Notre groupe extraordinaire après déjeuner dimanche passe

My host Nicole and Nadya

My sis Nadya with Andrea and the other new domestique - they are great

Leaving with my host dad on his moto

PC requires us to wear these nice helmets……et ils sont tres jolis n’est pas §

I am reading all of your posts--- thank u thank u thank u for all of the support and encouragement. It gives me a certain level of comfort when times are difficult and means so much.

I cant respond to them really because posting takes a lot of time itself; but please know this above and I love you all!

I currently reside.....

Andrea and I with our families and mutual friends

Nadya and I taking a siesta

Nadya and I taking a siesta

NEWS OF ASSIGNMENT!!!

Bonsoir tout le monde, j’espere ca va bien.

We now know where we are going after training! In a month, after swear-in, I will be moving to post by myself in Avrankou, which is a suburb basically of Porto Novo (the capital). So I’m in the “deep south” and could walk to the Nigerian border from my house if I could only get in! I will be working with an NGO—URDP (and I need someone to look that up for me and send me info on it.) I will work with a local counterpart in the NGO for two years and will be teaching some formations like we are doing right now in training in the community, consulting, talking with artisans, and working with women’s associations- marketing. I will have a desk and can come and go on my own schedule. Most likely, I will do office hours where people come to me, and then I go out in the community the other part of the day. I am pretty excited about this setup. I will be replacing a volunteer that is now just finishing her service, so things will be semi-set up for me. My house is supposedly pretty nice and has electricity and possibly running water. So much for roughing it!

The sessions for practice we have been giving are going good. Each Friday we give a class to a group of ten artisans in town here. We ended up team teaching as our French needs to be helped along. But things are great, really basic. We have taught a session on marketing and one on importance of budgeting and savings. They last about two hours and are pretty laid back. But they have a lot of questions, and sometimes we are just lost in the language. They are patient and talk really slowly. Basically we just read off sheets of paper and they take notes. That’s it until we are more competent in French. This is merely for us to practice and gain some confidence. They are great and really appreciate us helping them. Throughout the week, around our sessions, we visit our students- artisans- at their place of work, usually a small shack on the main drag, and observe and ask questions for practice when we get to post. It’s really quite interesting work and is great extra French practice.

My host mother just hired another little house girl that speaks little French and get yells at a lot. It’s just the way it is here, a power thing. Friendly people, but boy do they ever get pissed at their ten year old domestique when she’s not perfect. They work all day cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry for three meals and to sleep on the living room floor. I think I am a big perk for their days as well. They get a kick out of me, and they and everyone thinks it’s strange that I pay attention to them and even respect them. The food continues the same, lots of carbs and only fish and goat meat. To you “ugali girls” – Pate is the ugali of West Africa and I have it often, yes. It is like extremely thick cream of wheat with no taste that they serve with a spicy sauce and eat with hands. It’s fine but gets old after a while. Today Andrea and I cooked food for our hosts and mutual friends and that was quite the process. We bought two live chickens and I was all set to take them out this morning and couldn’t do it. They laughed and laughed and laughed. I watched and that was torture in itself. If I ever am able to pull it off at post by myself I will have to buy a bigger machete that isn’t dull and get the job done in an instant, if I don’t take my hand off in the process. It’s a lot harder than you would think, let me tell you. Chicken has never tasted so good, as I haven’t had hardly any in over a month. We also made mashed potatoes! and pasta salad. It tasted amazing. We cooked at a friend’s house that has a big kitchen with a real oven!

For fun here in Nati, as we continue to find signs of some nightlife, we recently discovered a good disco in town and have been there the past two weekends. The first time it was pretty dead except for the ten of us. We were out until midnight and that is kind of scary here, but I live next to Ryan, another volunteer, and so we always go back together. This last time we both barely fit on a super small moto taxi. Good times. The reason I say “scary” is because no one is out much past dark except the few people like us on weekends-- there isn’t a lot of light in the town so people go to bed pretty early.


Some info people requested:

My host mother is a secretary at a NGO and my host father works as a lab tech in hospital and is studying to become a doctor. They are both 25, like me ;-)

School here just started, so the streets are full of kids and also there is a sizable Islamic population, hence there are a few Islamic schools and mosques—and now I wake up every morning at 5 with call to prayer, as the main mosque is a few blocks from my open window.

I get NO intl news because in training money is limited for us and the internet time is tight enough as it is. I watch nightly news in general with my family, but it’s in French and focused on African politics. Eventually when I get settled at post in a month I will get a radio and get BBC. Other than that, there are a few cheesy South American soap operas dubbed in French, and a few local talk shows that remind me of Kramer’s set on Seinfeld. LOL

The kitchen in my house is outside by the latrines and the shower closet, a small concrete room that we prepare food in, and then cook in big pots outside in the yard. I have a small camping stove in my room I only use only for boiling my water. We have electricity that is fairly consistent but no refrigerator.

I bike like I was doing in Ames before I left, maybe 40-50 minutes per day and some walking.

No, there aren’t many cars here in general; mostly bicycles and motorbikes are all the city taxis. The cars you do see are rich folks, but mainly developmental groups-- belonging to various NGOs. There are so many developmental organizations here as this is one of the ten poorest countries in the world. There are lots of French citizens around, expats and tourists both.

We are in the rainy season, so its not terribly hot, but hot enough for me. Of our five guys in training, four have shaved their heads, and I am responsible for 50% of those at requests. It rains off and on and then the sun will shine most afternoons and gets almost chilly at night. But they close up the house often in the evenings because they think this is COLD- 70’s at night? It’s funny in the mornings you see people wearing coats. Maybe in two years that will be me.

Stresses, yes they are there of course. Kids yell YOVO at you and do this dance when you ride by. Some times you want to scream at them and tell them to call you your real name, but then you know that they are just curious and excited to get your attention is all. So depending on one’s mood, you can ignore them, smile and wave like they want, or yell at them to stop calling you a YOVO. Ryan, my neighbor and one of my closer friends here, will chase them with his bike or make monster faces at them. The language is stressful still as we all want to be at a higher level even though we are consistently improving. So that’s a constant thing for the next six months I imagine. Some days you are sitting in your house sweating and stinky and have to study language and simply don’t want to be here. But you get through it. It is not all the time. It is so up and down emotionally, yet we are all there for each other and a tight group--optimistic that this pattern is going to pass or at least settle down as time goes on. We work hard with language, technical training and everyday life. Then we party hard when we all get together. When there is free time leftover, we need to hang out with family and interact as well as practice French with them. As you can see, there isn’t a lot of alone time. The internet time is nice for that. But stressful as it is hit and miss all the time. I won’t complain, I have it.

Love to all, Sara

Forgot to write on my photos;

first one is ma petite soeur Nadya with the house girl Andrea who is 18.
She is called a domestique and I am becoming friends with her although Im not supposed to make friends with the "house help" but i love them anyway!

second is cotonou from the roof of PC HQ

Third is sister Nadya again; u can see she is quite the model!

parades and futbol

Since I wrote last, much has happened and I’m happy to report that most is good news ;-)

I celebrated my birthday this past Monday, which was not a big deal over here really. Some volunteers made a pineapple upside down cake, which was amazing. I went out with some friends to a local hangout and we chatted a few hours. Overall, it was a fine birthday. Curfew is around 8 pm, when it's dark. That is for the best probably.

Tuesday was Benin's Independence Day so we had a free day. We went to the local parade that was like any back home but with more dancing perhaps. They LOVE to dance, and dance well they do. Speaking of that, Wednesday we had a "dance party" for one of our afternoon sessions. It was for learning the traditional dances by region and also to observe different types of dress that we will eventually be buying and wearing. The dancers each took one of us yovos (whities) and pulled us out there on the dance floor to let us make fools of ourselves. LOL. My partner was the youngest in the group, a timid 3 year-old, and boy did we have a grand time!

This week we finally went to play sports, which were great especially since the weather hasn’t been too hot lately. All 15 of us played with our Beninois facilitators for two hours, mostly futbol (soccer) in the dirt, which was a whole other thing. Talk about no traction! Oh and if anyone is worried about diseases, no worries. A wild dog is hanging out here in the internet café, but I just received my rabies shot! Woo hhooo. One of about 10 during the first three weeks here.

People are friendly and help us out a lot, however there is soooo much unwanted attention all around. I can deal with the constant staring, but when people yell out YOVO and hiss at you to get you to look at them it's hard to stay patient. Yes, people HISS in Benin. That's also how they call moto taxis. Yeah, it's a bit interesting to get hissed at. But with all this, I just remind myself that its only because they are curious.
We saw our first funeral procession which consists of a big group of people literally running down the street with the men carrying the body over their head wrapped in cloth. They are singing about and celebrating the life of the deceased. It is quite interesting to witness and imagine I will be seeing this quite often unfortunately.

I just got done doing laundry and that equals a good hour of hard work! I only have three outfits here but my host mom watches me like a hawk, coaching me to get it perfect-- which is washing each article in bucket three times, and then rinsing twice. I like to get her laughing by telling her how tired and sore I am afterwards!

The food is good so far, but it's a lot the same stuff. It's tons of carbs and usually goat meat or fish. Some random fruits and veggies on the side makes for a nice meal. PC told our hosts hat most Americans cannot handle spices so they weren’t making the food spicy at all. I caught on to it and told them I LOVE spicy food. Now every meal is almost TOO spicy, but I suppose it's better this way. ;-) Breakfast is the same everyday-tea and biscuits (crackers) and some good days a chunk of baguette bread. I continue to enjoy my family. I have fun with Nadya and my hosts are so patient and help me with my French when I'm studying at home. The language is going OK--without doubt it is frustrating, but that's a given. It will get easier as time goes on. I had a start and that definitely put me at an advantage. Yesterday we went on our first work outing. We went in pairs to different small shops and asked them questions about their business. We took brief notes and when our French was exhausted all met up at the bar for FAB. ;-)
I have my interview with the PC placement officer later today. In a few weeks I may know better what I'll be doing the next two years and perhaps even where I will be living. Until then, we work full time on language, culture, and technical training. What I can tell you is that I will most likely be in a mid-sized city doing small-scale consulting and holding business classes for local artisans. There is a lot of observation and then offering advice on better business practices and holding classes after a simple needs assessment. Things are going to be EXTREMELY basic. For example, we teach people how to save money when they make a profit, how to record expenses, how to market a product, retain customers, and what will be really interesting - teaching accounting for illiterates via symbols. There will be other projects with the people we work with, as well as side projects we want to work on such as HIV/AIDS awareness, environment, business clubs in schools, etc. It's going to be a pretty flexible work schedule but I will make myself stay busy.

I don't want to scare you off - my posts won't always be this long. This is a general overview, and things aren't going to change much the next two months. During training, I don't have much Internet time at all, and when I do it's frustrating. I am now using my friend's laptop and will transfer this text to the cyber cafe to save time. So I'm sorry if I don’t respond to emails individually. But I am reading them all, and thanks to those of you who sent e cards for my b-day. As I have said before, please write general comments on this site so it's easier for me to read all at once. Otherwise, you can still send emails to me. I hope you are all doing well-much love