Post Visit

This past week we met our homologues and took a taxi 4 hours northwest to Bohicon to visit our worksites, check out our house, and meet our work partners. I had been to Bohicon once before, on my way to Nati, where the bus stopped for a few frantic minutes at the bus gare. Though the bus gare was pretty frightening, I was excited to see what was beyond it and what was available in Bohicon proper. Bohicon has everything that we need. The marche operates every day, and every 4th day is a marche day when all of the vendors are there. Even on non-marche days, we can find anything and everything--pineapples and other fruit, yams, tomatoes, couscous, rice, onions, garlic, sugar, potatoes, oatmeal, knockoff soccer jerseys, jewelry, shoes, dried fish, chickens (alive or dead), goats (alive or dead), coffee (instant), plates, silverware, furniture, etc. It's like a dirty, open-air WalMart--awesome! If we ever need any specialty items (like cheese or ground cinnamon, for instance), there is a supermarche adjacent to the marche that we can utilize.
Our house is rumored to be among the best in PC Benin. We have tile floors, an inside, American-style bathroom with toilet and shower, and an outside kitchen. We also have 2 bedrooms and there is a bar 50 yards away from our house where we can sit on the breezy second story and drink the night away (note: a large beer costs a dollar). Bohicon also has an amazing chwarma restaurant that is run by some really nice Beninese guys who we have already befriended. We are looking forward to setting up our house with necessary furniture--coffee table, chairs, and bookshelves, in addition to the dining room table, chairs, and bedframe that the previous volunteer was nice enough to leave behind for us--and getting settled in.
My work site is really nice. The park has been around for 2 years and it primarily needs help with marketing and financing. I'm planning on setting up networks with hotels in the area and other tourist sites and websites, and need to get a meeting with the mayor to talk to him about financing brochures and to approve a business plan that the previous volunteer had already worked up. A long-term idea of mine is to set up a national tourist network to better advertise and market tourism abroad because Benin has a lot of interesting tourism sites but a lot of people have never heard of it and probably skip over it when looking at places to see in West Africa. I met most of my work partners and everyone is really nice and I'm looking forward to improving my French so that I can actually communicate properly with people and learning more about the park and the surrounding area so that I can get to work.
Heather was able to meet some of her work partners and her boss, and is gearing up to lead sensibilizations in the community. One of our neighbors works for UNICEF so she may be able to get a secondary project in with UNICEF and she will probably help me with her marketing expertise at the park. The good thing about Bohicon being such a large city is that it's relatively easy to find work if we look for it, which will keep us busy and let the next 2 years fly by. The drawback about Bohicon being such a large city (about 150,000-165,000 people--it is the 4th or 5th largest city in Benin), is that we don't have the intimacy of living in a village where everyone knows us, but we have already started networking and making friends to make the transition easier and Bohicon a little more bearable.
We basically have only a week or so left of training, then we swear in on the 17th and move up here around the 20th. We looked into getting a box at the post office so when we move up here and secure it we will share the address with everyone.
A la prochaine fois--until next time!