Hi everyone,

I’ve been in Benin for about 3.5 months, but I’m just now starting up my blog since I haven’t had reliable internet access until this point.

For those who don’t already know, I finished college in June, did a little traveling around the U.S., and then set out for Peace Corps Benin on July 16. Staging was in Philadelphia from July 17-19, and then all the Trainees flew together from Philadelphia to Paris to Cotonou, Benin, arriving late in the evening of July 20.

From there, all the future Volunteers were split into training groups by sector. Mine is TEFL (Teacher of English as a Foreign Language), so I spent most of July 21-September 20 training as a teacher in Lokossa, Benin. Our training also included sessions on health, cooking, cross-cultural issues, mountain biking, and from 2-6 hours of language tutoring a day, six days a week.

We swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Cotonou on September 21, and I moved to my permanent post in the South of Benin on September 23. I’m not supposed to give the actual name of my town here for security reasons, but if you’re a reader who actually knows me (or who follows the links below), you’ll know where I am.

The Beninese school year started on October 4, and I’ve been teaching English to roughly 250 students in a public secondary school since October 15. My students’ ages range from about 10-16, though they’re all in the Beninese equivalent of 8th grade (here, 5e).

I’m very happy with my post on the whole. It’s a small town only about half the size of the town in Oklahoma where I grew up, but it isn’t too far away from Porto Novo, Benin’s capital, or from Cotonou, Benin’s largest city and the site of the main Peace Corps Benin office. I’ll be able to update this blog whenever I visit one of these two cities, which will probably be once or twice a month until my service ends in September 2009.

In the meantime, I’ve posted links on my sidebar to an online directory of other Peace Corps Benin blogs (Directory of other Peace Corps Benin blogs) and to the blog of some American documentary filmmakers in Benin whom I met a few weeks ago (Unseen Stories). Some of the blogs in the directory are written by PCVs from my training group who heroically kept up blogs in Lokossa despite the horrendously slow dial-up connection in the city’s internet cafe. You can check out their entries to read all about training.

The other Americans with the blog are in Benin for six months to shoot a documentary on child trafficking, which is a big issue here. When they first arrived in Benin a few weeks ago, they stayed with some connections in my post village, which is how we met. You can check out their blog to read about their project, Benin, my post town, and even see some pictures they’ve taken since arriving. They’ve written about me and the Beninese school system in their October 22 entry called “Lessons from a Peace Corps Volunteer.”

That’s about it for today. My French skills are coming along nicely, though the West African French I’m learning definitely isn’t what my Uni of Chicago French professors would consider “good French.”

I’ve kept up contact with the Beninese host family whom I stayed with in Lokossa during training. The night before I moved out, they threw me a good-bye party with all the “yovo” (white people) foods they’d been adding to their meals for my sake. After dinner, my host dad said that he and my host mom wanted to speak to me about my behavior with them over the past two months. After four weeks of getting feedback from observers during Model School, I more than half expected him to whip out a comment sheet and critique my efforts to adjust to Benin. Instead, my host parents began by asking me if there’d recently been any big changes in Peace Corps. I told them I couldn’t say. They then told me that they’d noticed a big difference between me and the other two Trainees they’d hosted in previous years. I tried to get to know them. I played with the children. I told them funny stories about my attempts to adjust to Beninese life. They wanted me to know that they’d noticed and appreciated my efforts. I think much of the difference that they noticed came from my French skills, which were higher than those of their past Trainees. Also, this was my second time around staying with a foreign host family, so I came in already knowing most of the ups and downs. Nevertheless, I was happy to hear them say that.

To everyone back in the U.S. and working abroad in Europe and Asia, I hope you’re doing well!