My school, CEG Daagbe -- the white board-looking thing is a faucet on the other side.  I'll try to get a better picture later, since I forgot to take ones of the courtyard area and classrooms. They're all open-air, with a tin roof and no doors.  The office has a door, an ancient computer, and an old-school Xerox machine, though!

This is my front yard currently... The holes are for wells, I think, but right now the land bridge thing is kind of scary.

This is my open-air kitchen and restroom area...No faucets or shower to speak of, but they should be there soon.

My living room! Should have a floor, ceiling, window covering of some sort (glass and/or mosquito netting), and maybe even paint by the time I move in... in a month.  My bedroom looks exactly the same.

Change Ain’t Gonna Come

A couple of notes on Beninese coins: for some reason, everybody wants them. Given the choice between a handful of coins and a couple of bills, I’m pretty sure that most marché mamas would choose the change.


This is the exact opposite of how I work with American money: I avoid coins like the plague (I throw them into a big coffee can the second I can), and I really only care about quarters.


Here, though, there are people who would rather refuse my business than give me change for a mille bill. This has happened multiple times, most frequently with zem drivers. I now actively search out places that will give me metal for my paper, and I hoard coins like it’s my job.


And another fun point: sometimes the change they give you is fake… why in the world would someone make fake 50 franc pieces? That’s like a dime. If I was investing my time and resources, I’d be pounding out 10 mille bills at least, if not 50 milles. Call me crazy.

Thank You! And I Promise I’m Not Hinting.

People were asking, so I updated the list of stuff I’d love to get. Done and done.


In other news, thank you so so so so sooooo much to the people who have sent me letters and packages – I get so excited to see familiar handwriting over here. A couple of days ago, I was having a really rough day of language (surprise surprise), and then suddenly I got two packages (first two I’ve gotten!) and three letters, and that alone made my week.

Everyone here was jealous – my home team totally kicks ass at the postal system – but no worries, I shared. A little.

The (strike-out American) Beninese Dream

On my last day of post visit, the directeur told me that we were going to visit the palm nut factory, and I was not excited. Palm oil (l’huil rouge) is thick and red and forms the base of basically every dinner in Benin. It’s absolutely awful for you, and my village produces a lot of it.

Anyway, so we went to visit this factory, and we started at the owner’s huge compound of a house – I don’t know how many wives he has, but there were a bazillion kiddos running around, and I’m betting they’re all his. When we met him, we had to bow as we shook his hand… I couldn’t figure out why, but whatever, I did it anyway.

After seeing this gigantic factory and how many thousands of gallons of oil it can produce in a week, I was pretty impressed with the factory itself. That’s when they told me that the owner built the factory from the ground up, and he’d never stepped foot inside a school.

That’s pretty incredible, I think. They told me I needed to give a speech at the end, so I tried (and failed) to translate the idea of the American dream into French. Unable to think of anything more eloquent, I said “c’est increible” about 15 times and thanked him profusely. Then we were friends: he invited me to a multi-day voodoo fete that he hosts at the factory in February – score!

Moral of the story: with some luck and ingenuity, anything is possible, even in Benin.

...and boobs are knees.

I’d just like to say that I have seen a ridiculous number of boobs since I got here. Most are flatter than pancakes and hang down to the waist (which is I guess what happens when you don’t wear a bra for 50 years), but any age is welcome to go topless – this weekend, my 14 and 18 year old host sisters in Daagbe were walking around in just shorts. Women whip them out all over the place for a variety of reasons: to feed babies, because they need to use their shirt as a head wrap, because they’re having a hot flash… really any reason is a good one. Probably makes laundry day easier, too.

Splat: A Fun New Game

Maggie and I came up with a point system for killing bugs, which is a surprisingly fun way of dealing with the disgusting number of bugs we see every day. These are hotly debated numbers, but so far, here’s what we’ve got:

Gnat/fruit fly: 1 pt
Fly: 10 pts
Mosquito: 30 pts
Big cockroach: 50 pts
Jumping spider: 70 pts
Huge spider: 150 pts

We started Tuesday, and so far Michael’s the only one who’s really made any points (he’s got 70). I’m on the alert, though, and there’s a cockroach right outside my door – feel free to play along from home!

Drama and My House

The first day I was at post, we went to see my house. Post visit is already an emotional time for stagiers, because it’s the first time we see the reality of service here – it’s not all like summer camp. I wasn’t expecting much from my house – a cement floor, a faucet outside, maybe a ceiling if I was lucky – but I wasn’t ready to walk into the building that I’ll live in in a month.


The place is completely unfinished, with dirt and rubble on the floors, no bathroom or latrine, and a 3-foot gap between where the roof ends and the wall begins. I walked in and immediately felt like crying: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture myself living there happily.

It took a day of thinking and forced positive thinking to get out of that little slump, but now I’m feeling better about the whole thing. Seeing the house made me realize what a struggle it’s going to be to set up an entirely new post on about $300 (that includes buying furniture, which is expensive), and beyond that, how hard I’m going to have to work to stick out the first couple of months. Because without Americans around to vent to all the time, it’s going to be pretty lonely, and I now realize what a big accomplishment staying for all 27 months would be.

After my day of list-making and processing (best feel-better list: Ways to Make My House Happy for Cheap), I feel much better. I went back to the house and took my directeur with me, and we talked about what needs to happen before I move in. He was telling me that they actually have some pretty cool plans for the house – a tiled bathroom, even – so if they actually manage to do everything in a month, I’ll have a pretty solid starting point.

Voodoo, Part 2

The second day of my stay in Daagbe, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house for a whole day. Not because I did anything bad, but because Oro, a voodoo fetish that women aren’t allowed to see (or they die/someone hurts them), was out that day.

Oro gets three days a year to rule the town, all within a 21-day span that’s like the Oro season of the year. By the time I move in to Daagbe, the season will be over, so I won’t have to worry about it until next year (the townspeople have promised to tell me in advance when he’s coming, so I’ll be completely safe). Actually, next year, I’ll probably take a weekend trip around that time – it’d be a good excuse to visit friends.

Anyway, so I (and everyone else in the town) stayed inside all day and listened to Oro run up and down the street all day – it sounded like a recording of a lawnmower with high whistling giggles on top. Fun fact about voodoo: woman priests are actually way more powerful than man priests. Less cool but related facts: women are so powerful that they can’t be trusted to handle their power until they’re older, and when they’re on their period, they’re dirty and can’t be let into the temple. Thus, male voodoo priests are obligated to have more than one wife, so that there’s always someone who’s not bleeding to work the magic.

That was a little critical, and I apologize. Voodoo is a pretty cool religion, and there’s a traditional healer who lives close to me in village. I met him, and he gave me a long speech (in Goun, translated by my friend Gabriel) about how he was so, so, sooo happy to have me there, how I was going to do such good things for the village, and how he was going to do some praying for me to protect me against any black magic that might happen. Really sweet, and good to know that I’ve got all sorts of gods on my side.

Post Visit: Whoa

Oooh baby, post visit was interesting.

I went to Daagbe on Wednesday morning, and I was excited to find out that it’s really rural even though it’s only 30 minutes away. The host family I stayed with seemed pretty entertained by my foreign-ness (the papa was hilarious, and/but he kept force-feeding me pate by telling me I was insulting his wife), and the people were, for the most part, really excited to have me there. I met every official in the place, got lots of long speeches promising me absolute security and support (Mom, take note), and waved at a lot of people.

I also got to see a little of the reeeeally rural part of town: I live off of the main village road, but if you walk into the bush, there are whole compounds of people living in legit mud huts with thatched roofs. We visited and chatted with some, my tour guide/fellow professor Gabriel translating for me, and I got to see the wood carvers making Beninese masks and sculptures right in front of me. So cool.

The school was exactly what I expected: bare bones. We do have electricity in the office and a computer, which is a big thing for around here. The classrooms are big, open areas with no windows or doors, there are latrines rather than toilets, and the staffing situation is interesting to say the least… only 4 out of 50ish teachers are permanent staff members. I also learned that sexual harassment is a really big issue in my school, so I’m both apprehensive about seeing it and really pumped about starting a girls club to combat it.

(Dangit, forgot to put the pictures on my flash drive. Next time, I promise pictures of the school and house.)

We went to see my house, and that was a bit of a letdown – details to follow (update: I found out that most people had/have emotional meltdowns on their post visits. Congratulations to me, I’m normal!). Because of the house, I was in a sad mood for most of the first and second days, but the third day was awesome. We visited a palm nut factory, met every official in the area, and drove to three different points on the Nigerian border (sidenote: I am expressly forbidden to enter Nigeria at any point during my service or they send me home. I told that to my directeur [the principal, my boss] and the laughed: “But how would they ever know?”).

Two tiny highlights from the last day: an exchange with my directeur and the presence of pork in my diet. The pork was this delicious roast pork from the side of the road that the directeur bought for lunch… I missed pig. And the exchange might not be as funny here as it was in real life, but it kept me giggling to myself all day.






The directeur was asking me what I wanted for lunch, and he told me my options were pork, fish, or lapin. I didn’t know what lapin was, so he started miming “rabbit” – ears and little hops, all while driving a car on the wrong side of the road. “Oh, rabbit. It’s ‘rabbit’ in English.”
“Ahhhh, oui, I remember. Larbert.”
“Rrrrrrabbit.”
“Oui, larbert. I’ll remember now.”

My impact on Daagbe's English has begun.

My friends Maggie (top) and Jenny -- it was a long day at school.

The view from my terrace

 My moto helmet (caske)... I duct taped a flower to it for flair.

At the birthday party -- my host sisters are the ones in matching red outfits, and the one in the black-and white skirt/top combo.  And on the trike is Moubarack.

My tissu!!

My braids (I kept them in a bun or a ponytail to avoid the inevitable braided mullet mohawk comparisons)

My now-gone henna tattoo... it's a random design, but the marks on my forearm are my name in Arabic -- my host sister is in Koranic school right now.

Van taking the Health trainees on a field trip.  Note that the bus was made for 11 people, but there are about 18 in there.  This is normal.