Greeting from Far Away

So I'm actually at a computer for once, one that actually has an american keyboard instead of a french one. for those of you reading this who doesn't know the difference basically the m, z, a are all in differnt places an there are so many more punctuation marks available. anyway, so i'm in cotonou for the day because i had been down south in ouidah for the past week going through some health training. it was a pretty great week over all. this was the first time all 10 of us had been together since we all left for our posts, so basically 3 months. the week was a typical american style confrence, filled with lectures both good and useless. What was totally awsome was that first the place was air conditioned, which probably seems like something pretty minor, but when you are use to 90 degree weather at least every day a little bit of air conditioning is like a bit of heaven here on earth. The other great thing about this week was the food!! i had a week full of vegetables, fruit and actual 3 meals a day, plus snacks, it was way cool. i probably gained 10 lbs. for those interested ouidah is on the coast of benin and played an important part in their history. the bay of ouidah is where many slaves were shipped out from. to mark this location they have this monument that is an arch way that dipicts men and women in chain, i cna't really discribe it, but it's pretty cool and very moving. the monument is called the point of no return, which would be a pretty awsome name for something had it not had the history that it does.
the week overall was a great motivator. i am really excited to get back to my post and try and implement the new strategies and information we recieved. Also during this week was the voodoo celebration. i'm sure i talked to most of you before i left about how voodoo is thought to have originated in benin. it's actually pretty interesting, unfortunately, because i come from the north i don't have a lot of experince/interaction with it. but the annual celebration was this week and i guess it is a pretty big deal. we went, but i was pretty disapointed. there was more speeches than anything else. maybe i'll check it out again next year if i'm in the area, but i definetly won't travel the 10-12 hours needed from my post to do it.
i'm sad to say that the safari i was suppose to go on at the end of this month/beginning of feb has been called off. we couldn't agree on a week and then those of us who didn't care got upset about the constant change and back out. so now it is up in the air.

i guess that's all for now. i'm heading to parakou tomorrow and will spend the night there because, well i live too damn far from cotonou to do all this travel in one day. more to come later...