Days in Africa as a Peace Corps Stagier seem to drag on
forever, weeks however seem to disappear in a blink of an eye. As I try to
remember where I left off here and what has happened since, it feels as though
I have not written in months and I want to tell you about how so much has
changed in the same moment I want to say nothing ever happens here.
I have now finished my core/language training, gone to post
and am now in the middle of my technical training. While my French is far from
perfect it is weird to think that it was only a little over a month ago that I
couldn’t say much more than hello, and now I am preparing to teach a class on
feasibility studies in French to a group of students.
I realize that during my first post I actually said very
little about the training I was going through with the Peace Corps other than
that it was a whole lot of language with some medical and safety and security
sprinkled into the mix. So to recap…
The first part of training was intense for me; it was a lot
of language with the same three people almost every day in each other’s homes
with lots of studying after class and time spent with my family. It was also
during this time that we learned more or less everything we were supposed to
know about service before we got to post. During the medical sessions I learned
about the various parasites and bacterias that will like infiltrate my body at
some point during service and make my life hell. We learned about all kinds of
worms and skin infections we could get while here, including a worm that will
present itself in your eye, I won’t go into any more detail, but the laundry
list of things I could get is pretty gross. I learned all about malaria,
nothing about dengue and a little about the other random diseases I might end
up with while I am here. We had one session dedicated entirely to snake bites
and skin problems, during which we spent a long time looking at pictures of the
different snakes in Benin and being informed about which ones are poisonous and
how long it will take for the venom to kill you only to be told that the
medical office also let the anti-venom expire so if we get bit we are kind of
SOL- then we skimmed over skin diseases and called it a day. Upon returning
from post visit one of the rural community health Stagiers reported seeing a
man come into her clinic to be treated for a snake bite, he was vomiting blood.
If I wasn’t already afraid of snakes, I most certainly am now. Luckily I am a
CED volunteer so I don’t have to spend too much time in places where snakes
could be lurking.
During safety and security I learned to be alert and some
other stuff, but nothing nearly as memorable as our medical sessions, except
for the session when Stagiers began asking what kind of weapons we were allowed
to carry and if we were going to take a self-defense course and what kind of
repercussions where there for resorting to violence. As this is the PEACE
Corps, the questions seemed to throw our Safety and Security trainer who
reminded us that our main focus should be staying out of situations where we
would need a weapon. Fair.
I passed my language exam so during the few language classes
we have during technical training I will now be taking Barriba, they don’t
waste any time here (well that’s a lie, but in regards to language learning…).
Technical training consists of about two to three hours of learning important
information about what we will be doing at post and about 4 hours of the
volunteers wasting time and planning what we are all going to do after the
day’s class. A perk of being a CED volunteer is that we take a lot of field
trips and we have gotten to see what creative entrepreneurship in Benin looks
like, which is good to see since the needs in Benin are very different than in
the United States. It has also been interesting for me during these sessions to
learn where funding has come from and to get a feel for the organizational
management of the projects. All of which I am trying to make mental notes of
for when I get to post and start my own projects, but in reality there seems to
be great variety in various projects’ organization and financial independence. From
these field trips and conversations with other volunteers and CED trainers it
seems clear that one of the major problems here is that there are an abundance
of NGOs and development oriented entrepreneurship projects all of which depend
on foreign aid to operate. Beyond just the dependence of foreign aid it seems
that many of them use most of that aid to employ members of the organization
and then only have a little left to accomplish the original goal of
development. While it is good that these projects are creating jobs for the
Beninoise and providing good salaries, the reality is by using aid money in
this way there is little actual development and forward motion toward self-sustainability.
As this is a mammoth problem and I have no illusions about my real capacity to
inspire progress here, I don’t image in two years I will be able to do much or
anything to help ameliorate this, but it is something to think about as I
consider how I want to use my time here.
I have enjoyed this phase of training because I am with all
the CED and TEFL volunteers every day and it has been nice to get to know the
other volunteers as the majority of my language training was spent with the
same three people, who I enjoyed but there are 61 other volunteers to get to
know in our group. Having the bulk of language behind me has relaxed me a lot,
as the first half of training I felt like I was working all the time, and now I
feel like I am at summer camp.
My family is still crazy but they seem to have become much
less interested in me since my return. This has been both good and bad, no one
seems to mind when I get in late after hanging out with the volunteers but now
they forget to feed me sometimes and when they do remember it’s pretty basic. My
host dad did make sure to buy a large case of beer for me, so I always have to
open bottles waiting for me when I return to the house, so I at least have
that.
Another volunteer had a bunch of us over for burgers and
fries, which was an amazing recess from Beninoise food. After which we decided
while we were all in Porto Novo with access to more American-like food we
should make this more of a tradition, so I agreed to host the next dinner of
chili. When I informed my host family I would be making another dinner for them
and that this time I was going to also have other Americans over they got
really excited and called the family photographer who showed up promptly the
day of the dinner to have a mini photo shoot with my family and the other
volunteers. So the day before the dinner I went to the market with two other
volunteers to buy the beans to soak overnight- of course after a pit stop to
the bouvette. It was starting to get a little late once we got there so we were
moving fast to find beans that were close enough to what we would use in the
states. There seemed to be only one woman selling what we decided looked like
the best beans, the price was a little high but we ended up taking them. The
next day after class myself and another volunteer starting cooking the beans
while my sisters hung out with us and waited for the other volunteers to
arrive. My sisters during the whole process kept asking if I wanted them to
grind the beans and I couldn’t understand why, so I just kept saying no, in the
United States we don’t grind the beans for chili. Finally after some time of
boiling the beans with little progress one of my sisters explained to the other
volunteer that we had not bought beans but peanuts and they thought we were
trying to make a peanut sauce. This was going to be a problem for the chili we
had promised to several hungry volunteers. So the peanuts were taken out of the
hot water and became a snack while we waited for the dried beans that I then
sent my sister to go out and buy. In the end the chili came out well, and we
just had a lot of peanuts to snack on in the house for the next week, which was
good for me when my family was being forgetful about feeding me. In any case
volunteers hung out at the house and enjoyed the chili and beer and my sisters
were delighted to have the company of so many other Americans much more new and
shiny than I was at this point. It was decided that night that the volunteers
had to come over another time to celebrate with my family one more time before
we all left for post.
It feels now as though the countdown is on for swear in, and
I am both anxiously awaiting it and nervously anticipating it. Knowing that
both my time with beaucoup de American connection and to figure things out with
the training wheels still on is almost up has left me trying to cram as much in
as possible and yet after close to 3 months with constant connection and little
alone time there is also the part of me that feels ready to have a home where I
can close the door and decompress. It is funny being at this point in my
service as I remember preparing to leave for the Peace Corps thinking this
would be the hardest part as I am coming up to the date marking this endeavor
being the longest amount of time I have spent abroad. I thought it would be at
this point I would feel ready to turn around and go home, but instead I feel
like I am only just getting to the start of my time here; that I am not
reaching an ending point but a starting point. Perhaps in another 3 months I
will feel differently but for now, this crazy life decision I have made still
makes since to me…
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