Noah's Peace Corps Blog

The lion stood no more than twenty yards from the car. Pardon the expression, but the massive male West African lion froze in the middle of the trail and stared like a deer in the headlights. It crept into the bushes as we approached, quickly creating space between it and us until it stopped, assessed us, and relaxed. We watched it for several minutes until it sauntered away. It was then we spotted two other lions further down the trail. For about a half an hour we rolled the car back and forth along the trail to catch better glimpses of these rare West African lions. They prowled through the bushes, laid around, and even chased each other, much to the delight of us smartphone-wielding Volunteers. It hadn’t occurred to me how dangerous such a large, strong, and ferocious cat could be until it came within 15 yards of our vehicle. Then I was happy to be behind metal bars in a big, scary thing called the automobile. I was on a three-day safari with five other Volunteers in Pendjari N...

I took a quick trip my first weekend back to the northern city of Parakou The flight back to Benin was delayed one day. I did not know when the airline instigated the change, but it evaded my attention up until I checked my bags in at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Int'l Airport to their new “final destination” of Paris. Then, out of artful negotiation, corporate responsibility, or sheer dumb luck, the airline put me up in a hotel for the 30-hour layover. The result? My first visit to Europe and the sites of Paris. This auspicious woopsie-daisy capped off a restful and joyous three weeks’ leave home in Minnesota. There, many of my preoccupations from my last blog post where dampened or managed with the help of loving family and friends.  Now, I’m back in Benin and have been for the last three weeks. I’m back to eating boiled dough with fish, rice and beans, and cassava porridge. It didn’t take long to dream again of takeout, but these dreams keep themselves working the nig...

In a few days I will celebrate one year at my work site. That's the first of hopefully two years of service with my community for improved agricultural production, community-wide nutrition, income generation and management, and gender equality. Also in a few days, the next generation of Volunteers will take their oaths of office and anxiously head to their work sites. I'm proud of my year's work at site and in helping train these new Volunteers, but I will unfortunately be absent from celebrating either of these accomplishments. That's because tonight, I'm traveling home. Etoile Rouge, a central point in Cotonou I will be in Minnesota (with a brief stay in Wisconsin) for three weeks to celebrate the holidays with family and friends. I will miss the charms of living and working with my community, from daily gardening and leading trainings to afternoons stripping corn and visiting with neighbors. An infinitely long series of joys, jokes, and connections h...

Over the last few months my host organization and I have been working diligently on developing a new organic gardening training center. Funded with the help of European partners and the labors of community members, this training center will one day teach intensive, organic gardening methods to interested gardeners. Its features are many: a water tower pumps water into an irrigation system of sprinklers and drip tubes; two composting stations facilitate the monthly churning of decaying organic matter into rich soil amendment; and three tanks house 100 catfish each that munch on moringa leaves and furnish untold gallons of nutrient-rich crap water that, when joined with fresh bovine poop, make for excellent fertilizer. Beyond the rows of irrigated vegetables in the northwest corner of the site sits a small garden promoting a long list of Peace Corps organic gardening methods. Here is grown kale, spinach, garlic, okra, cucumber, carrots, moringa, lemongrass, papaya, pineapple...

A major misconception many Americans have of the global poor (and poor Americans for that matter) is that they are listless, lazy, and lacking creativity. The reality is that the poor often work long hours -as they do in the United States,-or work many jobs and play many roles -as they do here in Benin. Nothing highlights this point more than my recent observations and work at site. I'll start with the corn harvest. Farmers sowed corn back in April/May and now hustle home every night with the day's worth of harvest. They promptly strip the ears and thump their thumbs at the kernels, which are then sifted, dried, and stored before milling. Corn is the primary food crop of Lac Ah ém é as it is eaten at nearly every meal in the form of boiled dough, or p â te (which I wrote about in an earlier post ). Nearly every household has its small 1-2 hectare field somewhere within walking distance of their home, and chances are they grow at least a little -if not a lot of- corn. Each ...

Last week was spent in cushy beds, swimming pools, and buffet lines. Mid-Service Training in Peace Corps Benin gives volunteers the chance to reconnect, recharge, and reevaluate their service amid all the conveniences one of the country's nicest hotels can offer. I found the day’s conference sessions engaging and the evenings of leisure and play joyful. The occasion also gave me time to reflect on sentiments that I’ve dwelt on for months. Mid-Service and a certain anniversary have aligned to underscore my point, which originates in the View from Mama Houndja's.  The SAS sector taking it easy at Mid-Service Training (Photo: Chizoba Ezenwa) ----- Mama Houndja lives about a mile from me in a small cement house that welcomes the narrow northbound dirt road to her village. Two cement rooms are raised above the ground by a few steps and a narrow porch. Behind the house in an opening of the road lies one of the village meeting places. There the water pump stands just ou...

Benin has been my home for eleven months. I have traveled from the rocky bluffs of Dassa to the sands of Ouidah's beaches and enjoyed the hustle and bustle of Cotonou as well as cool, calm mornings by Lac  Ahémé. Countless families and individuals at site brighten my day with their jokes, and our work together has developed from ideas into plans into missions. Work for me started to pick up last week as the farming season wound down a bit. Unfortunately in this regard, I had a commitment predating these eleven months in Benin, and that commitment was vacation. So I rescheduled some work plans, meetings, and training sessions for later in the month and left town for a needed break from the ordinary and in search of exploration. My college friend Alexander applied to and accepted a position in Peace Corps Liberia before I had done the same for Benin. Once it became evident in the winter of 2017 that we would be serving in the same region, we set our sights on meeting up for a qu...

I recently returned from another youth camp in the hilly central region of the Collines. This is the furthest north in Benin I have ever gone, and a week of conducting trainings on food conservation, business acumen, and reproductive health was capped with two excursions onto nearby rocky hills. The breathtaking views of the city of Dassa and the rolling countryside beyond proved a beautiful and stark contrast to my work site’s red soils, sand, and lakeshore. The real excitement these days, however, comes with the arrival of August 1, Beninese Independence Day. Parties and parades abound throughout the country as the people celebrate their shared history. In the spirit of Peace Corps’ Goal 3, I thought it a swell and hopefully-not-too-boring idea to write for my blog audience a brief history of modern Benin. While certainly abridged and far from definitive, I hope the following information will grant you a better understanding of both Benin’s place in history and the historical o...

The dogdays of summer have arrived in Benin. Classes are out, and exams finished. “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” corn in the US is more like “Reach for the Sky Come July” in Benin, even if the rains have been weak. Summer as a Peace Corps Volunteer means summer camps. At least 10 camps fill the weeks of July and early August across the country, inviting hundreds of middle and high-school age students to learn about public health, food security, leadership, English, and to meet new friends. For months I had been a part of a small team organizing Camp UNITE/GLOW in the historic city of Ouidah, which I’m proud to say made it through its scheduled program last week. Camp GLOW is an annual tradition for not only Peace Corps Benin but many other missions across the world. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World and targets motivated and accomplished young women for instruction in malaria prevention, nutrition, sexual and menstrual health, and leadership. In Benin, we have a Camp GLOW...