You Are Special

Okay, so in my last blog entry I shared with you all my flaming bus story. As you can imagine the three of us were pretty shook up the next day. I think to help cheer us up one of my friends, he was on the bus too, told us about how in his family they had a " You are Special" plate and whenever someone in his family had a bad day they would be suprised with this plate. So that morning for breakfast he made us two "You are Special" plates.

As you can tell from the syrup in Meagan hand we had pancakes that morning for breakfast. Great comfort food as well as easy to make.

Blessings from God

So I know in my last posting I said I would write more about what I had been doing to catch you all up, sorry that has not happend. However I did live through a rather terrifying experience and since i do hate to keep things to myself I thought I would share it with the loyal few who have kept reading this.

Tuesday afternoon, myself and two of my volunteer friends decided to leave Cotonou and head back up to Parakou to get an early start there before all the other volunteers show up. The 2:30 bus left at 3ish like always and we were on our way. It started out as an uneventful trip. Wonderfully the airconditioning was working and the horrible music video that they play on the tv screens was turned down low instead of at its normal ear splitting level.

It was probably around 8 or so, several hours into our journey with perhaps 2-3 still to go that I first noticed a burning smell. No one seemed to pay much attention to this so neither did I. I involved myself in a book I had brought along, reading by the flashlight at the end of myself phone, when a family of 3 rushed forward yelling to the driver to pull over the bus is on fire. I did not believe them at first because even though there was smoke and obviously a problem there probably was not a fire. So I did not panic. However they kept yelling for the driver to pull over and finally he did and this time when I looked back I did infact see flames. Oh Shit! The Beninise are not known for doing things in an quick and/or orderly fashion but thankfully the buss was only half full so though some pushing and shoving we were all able to get off. At one point we were contemplating going out the window when the driver was not opening the door fast enough but again thankfully that ended up not being necessary.

I would say within 2-3 minutes of all of us getting off the bus the entire thing went up in flames. It looked like something out of an action movie, thank god though the explosion part was missing, even though that is what the three of us kept thinking would happen. At this point we were still several hours from our destination and in the middle of nowhere. A bus heading up to Niamey stopped to check out what was going on, at this point they could see the fire but the fact that it was a bus was unrecognizable. The ppl on the bus were nice enough to make room for us on their bus and take us to where we were going. It seems just when you are ready to call it quits God gives us just what we need.

And so that is my adventure. It is a blessing from God that my friend and I as well as everyone on the bus made it through this ordeal. Had it been a full bus, I feel that this story would have been very different with a very different ending.

Don't Hate Me Cause I Don't Update

Yes, it has been forever and a day since I've written an honest to goodness update on this damn thing. Are there reasons for the delay? yes. Excuses? Plenty of those to, but I'm going to try and remedy some of that right now. I figured I'd tell you all about what I've been up to here just recently and then back track and cover what I did during the past couple months of no blogs. I hope that will satisfy all of you.

So February was the longest month of my life. For being the shorest month we go through it seemed to last ages and ages. The first two weeks rocked as I spent them on my first African vacation. Me and three other volunteer friends spent two weeks visiting Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. I will come back on another post and talk about the vacation but for now I'll just bring you all up to speed as to where I'm at now. So after getting back from my vacation I had a roughly a week to get my shit together for training activity I had planned over nutrition/malnutrition at my local middle school. This activity is the first of nine or ten I plan to hold over the next couple months in middle schools around my area. Again I'll post more specific information/reflections at a later date. The week following the training activity was forever long because the kids were on school break (they have more breaks than anyone i've ever heard of) so I had no girls club to help break up the week and I wasn't able to host a nutrition activity at any of the schools during that time because with the kids on holiday none of them would be around.

That bring us up to March, which could prove to be an incredibly busy month. Already I have held another of my nutrition activities which went suprisingly well. And I have schedule at least one more for this month and am working on the second. Also this month is the GAD dinner/auction. I talked about it last year a lot. If you remember me and another volunteer participated in a date auction and ended up going on a "date" with a fellow volunteer that included a car ride and appetizers. I know there is a picture of it some where in the old blog enteries. Anyway, it's that time of year again so we will all be getting together to eat, drink and raise money for GAD (Gendar and Development fund). And of course at the end of the month is my birthday. No plans as of yet as to how i'm going to celbrate it. But something will come up. If nothing else I'll be here in Kandi making pizza and watch movies and just hanging out. What won't be happening is me alone in my house, so not cool.

This month also had me going to Nikki this month to celebrate their annual Gahnine fete. It is a traditional fete (party/holiday) that is held every year around this time. The actual date of the event changes because it is based on the lunar calendar cycle so outsiders like us are always having to consult with the locals as to when it is. There is a volunteer who lives in Nikki and he was nice enough to open his house to us all for the duration of this celebration. I can't remember the specifics regarding the fete right now, but later when I am able to post pictures I will fill you all in.

So I guess that's all for now. I know this wasn't a terribly good post, but a rough over view to let you know kinda what I've been up to and what I will be up to this month. More will come soon I promise.