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!

...December?

Not sure what happened to November. Between amped up work, traveling, and visitors, the month seems to have slipped through my fingers in what is unfortunately going to be the probable trend for the next year.

Been souping up the workstation over the last month with fans, lights, compost piles, new security measures and, hear this, wireless internet. High speed, no less. Unfortunately I'm presently without a computer charger, so the wireless aspect is lost to me. Thus it's "same same but different" encore.

Been working a lot with the new "Institute of Fine Arts," not yet opened, which is located next to the workstation and aspires to be the largest museum of ethnomusicology this side of the Nile. It's there that we are going to celebrate at the end of our three-day Family Planning Borgou Bike Tour in February. There is toooons of work up here in Parakou, entirely different from my life last year. In short, life is ideal. As events approach, I'll provide more specific details regarding particular endeavors.

I may be asking for some financial assistance soon for a series of youth camps I want to help organize in the Spring. I'll keep all y'all updated as I find out more. Yeah, this is vague. This is vague. Sorry.

Julie Ann Clark, one my best friends from college, had the opportunity to visit Benin for two weeks last month. It was really awesome, and I took the opportunity to visit 2 places I'd been meaning to visit for a year. For the most part, we stayed in Parakou and saw some of the sites around the city, but our village sorties were memorable. She's a trooper, that one, and she's off to visit our other friends in Senegal before (hopefully) continuing on to see her old village in Mauritania. Godspeed, girl.

Will upload photos as soon as my comp's back up. Somehow, all of my electronics were recently reborn, like an early Christmas. Thus, I have a camera again for the first time in 2 months.

Happy Holidays!
-Dave