So it's almost the end of July, where's the time going? It's been a pretty crazy month thus far and the next couple weeks will be just as crazy. As I mentioned in my previous entry, last week was Camp Kandi. Myself and two other health volunteers covered topic ranging from nutrition, to AIDS to malaria. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work and I didn't even have to organize the event which always tends to be the hardest part of any job over here. After Camp Kandi, I went back to post for a few days. On Wednesday I left to come down to Cotonou. Now, I know I've lived here for two years and all but I'm not sure how familiar you all are with the geography of Benin. My village is in the north east region of Benin. I am about an hour and a half south of the Niger/Benin boarder. The largest city in Benin, Cotonou, is on the cost and about a 10-13 hour bus/car ride. I did this on Wednesday, getting into Cotonou around 4 or 5. There were a couple reasons for this trip. One I had some paper work that I needed to get done which I am ashamed to say that due to reasons two and three didn't really get done. My really good friend Miriam left last night for America. It's been really hard watching everyone leave. I'm dreading my last month of service in a way because I'm going to feel like I am all alone. But anway, I wanted to spend some time Mir and get some teaching materials from here. She was an English teacher here and gave me a bunch of stuff to hopefully help me out when I go to Palestine in the fall. And then my third and final reason for coming down here was because the new volunteer arrived last night. Yep, our replacements landed in Benin around 8 last night. Where it then took them about 2 hours to make it through cutoms and get there baggage and make it out of the airport where several of us were waiting to greet them. There are 56 of them, I wonder how many will stay? We came to country with 59 and lost 20 some over the two years.

Me and Miriam at the airport

Camp Kandi

So this week marked the beginning of week two, the health week of Camp Kandi. What is Camp Kandi you ask yourself? Camp Kandi is a two week summer school designed by a PC English professor volunteer and led by various other volunteers from throughout the country. The camp is free and voluntary for any student in the local middles schools (there are 3) who wish to attend. The primary focus of this camp is to help these students develop their english skills, however the volunteer who created this camp wanted to take advantage of all potential helpers she would have with other pc volunteers as well as realizing that these student's education is in general greatly lacking so anything we could teach/do would be a benifit. So last week environment volunteer were invited to do sessions with the students once their english lessons were done and this week health volunteers are taking their place. Monday a volunteer taught the students about malaria, and today I talked about the three food groups, what they are, why they are important and which foods fall into each group. Tomorrow, myself and another volunteer will start talking about how AIDS is transmitted.

Today was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I've been doing this same lesson all around my region over the past couple months, and when I do the full session it lasts around 4 hours. Today I focused solely on the food groups, as well as making a comparison between the pourridge that they ate that morning before comming versus a reciept for a porridge that I wrote on the board. In total it lasted about 50 minutes give or take. But good grief was I tired by when I reached that 50 minute marker. And then I ended up doing it four times in all. I have developed a new found respect for teachers here. I always knew that their work wasn't easy, but wow.

Aren't Latrines Wonderful

So I have a latrine. This isn't probably a news flash since you know I don't have running water in my house. But I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about why latrines are such a joy to have. Incident one happened during my first year of service. I was standing in my latrine lifting the cover so that I could go pee. I had done this hundreds of times before, not a problem right? Not more than 10 sec after lifting the cover off a bat flew out of my latrine and at me. Needless to say I panicked, screamed and did a lot of waving my arms around. Ever since this I have taken to rattling the latrine cover a bit before I lift it up in hopes of making any such creatures fall to the ground before I lift up. The second incident happened just last week. Since my first year I've gotten pretty lax about covering my latrine. It's mostly due to the fact that I share it with the other people in my concession and they never ever cover it so it seems futile most of the time. Anyway, this time around I had hiked up my skirt and was standing on the little foot pedestal things squatting when I look down into the latrine and see a big mouse (i refuse to believe it was a rat) climbing the walls out of the latrine pit. Because I was in mid-going to the bathroom I couldn't leave my spot and had to just stand there motionless and hope that the mouse paid me no mind as it continued to climb out of the latrine pit and up the walls of my latrine on the the roof.

For the most part I don't really mind using a latrine. It's a pain when I'm not feeling well and I have to leave my house 20x a day and walk across my yard and the creatures that live there are definitely not friends of mine. But since becoming reliant on one it has shown me how much water a toilet uses and how wasteful they are. Just something to think about.