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!
Friday, January 8, 2010
Christmas and New Year
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.
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.
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