Tuesday, September 4, 2012

weekend talent show


Hello everyone,

It’s been a very successful Saturday here in Benin by all accounts. In the morning we learned about fuel efficient mud stoves, which we will practice building next week. The volunteer I am replacing actually did a lot of work teaching people how to build and use them. I am sure that I will still wind up teaching a few people how to build and maintain mud stoves, but a lot of ground has been covered there already. I was encouraged to hear that /maintaining/ them is actually a topic that doesn’t get covered very much. I might have a unique opportunity to follow up with people and really re-affirm effective long term use.

After that I had Bariba class (local language) with a tutor. He’s a young guy, and he’s kind of new to teaching, but he is enthusiastic about the material, and I am really glad to get some extra time in with Bariba before getting back to my post.

In the afternoon we had a talent show that some of the other volunteers organized. Over all it was a pretty impressive event. Lots of surprisingly good singing and guitar playing, a quality improve sketch, some cooking, some water balancing, you know, all the basics. I had dreams of doing a little bit of colorguard, but it wasn’t exactly easy to jury rig a weighted flag, so sadly that didn’t happen. It was really fun to watch the show though.

In the afternoon I got to make talli talli with my host mama. Talli talli is easy-to-make fried banana dough balls, perfect for your almost too ripe bananas. This was very exciting because I haven’t gotten to cook much here. We chatted a little about Swear-In. It was generally a calm, sociable evening.

We are all starting to think more and more about the move to post.  I hope making friends is easily there! I’ve started making a list of things that I would like to pick up here in the south where they are cheaper. We will see how that goes. Little by little, petit-a-petit!

That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading.
With Love,
Lauren

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