It finally happened. Mawu and all the other voodoo spirits made the decision, and the oven that is West Africa has been cranked up. The good news is that all of my bucket baths are now with nice warm water. The bad news is that the last thing I want Read more…
The New Year is on us, and school has started back up. Harmattan is starting to finish up now, but this year harmattan has been much stronger then last year (both colder and longer lasting). With harmattan over, the hot dry season (chaleur) will be starting up before we know Read more…
It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for about a year and a half. Time is starting to go bye a lot faster, mostly since my schedule has been getting a lot busier since the school year started up. Got my haircut again yesterday, trimmed down to the Read more…
School is starting to get in the swing of things and things seem to be settling down. I think we’ve seen our last rain in village until April, so that’s a bummer. On the other hand harmattan is starting up, so the mornings can be kind of chilly. It’s peanut Read more…
The school year is starting to wind down now, only a couple of weeks left in the school year. The last couple of weeks it’s been nice and rainy, just the way I like it, and you can sort of tell that things are slowing down at the school. Our Read more…
Been a few weeks so it’s about time for an update of sorts. This next week is midterms, so the last week or so of classes have just been review sessions. We’ll see how well the kids do; my guess is that some will do very well, and others very Read more…
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks here. Work is picking up, we are almost at the end of the first semester (the first semester runs from October through February, the second March until sometime in May, don’t ask why the semesters are so unbalanced). Also, for a dry Read more…
Sorry for not being able to put up any updates lately. Although much has been happening, I’ve been without Internet access. I think I’ll be dialing onto the World Wide Web only once a month or so for the foreseeable future, so I’ll do my best to keep up to Read more…
My time in Porto-Novo is drawing to a close, and starting this week my work as a “real” volunteer will start. On Sunday I will be going up to Parakou, where I will stay for a few days to make some purchases I will not be able to make in Read more…
Last week marks the start of my teaching experience. After one week of teaching Beninese summer school these are the three things I’ve learned: I don’t mind teaching; I hate lesson planning; I really hate kids. Long story short, it’s really hard to control a class of 40 Beninese 11-15 Read more…