Hitting The Ground Running

Since Craig and I have been back in Benin, there hasn’t been a day without loads to do, which is nice.  When we first arrived back in Cotonou, we had to spend 3 days there getting our Ghanaian visa in anticipation of Brian and Dustin’s upcoming visit.  It was kind of ridiculous because on top of all the crazy requirements, you could only go before noon to apply for a visa and only after 3pm to pick up the visa (with at least a day in between for processing), which is why it took so long.  I guess it would make sense to do it like that if there was a lot of visa turnover, but there isn’t.  So it’s just laziness, I guess. 

We got back to Bohicon and both hit the ground running.  Craig started up his soccer club and a business course right away.  I had a week to plan a launching ceremony for my Amour et Vie (Love and Life) team that our host NGO came for, so I had meetings every day on how to actually execute the ceremony.  Luckily, my team has 3 other people on it, so when it came to inviting the whole town, it wasn’t too hard to get the invitations spread out.  The ceremony went really well.  My team prepared a skit to perform and aside from the rain thundering down on the tin roof and not being able to hear for 20 minutes or so, the whole thing went really well.  The community leader of the group, Gisele, whom is a Beninese woman who works with my CPS and who has tons of experience teaching people about health-related things, created some drama when the sodas came.  Here in Benin, sodas are reserved for officials and everyone else gets beesap or some other beverage, and because of that, there are always a limited number of sodas because they are considered to be expensive.  So when the sodas came and there was a rush of everyone, official or not, she just gave them out to whomever and some people who should have gotten one didn’t.  But she herself decided to keep one and chugged it right there in front of the officials without offering it to anyone else, including her own team members.  She is slowly starting to irritate me in ways like that. 

Setting up for the lancement

I also found out that she replaced the student on my team, Patricia, with another university-level girl (whom is also named Patricia) while we were on vacation because “her dad wouldn’t let her go to Parakou for the training”.   When I talked to the original Patricia, she said that it was because her family didn’t have the money to front to get to Parakou.  I had asked Gisele if she had the funds to cover the team to get there until reimbursements were given and she said yes.  Otherwise, I would have given them the money to get there myself and gotten reimbursed afterwards.  I guess she didn’t though and instead of saying the truth, she made something up, which is quite common here.  The new Patricia is also great and motivated and smart, but I just feel really bad for my original Patricia since she was really looking forward to doing this.  It’s like she got robbed of it. 

Craig and I have both been busy going to two different CEGs (schools) that we picked out to talk to the administration about choosing a girl from a poor family to receive a scholarship for all school-related expenses for the next school year, which is a Peace Corps-funded project countrywide.  We didn’t choose the school that we do our English and soccer clubs at because they are already benefiting from our other activities.  So we chose two different schools and both sets of administration have been really helpful and happy to work with us on getting one of their disadvantaged girls a scholarship.  We should be done with all of the paperwork next week.  I specifically chose Patricia’s school (the original one from my team) in hopes that maybe I could help her out that way.  I am not playing favorites though, so the scholarship will go to the neediest girl, but seeing as how her family didn’t have $8 to send her to the training, she may actually get it.  Stay tuned!

I also started meeting to implement and organize my next big project, a week-long nutritional recuperation program.  In the months of November, we are collecting all the contact information at each baby weighing for the women who have malnourished children and in December, we are inviting them to the program, which will take place in January.  Now all I have to do is fill out the grant application and figure out exact recipes for the nutrition-rich food that we are going to teach the moms to prepare.

I also went to my Moringa supplier’s house and operations location to see his set up and give him business advice on how to expand and be more profitable.  I also suggested that he begin attending the business course that Craig just started doing with Francois, our zemijohn man.  He was really happy about all of that and as I type this blog, he is sitting at our kitchen table with Craig going over business stuff. 

Craig has started teaching his homologue Excel while at work.  They have it on the computer that they use at his job and Craig created an Excel document to help them track all the details of visitors to view progress and the such and his homologue has been blown away by Excel’s capabilities.  Craig has also been playing soccer on the weekends with people from the park and other community friends we know. 

We started up our English club and oddly enough, it’s only boys who come.  This is a problem since we’re supposed to bring a girl to the National Spelling Bee next year up in Natitingou, but if we don’t have any girls participating, it’s going to be difficult.  After the first week of no girls, we talked to all the English teachers at the school to inform their students again and encourage them to come, but there still haven’t been any girls.  I’m not quite sure how we’re going to solve this pickle, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out.  One of the boys who comes to our club is in Premier (which is like being a Junior in high school) and can speak pretty good English.  He said he had a book about American things and when we got on the subject of Thanksgiving this week, he already knew what it was, which was truly shocking.  When we did that same thing last year, and not only did no one know what it was, but it was that much more difficult to explain.  Especially since they have no idea what any of the normal foods that are eaten on Thanksgiving are, with exception to turkey and sweet potatoes. 

When we got back from vacation, we also had responses from Russ’s (Craig’s former coach who is a teacher as well) students who received our package of letters that we sent to them back in July, written by our Camp GLOW girls.  I sent out a text to all the captains of each school who had girls participating in the exchange with information on a time and a place to meet, but only one girl actually showed up.  So we tried again with a different time and place, and again, only one girl showed up.  So it’s been quite expensive (with our phone credit and zem rides) and time consuming distributing these letters and at the same time, the boys in our English club are extremely interested in participating, so we have decided to still include only the committed and serious girls from the original exchange and give the rest of the letters to the boys in our English club to respond to.  I think that will work out a lot better.

On a side note, since we have been back, we have hosted a Zou Taco Tuesday with the four new volunteers in our area, which was a smashing success.  Craig has also gone up to Parakou for a regional VAC meeting as well as the Halloween party—I stayed home in Bohicon.  I have been traveling all around the Zou visiting the new volunteers as part of my duties as a PSN member.  Statistically, most people end their contract early in the first 3 months at post, so these visits are to give volunteers company as well as support in integrating and problem solving.  They all went really well and I am even more appreciative of our western-style home now, especially after visiting one volunteer who didn’t use her latrine at night because there were bats flying around in and outside it.  Our “close-mate”, Amy, had a mishap during a lightening storm which fried her computer charger as well as slightly electrocuted her (thanks a lot, Benin, for your tin roofs) so she was kind enough to let us use her internet key until her dead computer comes back to life with a new charger, which Brian is bringing.  She and I also tried making cinnamon rolls too, which were kind of successful.  So we have had an internet connection, albeit slow, in our house for the last couple days and the prepaid connection will last until tomorrow. 

Heather and Amy at Taco Night

Lastly, Craig and I are leaving on Tuesday to head down to Cotonou.  We’re leaving early so we can get some work done while we’re there, like printing, turning in forms, applying for grants, etc. Then, next Wednesday we head to Ghana!  Dustin is flying in on the 14^th, but because Craig has his PC boss visiting on that day in the afternoon in Bohicon, the soonest we can leave for Cotonou is the 15^th.  Usually, the taxis just leave for Ghana in the morning from Cotonou, which we’ll certainly miss, so we can’t head over there until the 16^th, which is when Brian comes in.  I have all the confidence in the world that Dustin will be just fine without us for a day and a half since his girlfriend has been there before and has been giving him lots of tips and instructions, not to mention a Ghanaian phone, which is a lot more than I can say Craig and I can do.  We’re spending about a week in Ghana after they arrive to take advantage of some beaching and the western luxuries that Accra has to offer, like sushi and movie theaters.  But more importantly, we’ll be with our twinsy and Dustin.  We can’t wait!  

Vacation Blog #4

We took the train into Athens, then a bus to Litochoro to prepare to hike Mt. Olympus the next day.  Litochoro was a scenic little mountainside town, and we stayed by the beach at a place about 5km outside the town.  We woke up early the next morning and our hostel host was nice enough to drive us to the starting point for the trail on Mt. Olympus at 6am for our all-day hike.  We started out in the dark and my headlamp stopped working so we wandered around in the dark for about an hour until the sun finally came up.  It was easy going for the first few hours until we got to the first stopping point, “Refuge A”, which lies about halfway up the trail.  From there it was really steep and slippery (the trail near the top is covered with loose rock), but we huffed and puffed and finally made it to the “top” by noon.  We ate our victory Snickers and headed down, were lucky enough to get a ride back down to Litochoro by a couple at the parking lot at the bottom, and dinner in town and got ready for our next day of travel, to Thessaloniki.

We took the early train to Thessaloniki (the ride is only an hour) and headed straight to the White Tower, its most famous landmark.  Once it was used as a prison for political prisoners but now it is a museum for the culture and history of the city.  We also saw the Agia Sofia, a 7^th-century church (but didn’t go in because it closes for 6 hours in the middle of the day), and other landmarks.  We couchsurfed and went out with our host later that night to a bar then a movie.  When we were waiting to get into the movie theater, our host mentioned that the Minister of Justice was right behind us and we thought nothing of it until intermission, when 20-odd protesters barged into the theatre, chanting and throwing yogurt on the minister, who was sitting in the back row.  There was a lot of pushing and shoving and a big racket until the movie was back on for a good 5 minutes.  We had a great time with our host and sadly left the next day to fly to Milan.

We flew to Milan in the afternoon and, because of a delayed plane, arrived just in time to make it to our reservation to see The Last Supper.  Later on, we met up with one of Heather’s good friends, Massimiliano, who she knows from her “Paris days”.  We had a short, good time in Milan; it is a very pretty city but we unfortunately arrived late and were scheduled to leave the next day for Cinque Terre.

We left early in the morning to take the train to Cinque Terre, where we spent 4 days.  It was one of the highlights of our trip and we took full advantage of it, waking up early to walk to the castle at the top of Riomaggiore and spend the day eating gelato and walking the meandering paths that connect to the 4 other principal cities in the area.  We tried some freshly made limoncello from a local farmer and ate the local speciality, trofie, a pasta made from chick-pea flour and smothered in delicious pesto sauce.  We also met a nice Quebecois couple and were able to brush up on our French that had become rusty since we left Africa.  When we left Cinque Terre we took a train through the Tuscany region and visited Lucca and Pisa en route to Florence.

Florence is a beautiful city and has amazing food.  We took a lot of pictures in front of the Ponte Vecchio, a famous bridge that is covered in houses (now converted to high-end jewelry stores), saw the statue of David, visited the Uffizi museum, and took a daylong side trip to a little town in the Chianti region for some wine tasting.  The Tuscany region is spectacular and everywhere you turn, it looks like you just walked into a painting.  It is probably the most beautiful place I have ever visited, and the food is fantastic, too!

After a few days in Florence we took off to Rome again to stay for two days until our flight left to come back home.  Unbeknownst to us, Rome suffered massive riots that day that we arrived back and we missed the festivities by about 2 hours or so.  We stayed with our good friend Paolo who we had stayed with before, and this time we were able to see the Pope and enjoy a last-minute cappuccino and gelato.  We spent our last night shopping and filling up our bags with wine and pasta to take back and enjoy in Bohicon. 

We arrived safely and refreshed and were excited to get home and get to work.  We are really busy and our schedules are fairly packed until February or so.  Heather is hard at work with her projects at work and I just started teaching our favorite zem a business course because he wants to start his own business.  We also have our English Club and Football Club that just started (because school started at the beginning of October), I’m still looking for a group of guys to regularly play football with, and are always trying to schedule other stuff to do.  To top it all off, twinsy and Dustin are coming out to visit for a few weeks at the end of November!

Lots of stuff coming up soon. 

Cheers.