Burned Bus

I shared with all of you about my near death burning bus experience. A couple weeks ago Meagan had to head down south and en route to her desination she found that the remnants our or bus was still there so she stopped and took these pictures. Here is what's left of our bus...

I am pretty sure that I was in the third row from the back and my friends were in the row in front of me.

Getting a little bit older

I'm 27 now. I'm now closer to 30 than I am 20. When did that happen? Wasn't it just yesterday that I was walking across my college campus or at the vary least leaving home to go to Africa? But it was a good birthday none the less. I wanted to avoid just sitting at home on my ass staring at my white walls contemplating the fact that I am another year older so I made plans with Meagan. She is friends with missionaries in a neighboring town and they make their own ice cream from time to time so I asked Meagan if she could talk to them about us comming over and making ice cream for my birthday. What I thought would be a simple, yet very tasty birthday turned out to be a three day birthday extravaganza. Day one was not even suppose to happen. It was the day before my birthday and I hadn't planned on going up to Malanvile till the next day. I was hanging around the house cleaning up and doing laundry when Meagan texted me. She was bored. One thing led to another and I ended up going to her place.

The night turned out to be a typical night of cooking watching Dawson's Creek. We made a really good salad with breadsticks dinner that night. If you could understand how hard it is to get vegetables up here you'd understand the importance of us actually eating a salad, but anyway. For dessert we tried to make this pistachio pudding Meagan's had for ages. You may be wondering how it is we can make pudding here, but instant pudding is a miracle. Cold water stirred into it and voila you have pudding. It's great! But for some reason it didn't really work for us that night so instead we used it to dip cookies into.

Here we are with our awsome salads and bread sticks.

Day two was birthday day! The day was started off with a coffee bread that Meagan had made the day before.

Me eatting the bread, yumm!

Since it was Sunday we decided to go to church. Like I said earlier Meagan has befriended these missionaries who live in the neighboring village. Each Sunday they hold service not terribly far from where she lives. Sometimes I go with her. They are nice people (man and wife with you child) and it's a really good way for me to practice my french. But anyway, since it was my birthday we did a couple things that we don't normally do, well I don't normally do I should say. The first being trying to look nice. It's hot as well as dirty here. So I am usually of the opinion why bother with makeup or doing my hair or any thing such as that because honestly I sweat off the make usually before I leave the house and am dirty within an hour. But it is fun to dress up once and awhile and so when Meagan suggested doing so for church that day I was like what the hell. I hadn't brought any of my nicer dresses with me so I couldn't look too nice, but I put some make up on and did my hair a bit different than what I was use to. We then possed for "glamour shot" in the living room. Sorry none of those pictures got posted. In honor of my birthday Meagan made me a balloon crown. Yes, Meagan is one of those people who knows how to make balloon animals and such. The crown was awsome and I wore while I walked through town on my way to church. Needless to say the local loved it. Many stopped up to ask us where we were going or what we were doing because obviously we don't wear balloon hats every day so they knew something was up.

Me with my balloon birthday crown before leaving the house.

Me outside the church, wearing my birthday crown.

After church we went to the market trying to make for my birthday dinner. We settled on burgers made from beans. I know that sounds probably horrible, or at the very least increadibly strange, but they are rather tastey. You cook your beans in one pot and in the frying pain you saute onions and garlic. When the beans are done you drain them stir in the onions and garlic add an egg and some oat me, mix to together. Make patties and then fry. But anyway... we got the ingrediants we needed for dinner and made it back to Meagan house at which point Meagan asked me if it was ok if Melanie came over for my birthday as well. I am not as close with Melanie as Meagan is obviously, but I still consider her a friend so I was like sure. By the way Melanie is a german graduate student living here working on fish ponds for school. So she came over and we decided to go tchucking. Tchuke is a localy made beer. It is kind of sold on the sly in these shacks around town, but not really on the sly because everyone knows where they are or where to get it if they want it.

Me, Meagan and Melanie with our tchuke.

After tchuking we went back to Meagan's house to prepare dinner.

Here I am with our dinner, burger with sweet potatoes, yumm!

What a great day! The following day was just as good to. This was ice cream day! The missionaries were cool with hosting us and making ice cream for my birthday. The only thing we needed to do was bring ice since she couldn't make enough to feed all of us. So that morning before we left Malanvile our mission was to find blocks of ice. It took some time, but it was actually suprisingly simple. I was afraid that we weren't going to find any because the power get cut a lot up here so often people don't have electricity enough to keep things like fridges running in order to make something like ice. But after asking around a bit we were able to find people who sold ice. So we packed up the ice and headed down to Guene. The missionaries were cool enough to also make the lunch of our choosing as well. We chose pizza and salad.

Here I am making ice cream. Since it was still my brithday weekend I was allowed to lick the beaters.

So that was my birthday extravaganza. After eatting ice cream we hung around for awhile and chatted. We also did henna tatooes, which here are call lalo, on our legs/ankles. After this I knew it was time to head back to post I had been gone too long as it was. So as it stands I am another year older now, any wiser, well that's debatable. But I'm still standing and I guess that's all that counts.

Until next time...

AIDS Workshop

Okay people I'm doing what I said I would, playing catch up. But here's the deal, ya'll need to start commenting more.

So AIDS "officially" has not touched Benin as much as it has many other African countries. Last records report 2-3% of the population is infected, however, most of believe these number to not be accurate. I have a couple reasons why I do not believe these "official" numbers. One is that there is a huge stigma attached to AIDS tests here so many people are still not getting them. Life is easier for them if they don't know if they have it or not. Another factor is the doing the test itself. More and more health centers are offering it but not all of them so those people who live out in the brush will never be tested. Another reason I feel these numbers are false is that all of the neighboring countries have significantly higher AIDS rates than we do. Benin does not have some protective bubble around it protecting it from this disease, especially considered how much crossing boarders does happen.

But anyway, even if these numbers were correct the best way to keep them low was to keep educating the population, keep teaching them how to prevent getting sick in the first place. I had been doing mini lectures on HIV to the girls in my girls club but I wanted to get to a wider range of people, especially boys. Because fidelity is an unheard of concept here I wanted to reach out to the young men in my community and teach them how to protect themselves and thus others from HIV. I decided to organize a two day workshop focusing on HIV/AIDS, what it is, how you can get it and what you can do to prevent it. I worked with 40 students, 20 boys and 20 girls. I asked volunteers to come up and help me do this workshop. I knew that a topic such as this could not be discussed all together, I needed to divide the group girls with me and the other female volunteers and the boys with the male volunteers. It was touch and go for awhile if I would even have male volunteers comming up to help. Out of the three originally asked two backed out thankfully on the day of the workshop a new volunteer to the region had come by to visit and was willing to stay and help out.

The activities I had originally planned on were to last for a day and a half, with the end of day two for review and getting the students involved by having them give presentations over the information. Well, I underestimated how much the kids already knew and we flew through the information for both days in day one. I was paniking at this point. What was I going to do for day two? I had already arranged for the kids to be out of school so I had to do something with them. But it was obvious by their behavior that we couldn't continue as planned or they would have revolted out of boredom. I was also in a tizzy that day because the lunch that I had arranged to come never did. I had asked a woman who makes and sells lunch to come and do so for my children. She said no problem and because this lady is my friend I believed her. Because I was busy the day before the workshop I was unable to go back an remind my friend to make the rice but I hoped she would remember because we had just talked about it the day before. Well she didn't remember. Thankfully my friends were there running the workshop for me so that I could be free to take care of the smaller details like providing food to all the participants. It was probably better that way anyway my friends have better french than I do. But anyway back to the workshop.

So we did several activies with the students. The first one entailed talking about our body parts. Since we were going to be spending 2 days talking about sex I thought we should familiarize

ourselves with the various terms used for our body parts. The idea behind it was that there is only one word for arm yet how many for penis? Also kids here have no idea what masterbation is. It was one of the terms we were to discuss but none of them had even heard of it before so we let it drop. We got them using condoms. For many of the students this was the first time they had ever seen or touched one. We taught them how to correctly use and dispose of them. We also wanted them to see how strong condoms are so we blew a bunch of them up and put questions inside. We then played hot potatoe and whoever had the condom last had to break it and answer the question inside. It was a lot harder than what they thought it would be to do this, but it was great to watch.

We did another activity where students took two dice that had the names of four fluids that transmit HIV and two that do not. The student then had to role the dice and explain what situation would put the two fluids that came up together. For example if one dice said breast milk and another dice said saliva, you could said during breast feeding these two liquids would be in contact with each other and that the person is at risk for catching HIV. The picture to the left show me with the two dice I made. The other white girl is Jaren, a friend/volunteer who came up to help me with this workshop.

Because we went through the activities so fast I was a little freaked out as I said earlier about what to do day two. I wanted these kids to be peer educators so in order for them to do that I wanted to work with them on how they would share this information with others. Day two was spent doing this. We divided them into four group, each group was responsible for different information. One did transmittion, one prevention, one condoms and one risky behaviors each group was asked to find some way to share their knowledge of their topic with the rest of us. The first time around they were horrendous. Their lack of general knowlege on how to do presentations would shame even an elementary school child. During round one basically each group got in front of the class and made one kid do all the talking while they just stood there looking at the ground, and the one kids who was doing the talking was doing so by reading directly from a piece of paper. After two groups proceeded to do exactly this we stopped them and gave them some feed back and what we wanted and expected. Basically everyone had to talk/particpate. We wanted some sort of introduction as to who they were and what they were going to talk about. We took a break then to give each group time to regroup and rework what they were going to present. It was awsome to see some kids really work at this and make their presentation awsome. Others, I was sad to see used this time to nap instead. The next round went so much better. This time most had come up with some sort of skit to prensent their information. However there were still the problem of not everyone participating and also when presenting information to group it is necessary to speak towards them not with your back towards them. Also covering their mouth with there hand while talking was a common problem. So with that feedback we sent them back to work on their skits. This final time I was blown away by 2 out of the four groups. There were two that worked so hard and you could tell. The other two, well one just didn't care and you could tell. They didn't apply any of the feedback or instructions we had given them and still had only one or two people out of the group doing all the talking. The other group I felt really bad for because they tried to please us and each time they did better than the time before but in the end they still sucked.

And so that was my AIDS workshop. It was stressful but it was a good learning experience for them and for me. The lessons learned from it have definetly helped me in my current work.

Here is a picture of everyone who participated day two. Can you find the white people? It's like playing were's Waldo. :)

So I said a couple posts back that I would try and catch you all up on my comming and goings during those months when I didn't post, so here is my first attempt.

So I was lucky enough to participate in two Thanksgiving dinners this year. The first first of which was the unplanned one. Thanksgiving fell not long after a two days AIDS workshop I had held in my village (I will talk about this in another post) and so I was busy running around trying to wrap up everything for that as well as get things ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Because I had to go down to Parakou to make some color prints (how sad that the closest color printer to me is four hours away, but that's another can of worms) I said that I would also pick up veggies while I was there. (Again how sad that I have to travel 4 hours to get vegetables) I wasn't looking forward to the trip but it's a necessary evil and I veiwed it as such. I don't remember why but I ended up going down with Noel instead of taking a taxi. I thought going with Noel in a Peace Corps vehicle the trip shouldn't take no time at all. WRONG! We made so many stops along the way that the normal 4 hour trip ended up taking around 7! By the time we rolled into Parakou it was already getting dark and I had about a half hour to get to the store and pick up some of the things I needed. My plan had originally been to get back up to my post after buying all the stuff the same day because I had to work the following morning, however getting into Parakou so late threw that plan out the window. However also saying in Parakou at this time were all the TFL volunteer (english teachers) they were all together for a Peace Corps training which happend to fall during Thanksgiving so they were using the workstation to fix dinner. And what a wonderful dinner it was too. Turkey legs, fruit salad, green bean casserole and so much more that i have forgotten by now. The next day I woke up early enough to finish all the work I had come to Parakou to do and then catch a taxi back up to Kandi to celebrate what came to be my second Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving last year was amazing and it was mostly due to the work of the older volunteers. They had planned ahead and asked their familys back home in America to send the "traditional" foods associated with Thanksgiving. This year we wanted to make Thanksgiving as nice for the new volunteers as the older volunteers made it for us last year. So between Meagan, Alex and I we asked our families to send us the things we each felt we needed to have a great Thanksgiving. Meagan took care of the stuffing and pecan pie, Alex found and cooked the turkey and thanks to my wonderful family I was able to provide the pumpkin and cherry pies as well as cranberry sauce.

Here I am after making the pumpkin pie, I am about to put into the oven.

Ryan and Alex were in charge of the turkey this year.

Me showing off part of our delicious dinner.

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.