Tales from Rohan

I took a taxi with two of my post mates, Mark and Kyle, up to Parakou with all of our stuff. On the way, I had the opportunity to take some photos of this beautiful country out of the open window, that just would never come out through the window of a bus.

My host family was fantastic to me. Family who had been around during my first few weeks came in from Cotonou and they made a big dinner the night before I left. They gave me some of my favorite foods to take with me and gave me plenty of American-style hugs. Papa came for dinner, but unfortunately he was still pretty tired from fighting off a bout of malaria and anemia, so he didn’t see me off in the morning.

Once you get north of Bohicon, the landscape starts to open up and spread out a bit and the livestock gets bigger. Here are some cows being led to graze through land right on the edge of the road.

Houses in Benin are either mud walls with thatch roof, mud walls with tin roof, or cement with tin roof. This is a pretty representative portion of a small village on the main road.

As you get into the provinces of Zou and especially Collines, you start to see these very cool—well—collines (hills), which are basically piles of rock jutting out of the ground without warning and then surrounded by semi-tropical vegetation. They form the backdrop for some very pretty villages.

There is an area along the gadrone (the main paved North/South road) that specializes in growing and selling manioc. This is what you make tapioca from. It is also what you need to make gari, a kind of manioc flour about the consistency of corn meal. While it has a pleasant texture, and does a good job soaking up the copious amounts of oil present in many local dishes, unfortunately it doesn’t have a whole lot of nutritional value.

Bananas growing at the base of a colline, and some classic mud huts with thatch.

Cotonou is a major port, and the source of much of the gasoline in Niger to the North. Pineapples are a humid climate tropical fruit, but much appreciated in the North (I brought 6 pineapples as gifts to Parakou). All of the gas trucks I saw from Niger were loaded up with pineapples on the roof.

And remember folks: “The views expressed here are mine personally and not necessarily those of the Peace Corps or the US Government.

On Friday, fifty of us former stagiaires (trainees) swore in as Peace Corps volunteers. As is traditional in Benin, at a big fête you wear même tissus (the same fabric) among some group you are a part of. As the only Information and Communications Technology volunteer from this year, I didn’t really have anyone to pick tissus with, so I wore the fabric of the business volunteers, since I have been training with them almost nonstop for 9 weeks anyway. As another show of solidarity, most of the male stagiaires grew some sort of mustache for the occasion.

These are some group shots with nearly everyone accounted for.
Environment

Small Enterprise Development + ICT
Yves (the program director for SED and ICT) is to my right.

Rural Community Health

Teaching English as a Foreign Language

The folks from my host family who came. They are always smiling until someone says they are about to take a photo. It’s one cultural aspect that you get used to quickly, but I don’t think I will ever stop smiling.

Me with “Bak”, the coordinator for SED and ICT. Bak ran the SED technical training and still found time to arrange for me to give two 90 minute presentations in French at a local Cyber, and found the owner of a local computer store who was willing to talk to me about what is available. And he did most of this while he was fasting for Ramadan.

Lucie was in charge of stage this year. She is also the SED program director in Madagascar, but Madagascar evacuated earlier this year, so she was available. What she lacks in size, she more than makes up for in energy, intelligence and enthusiasm. She got the loudest applause of anyone during the ceremony.

And remember folks: “The views expressed here are mine personally and not necessarily those of the Peace Corps or the US Government.”