Sunday, March 29, 2009

Paint World Map: Check

Finished the world map painting, or almost. The countries still need to be outlined in black paint and their names need to be painted on...also the black sea was lost to an over anxious student-painter, so that will have to be fixed. I will try to get pictures up soon of our work. Tried to start a co-op for the gardeners in my village last week but it fell through. It is hot season over here...102 degrees at 10 PM, indoors. You basicly sweat all day and night and drink alot of water. Mango season will start in all its fury once the first rains come. I hope they come soon. There is a dammed stream on the north end of my village and when I arrived the resulting pond was pretty big...now it is maybe 30 feet at it's widest and you can walk across. We are all getting ready to welcome in the new stage...they will be getting here in late July.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Paint the world...

I did lose my phone but I will get another one when I head down to Parakou early next week. I will have a new number so I will write it down here. I am about to head to a nearby village to help a TEFL volunteer with the painting of a world map on one of the walls of her school. The english teachers use these maps to help teach the kids lessons in geo., and large maps like these make it easier for kids to understand the vastness of the world better than a small one on the papges of their textbook. Many kids have asked me how much it would cost to take a taxi to America! I also want to wish a belated happy birthday to mom, with the service and everything happening last week I'm afraid it slipped thru.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Incommunicato

I think I lost my phone on the taxi ride from Parakou to Kandi (the road is very bad between those two cities and the taxi ride becomes a baja race). I will keep you updated on what is happening...if I get my phone back or get another with a new number. April is becoming very busy...I think I have a training next week and perhapse another at the end of the month.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Good Eats...

Another update on the work front: I helped with a malnutrition formation with high school students in a local village a few weeks ago. Then last week I held the same formation in my village. Another volunteer and I recruited the help of the local health center to effectively pass the information to the kids. It went much better the second time because the first outing was competing with national vaccinations from unicef and it rested on a Friday. We offered formation tee-shirts to the first kid to bring me an enriched porridge (they eat this stuff for breakfast and it is call bouille) which we showed them how to make...and a second tee-shirt will go to the winner of an essay contest. The subject of the essay was: 'What are the benefits to eating well/good nutrition?' Of course, at the end of the formation, the science teacher (who's help I recruited and did nothing at all throughout the entire formation) decided it was his time to talk and wanted the PCVs to give all the kids at the formation tee-shirts. This is a very typical response to formations because locals here don't value the information you give them (or in our case we gave them FREE FOOD), they want you to hand out money or gifts. It was an unfortunate way to end the formation having to convince the teacher that we were not being paid by the government to provide tee-shirts to ALL students and we were no pocketing anything and a large portion of the previous presentation's materials, including tee-shirts and food, came out of our volunteer pockets. I won't be working with this teacher again. But the health center speaker was great when she showed up...now all subsequent formations will try to include a staff member from the local health centers.

Monday, March 16, 2009

March Madness









We had a small service for Kate yesterday. It was nice. Right now we don't have any more info than we did on Friday. The last time I saw Kate we were celebrating the x-mas season as I was heading with a group to park penjari and she was heading with a group to Dogun country in Mali. I am going to stick around the south for a couple days to do some work before heading back up.



I apparently reached the limit for photos on flickr...200 is not a good limit! So I think I will be posting random photos on my blog. Here a some examples of Beninese 'tissue' and a little kid that kinda reminds me of a smurf...

Friday, March 13, 2009

Update #2...


I also wanted to let everyone know about my health-related issues from the last time I was online. The Zyrtec worked! I don't know exactly what caused the rash but there is a suspect. I do not know how many people are familiar with the source of thier cashews. They are harvested off the bottom of a soft, sweet, red/yellow fruit (called a cashew apple). The cashew is apparently in the same family as poison ivy and the nuts need to be roasted to neutralize the caustic chemical jelly (the jelly can give you chemical burns) that surrounds the nut...even the roasting process is dangerous and the smoke can cause blindness! I mention this because you can find many cashew trees in northern Benin and four days before developing my rash I sampled a raw cashew ( I mistakenly thought the FRUIT was an allergen, not the NUT)....big mistake. I was reminded of Ralf from the Simpsons and his wonderful quote: "It tastes like burning". I had burned my lips and tounge...but it was not too bad. I think i may have been cleaning my knife used in open the cashew nut a few days later, when the rash broke out. I might have touched a some leftover residue and then touched my side...the rest is history. Cashews are apparently one of the most labor intensive nuts to harvest.

Update:

Here are some pictures of the mural painting with the environmental group at another PCV's post. These pictures were taken before the mural was finished but you can get an idea.
I will be near the internet for the next few days. I am going down to Cotonou. A fellow PCV was found dead yesterday outside of her home. Her parents have been notified so I don't think I will get in trouble for posting this info. You can find more information on news sites such as abc.com or washingtonpost.com.