Happy New Year!

January 09, 2011
8:42pm

I have finally gotten back to my place after what has been a month of travels and holidays. Colt has been and gone, we’ve rung in the new year, my three month integration period is officially over, and in less than a week, my stage will have been in country for half a year. Before I delve too much into that whole passage of time thing, I thought I’d let everyone know that this Friday, the 14th, 20/20 is supposed to be airing the special on Kate Puzey’s death. Please tune in and someone send me a copy!

Colt was here for almost 15 days and it feels like we built a little life for us here during his time. Christmas morning was a blur of travel to Djougou and we basically showered and crashed into bed for several hours. I think he had been traveling for like 40 hours or something by that point. We woke up on the 26th and did our Christmas morning then. We took lots of ridiculously adorable photos and made dinner…tacos! Then we basically spent the rest of the week eating local food and watching an insane amount of 30 Rock and Inception (I almost convinced him to let me watch it a third time, but he convinced me to watch some Californication instead). We enjoyed each other’s company and fell into a lovely sort of routine that involved meeting up with some of my friends here, eating too much, and seeing my village. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. New Years’ was rung in with card games, cake, and champagne. Colt read Ender’s Game while I continued to gavage myself with 30 Rock and we started to get a little sick of each other. I think the constant cold showers started to get to him…no hot water and it is damn cold in the mornings here during Harmattan. We smoked some hookah on my roof the last day we were in Djougou and got yam pilee once more with cold cokes and then watched Pineapple Express and giggled like dorks while we cuddled. Ahhh. Then we stayed two nights in Cotonou where we just ate out at all the nice places I can never afford (Chinese, Thai, Lebanese, etc) and his last day we spent at the workstation while I was sick and throwing up for several hours (good timing!). He held me, though, and although we ended up not getting to go out to Indian food that night like we’d planned, it was nice to just spend those last hours alone and close. I did feel sort of guilty though…but I guess I shouldn’t have tried to be so macho and drink the shower water. That’s what I get haha. His flight left on the 7th late at night and he has safely arrived back home and had Christmas with his family. I sent a bunch of random African gifts for him to disperse to various people, just little trinkets and stuff, nothing fancy (I am so broke right now!). It was a wonderful visit, we took lots of pictures and videos, and hopefully the next 8 months and 3 weeks will pass by without hardly any notice at all! Yeah, we’ll see about that. =(

Hmm, let’s see…what else? Big projects are starting to get going now that I’m allowed to really jump into work…several girls and boys camp meetings are going on this month and I am going to get back into going to the health center regularly in addition to my time at the office. I need to get some scrubs made for the maternity so I can help with births, but until then I am going to help out a midwife nurse when she inserts IUDs and Norplant birth control. The Peace Corps has restructured some of its goals so that now what was my primary project (sexual health and family planning) is now technically a secondary project…so I also need to try to get more involved with the maternal health side and do more prenatal consultations and stuff with the midwives. In a really bullshit red tape move, the Peace Corps noticed that volunteers weren’t meeting family planning goals, so instead of giving us more training or directive, they just decided to abolish that program as a major source of focus, thereby making the stats look better, but not fixing the underlying issue. That’s just one example in a growing list of examples about Peace Corps administrative bureaucracy that seriously hinders volunteers’ ability to effectively work abroad. Sigh. Onto more pleasant things…

Er…yeah, I got nothing. Oh! Next month I’m going to Pendjari, the national park, with Andrew and Krista, Eric, and a couple other people. I had originally planned on going with Colt when he was here…but well, that didn’t work out. So too bad for him, I guess I’ll just send him a picture of the awesome lions I’ll see!

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here for 6 months already. Time has really flown by it seems and yet it feels like I’ve been here for soooo long. For some reason I can feel like I just boarded the plane from Kansas City a couple weeks ago and also feel like I’ve been here for years simultaneously. I guess it was the same thing in college; day to day felt insanely drawn out, but by the time I graduated, I felt like I’d just blinked and it was over. I do wish I would have savored my time at Wellesley a little more, but I think I did okay. Similarly, I think I’ll do fine here in my looking toward the future and yet relishing my moments in the present. I suppose there will a time when I look back on my service and wish that I would have just been more involved in the day to day small things and knowing that keeps me a little more grounded even though I just want it to be a year from now so badly. The time will come, though, and probably sooner than I think I’ll be saying goodbye.

And when I do…I’ll be a vegetarian again. Because right now…well, I’m not. Not exactly. I’ve decided to be an Afri-tarian. I only eat meat while I’m here in Africa. I’m just so protein deficient especially if I want to avoid palm oil fried wagasi. I’m also basically a vegetarian for economic reasons stemming from the commercial meat industry in the United States, which clearly does not exist here. So I’m eating fish and poultry which I haven’t eaten since 2004. The chickens here are all free range and crustaceans are basically just big bugs anyway. I’m actually sort of grabbing onto meat eating with gusto. I was calling myself a ‘meatatarian’ for a while, especially while gnawing the bones of a particularly tasty guinea fowl when colt was here. I’m planning on enjoying it while I can and reverting back when I finish up here, although there is something to be said about spending my money on free range meat in the United States as it adds an even more forceful economic incentive for companies to use humane treatment of their livestock. I’m not sure, we’ll see.

Moving on…Medical school packets for the advisory committee are due in a couple weeks so I need to really get cracking on that. Hopefully that will keep me busy enough to not count down the days until I see Colt again. I need to have an awesome application so I can go home to interview!

And speaking of that, I wanted to publicly declare that Colt and I are clenched into a competitive battle to lose weight. Whoever reaches their goal weight first gets to decide the number of children we’ll have in the future. This is not a decision he will get to make. Thus I must win. So please, no one send me pasta or sugar. If it’s in my house I’ll eat it, but if it’s not, then I will be the champion. Send Colt, however, lots and lots of goodies. I’ll update my wish list to include canned or packaged tuna and mints instead of chocolate and velveeta cheese…as much as that pains me.

I guess that’s it for now…things should start to get back to a semblance of routine, or at least as routine as is possible in Benin. For example, tomorrow is a voodoo national holiday and I don’t have to go in to work. Hello, Lord of the Rings marathon! My life is sort of awesome, yeah?

See ya when I see ya,

Elaina