The Presidential election was supposed to be on Sunday. On Saturday we were notified that they had pushed it back a week and it would now be the 13th. Seriously? You can just change something that big at the last minute?? Wow.
So we were also notified that we were off standfast until the 11th, told to go restock food, phone credit, etc. Great! So the next morning I headed up here to Natitingou. I had planned on going this week, just a few days later, but had nothing planned for Sunday and it's as good a travel day as any! Actually, travel in this country is never pleasant, and this particular trip, while uneventful, was extremely HOT. However, I made it up in decent time and almost immediately went to the market and bought a huge bag of fruits and vegetables. Yum!
Anyway, so I've gotten quite a bit of real work done, too, stuff printed, signed, scanned, and sent off to Cotonou for the Spelling Bee. Updated my computer, downloaded some new music, all kinds of fun stuff! Yesterday some volunteers from Mali who were visiting came to the workstation and cooked us all dinner - it was delish!
I'm going to head back to post today. My shoulder has really been bothering me lately - I think I tweaked something when I had my bike accident a few weeks ago but instead of getting better, it's getting worse. Unfortunately, it's the same shoulder I had pretty invasive surgery on a few years ago after I tore it to shreds during Kids camp! I'm in the middle of big, funded projects right now and really really really don't want to go to Cotonou during the election mayhem... so I think I'm just going to try taking it easy for awhile. I'm going to have a student pull my water so that will ease that stress on it a bit, and hopefully it'll just start healing itself!
Two interesting conversations I had yesterday:
A volunteer painted a huge world map on the wall of a school and when the kids had gathered around she asked them to point out Benin. The kids looked for a bit, and then pointed to Russia, the biggest country they could find. Must be Benin, right? So they had to step back to establish where Africa was, first.
One of the Mali volunteers was talking about a conversation he had with some villagers about heaven. The question was what will it be like there? and the answer - "There will always be enough rice and there will always be meat in the rice". Sounds like paradise to me.
Peace, K
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