I was we would say in Ghana...I have gone and come. Rachel and I left to go to Benin on Wednesday. I'd like to say we got up bright and early but considering we were up in moving before the sun...we just got up early. We hoped on a bus bound for Aflao, the border crossing point to go into Togo and of course got the bus without air conditioning, hooray!! But we did see an old woman who looked exactly like E.T. which basically made my day... Unlike my last time going through Togo, crossing in this time was pretty [View Full Entry]

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Benin, Benin, a stable democracy and what seems to be a good president investing in healthcare and education. lots of NGOs working all over the place,roads are crumbling and it doesn't seem any much better than it's dictator ridden neighbour that get no funding whatsoever, ok, not looking at numbers, just the visible signs. Granted, Lome in neighbouring Togo is really not tidy, if you see what I mean. Throughout my journey in Benin though, I was constantly bugged by one statistic, all the economic progress made by it is rendered null on a per capita basis because they have so [View Full Entry]

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Safe & Sound... will update the blog at some point in the very near future! :) (Finally found a wifi connection here today). :)TnT [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Cotonou and got dropped off at the main market during rush hour. Then followed the most terrifying moto taxi ride of my life. The driver weaved between cars that I thought were going to hit each other, at one point I actually put my hand on the hood of a car I thought was going to hit us. I could see, though, that if he hadn’t driven like a maniac we would never have gotten anywhere, traffic was hardly moving. We met up with some Benin PCVs at their bureau who pointed us to an affordable hotel and [View Full Entry]

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Our first stop in Benin was Grand Popo, a small beach town not far from the Togo border. Grand Popo has lots of hotels but seems to lack tourists this time of year. I think we were the only ones staying at the beautiful Auberge de Grand Popo; they were so desperate for our business that they invented a 25% Peace Corps discount. The Auberge has a beautiful beach with thatch shade huts and a swimming pool. It also has a beautiful outdoor restaurant that we couldn’t afford, but we found some great seafood in town. There are several kinds of [View Full Entry]

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How? How can this one place, this one small village, this one spot on the face of such a vast planet change me so profoundly, warm my heart all the way through, teach me so many lessons, inspire within me such a complex combination of happiness and sorrow? Doumè. No, not the village, not the market, not the dirt roads and the isolation and the poverty and the local language. Rather, all of it. All of it bundled into one indescribable experience. Layer upon layer unfolding itself daily, weekly, monthly in my mind. The smiles, the smells, the feel of the [View Full Entry]

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In the last week of my Peace Corps Volunteer experience in Benin, I realize I have not yet posted these photos. I might even have some more later... I went exploring in the ruins of Athieme. I went the first time randomly, and without the camera. The second time I went, someone warned me that snakes like to hang out in ruins, so the dogs accompanied. I was assuming a snake would find the dogs before me. The other photos are of things dear to me- mangoes and small children. [View Full Entry]

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Woke up thinking it was 10:00 when it was actually 11:00 because of the time change. Weird to think there's a time change when Benin is only 90 miles from the Ghanian border. We headed off to the Python Temple which is the voodoo place of worship. When we arrived there was a morning service taking place which was completely unexpected as we were informed the temple was more of a museum than anything else. It was really awkward walking in and I thought they would be osmewhat annoyed with us, however, they offered us chairs to sit down and observe [View Full Entry]

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Woke up and took a bucket shower which is really gross to do inside a bathroom. We waited aroudn our hotel for quite some time before we actually started our day to visit the stilt village in Ganvie. After our talk about visiting Nigeria subsided we got a ride to a village near the lake entrance to Ganvie. The ride on the water was crazy. We took a canoe for the four of us which was rowed by a small boy. Our sail was made out of a patched bedsheet. Our boat constantly felt like it was sinking. We actually crashed [View Full Entry]

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Athiémé celebrated International Women’s Day on the 8th of March at the secondary school’s playing fields. The basketball and handball teams, the two sports with girls’ included, had prepared the courts for the games, which meant that the courts had actually been drawn in, the lines scratched out with a hoe. We set up a tent at each court for the spectators and hauled the benches and chalkboards from the school. No matter how many times I mentioned it, we were still missing the water buckets by game time. I finally yelled and water appeared in buckets on a couple of [View Full Entry]

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