- Finally allowed myself to open a jar of American peanut butter Mom brought with her in July. Horrible discovery: after a year and a half of Beninese peanut buttter -- just ground peanuts, period -- Jif tastes like sugary lard. The flavor is kind of... Weak. Sad. It'll just never be the same.
- My village's central transformer or something blew up, taking with it all of the electricity and water in the entirety of Daagbe. No pumps were working, meaning that I was living out of the two trash cans of water in my kitchen. Fun! Ended up being only a week and a few days. Bathing out of a bowl... Now normal.
- The pope visited Benin. That's wonderful for the Christians in the country, a truly inspiring visitor. Minor problem from my point of view: to prepare for the highest-ranking visitor in all of Catholicdom, Benin decided to "straighten up" Cotonou. How? They razed hundreds of shanty houses and businesses from all across the city. As the hundreds of now-homeless men, women, and children stood and watched, bulldozers leveled row after row of shacks made of scraps of tin and salvaged sticks. Then they burned it all. The people I've talked to, most with steady jobs and cement houses, said it was a good thing: this way the people will be forced to pay for their space rather than "mooching" the unclaimed alleyways they inhabited before. And if South Africa and India are any example, razing shanty villages is nothing new. Still, it's disheartening that the most marked change in Benin after the visit of the most famous (currently-living) Christian figure was the leveling of hundreds of homes.
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