Bisous du Benin!

(written 23Sept2010)

So I'm officially in village! I've been doin the real deal since Monday (the 20th) and so much has already happened!! My homologue is keeping me super busy, and I feel like it'll be a while before I get the Peace Corps boredom. Let me apologize in advance, cause this was kind of hastily written, and might be a bit of a chore to read.

Sunday was my moving day. I somehow managed to be magically assigned a taxi all to myself, which was good because I had a lot of stuff to move around. After driving like 6 hours up from Porto-Novo, I had to stop in Basilla, which is Shannon's town) because a volunteer whose post has closed left a lot of stuff for me: two tables, two chairs, a cot, a giant water basin, general tupperware type things for food storage. We brought all that stuff to Penelan, and unloaded, and then backtracked 2 mi. to Pennessoulou (which is where my friend and closest volunteer Heather lives) to pick up the bedframe and giant food chest the carpenter made for me. The food chest is like an armoire with mosquito netting on the doors so that mice and bugs can't get to your food. It's super rad. My best purchase. A bunch of old ladies showed up at my house out of nowhere to help me move, and wouldn't let me do anything- they kept taking bags out of my hands and carrying them in. Heather's neighbor Alassane (he's a dude fyi) zemmed over with Heather to check out the house and for a brief visit. After they left there was a mini “welcome-Michelle” dance party in front of the health center! And they sure do love a dance party. The dancing isn't that hard core, there's mostly just like 4 or 5 women swaying, but they really really like it when I come dance with them. And I really really like to do it! We went to the buvette (bar) after and had some dinner, and that was pretty much it. See! Totally busy!

Monday I tried to unpack most of the day. I don't think anything really happened in the morning. In the afternoon Alassane and his wife brought Heather to town again because Penelan was apparently having some sort of fete in celebration of women? Which was just another dance party in our marche area. But this one was bigger! And you give candy and Nigerian 5 dollar bills to people who are dancing well, which really means everybody. So the candy keeps getting passed from person to person. And why were we using Nigerian money? We all went to buvette again and had Malta, which is Guiness' version of near-beer. It kinda tastes like molasses. They made us drink two bottles each.

On Tuesday I saw my very first, real life, not kidding, human baby, BIRTH! My homolouge had told me that I had to give a speech on vaccinations around 8:30, and when she wasn't at my house by 9ish I decided to mosey on over to the health center. A baby had just finished being born, and they were cleaning it off! I thought that was exciting. And all the villagers kept telling me “Good job!” and “Thank you!”. And all I did was show up late and hold the baby. As soon as the first mom got settled, one of the women who actually works with us at the health center, and has been ready to pop for a while, started going into labor, and I got to see that sucker beginning to end! I gotta say, for being in the middle of the bush in Africa, my midwives really did a great job. There are a couple weird things they do here though- mostly they will not let the woman cry out, and some mommas get whacked by a midwife if they get too loud. But that's pretty much how Beninese people react to everything. Once the baby came out it got a little on the whiny side, and the midwife that was cleaning her gave her a few good whacks. That's right old African lady, get 'em started early. They pierce the ears of all the girls, and they do it right after birth. The ears are so soft, they just push the earring right in. That was cool. The moms also have like zero rest time. I saw both of the mothers from that morning walking around at the vaccination event later that afternoon. Mothers generally go back to the fields like pronto. Hmm, what else? The weirdest thing about the birth to me was the placenta, because I guess I had never really seen one before. It looked kind of like a heart because there was just so much blood in it and it was all veiny. Cindy! I thought of you carrying your placentas at the hospital!

Anyway after all that, the vaccinations were supposed to happen and I was supposed to give my speech. But my homologue disappeared probably to do something important, so I hung out at the event for a couple hours, and some women showed me how to more efficiently shell peanuts. It was fun! I never did give a speech. Which is probably really for the best.

Wednesday we had a mini Peace Corps reunion! There are five of us that live fairly close together (fairly, not super). Jared (english teacher), Shannon (environment), Eric (health like me), and Heather (english teacher too). Shan and Jared came to my house in the morning and we made kick ass mac and cheese from the Peace Corps cookbook. We didn't have any onions, so I went to ask my homologue (I'm just gonna call her by her name now, because homologue is a lot to type out- her name is Reine). Instead she just gave me a bowl of onions and tomatoes and and eggs from her chickens. Fresh eggs, yum! That woman is such a gem, I'm telling you. Anyway, the mac was made with vache qui rit, which they have in the states (laughing cow)- it's like those little triangles of “cheese spread” in the refrigerated section. It was sooooo f-ing good. My first taste of almost American food since I've been here. Oh man. Let me relive the moment for a second. So good.
After that all three of us decided to walk to Heather's house 'cause that's where we were meeting her and Eric. It's about a 2.5 mile walk, and it was pretty awesome, because we were really walking through the African jungle. We saw a hornbill (like Zazou from the Lion King) and I just about lost it. Near the end of the walk we got caught in a giant thunderstorm, which was very wet, but beautiful. I'm glad we all got to share it together.
When we got to Heather's she made us hot chocolate and I charged my stuff! We didn't stay long. But it was lovely to see everyone and touch base after out first couple days!

Apparently every Thursday my health center holds prenatal consultations. So I went to a batch of them yesterday and Reine showed me how to fill out the Beninese maternity health cards. So I gave a little speech to the ladies about the importance of attending all their prenatal exams, and matched up their health cards with our maternity cards. Then I sat in on six of the exams, and Reine dictated the measurements, and I filled them out on the cards. I was really proud of myself, 'cause it was pretty complicated, and totally in French, and I learned a lot about the Beninese health system, pregnancy warning signs, and the different tests my center is capable of doing. It was fascinating. We sold mosquito nets to the women who needed them, and I learned how to fill out the mosquito net sales notebook. I really enjoyed it a lot, and I think it was really helpful to Reine cause she could go three times as fast with me there.
After all this, I made BREAD! Which was soo sooo sooo good. So good. It was yeast based,. I let it rise twice, which was super fast because it's always 90 degrees out. In the P.C. we use dutch ovens. You put your loaf pan or whatever into a large soup pot. You have to have like a can or something on the bottom of the soup pot so that your loaf pan doesn't touch any of the sides of the pot. And you put the lid on and just set it on your stove on low. It produces dry heat and will just bake anything you want! A thunderstorm hit just as the bread was coming out of the oven and I sat on my mat and ate warm bread with butter and honey and jam and nutella, and listened to it rain like crazy outside. It felt so nice. And I did it all myself!
I think I might get in the habit of making bread every week or so, because they just have Togolese bread in my village, which is kind of like Wonder bread and is bordering on super lame. It gets kinda stale quickly, and just has no ummph.

(written 31Aout2010)

So, I'm all kinds of excited, because tomorrow I'm gonna wake up at 4 am and head on over to my post in Penelan! This week is homologue conference in Porto Novo (the homologues are our work partners, mine is a midwife at the health center where I'm gonna work- Beninese, not white person). All the homologues come to meet us, learn about Peace Corps, talk to us about our posts, and then we all go back to our posts with them for the post visit, which will be Wednesday-Sunday.

It's super awkward because you have to talk to your homologue in French for hours at a time, and they make you sit next to them in all the information sessions, but none of that really matters because mine is AWESOME! I didn't really know anything about Penelan beforehand, but my lady says that the forest that I live in supposedly has elephants and lions! (Although Shannon my zoologist thinks this is not true- and I trust her on this matter) Also- while pate is the main starch down in the south, in my village apparently everyone eats mashed yam with every meal, which sounds absolutely wicked! I've been eating pate and fried fish (that is half tiny bones) every night for that last three weeks, so I'm totally down to never see either of those things again. Supposedly we also have tomatoes! (Which might also be a lie, but I'm optimistic)

That's all I'm gonna write for now 'cause I'm starting school soon, but I'll send you some more info when I get back and know everything!! Be excited!!

(written from 25July to 6August)


Now for some normal talk about food. Food here is interesting. There’s a lot of avocados, fish, chicken, eggs, peanuts, fried plantain, beans, rice and BREAD. Like baguette bread...but kinda stale. Beninoise do not believe in dairy, or general refrigeration, so there is no milk. There is this one kind of cheese that is like boiled/fried into a giant cake that lasts forever. And I guess they have those laughing cow triangles. And condensed milk tea. There are also ladies who sell yogurt on the side of the road, and dang, it's good. Most meals I have are either spaghetti salad or pate with some kind of sauce. I talk about pate with sauce in my vomit story. There are three kinds of pate- black, white and red, and a million sauces to go with them. You just have sauce all the time with every meal, and they can be made with seafood or veggies, or really whatever. There are also these peppers called pimont, that are either red or green, and are in freaking everything. Beninoise love their spice. It's really guaranteed with every meal. The spaghetti salad I'm talking about is a little weird. (but good....up to a point.. I've had it way too much lately). It's spaghetti and lettuce and other things, like beans, potato pieces, pimont sauce, sometimes tiny fishes or hard boiled eggs. And it's all covered in mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is king. My favorite is when they put this salad in a baguette, which I like to call a spaghetti sandwich, because it sounds ridiculous and absolutely non-nutritious.


I really love the oranges here- they are a little sweeter than those in the US, but you don't eat them the same way. You cut off the top, and squeeze the orange. When all the juice comes to the top, you suck it all out, and never really eat the flesh. It's da-bomb. There are plenty of bananas, and delicious pineapples that make your tongue tingley if you eat a whole one. We just missed mango season, but it'll come back around next spring!


Pretty much everything here is fried in palm oil. They even make sauces that are just like palm oil sauce. One volunteer said palm oil is like the least healthy oil that exists. Which is....great....But it sure does perk up a sketchy piece of meat! There's these fried dough things that I really love, called paté, which is like sometimes stuffed with fish or onion. But lately I've been buying from the guys on my street corner, and they don't stuff it with anything.


There is also stuff here called Fan-milk, which is essentially fake-sometimes-yogurty tasting ice cream. The fan-milk guys run around with little push carts. Fan-milk is the best friend of every volunteer because its cold. And just a tiny piece of kind-of-America. When it comes around, I can't resist buying it- EVER.
After the first five days or so, everyone began to go crazy for American food. The candy and coke I never enjoyed la-bas has become like a holy grail. If you are a volunteer and you bring American food into public, be prepared to share. My friend Bridget got a laughing cow cheese from her family today and shared it will me. I savored the aftertaste for like 20 minutes.