Bike Tour Video

Hey all. Here is a video depicting our experience on the bike tour. Enjoy!

Bike Tour Mania! Plus Extension News

This year I was able to organize the ONLY bike tour taking place in Benin. We biked hundreds of kms to spread knowledge (and tee-shirts) to ten rural villages in the Borgou/Atakora. Overall, over 2,000 individuals were taught about the benefits of family planning. What's family planning, you ask? It's as easy as it sounds. 

Step 1: Have a plan! How many kids would you like to have? Plan to make sure there are at least two years in between pregnancies so you have enough money (and energy) to ensure that they are provided for. 
Step 2: Make sure you don't get pregnant when you don't want to be. Most of each information session was taken up by sharing information about various methods to prevent unwanted pregnancies. 

Simple enough! Anyway, this went off really well this year. Check my facebook account for more photos since this is taking way too long. 

Extension : I'll be staying on a 3rd year to serve as the Food Security Coordinator for Peace Corps Benin. I'll be moving to the capital city and working in the actual Peace Corps Bureau. See you all during the holiday season when I finally head back stateside! 

 

International Museum Day, 2011!

Mme. SEKO, curator for the music museum, works on her exhibit.

In preparation for the upcoming Int'l Museum Day, May 18th, we've been working on setting up an exhibit at the local university. The theme for this year is "Museums and Memory." We'll be offering some plaques about the history of slavery in Benin, the history of music, and the history of tribal communication. Interesting stuff. We're working on preparing an "itinerant exhibit" that we can easily transport to schools and social gatherings to showcase what the museum has to offer.

Mme. SEKO and I hard at work...

Photos of Recent Happenings: Camp Succes de Tre!

  The girls of Camp Succes de Tre engage in a competition to set up mosquito nets. Mosquito nets are the most cost-effective way of preventing malaria, the number one cause of death in Benin.

 

Girls learn about a balanced diet.

Brigitte donated brand new jerseys to the school, and gave the girls the opportunity to be the first to sport them.

Of course, no camp is complete without a victory parade at the end.

A Boutique with Potential

Hey everyone. Last week Brig and I had the opportunity to visit our homestay family's in Benin's capitol, Porto-Novo. As expected, our families gave us mountains of delicious food in which we could hardly even make a dent, but they were happy to see that you could literally see the effects in our considerably expanded midriffs. It was great to see that my homestay mama was continuing her dress designs (see post: Turn and Face the Strange), and she had some really intricate new examples to show us. Brigitte's mama owns a boutique, which she uses to finance her five daughters' educations. These girls have managed to be extremely diligent in their studies, especially given the plight of young women in this country.



The boutique contains (mostly used) handbags, dresses, shoes, and perfumes into which she injects some new life. But the shelves of this boutique seem sparsely populated.




Here's how you can help. Gather up some unused (in relatively nice condition) clothes that we could put in her boutique to help her gain money to finance the education of her girls. If you're sending a package, you can just add one or two items to the envelope so we can donate them to her cause. She's really appreciative and a great example of what a single woman can accomplish if she sets her mind to it. Thanks in advance, everyone. And even if you can't donate, thank you for reading about this amazing woman.


Happy spring!

Benny's New Glasses

So Benoit, one of the smartest students I had at CEG Ikemon last year, lives in Parakou now. We see each other often, usually to cook and for me to give he and another student their living allowances. But Benoit has always been a noticeably squinty student. He would always ask to be moved closer to the blackboard, and it never seemed like he could open his eyes very widely. I feared the worst. So we took off to an amazing clinic today that's run by a Scottish ophthalmologist, at which he is able to see around 150 patients every day. Yeah... Here's our morning through the most honest of methods of reporting:

We started our journey by taking a moto-taxi out into the bush. The clinic is located a few km north of Parakou.
The complex is sprawling, and Benoit didn't know what to expect from an eye doctor, but he seemed composed as we approached the clinic.



We had to wait in a sizable line, but we had nothing but time this morning.

Although it appeared that others had a bit longer to wait as they camped out in the shade.


We finally got in to see the doctor.


And they gave him an old-fashioned check up.



End result? Styling! This was all relatively fast and really cheap. Overall, a very impressive organization.

Postpone for Democracy

It's an arduous task, holding fair elections when the population being asked to choose is poorly educated and access to information consists of pictures on billboards and word-of-mouth. The presidential elections, held every five years, have so far been pushed back 2 weeks due to insufficient distribution of voting cards. But they've been peacefully delayed, so there's no cause for alarm. From what I can tell, there are two main candidates in the north, although I've seen smatterings of support for other less-funded aspiring presidents. Up until about a month ago, there were very few billboards or pamphlets being distributed for any candidate. Now, billboards like this for the incumbent, YAYI Boni, are common in larger cities.



While there are plenty of little pieces of paper being tossed around by little kids supporting this candidate, ABT, some people still choose to campaign the old-fashioned way: by painting blandly on as-yet-unfinished buildings.




And then some people are so devoted to their local candidates that they can't bare to physically separate themselves from him (or her).


Music's in the air, people are registering at the last minute, and you can feel the buzz of an impassioned crowd. Some pundits are (correctly) labeling this an extension of the fete season. Others are calling it a triumph for West Africa's Latin Quarter. No matter what, this should be an interesting weekend. That is, of course, if election day isn't again prolonged...

Online Presence

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you know that this isn't the only blog I'm maintaining. Take a look at my other page, though you'll see that it's presently in French. Use google to translate the entire page if you want to see what we've been up to over at the music museum.

Museum of Music, Parakou

We've just started to set up our exhibit concerning ancient and modern communication methods among the various tribes in Benin. Pretty cool stuff! Anywho, enjoy. We're putting another blog for the Beninese Volunteer Corps active sometime this week, also.

Spreading the Seed

Let's just say that the idea of volunteerism hasn't exactly spread like wildfire, at least not in the way we think of it. Which is why it's such a pleasure to work alongside the Beninese Volunteer Corps here in Parakou. Founded in 2006,the CVB (in French) has worked on various projects throughout Parakou, including microfinance groups, bike tours, health/environmental workshops, and volunteer promotional activities. To be sure, it's going to take a lot of work to institutionalize this venture, and I'm almost positive the entire operation would cease to exist if Ibrahim were to lose interest, but they've grown by leaps and bounds since their conception four years ago.
Ibrahim's done a lot of work to recruit motivated young individuals outside of this city, but I'm quite sure that nobody in any small village will say that they're familiar with the volunteer corps here. First, they lack funding of any kind. While they've become quite adept at writing grants, they still struggle to finance simple things like electric bills (for an extremely tiny office). That's why it helps to start up creative fund-raising techniques like selling tee-shirts at local festivals and offering local language training to volunteers. In this manner, they're able to finance small purchases like this printer, purchased with funds from selling tees we designed last week.
Below, the president of a Groupement des Femmes who work with Moringa sits beside a basin of freshly harvested Moringa leaves.


Here, some local poultry eat feed combined with fresh moringa leaves to make them healthier and more valuable.

Trudging Along

This is a doll used in some ceremony or another that you can find in the Music Museum in Parakou, where I've been working recently. I know it's a bit creepy, but so are most voodoo entities in this bastion of voodoo culture.


This is Hillary Clifford, dressed to kill during the filming of our Peace Corps documentary. Hillary is stationed in the northernmost post in Benin, in a city that straddles the Nigerian border. We can no longer go to Niger due to the recent closing of the Nigerian Peace Corps program. In this photo, she is surveying a hot pepper field.

This is Christoph and Patrick working with a local moringa farmer named David on a new documentary we're doing about the miracle tree. Moringa can offer a stunning amount of nutrients to a people whose dinner usually consists of carbs, carbs, more carbs, and some animal skin. We just started filming today, and I hope to put it on youtube sometime during the month of March.

Other than that, things are moving relatively smoothly. I'm off to work with the Beninese Volunteer Corps and the Institute of Fine Arts as a representative at the Fete de Ganni, a five day extravaganza during which all of the Bariba princes show off their dashing horses and dress to the nines. It's a big tourist draw, so hopefully this should offer some good exposure. I guess we'll see.

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

Big Time

Time is absolutely flying. I've been jet-setting for a couple months now, heading N and S for various work reasons. Every so often I need to a take a breath and remind myself of a couple irrefutable truths:

1.) This is not going to last forever. In fact, my time here is nearly at an end. While 7 months may seem like a lifetime to some, I'm realizing more and more that it feels like I'm writing monthly reports every 5 days. Toss into the mix the complexities of a West African presidential election (coming to Benin this month), and we could be dealing with a dramatically shortened timeline. I thus made it my resolution to be happy in every minute of 2011. Those of you who know me will laugh at the prospect, and I must admit that the success rate has been spotty, but even in my most stressed times I can't help but appreciate the opportunity I've been given.

2.) I have learned more than I can ever realize. Maneuvering in West Africa is anything but straight-forward, but obstacles that once seemed insurmountable have become non-issues during the last year and a half. During a recent filming for a documentary, my fellow volunteers and I were surprised to find that we felt less eloquent when responding to questions in English than in French. Of course, it's difficult to speak well when you're staring into the eyes of someone who doesn't speak English, but still, it was a little jolting.

I recently had the pleasure of working with a local film crew to coordinate the filming of a 50th anniversary documentary for the Peace Corps. I was pleasantly surprised at the caliber of their work. Below is a picture of Brigitte and I in front of a presentation made in honor of the Peace Corps by the Beninese Volunteer Corps.





Here is my friend Ibrahim and I, sporting matching outfits, talking to a group of local women to start a microfinance club. We collect a set amount every three weeks in order to create an account large enough to give cheap loans to women with investment plans.


This is me being interviewed at the newly-built Institute of Fine Arts here in Parakou. My hand is on a massive drum used in ceremonies in the Atakore (NW) region of Benin. It was here that it first became clear that I no longer can speak English.

Ibrahim and I.

Work covers a wide array of activities these days. From microfinance groups to catching mice, from volunteer support to English clubs, how could any other job ever be as interesting as this?

Niamerry Christmas

So it's been quite the busy month since Mark and I got back from the mock bike tour. I, along with a few of my friends, was able to get up to Niamey, the lazy capital of Niger, whence we partook of the excursion to see the last herd of wild giraffes in West Africa, an ENORMOUS crocodile skeleton (see Supercroc wiki entry ), and had the best pizza (cooked by a volunteer) I've had since Upper Crust in Boston. Here's a horrendously (but purposefully) corny picture taken at the PC office in Niamey. These are my friends Brad, Sarah, and Brigitte.

Here we are again with the giraffes. That's a Tuareg wrap, in case you were wondering.

So we returned on New Year's Eve and were able to ring in the New Year in Parakou. Unfortunately, we just found out that a couple of Frenchmen were kidnapped in a Niamey nightclub by people claiming to be affiliated with Al Qaeda three nights ago. Dodged that one, but they were eventually killed during a rescue attempt on the Malian border. This one goes out to them. Happy New Year, all, and let's have a safe and prosperous 2011.