Benin is making me afraid of the dark

So about two nights ago I couldn’t really sleep. Not that is anything new because now that it is getting hotter I’ve noticed that I don’t sleep real well. Anyway, I was tossing and turning trying to fall back asleep when I heard a rustling noise around my door. A little freaked out I couldn’t deicide on what to do. My lantern was next to my bed because I read before I go to bed, but my matches were near my door and thus near the noise. Thankfully the other day I noticed that I had a book of them in my kitchen cabinet so I carefully got out of my bed, I didn’t want to frighten whatever it was making the noise, and made my way into the kitchen and fumbled through my cabinet until I found the matches. Lighting up the lantern I look around my walls and ceiling, which has become a habit of mine. Why you may ask? Because you never know what is creeping and crawling around and at various time I have found various insects (spiders, cockroaches) on my walls. Sure enough, I saw the biggest “spider” of my entire life. It had to be at least 4 minutes long. I was torn, do I try and kill this scary scary monster in front of me or do I go and investigate the noise I in my living room/bedroom. I attempt to kill my “spider” but it moves to fast and I can’t reach it. So I decide to investigate the creature in my living room. I take my broom and hit my screen door. Nothing runs out, so some of my fears of giant rats are gone. So I use my broom to push open the screen door and again I don’t see anything. I would have left it at that and gone back to bed except for the “thing” in my kitchen. My bug killer was outside; going to open the door I look down and guess what was there? A lizard, I hadn’t imagined hearing noises. I can deal with a lizard more than I can a mouse or god forbid a rat. Anyway, I go and get the bug spray and armed with it in one hand and my lantern in the other I go in search of my “spider”. It had moved while I was gone but with the spray I could still get it. I sprayed it once and it fell onto my kitchen table but the damn thing was able to crawl right back up. I spray it again, and it falls to the table once again, it still doesn’t die right away instead it crawls away under my stove. With that much poison on it, I was convinced that it had crawled under my stove to die. I went to bed. The next morning while lying in bed I see something out of the corner of my eye on the floor in my kitchen. I think at first that it’s a mouse or a lizard. Putting shoes on (shoes always make me feel more secure when killing something) I grab my broom once again and go to investigate. Thankfully it is neither; it is instead the “spider” from last night. I couldn’t tell if it was dead or not so found something heavy to drop on it. Satisfied that it was dead I found a piece of paper to pick it up. It had 10 legs so it couldn’t be a spider. And if it wasn’t at least 4-5 inches long I’d be surprised. The body on the thing was huge and I could even see the hairs on its leg. So what hell was this thing that I killed? I took a picture of it, but I don’t have a way to load it up right now. I will try and show you all soon. Things like this are making me afraid of the dark.

I am the scary house

So I was sitting at the health center like I normally do, writing in my journal when I look up and see two little girls a couple yards from me, staring at me. Being stared at is nothing new, comes with being the only white person for miles and miles and the first one most have ever encountered. Anyway, these two girls were giggling and then one ran up to me, said hello shook my hand and ran off. This must have given the other girl courage, because before I could blink the other girl was over doing the same thing. This brought the me to the realization that I have become the scary house that is often used in tv shows or books have a bonding experience for kids. You know what I’m talking about; usually a show will have an episode where there is talk of a haunted house and how the kids dare each other to run up and touch the door. I have become that door, that scary house.

Forever and a day

This is from the 11 of this month

It’s been forever and a day I know. It’s not my fault, blame it on African internet, or recently the lack there of. It’s amazing really, you get use to having something and then when it’s taken away you’re like, what the heck, I was using that. Only to remember, oh yeah, I’m in Africa stuff like that is suppose to happen. So what was I up to during the lovely month of January, since I am pretty sure I didn’t post anything, or if I did, I only posted once. Well, I welcomed the New Year in with style, rocking it out in Malanville with Megan, Audrey, Ryan and Michael. Dinner, dancing, wine and Dawson’s Creek what more could 5 twenty somethings want/need to welcome in 2008? A few days later I found myself on a bus heading down south to Ouidah for training. Periodically throughout the year different sectors (in my case the health sector) get together and talk about what they’ve been doing and get further training and ideas about what they can be doing at their posts. It lasted a week, and though I was looking forward to seeing all my health pals, I was not really looking forward to the conference its self. But I’m glad to say that I was wrong, and that the conference went really well. It did what any good conference does, it inspires you to want to go out and change the world, or at least in this case your village. It is not until you reach your village however that reality starts to crash down around you and you realize that this new wonderfully awesome things you were taught about, well they are easier said than implemented. So for most of the month of January I have been trying to figure out what to do with myself over the next two years. Big surprise, huh, since I believe in most of my posts or letters to you all, I have mentioned this “trying to figure out what I’m doing here”. The PC gives us things that they would like us to work on, such as Morgana trees, soy, mosquito nets, mud stoves and so on. However, over the past few weeks I have realized that my village already knows and uses this kind of stuff. Well, except for the mud stoves, but I was told that people would probably not want to use them b/c they are comfortable with what they have and know, and are not likely willing to change. So the few ideas I came here with are slowly one by one being shot down. So I’ve kinda been in a discouraged frame of mind here lately. But then this past Friday, I did my first health lesson for the women who come in to get their babies vaccinated. I give the information in French and the midwife that I work with translates it all into local language for me. Or at least I believe she’s translating it into local language, she could be singing the lyrics to a Greatful Dead song for as much as I understand local language (which is Mokole, incase I’ve never mentioned it before). I was so nervous before I started, and I told Safia (the midwife) this and she asked me why, and I explained that this was the first time I had done this before and she was like it’s going to be okay, you’ll be fine. And I was. There were times that she didn’t understand what I was saying; thankfully I had everything written down so between that and my retrying to explain the concepts in more basic french everything went really well. It is amazing how something so small as a half hour lesson on breast feeding can change my disposition. To finally feel as if I have accomplished something is so wonderful, I actually feel like I am earning the right to be here, instead pretending like I actually have the right to be here like I usually do. May the work keep coming. My hope is to keep doing the lessons every Friday with the women who come for vaccinations, but change the topic I speak on every month or so since different women come each week. I am going to start up my girl’s club health lessons this week as well. My two new project ideas is to start a prenatal group for women who pregnant with their first child and to do a health conference of sorts on women’s health for the fathers in my community. Men rule everything here and very few have any respect whatsoever for women. I want to explain what it is important for the woman to go to the doctor for prenatal check ups, and why she needs to eat better than what she does, stuff like that for the most part. I am hoping that I can get enough interest to start a weekly or month group to continue on teaching them. But we’ll see. Everything here is just wait and see for the most part.

Greeting from Far Away

So I'm actually at a computer for once, one that actually has an american keyboard instead of a french one. for those of you reading this who doesn't know the difference basically the m, z, a are all in differnt places an there are so many more punctuation marks available. anyway, so i'm in cotonou for the day because i had been down south in ouidah for the past week going through some health training. it was a pretty great week over all. this was the first time all 10 of us had been together since we all left for our posts, so basically 3 months. the week was a typical american style confrence, filled with lectures both good and useless. What was totally awsome was that first the place was air conditioned, which probably seems like something pretty minor, but when you are use to 90 degree weather at least every day a little bit of air conditioning is like a bit of heaven here on earth. The other great thing about this week was the food!! i had a week full of vegetables, fruit and actual 3 meals a day, plus snacks, it was way cool. i probably gained 10 lbs. for those interested ouidah is on the coast of benin and played an important part in their history. the bay of ouidah is where many slaves were shipped out from. to mark this location they have this monument that is an arch way that dipicts men and women in chain, i cna't really discribe it, but it's pretty cool and very moving. the monument is called the point of no return, which would be a pretty awsome name for something had it not had the history that it does.
the week overall was a great motivator. i am really excited to get back to my post and try and implement the new strategies and information we recieved. Also during this week was the voodoo celebration. i'm sure i talked to most of you before i left about how voodoo is thought to have originated in benin. it's actually pretty interesting, unfortunately, because i come from the north i don't have a lot of experince/interaction with it. but the annual celebration was this week and i guess it is a pretty big deal. we went, but i was pretty disapointed. there was more speeches than anything else. maybe i'll check it out again next year if i'm in the area, but i definetly won't travel the 10-12 hours needed from my post to do it.
i'm sad to say that the safari i was suppose to go on at the end of this month/beginning of feb has been called off. we couldn't agree on a week and then those of us who didn't care got upset about the constant change and back out. so now it is up in the air.

i guess that's all for now. i'm heading to parakou tomorrow and will spend the night there because, well i live too damn far from cotonou to do all this travel in one day. more to come later...

Happy New Year!

Happy 2008 everyone! Where in the heck did 2007 go? So how does one ring in the new year in Africa? By having a dance party of course :) I spent New Years Eve in Malanville with two other volunteers. Benin is different than the USA in that they celebrate the new year actually on the new year, where as we do everything the night before. So during the day of new years eve, me, meagan and ryan went on a pirogue ride along the Niger River. A pirgoue by the way is a tiny wooden boat. The one we were on was only big enough for the three of us and the two boys who steared/paddled. It was really fun and relaxing, well maybe i wouldn't go so far as to say relaxing because it was a tiny boat and any shift of body weight caused the whole thing to move. Not great on my nerves. After that it was about lunch time, which being in Malanville of course ment igame pile, which is pounded yams (not sweet like in the usa) served with a sauce. it is great, a specialty of the north. After that we headed back to Meagan house because another volunteer was suppose to be comming into to celebrate with us also. Sure enough she was waiting at the house when we got there. Because it was the hot part of the day we mostly just sat around her house for awhile, chatting and listening to music. Because it was a holiday and there was a fairly large group of us together, we decided to go out for tchuck which is a noncarbonated, fermented millet beer made i think only in the north. it kind of reminds me of apple cider that has gone bad, but better tasting than that makes it sound. By the time we wrapped up there, by there I mean this tiny shed like building that we were sitting in drinking, it was getting late so we decided to head back to Meagan's for dinner. Ryan and Meagan made dinner while I dj'd the dance party. Let me just say Audrey can dance. After dinner we moved our chairs outside and sat around talking. It was a really good conversation, something that went beyond the general stuff the most volunteers talk about when they get together (poop, food, where do you get your water from). I remember we discussed where we were this time last year. I knew of course that I was at Becky's house because she always has something at her house New Years Eve. I believe we played charades that year but i could be mistaken. We then went around and answered the question, what makes us tick. This was a hard question for me to wrap my head aruond. The best I could think of and I know I ddin't articulate it was well trying to be a global citizen. Trying to figure out what my role in the world is and will be and trying to do as little damage as possible. It was after this that i reprised my role as dj and moved our dance party outside, much to the delight of Meagan neighbors who watched from their doorway. So 2008, the year of Benin, was brought in with good music, good friends, laughter and dancing. If this is a sign of what the new year is going to hold, i think i'm in for a great time.

Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. I miss you all and have been thinking about everyone tons and tons. I dont have time to write about what i did this holiday season; but it will be comming soon. I just wanted you all to know that you are in my thoughts.

love,
jenn

Merry Christmas

Wow, has it been a long time or what. I have wanted to write beofre now, but the internet is down in our workstation so I had to use a internet cafe computer and they are usually so slow and so busy that i dont have the time to write a proper post. So it is four days till Christmas and I have sweat running down my back. Now if I was from Texas or Louisanna or something, I wuldnt think anything of this, but I am not. As an Indiana girl it is not Christmas until snow is falling, my nose is running and I am so cold that I am shivering so hard it hurts. In a way I am glad it feels like July here, because it makes it feel less like Christmas. And really since my village is a muslim village, if it wasnt for my calendar I could forget its december altogether really. So this makes it all easier to be away from you all, the family and friends whom I love and miss.

So you might be wondering what I am infact doing for Christmas. Well, like I said earlier my village doesnt do the whole Christmas thing; hozever, they do do Tabasky, which is holiday that i know involves the killings of goats, but other than that I know nothing; oh yeah and it is based on the lunar calendar so its date changes year to year. Anyway, the reason I am not going to be learning more about this is because I have gone south to Bohicon this holiday season because the health volunteer is working on doing some stuff at some of the local villages and a near by orphanage. She needed some helpers so I got on the bus and came 8 hours to give my help. I know we will be giving out toys to some kids, there was not enough money to get a toy for everyone; though everyone will get somethng, perhaps some candy or something if not a toy. And then there is going to be a good meal will be involved because that is something most of these kids really lack. So anyway I am going to be down here working on this until the Christmas, and then the day after I am going to be heading back home.

In other news I want to give a big huge thankyou to all of you who put stuff in the box to send to me. I recieved it last week, which was amazing timing since it was on the last mail run before Christmas. Everything was wonderful, you guys are awsome, thank you so much.

I guess it is time to wrap this up because I am in the internet cafe and people are waiting for me. I miss you and love you all and my thoughts are with all of you this holiday. Keep your fingers crossed that this time next year I will be able to be there with you in person.

Until next time...