Noah's Peace Corps Blog

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