Noah's Peace Corps Blog

If I had to describe my last two weeks with one word, it would be infectious. It’s not a beautiful word, but it is a bit fun to say. Its connotations arouse images of hospital beds, hazmat suits, sneezes, and a runny nose. In fact, I find it difficult not to add “diseases” each time I say infectious. Infectious, however, also means communicable, transferrable, and catching, and while my last two weeks certainly had its share of the bad kind of infectious, it also saw a good share of the other, better kind of infectious. About two weeks ago I noticed a growing skin infection on my left arm. I had previously and successfully treated some minor red inflammation on my arms with allergy medications, but this infection was not as kind. I’ll spare the reader the details but suffice it to say that by the beginning of the work week my underarms were blistered with, well, blisters. Or maybe they were boils. What mattered was the discomfort and pain that had – mainly metaphorically - reall...

You never really know a place until you’ve tasted its food. We imagine France as starlit evenings of wine, Nutella, baguettes, and escargot (but not all at once). It’s easy to conjure and image of dinners in Japan with Kobe steak, rice, and sushi (perhaps at once). And in the United States, we eat hamburgers, tacos, and take-out (if not all at once, you’re doing it wrong). Considering this tasty truism and my Peace Corps goal to share Beninese culture with Americans, I am happy to present to you [*drum roll*] Beninese food! My PCV peers might be a little surprised at my enthusiastic presentation of Beninese cuisine. While they share my joy for sharing of Beninese culture with Americans, I assume many don’t think of food as a hot topic to write home about. The words I’ve heard that describe our culinary experience include the passive-aggressive “different” and “interesting,” the more upfront “invariant” and “boring,” as well as the all too desperate “p â te again???” I admit that...