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.

Happy Birthday Mom

I am a horrible daughter and forgot that yesterday was my mom's birthday. She would have been 52. She was too young to have died when she did. The older I get the more that plays in my head. She had so much life to live, so many things to see and do. Not a week goes buy that something doesn't happen that I don't want to share with her. I can't count the number of times I've picked up a pen to write her a letter to tell her about something or other that's happend. Lord I wish she was still here. Never in the condition she was in for her illness was the personification of a living hell in my eyes. But in my weaker moments I long to be able to talk to her again, hear her laugh, have her hug me. I forget how bad it was while she was alive when I get to missing her.

So Happy Birthday Mom. I miss you and I'll always love you. And you can bet your bottom dollar I would have given you hell for getting to so old :D But I'm equally sure you'd have given me as much hell over the fact that I have as much gray hair as you.

Working or Should I Say Not Working in Africa

Who knew I would be posting again so quickly, not me that is for sure. but today has been an annoying day so i thought i would share it with you all to get a hint of the frustration peace corps volunteers often face. i am not even really sure where to begin. i guess i zill start with what happend today. you see, once in the beginning and once midway through our service our pc bosses will come up to our village and ask us a bunch of questions regarding everything from safety and security issues, to the type of work we are doing to asking us to talk about our cultural integration. After we finish up we go and meet with our in village bosses to discuss the kind of work we are doing, what problems they are having and what not. today was my meeting. it started out ok. i told them about how much of a struggle it was to get any work and how unless i do everything and pretty much hand it to my work partners it doesnt get done. i know we talked about a bunch of things and not all totally work related some had to do with peace corps and their training of us; what works and what doesnt, that sort of thing. my biggest issue in that regard had to do with language training, unfortunatly i did not really have any ways that i thought they could do it better. so after we finished talking at my house we went over to my health center where my me, my pc boss and another staff member met zith my village boss, the nurse and doctor of my health center. it totally felt like a parent teacher confrence. this is where things began to get uncomfortable. after talking and talking it came out that basically they were dissapointed in me as a volunteer because i was not doing the work they wanted me to do or thought i should be doing. this pissed me off because not once in the 14 months i have been here have they ever mentioned any work for me to do. for example, there are people who work with the health center by going out to other villages and give lessons over various health issues; they want me to be going to these and helping out. this meeting was the first time i even heard that they did this. i knew that water is a problem in my village so i offered to look into building a well for them. when i brought this decision to them they did not seem excited at all. they were very much whatever. today they bring up to my pc boss that water is a problem and they want to know if it is possible for pc to help build a water pu,p of some kind. did they tell me they wanted/needed this, no. it is times like this that i want to just wash my hands of it all and be like whatever, i am going home. i know that is not the answer though. i will keep you all posted as to what happens next.

On the Road Again, Just Can't Wait to Get on the Road Again

Well, as you can tell from the title of this entry I am about to get traveling once again. I am happy to report that after little over two weeks I am finally going to be returning to post. I've been gone forever and a day because on the 6 of this month I had to come down for a middle of service medical evaluation (all volunteers have to do it so don't worry) and i'm happy to say that i'm pretty damn healthy. i have ameobas which i have to take meds for when i get back to post but other than that i'm probably in better shape than i was when i left home. but anyway, the exam went to the 8 because i had to have a tb test (all health volunteers have to do this, so once again, don't worry). again i'm happy to report no tb here. the reason i did not go home after this was that health and environment volunteers had to do a HIV/AIDS training starting the 13. Well you see, i live so far away from where this training was being held that it would have been pointless and just plain uncomfortable to travel from the medical unit to post and then back down to this training. so i stayed down here. i'm pretty sure i've already explained all of this in an earlier post. i'll try to post pictures in the comming weeks from the training and give you a better overview of what we did. it wasn't anything too special, but like always it's nice to get everyone together. and it's not like i'd turn down an opportunity to spend a week with a shower, cnn, and air conditioning. you may be wondering why, if the training was done on friday am i still not back at post, well the answer is that i am taking advantage of a free ride. my peace corps superivors is scheduled to come by and visit my post this tuesday. so me and meagan have decided to wait around and ride up with her because peace corps staff always get to travel in nice air conditioned suv's. i'd take an suv trip over an 10+ hour taxi or bus ride anyday. the only down side is that having stayed here i've spent even more money. in the past two weeks i think i've blown 100$!! i'm a little freaked out about this b/c i'm suppose to be saving this money for my vacation to mali. gotta live like a hermit the next couple months to make up for this huge splurge. i guess that's it for now. i hope to have an opportunity to post again, but i have no idea when.

so until then...

Trying to Play Catch Up

Well, this was going to be letter (sorry gram) but I thought ya'll might find it interesting to hear what I've been up to, so here it is.

So last Friday after two weeks of planning and being up off one other time I actually was able to do a cooking demonstration for the women who come bring their kids in for vaccinations. Basically what the cooking demonstration consists of is teaching these women how to make the foods that they already more nutritiously. People here tend to eat a lot of empty calories, most carbs, stuff that really has no nutritional value. So what I did was take a food that everyone feeds their children bouille, or as we know it porridge, and show them by adding things, in this case peanut flour and mashed bananas they can make this be nutritious and help prevent malnutrition in children.

In the left corner is a mix of mashed bananas, sugar, and oil and in the middle is a mix of peanut and corn flour.

I want to focus what time I have left here on nutrition and trying to teach the people here how to use what they have more efficiently. I don’t know if it’s going to work because honestly, they don’t like change. We are talking about a nation that will literally eat the same thing every day for days on end. You may think you eat a lot of the same thing, say for instance you like spaghetti and meatballs, but I bet you can’t imagine eating it every day for lunch and possibly dinner for weeks at a time. We’d get sick of it first. So bringing in any kind of change is slow to say the least;

This is Safia my in village work partner. Here she is putting the whetted flour into the pot of boiling water to heat up.

which is partly why I am in the process of trying to plan/schedule nutrition lessons around my region. I want to target young girls and boys and teach them this information and get them to try some of the food so that when they become adults themselves there is at least a chance that they might bring some of these practices into their households.

This is one the women who had come in to get her child (the lump on her back) vaccinated. Somehow she become in charge of dishing up the food for the other women.

Earlier in the week I went up to Niger with Meagan to do a radio show over nutrition and Morainga. For all of you who don’t know what morainga is, it is a tree that can be found growing in most underdeveloped countries. It’s called the tree of life because every part of this tree can used for something, from putting the leaves in a sauce to eat to using bark and roots for various things. Anyway, this tree is incredibly nutritious and parts of our training when we first joined pc was to learn about morianga so that we could go back to our communities and teach them about it and encourage them to use it. It is a good supplement to make up for the fact that they are all malnourished pretty much too some degree.

Here are Meagan and I a couple minutes before we started the show.

The show went off without too many hitches. My French is bad which makes me super nervous when I have to speak it in front of others. And because I'm so nervous I tend to scew up even more, but I think I did better this time than last which makes me happy and proud of myself. The more I do this the more confident I hope I will become. I'm determined to keep improving my French. I also did a section of the signing off in local language. Well Meagan's local language not mine. I managed to fummbled my way through it, though lord know if anyone listening actually could understand what I said. It was good for a laugh though.

This Week in Cotonou

Every volunteer half way through their service must go through a middle of service medical exam. It's not fun. The doctors are wonderful, but when you are use to the efficience of American doctors/nurses it can sometimes get a little rough. Anyway, originally we were asked to make our appointments around the shuttle schedule. The shuttle is car that leave Cotonou and delievers/picks up mail and other goodies and delievers them to one of the three regional peace corps offices set up around the country. I was a good volunteer and did this. Well shortly after doing so, word got out that PC got funding for all of us to go through HIV/AIDS training. The problem was that this was schedule to happen two weeks after my medical exam. Now 2 weeks might not sound like that big of deal, but for me to get home and do so comfortably it takes 2 days and so thus leaving post to get to cotonou takes 2 days as well. The medical exam takes about 3 days. So basically I would have come down, when finished gone home and then like 4 days later turned around and come right back down again. There is no way I wanted to do this. Traveling in this country is too damn slow and uncomfortable. So I tried to reschedule my exam, and I was lucky enough to be able to do so, a bit. I got it pushed back a week to the 6, which exaplains why I am currently here in Cotonou.

So my midservice started on wednesday. It was a pretty routine thing, what health problems are you having yadda yadda yadda. Based on my answers i had to have some blood drawn and put on some medication for ameobas. I also had to have a TB test done, but that is standard for all health volunteers. Don't worry anyone all my tests came back normal, besides having ameobas, i think I'm healthier now than I have been in my life. The problem is now that my medical stuff is done, where am I going to stay because you see I still have like 4-5 days to kill before this HIV/AIDS training. Life is always an adventure here, even when it shouldn't be. I could stay in a hotel but that's a bit expensive especially after several days. Last night I got the doctor to let me spend another night here in the medical unit, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that much longer. I'm hoping so because it allows me tons of time on the internet. I've been able to talk to Patrick for the past three nights which has been fun. I miss being able to talk to people back home. But also the tons of time online is why I wrote this incredibly boring post. It's early, I can't get my stuff out of the room b/c everyone is sleep and since I have time I feel like I should write something. So here you are, one very boring blog. I promise to write something better soon. I will catch you all up on what I've been up to prior to comming down to Cotonou.

So here are some highlights about staying in Cotonou...

1. Hot Showers, I can't tell you how much I miss hot showers and for the first time in months I actually feel clean. We'll see how long that feeling lasts.
2. Internet access, it nice to be able to check email when I want and to do more than just check email, to have the time to surf a bit and look things up is refreshing
3. food, there is so much more food here than at post, i've had delicious pizza while here, as well as hummus and some sort of middle eastern cheesy dish, yummm (this is also a bad thing because you go through money like water whenever you come to visit)

That's it for now, more to come later.