Thanksgiving

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. It was a little weird for us, celebrating it without our families back home, but we did celebrate it with a couple members of our new Peace Corps family. At the last minute our friends Carlos and Andrea, who live about 2 hours northwest of us decided to come down and celebrate with us. We all went out to dinner the night before Thanksgiving for some cheap food (rice, sauce, and wagasi cheese—400CFA/.90 cents) and caught up.
We don’t have access to your typical Thanksgiving foods (except yams and potatoes) and since we’re all from regions with heavy Latin culture, we decided to make Mexican food. Carlos, Craig, and I all went to a garden that is run by handicaped people to buy our produce. Unfortunately, they sold us avocados that weren’t ripe yet so we couldn’t have any guacamole and the papayas that we had for our beverages weren’t all the way ripe either so it was a little chunky. Regardless, we had a nice spread. Home-made tortillas and tortilla chips, salsa, refried beans, Spanish rice, Tapatio potatoes, and the dessert—arroz con leche, or rice pudding while drinking frozen fruit daiquiris made with papaya, pineapple, and bisap syrup-made from hibiscus flowers. Sister Madeline (from a previous post) was in town and stopped by with a bottle of white wine for us to celebrate the holidays with and we had our neighbors over for the actual dinner part.
We ate all day long to make sure that something that day felt like Thanksgiving since we were without our normal company and it was extremely hot like usual. But while surrounded by new family, friends, and neighbors, it was the closest to a “normal” Thanksgiving that we would get to and it was really nice.

gutting the papayas for the daiquiris

the Thanksgiving gang

cooking away!

the finished product...or what would fit in the screen

Something to Be Thankful For

We have been living in Benin for less than six months, and it is interesting to reflect back and see how we have already changed—and what we have to be thankful for.
It was not until we arrived here that we realized just how well we live back in the States. It’s easy to take for granted the little things, like free public education and a civil service and law enforcement that isn’t rife with endemic corruption. Kids in Benin regularly wake up at 5:00am on a school day to do homework then housework before going off to school, then come home and cook and clean before going to bed at 11:00 at night. School costs money, and if Moms does not make enough money selling rice and beans outside the front door and Pops is a degenerate drunken Zem driver with a second family somewhere else, kids sometimes have to pick up a job cleaning houses or working at the marché to pay their school fees, which are something like $20 a year; or even worse, having to work as an apprentice for free because you cannot afford school fees, like the 10-year old apprentice to the 14-year old man-boy barber who cuts my hair for sixty cents (ages are approximate). Corrupt police set up checkpoints along the only major road in the country to force taxi drivers into supplementing their income, usually right in front of a roadside stand that peddles pilfered Nigerian gasoline at a discounted rate.
There are great things here, though. It’s great to wake up early before it gets really hot and walk down the dirt road and salue the Mama’s setting up their makeshift food stands (or walking around with various assorted goods on their heads), to see the joy and surprise on their faces when the Yovo greets them with a cheerful “A fon gonji a!” or greeting our neighbors with a quick “bonjour” and “bonne journée” as they walk their motos out the gate to leave for work. Little things are fulfilling, like when my work partner treats me to a satisfactory “Voila!” as I begin to slowly figure out what is going on around me. Making those personal connections is one of the most important parts of this experience.
Thanksgiving is about being appreciative of the little things, but also of the big things, like family and friends. We left behind family and friends in Arizona, California, and Texas to come on this little journey and we couldn’t be more thankful for their love, wisdom, and support, and we are thankful for our new extended family here, from our host family in Porto-Novo, Embassy staff, our Beninese neighbors, and, of course, our fellow PCVs.
To our family, here’s to you on this Thanksgiving. We have much to be thankful for.

Work

Work has started slowly here, but is quickly picking up. Our first (almost) two months at post was spent getting accustomed to the area, meeting people, figuring out the marché schedule, reading a lot of books, magazines, and online articles, and preparing for the work that would inevitably come our way.
That time is hurtling toward us with reckless abandon. Our schedule is starting to get packed with Fongbe lessons, meetings, excursions, baby-weighings, sensibilizations, and trips to the Cyber to research and post marketing materials. It seems like every day this week we have something on our schedules. To wit: Monday we had a meeting at the local CEG to present an English Spelling Bee project (that PC Benin is putting on--the finals are in Nattitangou in June or at the end of the school year, whichever comes first); Tuesday and Friday we have Fongbe (Fon) lessons; Wednesday we have another meeting at the CEG, this time with an English professor who may become our contact person for the spelling bee as well as a soccer game (we might be starting not only an English club, which would coincide with the spelling bee, but also a girls’ soccer club at the school, with help from our neighbor); Thursday Heather has her APCD (her PC boss) visit; Friday we have a sensibilization on Moringa in Abomey and the aforementioned Fongbe lessons but I also need to research the histoire of the parc and write up information to post on travel websites and meet with my homologue to discuss ideas that I have for the parc (and how to present them to the mayor so we can actually get some reinvestment there). Saturday we have off but Sunday I have my APCD visit and next week is Thanksgiving.
So everything is picking up now. No more whining about having nothing to do. We’re also trying to coordinate “work trips” with other volunteers to visit other parts of Benin, all the while studying for the FSOT, building up mileage before we start marathon training, and trying to avoid explosive diarrhea.
Fun times.

Cheers.

Halloween, The Faint, and Cotonou

Heather and I went to Parakou over Halloween weekend for a pair of meetings and a Halloween party (as John McCain and Sarah Palin). We tried to "come home" to Bohicon on Sunday but we had bus problems--meaning that we paid for our tickets, but the bus never showed--so we got our money back, returned back to the workstation, and left on Monday morning with a different bus line that would actually transport us.
Heather started feeling ill on Monday, and I started feeling sick on Tuesday morning. We had our first Fon tutoring session and we returned home and Heather was still not feeling particularly well, and I also began feeling ill. I began losing fluids at about 1:00pm was tired, achey, had a headache, and nausea. We called the Peace Corps doctors and they told us to drink fluids and try to stay hydrated. At about 7:30pm I threw up for the first time, and started to drink ORS, the Oral Hydration Fluid that we have in our medical kit.
At about 8 or 8:30pm, I was feeling nauseas and tried to stand up and walk 8 feet to the bathroom, when I fainted from severe dehydration. Heather saw me stumble and tried to catch me as I apparently (I don't remember, it was like a dream) ran into the wall, then fell onto the floor. She said that I passed out for about 10 seconds. When I came to, I asked her what was wrong. I had no idea what just happened. She helped me to the bathroom, then I broke out into a sweat--dripping puddles onto the tile floor--and Heather called the doctor, then rousted up our neighbor, Gilles, to help. The doctor instructed us to go to the nearest hospital to get me an IV. I got on the back of Gilles' moto while our other neighbor Gilles volunteered to take Heather. About 10 minutes later, we were at the (private, not public--everything that the government is in charge of here falls apart) hospital to check in. Two bottles of IV solution later, and I was discharged (it cost us 12,200CFA, about $25). Our Peace Corps doctor was in constant contact with the hospital doctors the entire time and they took really good care of me.
Our PC doc asked us to come down to Cotonou on Wednesday for an exam, more fluids (not intravenous), and blood work. The good news is that I don't have malaria and I may have had bacterial diarrhea. When the lab analyzes my "sample" they will let me know. We thought that we would only be here for a day or two but the doctor discovered that I have an abnormally low heart rate for someone who is not a world-class athlete (anymore). The long and short of it is the doctors want to make sure that I don't have an underlying problem that the sickness has exacerbated and illuminated.
In the meantime, we are feeling better and have been running errands around Cotonou: going to the bank, buying necessities, raiding the workstation library for books, eating ice cream and chwarma, etc.
On Saturday, we went to the Ambassador's house and went swimming. He opens his pool every Saturday for Peace Corps Volunteers and it is amazing! We didn't get to hang out with him but did walk across the street and saw some embassy staffers playing softball and hung out with them a little bit. At their invitation, we had brunch with them on Sunday at the house of one of the FSOs. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them and seeing what life is like to be Foreign Service Officers. Some are former PCVs and we were able to ask them about the Foreign Service Officer Exam, which we are both studying for and planning to take at least once before we leave Benin. We plan on getting in touch with them whenever we're in Cotonou.
We should be leaving on Tuesday to go home, and we both have a feeling that we need to make up for lost time at post since we have basically been away for almost 2 weeks.

Cheers!