The World Changes Every Day

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 pho...

Peonga is off the beaten path.   Very.   My journey there on Sunday, August 6, started at 4:45 am when my alarm clock went off.   After a bucket bath and a bowl of baobab “bouillie” (gruel) for breakfast, my host parents drove me to the intersection where I and other volunteers were to meet our bus.   Our counterparts from post were also there – they had come to Porto Novo to meet us.   The two previous days had been a workshop with them to go over the work we will do together.   Twilight turned to morning as we waited for our bus, got on, got off to take a more comfortable bus, and loaded luggage, finally leaving at 7:40 (instead of the official departure time of 7:15).   Our destination: Parakou, Benin’s second largest city, 7-8 hours away from Porto Novo.   Other than the speed bumps (which were placed in sets of 6, one right after the other, far too frequently along the road),   I enjoyed the ride.   It was our first real foray ou...

I just got back from my 2-week post visit to Peonga!  Several blog posts are to come about my adventures there, so stay tuned.  Several of you have asked about other ways to stay in touch with me, especially my mailing address. I've finally gotten around to posting my address on this blog - it's at the right-hand side of the page.  I might get another address later, but this one should work fine for now.  A shameless plug for contact from home: letters and care packages would be great!  I will have lots of free time at post, so I'll try to write back to anyone who writes to me and send it using a cool Beninese stamp.  For care packages, anything you can think of would be great.  Unperishable food, seasonings, etc.  Reading material is also a good idea.  We have a good book sharing system among volunteers here, so if you send me a paperback book, or magazine, or anything I'll pass it on once I'm done with it.  Padded envelopes are much ...

For the next two years, I will be living in a two-room cement house with a tin roof, in a village of 8,000 with no electricity or running water. There are no paved roads in my entire commune (the Beninese equivalent of a county). Get out your detailed maps of Benin, and draw a big star with my name on it on…Peounga, Kalale Commune, Borgou District! In case your map doesn’t include that level of detail, my site is located in northeastern Benin. We learned our sites on Friday, and based on my info packet it seems like Peace Corps has given me my dream post. Here’s a summary of what Peounga’s like and what I’ll (theoretically) be doing there: Agriculture and Environment The area around Peounga is prominently agricultural – main crops are cotton, corn, and sorghum. Cattle herding/raising is equally important. My site is very close to a large national forest (the Three Rivers Forest) as well. The northeast of Benin is predominantly flat savannah, drier than the south. Temperature-wi...

When I was little, “dress-up” was one of my favorite games.  I didn’t have the mass-produced, cheap satin Disney princess dresses; instead, all my dress-up costumes were real clothes that we got from thrift stores, hand-me-downs, or other sources.  There was a black-and-white former prom dress that I remember, several folky outfits that served for “little house on the prairie” reenactments, striped shirts that were great for pirates…and plenty home-made costumes from Halloween.  Dress-up morphed into full-blown living room theatre as I got older, the same costumes providing scope for historical plays based on the “American Girl” series and “Ranger Rick” stories about animals sharing environmental messages.     I distinctly remember worrying that I wouldn’t like to play dress-up any more when I grew up.  If I could go back in time, I would tell little six-year-old Bethany that she has nothing to worry about – I have successfully become an ...

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that I’m spending the first several weeks of Peace Corps Training here in Porto Novo learning Bariba, a language spoken in Northwestern Benin. I and my classmate (another EA volunteer) are two weeks into our Bariba-learning adventure now. It’s intense – most days we have language class from 8:00-12:30 and again from 1:30-5:00, with one half-hour break in both the morning and the afternoon. Some of the time is also spent learning about cross-cultural topics. We started with greetings. This sounds like a simple enough topic, something that could probably be covered with the equivalent of “Hello, how are you?” But greetings are very, very important in Benin, even more so in the North than in the South. When I told my host father that I was learning Bariba, he said that up north I could expect to spend up to half an hour greeting someone else. Accordingly, we have learned a plethora of greetings for every occasion. There are the usual “good morn...