of those too!” (it was really hot and I can actually drink bisap because in order to juice a dried hibiscus they have to boil them for awhile) when the guy was all, “We also sell ice cream.” ICE CREAM! What!? I didn’t ask to see the ice cream just then, because I know I would have wanted one and popcorn was enough for the day. Also, I know that if I know there is ice cream there I will go back- it’s a good day excursion. So from talking to the guy (and to the busy mama a little as well) I deduced that this amazing establishment of my dreams was not, in fact, a bouvette- which sells beer (and sometimes wine) along with suceries (soda pop) but is what he calls a “bar” which is basically where Muslims (guys, of course) can hang out like it’s a bouvette, but where there aren’t all those pesky temptations (unless you call ice cream a temptation, which I do, but Muslims don’t). As he shows me around I also find out that there is a foosball table, man those Muslims in my village really know how to party! Popcorn! Bisap! Ice Cream! Foosball! Sometimes it really sucks to be a girl here, because I know it would be absolutely culturally inaprops to hang out there with all the Muslim guys one night. But man, that would be fun! Don’t worry… I won’t actually do it!

In other news, my birthday was pretty awesome, in large part due to the fact that I got two packages (thanks Mae and Mom!) and also that I spent most of the day (a little too much actually) in Cotonou with my friend Laura. It was really great to hang out with her and also get to chat with everyone at the office, it was the most time I had thought all in English all in a row for a long time! And when I got home I had Annie’s shells and cheese (thanks again Mae) with Cherry Kool-Aid (thanks Gram!) and God decided to give me another present. You see, here, unlike in Porto-Novo, the electricity usually goes off during the day, which is pretty sweet, but also a let down. A let down because as my neighbors will tell you (they think I’m crazy) I really like to look at the starts. But even here there is quite a bit of light pollution. However, on my birthday, just as I was finishing eating my amazing mac and cheese all the power went out. It was an amazingly clear and clean night and with the view from here I could see more stars than I’ve ever seen at one time before. It was absolutely beautiful, although I did find myself wanting to know what constellations I was looking at (nudge, nudge, wink, wink if you are thinking of sending me a package!)

So long for now, I think this will get posted fairly soon!
Love, Glenna

Oops...

2009-10-31T03:04:00.000-07:00

So appparently that video didnt turn out so well; ill try again later. Im in Porto Novo right now; but i stupidly forgot the flash drive with a few blog posts on it already so this on is live people!

First of all, thank you all for the birthday wishes weither they be in email, failed or sucessful phonecall or facebook message, which i cant read due to technical difficulties, but i know are there!I had a pretty awesome birthday weekend, with a trip to Cotonou, cupcakes and a little party in my consession with my neighbors and even some packages that got through customs, thanks Mom and Mae!

Since then, I have been well, if a little busy! School is starting to pick up and this last week I gave my first quiz. The results were dishartening, especially considering that all we have done so far this year is review from last year, I should say that the results were only really dishartening to me; for Benin, and the French type school system in general they were very good, as more than half of my students passed. Being in a system that teaches to the top of the class while leaving the bottom of the class in the dust takes some getting used to... and Im still not entirely sure how to go about it!

Sadie the kitten, more awkward adolecent cat already, is doing well. Still eating lizards in the house and more recently in the consession at large as I have started letting her run around when i sit outside grading papers or reading or what have you. The Mama of the consession thinks that she will still run away, but because every time she comes in the house I give her little smoked fishes she always comes bounding up the steps when I call her. She treats my mosquito net like a kitty jungle gym and hammok and has recently started sleeping up there, so that when I wake up at 6 am, there she is looking at me with hungry eyes and saying *feed me mom, feed me*.

You know your a PCV when...One of the packages that I got on my birthday was from my mom, thanks again mom, and when I opened it I didnt really get to look at the contents too much before shoving everything in my bag and heading back to my post. When I got home I was so tired it was all I could do to simply pour myself into bed and sleep, therefore it wasnt until the next day that I pulled everything out and really looked at it. The first thing I did was put all of the choclate into my little dorm sized refrigerator; yeah, i know, i have a fridge. anyway I noticed as I was pulling things out that a ton of ants had gotten into my bag during the night! I thought this was really annoying and kinda weird since everything was sealed and I hadnt had an ant problem until then, but I dealt with it and whatever... So a couple of days ago I got an intese chocolate craving and headed for the bag of m and ms that were chillin in my fridge. Opened the bag, noticed theyd melted a bit, oh well and started munching away. Then I noticed, the entire bag was filled with dead ants! What did I do? The only thing to do... I went through the bag and picked out the ants. All the time, not grassed out but slightly annoyed that A.damn Beninese customs for having ant intfested wearhouses where they kept my package for weeks and B.damn Mars CO. for not having well sealed bags! After the sorting was through and I was eating some m and ms I mused that in a year I probably would eat the ants for the extra protean and that in two years i wouldnt have to rationalize eating ants, and that a year ago I would have thrown the whole bag out! Life is sure interesting...

Every once in awhile when Im planning classes or something where I have to think of the date I think of how weird it is that its OCTOBER, which ends today. and that it feels as if I have really only been here a few days, except that when I think back to when we first got here it seems like a million years ago! As I sit on my porch and drink tea while looking over the breathtaking Oweme Tiver Valley I think about the fact that at home its cold and rainy and it will soon be winter and Im sure that the next two years will feel like endless summer to me.

With that! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
love and miss you, Glenna

Sadie eating a Lizard

2009-10-16T02:08:00.000-07:00

It was a little gross, but I hate those little bastards pooping all over my stuff and popping out of places unexpectedly.

Happy Birthday to me...!

2009-10-16T01:50:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2009
Happy Birthday to me!
I’m in Cotonou today buying a few things at the Hyper-Marche Arivan (cake pan, litter box, anything else that catches my fancy), which according to reports of other volunteers is pretty much a Wal-Mart, but in Africa. And meeting up with my friend Laura for lunch and some catching up, including a chat about our chats (cats) like two little old ladies (no offense Gram! it’s a good thing!) speaking of which, hopefully I can figure out how to load some of the videos/pictures of her (and other stuff too).

Other things… school and my post is really great. I’m learning some local language, Gun (pronounced Goon, like in The Goonies, that amazing movie from the 80s), with a lot of practice to be had in my concession (the compound that my house is in, which is: a Grandma who sells African moonshine in the market, 3 of her daughters, and all of their kids, the Censour-VP- of my school, and some older boys who board here during the school year as they live to far away to commute and their villages are to small to have a high school) as only some of them speak French but they all speak Gun, except me, I spend a lot of time watching things, like the stars and the kids running around. I also like just to wander around the village randomly “saluaing” (saying hello, it’s very impolite on to do it) people, which is pretty fun and has lead to meeting some really helpful people, like my vet. His name is Dr. Josef and strangely, he is just like every other vet I have ever met in my life, including that everyone calls him Dr. First Name and he remembered my cat’s (Sadie, for Sexy Sadie the Beatles song) name more readily than he remembered mine- an admirable quality in a vet! I’ve also laid some groundwork to do some work with the nuns here, who are pretty cool and not only take in all the orphans who are left (literally- there’s a basket there) on their doorstep, who are disproportionately girls and there are also many disabled kids that live with them. The more I talk with them and get to know the orphans (a few of the girls are in my classes) the more I think that they actually have it pretty good, in comparison to what might have been. First, they all go to school- which is by no means obligatory here, and which you pay a fee for, even at public schools, not to mention uniforms and school supplies which are not terribly expensive, but are expensive enough. I’m hoping (and I think the nuns are too) to work with the disabled kids (I’m sure your very surprised, haha) because I feel like with them I could really make a difference, because I have some experience and some training ( I know I don’t have much, but since it’s unheard of here…) and I have been really upset by the plight of the disabled in the developing world; because here they don’t pay taxes, on anything, there is no money, for anything. There is no money for schools, hospitals, roads, and certainly not for the disabled; so they are beggars on the street and I can only assume that those are the lucky ones as they are not severely handicapped, but only mildly handicapped, so the others… anyway I hope I can help!

So school… is interesting. Learning names hard! Both of students and of teachers, all of whom have a very unfair advantage because I stick out like the only white person within ten kilometers! Because I am! Not that its that bad… it’s just weird. Although I have fairly successfully trained all the kids that I see on my way to the school every morning not to call me “yove” but instead call me “Madame”, now if only it would trickle up to the marche Mamas! Classes are really good. The kids are (usually) interested in what the crazy white lady is doing (miming, saying everything, including their names, with a funny accent) and although I’m a little worried about what will happen when the novelty wears off however, I’m certainly going to milk it while I can. What is really nice is that unlike all of the other TEFL volunteers I know I only have one grade- cinqieme- about 7th grade (kinda) in the American system. 5eme is the second year of English for all of my students, which means that they understand the VERY basics, but I am planning on reviewing for a few more weeks. Another thing about having only one promotion is that I only have to make 2 lesson plans a week, although I do have to do each of them 4 times, which is a little redundant and makes one class hard to separate from the next in my mind. The thing about it is that I am the only teacher for 5eme, which means that I get to set my own agenda for the classes and when it comes to making tests, I just get to write them and I don’t have to collaborate, on the downside it does also make me an island unto myself in the English department. Oh well, they are all really nice, just a little stand-offish and awkward, as one would probably expect, but I’ll get to them (muahaha).

A crazy cat lady ramble…. Have I mentioned my cat? She’s adorable! Although she is already a bigger kitten than when I bought her. She chases, plays with and eats the lizards that infest my house and they are already starting to leave, although I will miss them, if only for her amusement. Hopefully one of the videoes I loaded is of her playing with her food… it was a huge lizard that she caught and when she ate it she looked like she was pregnant! She’s a lover cat though- hence the name, and she LOVES me, pretty much I touch her and she starts purring like crazy, my theory is that she really just loves the fish that I feed her on a daily basis. She also thinks that my mosquito net is the best cat jungle gym/hammock/cat bed combo. At first I was worried that she would tear it, but then she figured out that she can move around easier without her claws, so I guess it’s alright.

Anyway, gotta go! Hopefully it won’t be another month until I can write!

September 18, 2009
MODEL SCHOOL IS OVER!!! Yay and sad day. Can you detect conflicting emotions? That’s because all at once I am sad that it’s over, because I learned a lot and it was fun in between being terribly hard, but I am also very happy because it was a lot of work and a lot of teaching and a lot of training and a lot of stress. It was just a lot. As we look toward swear-in on the 25th I feel the same way about it and moving to post. It’s exciting because I will finally be on my own and doing my own thing, but I am also sad to leave all my friends. On second thought, I’m not leaving them, it’s more like we’re all leaving each other. Not to mention that the prospect of being at post, the only Yovo in my village (although, luckily not the only one they’ve ever seen) and with a post-mate 10k away, but pretty much tout seul.

Last night I was at school (it’s a CEG, a kind of combo Middle-High School) waiting for my friend Laura to get done with tutoring so that we could bike home together, and as the sun snuck behind the cement buildings it started to cool off from the raging heat of the afternoon and was very peaceful. I hope I have enumerable moments like that at post. I felt the same peace that I often feel at home, watching the sun set over Admiralty Inlet or seeing the lights come on in the darkening city.
August 24, 2009
Back in the Med Unit again! And again, nothing too serious, but gross this time… I won’t go into the details.

This last week I went to my post on a visit and I am really in love with it!

The village is about 40 minutes north of Porto Novo, over “terre-rouge”, a dirt road through the jungle/banana plantations. The ride is absolutely beautiful, if a little bone-jarring. The first time I drove along it, I was amazed at how breathtaking the whole scene was. The Oueme River and its surrounding valley on one side of me and seemingly endless lush jungle on the other. Every once in a while we would pass through a small village (and a few big ones) that are made of the red mud with either palm-thatch or corrugated iron roofs. It was like driving through a National Geographic magazine on the back of a moto.

My house is very nice, and as it has been lived in by 3 other volunteers, it’s fully furnished (score!)- although I really need a new mattress for the bed, and a fan would be really nice, and a fridge, maybe... but that’s what a move-in allowance is for!

The village is on the small side, but because if it’s proximity to the river and the valley it also has an AMAZING (by all accounts) market that happens every other day, although the markets alternate between the pitite and the grande. I was also very excited to learn that because of the fertile river valley that there is always something along the lines of fresh fruit and veggies in the marche, although they will vary depending on the season.

All for now! Love you all!

Beatles, Bob Marley, and the Bathroom

2009-08-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2009
Back in the Med Unit again! And again, nothing too serious, but gross this time… I won’t go into the details.

This last week I went to my post on a visit and I am really in love with it!

The village is about 40 minutes north of Porto Novo, over “terre-rouge”, a dirt road through the jungle/banana plantations. The ride is absolutely beautiful, if a little bone-jarring. The first time I drove along it, I was amazed at how breathtaking the whole scene was. The Oueme River and its surrounding valley on one side of me and seemingly endless lush jungle on the other. Every once in a while we would pass through a small village (and a few big ones) that are made of the red mud with either palm-thatch or corrugated iron roofs. It was like driving through a National Geographic magazine on the back of a moto.

My house is very nice, and as it has been lived in by 3 other volunteers, it’s fully furnished (score!)- although I really need a new mattress for the bed, and a fan would be really nice, but that’s what a move-in allowance is for!

The village is on the small side, but because if it’s proximity to the river and the valley it also has an AMAZING (by all accounts) market that happens every other day, although the markets alternate between the pitite and the grande. I was also very excited to learn that because of the fertile river valley that there is always something along the lines of fresh fruit and veggies in the marche, although they will vary depending on the season.

Model school starts this week and I can hardly wait!

So recently my host family’s house in Porto-Novo got broken into, nothing of mine got stolen, but my family’s TV, DVD player, all the DVDs and the fan! The scariest thing is probably that this all happened while we were all home, and asleep. Anyway as you can imagine the day after this fiasco was a pretty depressing one around the house, so I decided to get out my iPod and speakers. (Also, two days before this I had bought a guitar- and played the few songs I know on it, mostly Beatles stuff.) The result of the whole iPod/guitar conundrum is that now my family LOVES the Beatles, and goes around the house singing ‘Hey Jude’ which is the biggest hit of all with them, and generally makes me smile. The other big hit is Bob Marley, who my host mama thinks is particularly good for Sunday as he sings about peace and tolerance and brotherly love.

I got locked in my bathroom. I actually have a whole bathroom/shower/sink to myself, which is pretty great, but also apparently dangerous. My bathroom is connected to my room, and only my room, and as nobody ever comes in without knocking or calling I usually just close the door, which doesn’t really shut all the way unless you lock it, but this is not usually a problem. However, last Sunday my friend Laura was over and we were hanging out in my room and I had to use the bathroom, and of course I locked the door so that it would shut properly. It shut a little two properly for my taste and I was utterly stuck. Luckily Laura was there so I had her throw my Leatherman to me through the open window-like ventilation and I took the handle off the door. This didn’t actually work as the door was still locked, but fortunately my host papa came to my rescue with a screwdriver and got the door unlocked. In the meantime, I am in laughing hysterics (my family thinks that I’m crying) on the floor of my bathroom, laughing my butt off at the total ridiculousness of the situation!

All for now!
Kisses and misses! -Glenna

A good, long post... hopefully

2009-08-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

I am in the lap of luxury at the moment... I just ate a cheeseburger, I am chatting AND blogging AND on iTunes AND watching DVDs, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Why this amazing feat of American leisure multi-tasking you ask? Because I am at the Peace Corps Office (known around here as "the Bureau"- which just reminds me of "the Burrow" in Harry Potter, and it does have a kind of unplanned, magical quality to it) to have my blood drawn tomorrow morning, and I tell you it seems like a small price to pay for all of this awesomeness.

In other news...
We find out our Posts on Thursday!! Yay!! I will finally have an answer when people ask me where in Benin my post is, then next week we get to meet with our principles and actually go and see our schools. The week after that we start model school, where we get to teach English to real, live, Beninese kids who come to get free English lessons from real, live, American Yovos. (Yovo being the name that we all get called- my new favorite thing to yell back at them is "maywe" which is "black person" in Goun, the language most common in Porto-Novo)

Training is going really well, it can be a little tedious at times and sometimes I get confused when they switch from French to English and my brain doesn't switch with them. Model school starting should really switch things into high gear as it is a pretty good taste of what really teaching here will be like (at least with the kids, as kids are kids and teaching is teaching no matter where you are- even if it does have it's own challenges in different environments). One of the reasons that things are so tedious at the moment is that I feel like it's just a tease of what is to come, it's like showing us a huge ice cream cone in a glass freezer and saying, we're going to tell you all about the wonders and pitfalls of this ice cream cone, but you can't have it just yet...

My host family is amazing!! I love them! (even more so after hearing about some of the other stagiers families) There is Mama and Papa, Mama is a mid-wife who has her office in a detached "cabinet" that is in the house compound and Papa, who is on vacation right now, but who is a Physics professor at the private, Catholic high school that all of my siblings go to or will go to. Arselle, 17, just graduated from Lycee and got her BAC (which is the test they take to get out of high school with a degree- and because its called the baccalaureate, which is why I thought that she was graduating from college) and there was a huge party at my house, which was amazing and I wish I could have stayed up for, but it was on a Sunday and I had school the next morning so I just went to the "family" part of the party and didn't stay up for the discoteque part of the party (I slept through it- which was kind of amazing). Next is Anais, 15, called "Neso" at home, who is pretty cool and a little shy, but a good kid, he does a lot of work around the house and is very sweet. Then there is Harry, who is 12 and very precocious, his favorite activities include playing with my bicycle (which he has been told not to do several times, but I get it, it's a shiny new bike which he's been told not to play with) and bouncing the super ball I gave him all over the house (which is all cement so it's perfect!) and of course, in the tradition of brothers worldwide, fighting with Deo. Andeole, 7, or "Deo" as everyone calls him, is cute as a button and ADORES me (which is SO cute) he always wants to carry my bags, get stuff for me ext. (which I feel bad letting him do so I don't very much, but he loves it when I let him so...)he has also started to imitate my accent, which is cute and also makes it really easy for me to understand him. Last, but not least, there is Katherine, or "Kathy" who is a niece of Mama's but is also our domestique, which isn't actually as bad as it sounds; because most of the families that we live with in Porto-Novo are very wealthy by Beninese standards, many of them have domestiques, in the case of Kathy she works for the family (but she doesn't do very much more than Arselle and Mama, but she does do a little more)but they also send her to school during the year, so it's beneficial for both sides.

I learned how to do my laundry (by hand, of course) this weekend and man, does my back and my knee pits hurt! (from squatting and scrubbing and wringing) It is an intense operation, and I am so glad that my sister Arselle was helping me! First, you fill 4 buckets with water (from the well, pulling water is really fun, and I can feel my arms getting toned well from doing it everyday), in the first bucket you lather the garment well, paying extra attention to the areas that get dirtier and/or smellier than the others (armpits, collars, hems, knees, butts) then you gently lather everything against everything else, taking care not to stretch things out, rinse, wring and pass to next bucket. In the second bucket you soap and lather again, but less this time, and you beat the crap out of it more, rinse, wring and pass to the next bucket. This is the first rinse bucket. Almost all of the soap should be out at this point and there should be very little dirt, rinse, wring and pass to the last bucket. This is like the "tester" rinse bucket, the water should stay clear (which I have a problem with because I don't wring the soap out well enough- I'm learning!) As you progress, the first bucket needs to be replaced and when it does the second bucket moves up the line and the first bucket gets new water and goes to the end of the line to become the rinse bucket, and so on. It's really hard. I have a whole new respect for all of the women here, not to mention my great-grandmothers who also did their laundry by hand. And to think I used to complain about running up and down the stairs of my apartment building to change things from the washer to the dryer! Hand washing is really hard on things though... some of the shirts and jeans that I have had for years bleed out in the wash, and it was all cold water too!

My French has gotten a lot more fluent and I am even starting to have a Beninese-American French accent instead of a French-American French accent, which is good because now when I discouter (barter, you do it for everything) people can actually understand me, which is key to discoutering. Most of my French class is review for me, granted a much needed review, but still, I will be glad to start local language classes after we get our post assignments. Except that that will also mean that I have to give up Inez, my French teacher, who I love and is amazing and also has one of my favorite names in the whole universe.

Some of you have been asking me what a typical day in training is like, and you won't take my word for it that's it's pretty dull so I thought I would give a description.

5:30 AM- The Mosque starts doing it's thing. Roll over, go back to sleep.

6:00 AM- The butcher across the street starts slautering for the day, and the cries of the goats sound erily like those of children... Roll over, go back to sleep.

6:30 AM- My actual alarm goes off. Get out of bed, fish for glasses which have slid somewhere down the side of the mosquito net, get up, get bucket, pull water from well for bucket shower.

6:40 AM- The Bucket Shower: is really pretty simple, you have a bucket and a conveniently sized bowl and you shower with them, the water is so cold that I still can't get myself to stop gasping the first time I get wet, but it's getting easier. Get Dressed while trying to not get my cloths wet on the wet floor of the bathroom (always a challenge), do something (ANYTHING!) with my hair, which is currently at an awkward length, and it's really hot here' so I want it up!

7:00 AM- Wander into the dining room to see what's for breakfast usually some variation/combination of this: Tea, Hot Chocolate, Porridge, Beninese oatmeal (which is amazing), omelet, and of course French bread (which is always warm and amazing as it comes from the bakery that's right by our house)

7:30 AM- Laura calls. I hang up on her. This is the way that we have worked out for her to tell me that she will be at my house in about 5 minutes, so that she doesn't have to spend credit on her phone everyday.

7:35 AM- Laura and I bike to school, which is always entertaining... getting called "Yovo", getting the Yovo song sung at us, getting hit on by every man under 30 and some over, getting randomly touched, getting honked at my Zemi (moto-taxi) drivers, you know, the norm for a white person riding a bike.

7:50 AM- Get to CEG Davie, talk to our friends about what crazy antics our host families got up to last night, what they tried to feed us, etc.

8:00 AM-12:30 PM- Morning classes, in two blocks consisting of Language or Technical TEFL sessions. Language is amazing, because my teacher is excellent and there is only one other girl in my class, so it's really interactive. Tech is thus far just talking about teaching in Benin, the Beninese school system, teaching without resorting to French, etc.

12:30-1:30 PM- Lunch is always an adventure as we can either by from the Mama (any older woman is a Mama) who sets up at the school, or venture into the streets to try the that fare, which can go either way but is usually pretty good. My favorites thus far are fried breadfruit and toasted coconut.

1:30-4:15 PM- Two sessions of either Language, TEFL, or Cross-Culture classes, by the end of which stretching my legs on my bike feels amazing.

After school is a wild card, I either hang out with some of the tranees at a bouvette (bar) or head home and hang out with the fam, I try to keep it kind of equal so that I get feel socialized while still taking advantage of living with a French-speaking family (not to mention my family is cool). And also going to the market, or the tailor, or something like that.

8:00 PM- Dinner time! Always an adventure...

9:30 PM- At this point I am falling asleep at the dinner table, so I go to bed, only to start all over again in the morning :)

And now, as I am doing the same trick at my computer keyboard I suppose I should post this blog and give up a few precious hours of potential free internet time to sleep.

Love you all and keep in touch!

Goings on...

2009-08-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

August 3, 2009

Sorry it’s been awhile, but I have been busy!! And chances to get to the internet have been few and far between.

Training- things are going well, I am getting to know the people in my sector really well and the training is pretty basic right now so not all that interesting, but it will hopefully get better!

French- my French is improving a lot! But I feel really lucky that I started with a strong background in French before I got here because I don’t really struggle to communicate with my family at all, as long as they don’t speak too quickly.

Health- Doing well, a few minor things, but it will all come out in the end.

My Host Family- is really, really nice! I have my parents, a sister who just graduated from college, and 3 brothers ages 15, 11, and 7 and a plethora of extended family members who are always stopping by to say “Bonjour” (and to check out the Yovo).

Being a Yovo- it’s weird, being the minority. It seems like every time I am not at home or with all the Peace Corps kids (and even sometimes then), that I get pointed at and called “Yovo” on the streets, the little kids have this pretty annoying song that they sing “Yovo, Yovo, bon sois…”. It’s just difficult to give up any and all anonymity that I have at home, not to mention that you have to bargain at the market twice as much as anyone else because everyone thinks you are rich.

My first weekend- was very eventful. Saturday was Independence Day here and then on Sunday there was a big party at my house for my sister’s graduation. Saturday we stuck pretty close to home because my mama, sister, mama’s sister’s “woman” and another hired woman worked for two days to cook a whole goat, a turkey, two rabbits and countless potatoes, rice, bananas, tomatoes, and I don’t know what all. Independence Day here is pretty much the same as the 4th at home, but less commercialized and there are no fireworks. But there is a military parade and a bad-ass soccer game on hard packed red clay. Sunday my host sister had a graduation party and it was crazy!

First Post In Benin!!

2009-07-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

July 27, 2009

The last few days have gone by all too quickly. I'm getting to know my fellow stagiers (trainees) and also some of the current volunteers. We are living in a hostel/monastery in a suburb of Cotonou; as it is an enclosed compound we don't get to go out much, so most of what I have seen of Africa is from the van going to and from our training area to the PC office for shots, various interviews, and to use the wifi! Today we have zemijohn (moto-taxi) training - don't worry Mom, we have helmets- and also interviews with our program directors (ikes!). So I don't have much time, but I will probably get a chance to call later this afternoon (morning to you). Love you all!

PS- I am going to add a sidebar with things that you should feel free to send me! Yay Packages!!

July 25, 2009 (I think)

I’M HERE!!!
Got here tonight (hopefully I’ll get to post this tomorrow, there has to be internet somewhere!!) at around 10 PM, got to our first place to stay. It’s called St. Jean Etudes and it’s a monastery/school that the PC rents for us the first few days, it’s a dorm-like situation. We meet our host families on Tuesday, so until then- it’s home!

Our flights were LONG!! With a two hour delay in Philadelphia and then another 40 minute delay in Paris. I slept off and on and as a result didn’t see one whole movie during the total plane time of 18 hours. I did however, receive a gift from the Airplane Gods- a pair of ridiculously swollen feet! I’ve never had that happen before and now my feet and even my lower legs are swollen so that my chicken ankles look like cankles!

On the ride in from the airport I got my first glimpse of Africa, and it looks good enough to eat. We were all crammed into a couple of vans and as we drove through the city every so often over the smell of burning gasoline would come a delectable snatch of something better, I can’t wait to have the chance to explore!

Time for bed now, under my mosquito net, which is both functional and aesthetically pleasing...

Love you, Miss you, Write more soon!

Philadelphia!!

2009-07-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

Hi All!
I got this far! I've met a few of my fellow PCVTs, we went out to dinner last night and had a great walk/chat along the way. Training starts at 1 PM so I'm getting some sight seeing in with the girls I met last night and I'll update you all after some things start to happen.

I love and miss you all!

Good News!!

2009-06-22T23:17:00.000-07:00

Today was a day filled with good news from the Peace Corps!

First, this morning I called the PC travel agency and got my flight info settled. I'm leaving on the 21st at about noon and arriving in Philadelphia at around 10 PM, with a stopover in Nashville. All of that makes it seem like it's really real and is really going to happen.

The next bit of excitement was that I will not be delayed because of my Hypothyroid! Yay! I do have to make sure to have it checked out once I've been in Benin for about 2 weeks (which will be two months after I started taking the medication, so it's really just a check-up), but I won't be delayed! Yay!

Really the one down point in my day was that I started packing in earnest, so my room now looks like an alcoholic lives here due to all of the liqueur boxes piled high (they do make the best packing boxes though!- so good and sturdy!). And now that I have my flight info I can pretty safely say that I can take my guitar with me to Benin without too much of a problem, although Delta did say to have it in a hard case, which worries me... Oh well, I guess there is always something to fret over!

One more week in my Seattle apartment :( I sure will miss it, from Babar upstairs to the drunks in the alley, but especially I will miss my roommate Marie and my half-roommate Andrew! And maybe my super-huge closet too!

30 DAYS!!

2009-06-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

So as of today I have 30 days (and a few hours) until I leave for Benin.

I thought you might all like an update...

First, the last day of school was yesterday. I met this particular milestone with both excitement and sadness. While I have been subbing in Seattle Public Schools since October, I have been at mostly Thurgood Marshall Elementary since the beginning of the year, working in two different rooms of Autistic boys. Over the past few months I have grown really attached to both the staff and the students and I will really miss it; however, I can hardly wait for my Peace Corps assignment to begin.

Excitingly, I got my staging information on Wednesday! Unfortunately, because I was still working and the PC travel agency is on the East Coast, I haven't made my exact travel arrangements yet, but I will on Monday! When I think of this I begin to think that this is really going to happen. Yay!

Depressingly, I think I might get delayed. I recently got a physical done to be on the safe side before I leave and the Doc discovered that I have a Hypotyroid (sp?) which should really not be a big deal (the pharmacist told me that the side effect for an overdose of the medication is "jitteryness"- yep, it's that serious...) but because I'm leaving so soon and the PC likes you to be on any new medication for 3 months before you go, it's a problem. Hopefully it will all work out, but in the meantime my palms have broken out in hives from the combined stress of this and some family stuff as well. I WANT TO GO TO BENIN!!!! NOW!!!

In the meantime I am going to try and see everyone before I (fingers-crossed) leave. I got to Spokane for my friend Anna's wedding (which was a blast) but I would like to get over for a week or so and see everyone now that I am on vacation, but it will really have to wait until I my Seattle apartment is pretty much packed up to go. So if anyone reading it is driving the ol' 90 cross-state let me know. I'm also moving to Port Townsend at the beginning of July, so come and visit me!

Tata for now!
Glenna

Back from Hawaii!

2009-05-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

So, luck me, my Gram decided that because I am leaving for Africa in July that I should come to Hawaii with her for two weeks, and I just got back on Tuesday. It was a really, really great trip. I got to spend some time with Gram, get to test my high heat/humidity endurance (although I'm pretty sure that Benin will be both much hotter and much more humid than Hawaii), and have some R&R. I also got to test my big duffel bag: it works great- but I think I am going to need to take advantage of Osprey's amazing warranty because bringing back Deruas (Tahitian bamboo instruments)for the class I'm working in at the moment put a couple of little holes in it (and I don't want it to fall apart en-route to Benin!).

I am also going to take this opportunity to steal Camille's amazing blogging skills and upload them on Picassa with a link from this blog- coming soon!

A Packing Dry-Run.

2009-04-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

So me being me (hyper, pro-active, slightly OCD, REALLY excited about the Peace Corps and Benin!, too much time on my hands) I decided that it would be a good idea to try and pack the things that I already own before I went out and bought more stuff (good plan? right?) and this is how it went. I have included pictures because I wanted to try and put them on my blog (which I haven't done) before I was in a developing nation with dubious Internet. Enjoy.

&nbs

Picture #1-The Problem
This is all the stuff that is on "The List" that I already own. So roughly about 3/4 of the stuff that I believe I want to take to Benin. ("Do I want to take it? Do I need it? Can I get it there?" Blog is probably coming soon) Everything is laid out (or in the case of the cloths thrown from the closet into a pile) on my double bed. I was dubious about this plan from the beginning... who's plan was this anyway? Oh, wait. It was mine.

Picture #2-The Solution
These are all of the bags that I am taking with me: my "big bag", the Osprey Porter 90- basically a duffel bag with backpack straps; my smaller bag, the Kelty Redwing 2500W which I took around Europe for 2 months; my trusty "large" Timbuk2 messenger bag; and, my guitar case. As far as I can tell these bags will pass all airline, airport and Peace Corps guidelines for luggage and such (the guitar is the only questionable part, and I have researched it enough to put myself at ease).

Picture #3-The Miracle at Summit Place!
That's it! All packed! And there is nothing but my guitar in my guitar case (I plan to pack some cloths around it for added protection) and "wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles" good ol' Tammy (my Timbuk2 bag) is COMPLETELY EMPTY! Not only that, but I didn't really even have to try to pack my other bags, no sitting on them, no straining the zippers, not even the layering of cloths and less squishy stuff to maximize space efficiency! I think packing for two years like this might be a possibility! Even a pleasure and joy! I can't believe my good fortune! I hope that I still think so when I have to pack for real!

The next challenge: Is it too heavy? But I would have to have a scale for that!

Thus ends my pre-Peace Corps musings! Good night!

Happy Easter!

2009-04-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'm at home, in Port Townsend for the holiday this weekend and I am glad that once again the weather forecasters were wrong once again. It's beautiful outside! The sky just has the wispy remnants of clouds and the sea is its azure deep blue. The wind is cool, but not so cool as to cool the sun's rays overmuch and my soul aches for the beauty of it. My surroundings are perhaps more heightened by the fact that I know I will be leaving soon and that I will long for this glorious panorama. Even more piqued is the fact that I am cherishing every moment that I can spend here with my family. Cooking and singing along to classic rock with my mom while we cook. Talking about old movies with my gram. Teasing my step-brother about everything. In a way I don't ever want to leave, but as I look for the tell-tale signs of spring around me I also know that it is time for me to leave, and in the leaving, change and become a better, stronger person.

It is with this contemplative air that I am approaching this new period of, you guessed it, waiting. I have submitted all of the paperwork that the Peace Corps needs for now, and now I have to wait for my staging packet- which will arrive sometime in late June. Oh well, at least I'm practicing patience!

My Mail Came!

2009-03-30T22:38:00.001-07:00

A not so exciting title to a VERY exciting post! You also might have noticed my new blog title! That's right! I'm heading to Benin! (Google it if you need to, I promise I won't judge you, although the map I can make of Africa with my hands is pretty kick-ass) I'll be leaving for Staging (the pre-departure training) on the 21st of July. After 2 days of that (I think in Philadelphia-but I'm not sure) I (and the rest of my group) will leave for Benin together. Once I get to Benin, then I will live with a host family for 2-3 months, practicing my French and probably also learning a new, African, language- awesome! Then from there I will get my actual, two-year assignment, and I will move to my own house (or potentially, mud hut) and start working as a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) teacher at the 7th-9th grade level, to a class of up to 60 kids (scary!). I'm pretty stoked! Yay! I know something! Yay! I have something to do! (even if it is in the form of a ton of paperwork...) Yay! I'm going to Benin... now I just have to call and tell the Peace Corps that!

I'M INVITED!!!!

2009-03-28T09:33:00.001-07:00

Yay! I am officially Invited today! I got an e-mail telling me that my Peace Corps profile had been updated and that excellent news was awaiting me. Unfortunately, my profile doesn't tell me WHERE or WHEN I'm going- I now have to wait anxiously for the mail to come- which will be made more difficult by the fact that school is out for Spring Break so I am not working this week. I will probably just end up re-arraigning and power-cleaning my apartment (sometimes the jitters work for good!)

Some Good(ish) News

2009-03-05T23:03:00.000-08:00

So today I had a phone interview with the my Peace Corps Africa Placement Officer. I think that the interview went well, and that's the good news. The "ish" news is that I still don't get to find out where (and when) exactly I am going. Because of some Medical Issues (nothing serious), they have to make sure that I can be close enough to get checked regularly and also get my medication; I'm not really sure what this entails, but apparently it takes 2-3 weeks. At this point I hope it ONLY takes 3-4 weeks. In the meantime, I thought I would give everyone an idea of the time line that this has taken (and it will also remind me that 2-3 weeks is NOT a long period of time).

February 2008: Begin On-line Application
April 2008: Submit On-line Application
April 2008: Submit On-line Medical Application
May-August 2008: Compile and Submit Medical Application
(June 2008: Graduation)
October 2008: Peace Corps In-Office Interview
October 2008: Nominated with Medical Hold
January 2009: Submitted Final Transcripts
March 5, 2009: Phone Interview

So that is my complete (up to now) Peace Corps Experience, paper work can be fun...right?

2009-02-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

OK, I need some help. I have here a detailed packing list (complied by reading the Official Peace Corps packing list, plus several blogs of Peace Corps Volunteers, plus what I think will be good for me to have). "The List" is split into two sections, the "HAVE NOT" and the "HAVE". Being rather broke (and cheap) and knowing that I have a ton of friends and family out there with full garages and keen eyes, I have decided to post my list and ask for the things that I "HAVE NOT", and all of you would search your homes and your heads and your hearts and give me some of what I need (I say give because I cannot promise to bring it back safely and in one piece), or tell me where I might get a good deal on it, etc. So, here goes:

HAVE NOT

Solar Panel (Sunlique? or Brunton?)

Solar battery charger

Rechargeable batteries

Small (pocket size) shortwave/fm/am radio

Red Cross emergency shortwave radio

Ipod armband

Extra Memory Cards

Skype Phone

Handheld tape recorder (+tapes) or Ipod recorder?

Extra Camera Battery

Gorilla tri-pod

Lantern/Flashlight

Travel vacuum bag for pillow

Sea Pearl Tampons or Diva Cup, reusable pads

Hand Sanitizer

Dr.Bronner’s Magic Soap (Tea Tree and Peppermint)

Prescription Sunglasses

Glasses Repair Kit

Glasses Cleaner

Razor that takes replacement blades, razor blades

Pepto-Bismol Tablets

Sunscreen

XS Timbuk 2 ($60ish-more durable) or le SportSac Deluxe Everyday Bag($40ish-less durable)

Guitar Case (Gig Bag?-can probably carry-on or Hard Case?-would be OK to check)

Seal Line Case/Pouch

Sleeping Bag Liner (silk or cotton)

Bug Hut ($39, REI.com)

Hammock (travel/backpacking- lighter)

Thermarest Pad/Chair thing

Carabineers (2?3?)

Aluminum Water Bottle (have one, want another-with wide Nalgine top, for water filter)

Camel Pouch

Headlamp

Small Wallet (that will fit weird bills)

Letherman (Surge?$53.49, futurepowerpc.com or Wave)

Thermometers (outdoor and medical)

Macabi Skirt (one black, one stone)

Cotton Pants

SPF shirts

Running Shorts

1 piece swimsuit

Chacos? (PCV 50% discount)

Cotton Pants (3 pairs)

SPF sun hat

Cotton Slips

Long and Short Sleeve SPF tops

Buzz Off bandanas

West African Bird Guide

Appropriate Star Charts

National Audubon Society African Wildlife

Compellation of Favorite Songs for Guitar (Make)

US map (one pocket, one wall)

World map (one pocket, one wall)

Parmesan cheese

Koolaide

Uncle Dan’s

Powdered Cheese (like in Mac&Cheese)

Popping Corn (also figure out how to do this)

Taco Seasoning

Instant Oatmeal

Scissors (2-3 for paper/sewing, 1 for haircutting)

US Stamps

3 Moleskin Journals

2 Moleskin Pocket Notebooks

Photo Albums (one personal, one to share)

Plastic Document/File Folders

Solar Calculator

20 Passport Photos

Stickers

Pens

HAVE

Guitar

Playing Guitar for Dummies

Diver’s Towel

Water Purifier

Sleeping Bag

External hard-drive

Ipod (and 3 sets headphones)

Otterbox

Ipod speakers(Sonic Impact iF3)

Analog watch (Solar)

Pack – Osprey Porter 90

SPF hoddies (green and orange)

SPF skirt

North Face Windwall

North Face Shell

SU Sweater

Timbuk2 Large Messenger

US to French Power Adaptors

Bible

6 Tank Tops

PJ pants/shorts

Hiking Boots

Running Shoes

Bandanas

Laundry Bag

Umbrella

Spatula (both kinds)

Non-stick frying pan

Can opener

Sharp Knives (2)

Ziploc Bags

Duct Tape

Pocket Knife

Frisbee

Uno (National Park Edition)

Cards (one red, one blue)

5 Crowns

Glasses (2 pairs) (+cases)

Glasses Cloths

Toothbrush, Toothpaste, Floss

Hairbrushes, Long Tooth Comb

Accordion Folder

Moleskin Planner

Moleskin Address Book

Moleskin French Notebook

Moleskin Pocket Notebook

French Dictionary (Le Petit Robert)

French Grammar Book

Pens, Pencils, Paper Clips, Stapler (+staples), Scotch Tape (the tare kind)

Camera (get it cleaned!!!)

Aluminum Water Bottle

Kelty Redwing Daypack

Spices(comboIndian, Mexican, or Chinese spices and things like lemon pepper, seasoned salts

[e.g., garlic salt], cilantro, dill, and rosemary)

Jane Eyre

The Feminine Mystique

Blank CDs (CD envelopes)

Hand Crank Flashlight

Battery Flashlight

Combination Locks (2)

Sewing Kit (Make)

Index Cards

Postcards, Posters (to decorate)

Deodorant

Ear Plugs

Echinacea

Hand Towel

Washcloth

Lotion

Nail Clippers

Passport Holder

Wire Train Lock

Gram’s “Family” Calendar (it wouldn’t feel like home without it!)

Jeans (2 pairs)

Capri Pants (2 pairs)

Belt

Socks

Underwear

Stationary and Envelopes

Full Size Sheet Set

Potato Peeler

Nesting Tupperware

Sharpies

Pillow (vacuum bag for transport)

Chapstick!

Collapsible Steamer Basket

English Dictionary

Thanks for reading, and if there are any Future PCVs or RPCVs out there tell me what you think!

Welcome 2009!

2009-01-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hey all- thought I would write a little update if anyone out there is reading this at the moment.

I am still anxiously awaiting any and all news that the Peace Corps is willing to send me, and in the meantime I am trying to see all of my friends and spend as much time with my family as possible. I just read my last post and realize that when I wrote it I was still working at Lochner. I have since quit there and am currently working as a substitute instructional assistant (teaching aid and/or assistant) for both general education classes and special education classes. Other than being a lot of fun ( I can't believe they pay me to do it!) I am also learning a ton of things that will be really helpful to me both when I have my own class in Africa and when I teach in the future. Subbing has really been helpful for me, in that it has helped me figure out that teaching really is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Subbing also gives me the flexability to NOT work when I want to. For example, this weekend my step-brother Brian and I took a little roadtrip to California, so that he could look at a school that he is going to there and so that I could see my good friends Nikki and Camille. With a "real job" there is no way that I would be able to do that and having that kind of flexability when I am planning on leaving the country for such an extended period of time is really excellent.

Speaking of my friend Camille, she is also going to Africa with the Peace Corps this February. She and my friend Chris are both leaving next month and seeing them gearing up to go has really started to make the whole thing closer to reality for me. While at times leaving still seems like a pipe-dream, when I am talking to them (even about things as mundane as the endless paperwork) it somehow comes closer to fruition in my mind. I am really excited that I will be able to share (as much as anyone can) this totally amazing experience with two such amazing friends. As both of them will also be writting blogs (Camille in Senegal in West Africa and Chris in French Guyana in South America) I will also add links to them here (as soon as I figure out how!).

I am also trying to put together a list of what to take, that I will hopefully be posting here soon!

Hopefully...

2008-06-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

So this is a "hopefully" blog that I am starting because I'm pretty sure I'm going into the Peace Corps in June 0f 2009. I wanted to start it so that I could put the info in my Thank Yous for graduation. So if that applies to you Bookmark this page and check it in a couple of months, as I will post more when I know more.

Where I am in the process:

I am in the midst of completing the medical file (which is just the thrill of a life time- haha), which is apparently the longest part of the process and 2-3 months after the Peace Corps get my medical file (it takes that long to review it) I will get both a specific country that I will go to (probably in Africa) and a hard leave date(probably in June 2009).

In the meantime:

I got a job at H.W. Lochner in Bellevue, as a receptionist. Not my dream job, but it pays the bills and it also enables me to stay in Seattle, so it will do for the moment. I also have to get 6 months of ESL experience at some point in the next year, I haven't figured that out yet, so if you have any ideas let me know!

On Graduation:

So I just graduated from Seattle University on the 15th and while I am glad to be done it is also bittersweet as I watch many of my friends leave Seattle for ports known and unknown and I really want to go with them. At the same time I can rationalize my staying put really well (save money, stick close to home, take a break) so this leaves me in a space of the "in-between" which I hope will lessen when I am more settled with what I'm doing right now.

Anyway- toodles for now, talk to you later!- Glenna