This has been an excercise in 'Hurry-up...and wait'

Im STILL in the Cotonou PC bureau because the doctors wanted to see how I responded to the groups of pills I've been taking. I believe that TOMORROW I WILL be leaving for my post. This gives me an excellent opportunity to explain a little about the Beninese sense of time and schedule which has invaded the PC hive mind here (it is only natural since peace corps has been here for 40 years now and many of its employees are host country nationals). Let me preface this analysis by saying that this is not a negative critique...if the doctor wants me to stay another day to make sure my health is on the right track then he/she is the boss and I am behind him/her 100%. Unfortunately when I left post to come to Cotonou I had no idea what to expect as far as a time frame for my eventual return was concerned. I thought I was going to get some blood work done and put on beefy anti-malarials and sent back to post, either that very day or the next. I thought this because for northern volunteers they have to take the trip all the way down to Cotonou and they take their beefy meds on the way down if they think they might have malaria and they get approval from the docs over the phone, being a southern volunteer means I can come into the med office more readily and let them take their time in correctly diagnosing me (all of this is to my benefit). After arriving and being told that they were going to take blood samples at various times of high fever in order to 'catch' some malarial parasites (malaria is a serious disease and only a very small concentration are actually needed in your blood to make someone very ill, this way it is very hard to actually find the malarial cells in the blood) I figured that I would probably be out of this office by Monday afternoon. After multiple negatives in my blood screening and the eventual confirmation that I had amoebas I was sure that i was going back to post Monday or Tuesday. But, in the name of thoroughness the date kept getting pushed back to make sure the plethora of pills I've been taking to kill off the amoebas have worked, my final date of departure is tomorrow...thursday....i hope. My homologue (work partner) probably thinks I skipped town on him since I told him I would probably return last Fri/Sat.
On another subject, being in the office means I still have access to the mail and I just got 2 packages from Grandma (cookies/candy/protein bars) thanks! I'll give the animal crackers to the dozen or so kids that live around me in my concession.