Three weeks until we swear in and move to post. Now that we’re in model school, the second phase of training in which we teach actual classes of actual Beninese students, training is getting slightly more bearable. There’s more work, but at least it has a point.
I started a trend. Trainees are getting sick and going to Cotonou in droves. We may be in one of the poorest countries on earth, but when I got sick, the PC gave me excellent care and no one asked to see my health insurance card. I’m just sayin’.
While sick I finished Things Fall Apart. It was strange reading a book about West Africa while in West Africa. It didn’t feel as foreign as I expected it to.
I got an issue of The Nation in the mail yesterday. It was addressed to Cotonou, Ghana (?) but still got to Cotonou, Benin. My efforts to have them send my subscription here were somehow successful. Now I can read some intelligent articles and my stop my brain from oozing out my ears.
In Cotonou I saw a flyer addressing the “American ex-patriot community,” which was almost as unfortunate as when someone here referred to the founder of the Peace Corps as “Major Shriver.”
