What's going on:

A few more weeks have passed by and work has been moving along. I had the great opportunity to share a traditional Thanksgiving with several Beninese at a friend's post. It was really great to celebrate perhaps the second most fundamental American holiday with Host Country Nationals (HCNs). We had to stuff a few chickens because turkey was cost prohibitive, but they were delicious. After dinner we played music and danced.

At school things have been moving along. We had our first series of exams this last week and so far my kids seem to be getting the lessons (the students that can read of course). I am anxiously waiting the funds for tooth paste. When I receive them I will make a trip to the capital. I have made a flier and will go around to all of the 6e level classrooms and make the announcement just before winter break.

I am also looking forward to getting my hands on some art supplies a family friend collected from the school where she teaches. People at home have been so helpful in realizing my visions for my time here. My service wouldn't be the same without their support.

Moringa is slowly coming along. This month we are taking to the dirt roads and building a network of health centers and sales women in 5 villages who we will train about the product and its benefits. We are also hoping to connect with walking pharmacies, women who roam around towns and villages with baskets of pills and medications. These women tend to be really well informed about their product and arrive at ill people's house extremely poignantly. If we can build a good sales team capable of helping us to create a informed client base, it will greatly improve our chances of success. Next month we are looking to start our marketing campaign at local health centers during their baby weighing and vaccination days.

The only sad news is the death of my iBook. I mourned for a solid 48 hours, but I have a friend taking it home to get it fixed or rescue the hard drive. Hopefully it should arrive in 5 weeks or so along with the art supplies mentioned above. Having a laptop has been so great for my work (and sanity), but I will make due if the iBook is beyond repair.

Minty Victory is Mine!

I want to take a chance to thank my Mother Colleen, her husband Larry, and my Uncle John! They are helping me to realize one of my PC visions. They have come together to fund my Toothbrushing Club! Soon I will have an army of little toothbrushing maniacs all foamy-mouthed and cavity-free every morning. I'm sure there will be many photos and even videos! I will post updates you can be sure.

Support your Volunteers

Several months ago there was a lot of talk about cuts in Peace Corps funding in American news media. You may have seen something in your local paper or on the television. These budget cut backs are currently being implemented all over the world. The African Region has decided to cut volunteer numbers rather than the support staff. While it in unfortunate that ten less communities in Benin will receive a volunteer, I am glad that this approach was taken. Unfortunately, we are still experiencing some financial difficulties here and they could become worse over the next few years.

I remain hopeful that this could change in the coming years. Both McCain and Obama both mentioned increasing the Peace Corps budget while on the campaign trail, so it would seem bipartisan support for PC is a no-brainer. I would also support stategic and structural changes, but I'm not going to lay out my 7 point plan here. I will say that I would increase the readjustment allowance for RPCVs (now it is at 6k USD, not enough to "start over" in a major American city).

I am posting to take the opportunity to pass along this link I came across that guide people through the process of contacting your representative to ask them to support the PC program. Please pass the word along, we are doing our best out here, and it would be a shame if cutbacks became too extensive and whole programs were lost.

Moringa Madness

We've hit a couple more hurdles, but are still moving forward. We ran into a snag when we were asked for a copy of the title for the land my NGO partner, SADEC is donating to the project. This is a problem when, like most of the developing world, rural property titles don't exist. There is no way to prove legally who owns what; this can be a problem even in urban areas. We managed to negotiate a solution whereby the king of my village and the Chef d'Arrondissment will sign a typed up document verifying the ownership of the property.

Due to setbacks we have reworked our schedule and modified our plan quite a bit. Though I think that our new solutions will actually put us in a stronger position at the end of the day. Asside from that we have worked together to solve the problems which has improved the problem solving abilities of our team. This is something that will make it easier when it is time to walk away next September.

Come January we should be ready to roll out our marketing campaign/ informative workshops at the local health centers and open our product into the marketplace. Before this can happen there is still much to do: we have to contact our local sales reps (Marché Mamas) and train them. We also need to collect preliminary data from the health centers we will be working with so we can acurately analyze the impact of our work.

Little by Little

School has been back in for a couple of weeks and things are running about as smoothly as can be expected (which is to say not at all). No matter, I've been teaching my lessons and doing my best to get the students back into the school mentality. So far so good.

With my grant project I hit a pretty major snag. I'm happy to say my partners and I sat down and came up with a work-around. Having surmounted a major challenge makes me confident
our team can really make this thing work.

Other than that, I've been up in Parakou (a northern city) for a couple of days now. We had our regional Volunteer meeting. We also used the time to kill, butcher, and grill a sheep. It was delicious and a lot of fun.

Elections are coming up soon. I had planned to watch them with some other volunteers, but I don't want to spend all of that time out of village. I'll probably make my way with a friend or two up to Glazoue Wednesday, grab a beer, and watch some satellite TV.

Not much more to report. I'm alive and doing fine. Going to be out of contact for a while, I think.

Wish GRANTED!

Hanging around the bureau here in Cotonou all week had been just okay until today. I've been caught up in the MedUnit trap since Monday. I've been spending the week counting my francs making sure that I had enough money to go home. But today I was cleared to leave tomorrow and I received some great news...

My grant proposal (the one I wrote on Moringa to fight malnutrition), was approved! Well it will be as soon as my work partner signs the agreement form. Whats more is they are going to fast track the money direct into my bank account so that I will have access much faster. This is great news! The people in my community will be so happy.

There is such a great need for a clean and reliable source of protein and vitamins where I live. If things go as planned that need will be filled within the year, in a financially and environmentally sustainable way! I have a lot to start doing when I get home, with school starting, the other projects I have planned and now this, it should be a pretty big year.

Morocco: Imlil and the Hike to Basecamp

We meandered around Marrakesh a little in the morning before getting out of the city. We took a mini buss to a small village named Asni that serves as a transit hub for several mountain settlements in the High Atlas mountains. In Asni we ran into a Czech tour guide that brings groups over land twice a year from the Czech Republic. He was nice enough to offer us a ride to the village we were destined for, so we didn't hesitate. The climb along the mountainsides was amazing. In Imlil Oran, our new friend, hooked us up with a couple of his local colleagues and they got us a great room.

Cafe Soleil was the perfect countryside hotel. The room had a really nice bucolic feel. The floor was covered in layers of Berber carpets in deep reds, black, and cream. The beds in the room were extremely comfortable and we had our own shower. The view from the room was stunning. Set right off of a seasonal riverbed, and facing two mountains the hotel couldn't have been more picturesque. Down below our window a well maintained garden was framed by trees. For dinner the staff cooked us a great chicken tajine. A tajine is a traditional Moroccan dish cooked in a ceramic dish with a cone-shaped lid over coals. They are filled with a mixture of meat and veggies and are smothered with clarified butter. We couldn't believe how good the meal was, it was the perfect thing to get us ready for the next day's hike.

The next morning we took our breakfast in the courtyard looking over the dry rocky riverbed. Moroccan marmalade, bread, butter, orange juice and Nescafe, a nice start to the days walk. The fresh flavors of the marmalade and orange juice really doing justice to Morocco's reputation as a great producer of citrus.

We set off for the days walk winding through a hillside park on our way out of Imlil. Climbing a series of switchbacks led our party to Armoud, a neighboring village on the edge of a rocky graphite-colored valley floor. We made our way across the rocks following the faint trail to a neighboring hillside. On the hill we took our first break. As we ate under an gnarled, hollowed out old apple tree some Moroccan children were skipping and playing down the path. We offered them some figs and peanuts, which they gladly took as they giggled off further down the trail.

Pressing on, I watched as the landscape became more and more radical. We crossed a beautifully constructed aqueduct carved into the hillside. The structure would later symbolize a gate between a landscape influenced by the ingenuity of man and one left to the will of nature. As our progress continued the land fell away to the right to create a deep gash in the Earth's surface. At a waterfall we crossed to an adjacent hillside. There in the crook of the two peaks was a roughly constructed group of shacks occupied by vendors hoping to eek out a living on passing hikers as a “last chance” style of commerce. Thanking them, we climbed into the mountainside to eat our lunch of sausage, pita, Vache Qui Rit (cheese spread), and dates.
After lunch we continued on our way making good time. We had a long day ahead and I wanted to make it to the base camp before dark. Eventually we came upon another vendor selling cold beverages in a very inventive way. He had blocked a natural spring and attached a hose. He led the hose to a water bottle and used it as a sprinkler, wetting down an overhang. The rock would drip over the drinks making them cool and enticing. I was blown away with his ingenuity and wanted to stop and ask some questions; unfortunately we didn't have the time.

Continuing the vegetation was dwindling to mosses, tumbleweeds, and only the toughest shrub-trees. We were traveling in the hot season in Morocco, so much of what we saw was on the extreme end of the seasonal swing. Roots seemed to be minimal as the trees stretched, reached, and twisted as far as they could to catch the sunlight that poured in as the sun skipped between the surrounding mountaintops. We also encountered a crossed several local Moroccans trafficking goods and gear to and from Imlil and the surroundings. They used mules to carry the large loads. Saddled with bright blankets and harnesses the mules slowly persisted under the weight but surefooted, they continued.


Along the way we met several interesting people. A couple of Americans coming back from a small day hike recounted their travels of the last 8 years that had kept them out of the US. They seemed to have come into some money and decided to tour the world on a sailboat. “Our money is running out.” they told us; unashamedly and not disappointed, simply stated as a fact. They were heading back to the US after a couple more stops and going to look for work. We wished them luck and continued on our way. Now several hours and many kilometers into the day's hike, we were feeling rather exhausted. Luckily we soon ran into a pair of vacationing Irish. The couple seemed to be gushing after coming down from the summit that morning. The warm exchange was reassuring and sure enough just around the bend we saw the refuge where we were going to stay the night.


The “hut” or “refuge” was far from what the words conjured up in my imagination. Climbing up to the first we were impressed with the massive scale of the building. Here, more than 30k or rough mountain trails and bad gravel road, people had built some impressive stone structures. The refuge had hot showers, electricity (generator), plumbing, and was detailed in well-crafted wooden trim. We entered got our beds in a bunk-style room, and went down to shower and eat.
Dinner was more of the same sausage, fruit, nuts,etc. We added on a bowl of warm Harissa soup. Harissa is the traditional soup that Moroccans eat to break the fast. It is a thick tomato-vegetable base. Its was a great way to get back some nutrients after a long day of walking. At dinner we met a couple more Czechs, Ales and David. They were planning on climbing, but David had fallen ill. Ales asked if he might join us. We talked a while and got to know each other. Ales had finished a job as a programmer and decided to take a trip to Morocco before settling into another job. David had been living in Ireland for four years or so and was also thinking of changing careers, he was very interested in long-term volunteering so we talked a bit about the challenges and rewards of such work. David and Ales had met over the internet and only really met face-to-face there in Morocco. They made a very interesting pair, Ales being more solemn and serious, where David seemed to laugh at everything. After chatting a while and making our plans to meet in the morning, we repacked our bags for the climb and went off to bed.