Hi! I know it's boring to sit and read and I'm a very visual person, so here are some carelessly selected photos to provide you with a decontextualized cross-section of my life:
Grand HoHo! Merry Christmas, everyone! I'm just gtting around to uploading photos from the holiday season and months leading up to it. For Christmas, about 40 of us piled into taxis and headed West to Grand Popo, only of the only "nice" (i.e. touristy) areas of Benin. On the border with Togo, Grand Popo is a stretch of beach lined with little inns and restaurants. I spent less than $50 in three days and came back feeling like I had just taken a cruise. On the beach one day, we happened upon some men who started and NGO collecting turtle eggs and then releasing the hatchlings to protect them from natural predators. It was amazing to see the little guys head back into the ocean, flapping their little flippers into the surf. Smiling, we watched as they disappeared into the sea foam.Five minutes later, fishermen pulled in their nets right where we had just released the turtles. Horrified, we inquired as to why the NGO had timed the release this way and the only answer the skilled marine biologists could come up with was "No..." as if we hadn't just asked an open ended question.
West Africa wins again.
Fishermen and women pulling in the net in Grand Popo. The catch (hopefully minus the turtles) was then transformed into a delicious meal for us by Mama Lucy, proprietress of the little Inn on the beach where we stayed for the equivalent of about $10/night. This was a fun shot to take because if the fishermen catch you taking their picture they steal your camera and break it, and the thrill of sneaking around with my camera got me thinking about going into investigative photojournalism. Or espionage.
On the way to Grand Popo for Christmas! We sang Christmas carols for the chauffer, who seemed to love it.
Flooding in southern Benin, between Ouidah and Come.
Grand mosque in Niamey.
Women at the well in village. Waiting your turn to pull water can require quite a bit of patience, as the order is socially driven and a crucial part of village politics.
Me with giraffe. We rented a taxi who took us out into the bush, then founda guide help us search for the last wild giraffe herd in West Africa. We ambled after them over the dry grass, trying to be quiet, and it worked well as giraffes dont' seem to spook easily. The kept their distance but weren't particularly scared of us. We saw a three month old baby and roamed around with them for awhile. It was amazing and they were so graceful, excepting when there was something on the ground they were after. To take a drink, they spend awhile sidestepping into a straddle so that their long necks can reach the ground.
Giraffe.
Giraffe.
Giraffe.
Seed and crop stockage huts in Niger. These structures are built to store dry crops for use during the off season. They are built off the ground to prevent rot and to protect from the sun. They are absolutely critical to staving off starvation during the long dry seasons in the desert.
The Niger River basin. I think. Is "basin" the geological term for a river's banks and surrounding low-lying areas? I'm not sure and Google isn't working. Anyway, in the middle of the photo is the mighty Niger.
Donkeys pulling a day's harvest on the long haul back to village.
Little mosque in the middle of the desert. Everywhere you go, mosques are the center of social activities and the call to prayer takes precedence over all else 5 times a day.
A village outside Sadore where ICRISAT collaborates with a womens group on palm fruit production.
At ICRISAT, agricultural research center outside Niamey in Sadore. state of the art facility researching hundreds of varieties of fruits, vegetables and groundnuts in the interest in food security. The goal is to produce seeds which are more effectively cultivated in the harsh Sahelian climate. We toured the facility all day, indlucing the impressively organized seed storage freezers, which store over 75,000 strains of groundnut seeds produced over the past several decades and stored at temps as low as -20 degrees celsius! Their grounds are expansive and include almost every kind of crop imaginable. They develop the seeds and then collaborate with independent womens groups in nearby villages, who cultivate and produce the foods while collecting data at the same time. www.ICRISAT.org for more in you're interested. Tom is a fruit farmer so we went primarily out of interest in his projects at post. He bought some seeds at the end of the day.
At the artisans' welding workshop, where water-pulling mechanisms are welded and distributed. In villages, people use bicycles, mules, whatever they can to pull water from hand-dug wells. These devices make it easier and more efficient to pull water so it is easier physically and more people can pull water on a given day.
Sangare, Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) for the Agriculture program in Niger, shows how a hand-crank works.
Foot-pump wells. They have stopped using these as much as it is usually the women fetch water. In a country with a 7.2 (yep. 7.2) fertility rate, women are often pregnant and the hard labor of foot pumping can be dangerous during a pregnancy. Especially since the women work up until they give birth and their backbreaking work often masks labor, a trend toward hand-cranks is rising.
Well parts at the NGO before they are distributed.
In Niamey, a regulation-sized olympic pool was built for athletes to train and to host official competitions and meets. Again, typical: they didn't account for the tiling in the blueprints, so the finished product was a pool a few inches short of the regulation standard. It is now used just for recreation. Go, Niger!
Bank of the Niger at sunset.
Me, Tom, Jeff and Scott on the Niger river. Tom is our Northernmost volunteer and is on his third year. He also speaks Djerma (Dendi) so did some crucial translating on our trip. Jeff is my platonic boyfriend and one of my favorite people on Earth. Scott was my closest postmate during my first year of service and just finished here in Benin. I love these people and couldn't have asked for a better travel group.
Me, Tom, Jeff and Scott with the artists who created the batiks behind us. We spend such a great deal of time trying to integrate into our cities and villages in Benin that for Niger, we decided to adopt a strict "Not My Village" policy and to go all-out tourist by taking photos, asking questions and being just as obnoxious as we pleased.
PIZZA! Best pizza I have found on this continent. Not that I've been to that many places here. But still, the cheese makes me so happy. As a side note, Peace Corps Niger has since been suspended. Two French men were kidnapped by Taureg rebels in Niamey. I'm glad we got a chance to see the country before it was deemed unsafe. I'm also glad it wasn't us. No more travelling in the North!
Arabica gum at the marche in Niamey. It's hardened tree sap and i'm not sure what it's used for. The guy selling it said it could be sucked on like candy but it had NO taste. Maybe boiled with sugar and fruit then re-cooled?
Rock quarry in Kandi at sunset.
Cows in Kandi. Kandicows. Kows.
Rock quarry in Kandi at sunset.
In line for the Thanksgiving feast.
Eddie and Hillary, two top chefs for our Thanksgiving feast in Kandi. Drunken stagiaires killed the bird the night before, but after a night and a day in a cement sack and six hours in a roasting hot taxi, it turned out okay. No one was poisoned.
Cattle market along PK10 between Porto-Novo and Cotonou. Ths was right before Tabaski, when everyone was buying their animals for the big feast.
A field.
Bridget in her village of Toffo.
A Christian monastery in Toffo.
On one of my post visits. This is Laura in Huegbo, pulling water from the well outside her house.
Angele and Qlef, friends from Djigbe, on their visit to my house in Cotonou. I wished they could have stayed longer!!
A fashion show in Cotonou by designer Wemi from Nigeria. I was invited by a friend's work partners from MTN, a multinational West African telecommunications company. It was really neat to see how the designer incorporated traditonal fabrics (Nigerian cotton) into modern style dress. Also it was fnu to get dressed up and go somewhere for a night.
I gave this little girl an apple from my purse. She had never seen one before, nor had most of the women in this remote village. They passed around to about 15 people, each taking a small bite then scowling at me suspiciously. I guess in a world of bananas, mangoes and pineapples, apples are pretty bitter! (They did end up thanking me and asking for another).
On a trip to Savalou to do a survey with CARE. My work partner and I interviewed local health workers and community leaders on common health practices and community resources to determine the root causes of child and maternal mortailty within the commune. Here we are with a womens group in Awaya. The other yovo is Louise, an intern from CARE Denmark who worked with me for 6 months.
A womens group in Kpekpede shows the cases which they use for microfinancing. Each woman contributes the same amout per month, $ 0.50 for example, and then the fund is divided into smaller funds, one for group purchases such as equipment for soy production, one for small loans to women for their childrens' educations or busniess costs, and a small emergency fund for health or natural disaster-related expenses. Loans are repaid with interest, and when I visited each of these two groups had $500-$600 total saved in their cases. Groups have presidents, secretaris and treasurers, each of who holds a key so that the case can only be oened by all three at once. It's a really neat system that has helped women worldwide to open small businesses, receive educations and pay for lifesaving medication for their children.
Our truck became stuck while trying to cross a waterlogged field. It took about 45 minutes and as many people to free us...
...only to become stuck again thirty feet later.
An example of why a relatively simple excursion can turn into an all day trial. Two hours into our morning, we encountered this rain-eroded hole in the road. We turned around and went back to where we started, then found a different road to travel. No lunch that day : ( but you get to see a lot more in a car than you do when you travel by bike.
Some of the kids in a village where we interviewed a womens group. They were particularly enthusiastic singers, so I got out my camera and snapped a few pics.
The roads are kind of a crapshoot, and when obstacles are encountered it can take hours to pass. I sat with Louise, fellow CARE intern, as our male work partners hacked a path around this fallen tree. They also paid for help from two villagers who were passing by with machetes.
Mist coming down the hills in the morning. Savalou is a hilly area in central Benin, known for its views and Gari production.
View of the sunset from the roof of our hotel.
Students work in the fields each morning before school starts. Pictured are primary school students in Savalou.
This woman was boiling manioc to make Gari (manioc flakes that are sprinked on a meal to fill it out) while sitting in the sun on an extremely hot day. In an almost unprecedented gesture of empathy, an old man came over with the branch you see to her right, dug a hole with his machete, and settled it there to provide her with some shade.
Louise, an intern from CARE Denmark researching soy production, storage and transformation. The white bags behind her are filled with dried manioc and tapioca used in cooking.
On the road from Dogbo to Lokogba. I was on the back of a motorcycle and just blindly shooting pics over my shoulder. I liked the way this one turned out: three women returning home from the well with water in large jugs on their heads. The walk was about 1-2 kilometers from their well to village.
Visiting a friend's post in Dogbo where he teaches English. The three neighbor kids were over playing in his livingroom and discovered I had a camera- then really started hamming it up. The little girl in the middle was simply captivating.
