alive!

---

alive and well in cotonou! a whole hell of a lot has gone on since moving into kpovie. firstly, this is a french keyboard so expect many spelling errors. secondly, there is no electricity or running water in kpovie which means i quite awesomely go get water from a well and carry it back to my house on my head. not going to lie, it took me a good 2 weeks to actually be successful and not spill water everywhere.

the first few weeks were pretty difficult especially being completely cut off from everyone back home. my homologue and i are both citygirls so village life and all the rules set in place by SYTO benin were a lot to deal with. there was a lot of not adapting, some yelling, a minor mental breakdown, and then we were ok. christmas was a blast, our group slept over at the supervisors place and just stayed up and had fun. new years was cool too, though none of us could figure out what time it actually was so the countdown was a little skewed

wish i could upload some photos, but kpovie is really beautiful. terribly boring at times but my host family has been amazing, i have 5 host siblings which include 2 sets of twins! additionally, i lucked out and am living in a giant family compound with a lot of the other JCM people nearby.

side note: the goats here have been driving nadiath and i up the wall. they arent even our cfamily goats, they just hang around our house all the time and bleat endlessly then wander in to steal food and eat out of our garbage. there is now a stick in each room for chasing out goats. this will surely be hilarious in hindsight when I finally can stop being paranoid about goats wandering partout.



30 minutes are up for the cafe so thats all! love you and miss you and definitely thinking of you <3

---