Post Visit Part Deux

So in my last installment I had just returned from my post visit to a village in north western Benin. It was a crazy few days, filled with moto chaces across the capital, abandoned briefcases, bus changes, and i guess ultimatly post changing. Because my post visit a few weeks ago was such a bust my director is allowing me to change posts, which is why i am here using the internet when normally i would be staying in my internet free village.

Today I came down to Cotonou because tomorrow morning I am to be put on a shuttle heading up to Kandi which the biggest town near me. Don't ask me the name of the village because I can barely say it much less spell it. All I know is that it's in the far north eastern side of the country not far from the niger and nigeria borders. The pain in the ass thing is that the shuttle ride is going to be like 9 hours long and that I'm going to be missing 3 days of language class to make this trip.

Normally I'd be all about missing class but you see, the peace corps requires that you meet a certain level of language fluency before they allow you to become an offical volunteer. well the test to see what level we have is a week from this wednesday, the wednesday i am returning on. So you see missing the classes is coming at a really bad time for me as my french rather sucks. i'm a little nervous, but not horribly worried b/c i know i will be able to get extra tutoring between when i return and the test date, but it wouldn't hurt if everyone kept their fingers crossed for me just the same.

There isn't a whole lot else to report since my last posting. my schedule hardly every varies. I'm up a 6:45, eat, have a bucket bath and leave for class by 7:30. I then have french from 8-10 and then technical training from 10:30-12:30. We then break for lunch and general repo till 3 at which time we have another 1.5 hr of language followed by more technically training. We then have the choice to do one on one language tutoring if we so wish. I wish about 3 times a week. We dont' even have Saturday's off. So far we have either hands on partical stuff or some sort of class or something or other every saturday till 12:30. The only day of the week we are completly free is Sunday. Which for most of us is laundry day. An odd thing about laundry in this country, it is socially unacceptable to wash your underwear and bras outside in public, and by public i mean jsut in your own yard. I wash mine in my bed room.

Well I am ashamed to say taht I have been hogging this computer for hours now but only have this short pitiful post to show for it. I swear one of these days I will write more, but until then bare with me.