Noah's Peace Corps Blog

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...

After meeting the needs of the workforce of host countries, the second goal of the Peace Corps is sharing American culture with host country nationals. What better occasion to embrace Goal 2 than the Fourth of July? A few months ago, I approached my work counterpart and local friends about the prospect of a Fourth of July party. Thinking about ways to attract a broad range of people, we put our sights on a night of sports, food, and media. Instead of calling it a Fourth of July party, it made more sense to emphasize Goal 2 through a Jour de l'Amiti é , or Friendship Day. We were fortunate that the Fourth fell on a Wednesday, meaning that students would be off of school. We coordinated four teams across two villages to compete for men's and women's soccer championships ("Coupes de l'amitié"). The players trained weekly and selected their jerseys before taking the field in front of hundreds of spectators. The terrain and goals were smaller than regulation, ...

Well, it’s been a quiet week at Lac Ahémé, my work site and home out there on the edge of the tropics. The word tranquility comes to mind, even if it sounds more like a molecular quality of a noble gas than the consequence of a kind and equally noble lake breeze. The wind has picked up a bit over the last few weeks, making for warm, splendid evenings on sandy and grassy shores lapped by cool, brackish water. You may think the more consistent wind would portend more turbulent air, and you may very well be correct. The reality is, however, that our dear word tranquility still reigns here at Lac Ahémé. Oh, it sure is peaceful. And that would be mighty fine were it not to apply to precipitation. As a result, it appears the people of Lac Ahémé are the only un-tranquil part of the landscape. (That is, if we put aside the roars and revelries of children playing in the streets, but there is nothing new under the sun.) You see, June should see rain just about every day, at least fo...

There had to have been a way to avoid the heat and strain, but there we were, hiking up and down the hill, digging holes, and struggling to get enough water. For the plants, that is. It was June 1st, Arbor Day in Benin, and my host organization, host communities, and I celebrated with 60 mahogany trees, 50 beechwoods, and 20 orange and mango trees, respectively. Working across three villages, two schools, and two excruciating long, sunbathed roads, we planted these 130 trees to improve educational access for local girls. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, so let’s rewind. L'Avenue des Arbres de Houedjro It’s late March, and my community is knee-deep in what would become a three-month national teachers’ strike. At the same time, my counterpart brought Arbor Day to my attention as my host organization usually uses the day to plant trees and raise awareness of environment issues. We had neither seeds nor funding and would have to start scrambling if we wanted to plant...