The Future is Bright, but Unclear

I mentioned in my previous post that my time in PC is coming to an end. I know find myself looking towards the future and asking myself "now what?" I feel like I am graduating college all over again...saying good-bye to friends and a place I've called home now for over 2 years as well as choosing what path I will take as I move on from this amazing experience. Some volunteers are going straight home to look for jobs in what seems like a horrendous job market, some are going to travel and then go home before starting graduate school, and yet others are continuing on with Peace Corps. Some will stay in Benin but doing different work, but most will be going to different countries and again some will stay working in their same field (i.e. keep teaching English) while others will use these past two years experience to find a new job. So where do I fall in all this you ask?

Well I applied and was accepted into a volunteer program in Palestine teaching English and doing general youth outreach work. I had planned on traveling a bit with Patrick before hand to the neighboring countries of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. After finishing up in Palestine my plans were to spend the spring months working in a language immersion camp for french kids in France to help earn some money before going home for the summer and starting graduate school in the fall.

But I'm not sure if that is going to happen any more. I was recently offered another post withing Peace Corps. This time I would be volunteering in Cambodia as a Heath Education Leader. I would be more involved in the training of other volunteers in this position, but probably doing similar work as to what I have been doing. The only problem with this is that it is a new job and thus not very organized as to what they want/expect. But still a definite option.

However there a third option on the horizon. I am looking into going to Jordan with Peace Corps as a English teacher or a Youth Development Volunteer. Because I am switching sectors (I am currently a health volunteer and these positions are not health) I have to send in my resume again and get a letter of recommendation from my PC boss to see if I am qualified enough for either of these.

So as you can see options out the wazoo. I know I am blessed, because as one volunteer stated it is better to have several options than none at all. However it is stressful. I want to make the right decision, but I have no idea what that is or even if there is in fact a wrong decision to be made. All of the above will be great experiences that will help me grow and develop as well as give me skills for my next job. It's just making that choice.

The Beginning of the End

22 months ago I stepped on a plane heading to benin, west africa. boy did i not have a clue as to what I was getting myself into. all i knew was that i was to be a rural community health advior living two years in a small west african village. images of mud huts (mine, not theirs) filled my head. i pictured people eager for help, waiting only for someone to share their knowlege. and through it all not once did i consider how difficult communication would be. how naive i was. i am reflecting on this now (and probably will many times before I leave) because this past week all of the volunteers came into country with (35 out of the 59 we started with) were pulled together for a 3 day confrence in Ouidah. With a beautiful ocean backdrop for the confrence we relaxed either poolside or on the beach after day long sessions convering topics such as resumes, power statements, readjusting to the states and basically life after peace corps. This was the last time we were all together. Slowly one by one we will begin leaving to start our new projects, our new lives lives outside of Peace Corps, or should I say outside of Peace Corps Benin at least. Next week the first of our group will leave. 2 volunteers got picked to go do Peace Corps China, teaching english at universities and so they must leave next week so that they can have their 30 days of home leave (PC pays for volunteers to go home for 30 days if they decide to continue on with PC for another year). A lot will be leaving the end of June and after that we are all kind of sprinkled throughout July, August and Septemeber.

It has been a great time seeing everyone, but tinged with sadness as well. Saying goodbye is never easy especially considering all that we've been through together. I find myself looking around the room sometimes wondering who will I keep in contact with, who will move from being a Peace corps friend to being a real world friend. I would like to think they all will be but I am more realisitic than that.

So we started out with 15 health volunteers, but are only leaving with 7. Here we all are at our Close of Service Confrence in Ouidah. I made us all matching shirts.

Here's a close up the shirt. On front it says, "We Came, We Saw..." and on back it says "We stayed" and is followed by a map of Benin with all of our names and posts listed.

It has become tradition with the health sector to wear meme tissue (same fabric) to the close of confrence ceremony. meme tissue is used in this culture often as a sign of family and save for special events.

Our night were free to do with as we pleased, however we were pretty far from town so we stayed at our hotel for the most part. One night some of the volunteers decided to have a talent show/skit night. Well not many people were prepared so I was a filler telling a short story about the night I recieved my breakfast at 2 am by my host mama.

Here I am with a couple volunteers.

Ouidah in the Morning

Ouidah in the evening

My Home

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.