The World Changes Every Day

  The month that it all began!    This is an exciting blog post, because a lot of the things I was thinking about and hoping to do in months one and two finally started to happen. Mud Stoves I built my first mud stove with Azara, a young mother who’s my neighbor.   I had told several people that I would build stoves for them once they collected the clay and dried grass we need, and she was the first to get the materials together.   The “clay” we use is actually the sand from termite mounds.   There are a lot of termite mounds in this area, and the sand is very strong.   I built the stove in the evening, with Azara and a young boy from her concession who I think is named Gbaguidi.   We first mixed water with the mud and broke up most of the hardened chunks, and then mixed in little bits of dried grass.   Then we found three tall rocks to place under the pot we were going to use.   The pot has to rest on three rocks, and the stove is most efficient if the height of th

  I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance And when you get the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.   My theme song for Peace Corps so far has been “I hope you dance” by Lee Ann Womack.   I’ve listened to it so many times on my ipod, especially when I need a little encouragement.   It doesn’t always feel easy to dance – to live all the experiences here whole-heartedly, instead of holding back and “sitting it out” every now and then.   But the rewards have been moments of amazing sweetness and inspiration. There’ve been literal chances to take this song to heart.   One of these, a favorite day in village so far, was October 23 -   the day I made about 50 francs (around ten cents) for dancing in the marketplace.   When learning about Benin, I read that although about one third of all Beninese identify voodoo as their primary r

Two months done!   I realize I wasn’t able to post the last one until now – didn’t have internet access – so you’ll reading both at the same time.   But I’m glad I’ve started doing these 1-month “taking stock” posts.   At first I thought nothing new had been accomplished in this past month, but looking back through my journal I realize I have made a lot of progress in many ways. The Garden We still haven’t done much actual gardening work yet.   Part of it is because we’re waiting for a team from Niger to come give training to the women on how to grow plants using drip irrigation, and other topics.   Because of budget, logistics, and other issues, the team hasn’t made it down yet.   They should come any week now.   The second reason we haven’t been gardening is the season – the rainy season just ended and harvest is in full swing.   Almost every day, the women are in the fields, harvesting corn, peanuts, soy, cotton… My major victory, and really the defining factor of this mon

Water It’s the end of the rainy season.   In the months that come, I’ll experience the dusty wind called the Harmattan for the first time, the green grass will dry up, and the cattle will be herded miles from the village looking for food. I’ll also have to start putting a bit more thought into how to get water. Like most volunteers in Benin, I don’t have running water.   When I arrived in village about three months ago, one of the first things I bought was a large black plastic water barrel, and several plastic basins.   My water barrel lives behind my house, under the sloping tin roof, and whenever it rains I line up the plastic basins next to it and collect as much of the water running off the roof as I can.   Up until very recently, I was able to get plenty of water to meet my needs this way.   I boiled and filtered the water for drinking, and also used it for bucket baths, doing dishes and laundry, and washing my concrete floor.   But now, “whenever it rains” won’t be

One month down, 23 to go.   Today is my official “one month anniversary” as a Peace Corps volunteer.   I know when I read other people’s Peace Corps blogs, I wished there was more detail on what the work of Peace Corps was actually like.   I’m going to try to write a work-related post on the 15 th of every month – each anniversary – to keep track of what I’ve done. As I’ve mentioned before, my primary job in Peonga is to work with a women’s gardening group.   The group has been gardening for many years, but they recently received help from a partnership of SELF (an American NGO), ADF (another American NGO), and ADESKA (A Beninese NGO) to install a solar-powered pump and drip irrigation system.   Most gardening here happens in the dry season, because this is when people are free – during the rainy season they work in the fields, growing staples like corn and yams.   In past years the group had their garden near a stream, so they could water the plants.   With the new irrigation

One of the worst things about procrastinating on blog posts/ not having internet often is that it’s so hard to decide what in the world to write.  There’s so much!  I’ve been an official Peace Corps volunteer for about three weeks now.  This early part of service is focused on getting to know our communities.  I do lots of visiting people and walking around village.  The women’s gardening group I was invited to work with is getting a nice irrigation system with a solar-powered pump installed by an NGO, and they’re setting up a new garden.  We should start planting sometime this month, and when we do I will have my own plot in the garden to demonstrate growing new vegetables (like cabbage, lettuce, carrots, melons) that they don’t currently grow.  Not much gardening work going on right now, though.  I have started learning Fulani, with informal lessons twice a week and lots of opportunities to practice.   This is my first real trip away from my post; I’m spending some time in Parako

Meant to post this about a month ago, but haven't had internet - so here you go! Tomorrow morning, I and the 64 others in our training group will board a bus for the Ambassador’s house in Cotonou.  There, our trainers, Peace Corps staff, host families, and all of Benin (or anyone who is interested in watching the televised broadcast, anyway) will watch us take our oaths to become official Peace Corps volunteers.  The past four weeks since our post visits have gone by very fast.  We’ve been doing technical training – for us Environmental Action volunteers, this has meant learning gardening techniques, how to build improved woodburning stoves out of mud, how to set up a tree nursery and graft and plant trees, and how to conduct environmental education activities in schools.  Our training was a mix of classroom and hands-on activities, and we paid several visits to a village near Porto Novo for practical experience working with gardeners and building mud stoves.  We also had a

I could easily write pages and pages about my two week visit to Peonga, and maybe that’s why I haven’t written much yet – it’s hard to choose what to tell.   How can I sum up an entire place?   Every day in Peonga was filled with some moments of inspiration, heartwarming interactions, learning and accomplishment, and other moments of extreme boredom and lack of direction and purpose.   Site visit was easy and hard, exciting and slow, joyful and frustrating.   One afternoon I got a phone call from a current volunteer in Peace Corps Benin’s peer support network, to ask how I was doing.   I was sitting under a beautiful mango tree and feeling great, gushing about how great my site was to her over the phone.   Just five hours later, after having spent a long evening sitting at my host family’s boutique (convenience store) with nothing to do, all the conversation around me in Fulani which I couldn’t understand, not interacting with anyone, I had a tearful phone conversation with someone