The World Changes Every Day

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. ...

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....