Noah's Peace Corps Blog

A fɔn ganjià ? On Saturday, I woke up ( fɔn ) recovered ( gangi! ) from jet lag in a bustling Cotonou, ready to depart for our training center in a quieter city in the south. The ride brought us across plains of tropical savannah and lakes spotted with fisheries to the pleasantries of WiFi and ping pong at the Peace Corps Training Center. It’s here that instructors will push us on improving our French (so far so good!), learning the local language of Fon, and branching out in cross-cultural workshops and agricultural extension classes. I welcome the chance to walk around the city with my fellow trainees and chat with Beninois outside the cadre of our excellent facilitators. Training will, however, occur primarily in nearby villages where host families will facilitate immersion and instructors will live alongside us to conduct most of our lessons. Doing this in small groups of volunteers sprinkled across several villages provides a more personalized and interactive learning env...

I have spent the last day and a half in Washington, D.C. with preliminary orientation sessions. The cohort of agricultural extension and public health volunteers is 40 strong and on our way to Paris tomorrow and Cotonou, Benin sometime Wednesday. The members of my cohort come from across the nation and globe, each with their unique background in upbringing and education. Among us is an NCAA DI Championship-winning goalie, a former caretaker of over a dozen Broadway theater buildings, students right out of undergrad, couples, and mid-career professionals. Regardless of our differences, we share the position of Peace Corps Trainee with goals of service, cultural exchange, and human development. It's that kind of commonality of motivation that has occupied my mind when it's not tuned into the logistics of traveling over 5,000 miles from The United States to Benin (and that neglects our detour to Paris). In fact, it was not at the beginning but at the end of orientation that we...