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!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
A Week in the Life
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.
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.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
I know, I know, I have been remiss
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.
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.
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