Friday, June 30, 2006 I'm alive!

... and tired of moving up and down the country. We're currently in the midst of ridiculous amounts of planning for the incoming stage. That's right PSL-19, this is all your fault. We finished up the final schedules for the new program this week... which was not quite as bad as I thought it would be. I'll head back down to Cotonou next week to work on training things (vague, but that's about as much as I know). Then-ish the new trainees arrive. Scary. Scary for me, and them I would imagine.

Talking to people online today I realized that it's summer in the States. It's hard to remember things like that when we only just finished the hottest season of the year. It's been raining quite a bit recently, so to me it feels like anything but summer.

I'm going to be continually in and out of internet... so pardon my lack of updates for the next month! Sorry.

Oh. Camp GLOW went really well, i have a ton of good pictures. I'm going to try and come in tomorrow and do a massive uploading frenzy. I'll see what I can do.

Thursday, June 15, 2006 If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a Worldspace radio. The new sets are so freakin' cool!! I wonder if they deliver to Benin...

One of those odd things that you don't think you hear quite right happened on the cab ride up to Natitangou. We were talking to one of the passengers after passing through Djougou and he mentioned that in Parakou someone had had their testicles stolen. He also said that 2 young women had their "choses" stolen. This is of course all by magic. Now, we didn't take much stock in his ramblings, but on arrival in Nati we heard the same story from a different village. Testicles are getting stolen left and right here. Naturally it's all because of sorcery.

In any case, this all sounded very bizzare to me... but it turns out it's not a cultural phenomenon that's solely African. It's called Koro. (Katherine found this article after googling "African penis theft"). And it also turns out that it's happened here before. Both of those articles talk about penis theft, and it's true that this time it's testicles. Still, it's interesting.

In the same realm of genital theft.... This morning Seraphine (my kick-ass-secretary-lady that I've no doubt mentioned before) greeted me with a "Jeez, your bag is huge. What do you have in there, mens heads?". I replied that no, I infact had womens heads too. She countered, saying "No, your bag is probably filled with vaginas!". Some white people get accused of being stingy, some of talking funny. I get accused of stealing vaginas.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 Meat fest was delicious, although I wasn't really happy with the hamburger texture. Too much blood in the meat made them sort of soggy... and I think I used too much egg for the amount of meat. Oh well, live and learn.

Saturday I made a random trip to Nati in hopes of hitting up the waterfalls with a group that was going. That unfortunately didn't work out. I did however get to go visit Ly's post, which was fun. Her town is much bigger than I had imagined. In fact that's been a developing theme with most of the volunteer posts I go to. They are all a lot bigger than I imagine. Any how, good times were had.

The new stage is coming, and my schedule is full until they do. It's going to be insane with this girls camp next week, followed by material preparation for the newbies, and then their actual arrival. It's going to be a crazy 4 weeks.

Thursday, June 08, 2006 Dude. I just did used iChat's voice capabilities to talk with the States. Overall, I was incredibly impressed! I didn't think it was going to work almost at all, but surprsingly it worked quite well. Like had I had my headphones we could have had a very normal conversation (truthfully it sounded BETTER than my cell phone usually does). I'm interested in a repeat performance... so all of you Mac users interested, email me! I'd also like to try Skype, so yeah. That rules in you PC folks too.

Tomorrow is going to be the Parakou Meat Feast and Couch Celebration. It's going to rock. Weather permitting, I'm busting out the old barbecue, oiling up the meat grinder and going to town! I have to say I'm looking forward to this more than I ought to be.

I seem to have entered an dormant period in work. Many of my work partners seem to have a lot of things going on at once, and learning about HTML/CSS doesn't seem to be one of the important ones. Things are slowly picking back up, but it's been annoying to have been consistently told to go home AFTER having shown up for appointments. Alas, mais c'est comme ça en Afrique.

I've actively been trying to avoid the workstation as of late. For the past few weeks I feel like I've been living there. The workstation is great, but I can't describe how much I dislike being there. Most of the time I'm there it's for no real reason than to visit the out of towners. Yet there is usually a lot of "destressing" going on, which usually means reading girly magazines, or watching media. Media watching is often curbed by work being done on the computer, so there is lots of girly magazine reading. I have to say, if I'm going to hang out and do nothing... I'd rather do it at my house. It's true, I don't have a giant stack of People or Us Weekly, but my couch is more comfortable, my music selection my own, my computer more accessible and if I leave cups and dishes around only I'm affected. So yeah... I'm tired of the workstation. Sorry people.