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