how's Benin compare economically to other countries in Africa? Is it one of the richer or poorer countries? I'm assuming poorer if the Peace Corps is there

4/4/2014 4:20:26 PM

It's nicer than Detroit.

4/4/2014 4:40:48 PM

Benin is one of the poorer countries in Africa, especially if you account for current wars. Benin manages to be poor in peacetime. Other countries needed massive internal wars.

IMF ranks Benin at 163 out of 187 countries in terms of GDP per capita. Meaning that only 24 countries are poorer. About half of those had wars -- nasty ones -- in recent memory, including the lowest ranked country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has pretty much been in a state of constant civil war since independence.

That said, 21 African countries are technically poorer than Benin (Haiti, Afghanistan, and Nepal are the three non-African countries). There are 54 fully recognized countries in Africa, so we're slightly below the halfway mark.

But in real terms, what does that mean? I can't say for sure, because I haven't been able to travel to other African countries yet. Neighboring Togo and Burkina Faso are technically poorer, though they have some things we don't and a lot of goods in Benin originate in Togo for various reasons. We have more paved roads than the landlocked countries, because the colonialists never paid attention to them, but that still amounts to basically two highways for the whole country (each of which can charitably be described as having two lanes).

4/4/2014 5:00:42 PM

See? Told you it was nicer than Detroit.

4/4/2014 5:04:12 PM

The comparisons to Detroit and Warren County are kinda funny. Not, you know, ha-ha funny, but...amusing.

It was 100 degrees today. In my house, where there's a fan.

4/4/2014 5:24:00 PM

i turned the air conditioner on because it got above 70 in my house

we all have hardships to bear

4/4/2014 5:24:49 PM

Ain't no hardship, brother. Next time I have AC I ain't turning that motherfucker off until there's frost on the windows. I have learned to respect that shit. I have also learned that when you drink a half-liter of African moonshine you swear and say "ain't" a lot on the internet.

4/4/2014 5:31:30 PM

what do they make their moonshine from?

4/4/2014 5:47:11 PM

Palm wine. They could tap a palm tree, same way syrup people tap maple trees, but they just cut 'em down because Beninese people have some deep-seated hatred for trees. Then you ferment what comes out into wine, which is tasty enough by itself, at least when it's cold. Or you can distill that product down into moonshine.

My great lament for Benin is that they don't have rum. All you need to make rum is sugar cane and a drinking problem, and Benin has plenty of both, but they don't do it. Why? Because a cane press requires a large animal, a horse or donkey or ox, and a Beninese person would be inclined to eat said animal.

4/4/2014 5:53:01 PM

haha see if you can get a rum distillery project approved

[Edited on April 4, 2014 at 6:14 PM. Reason : ask that twwer that's starting one in raleigh how to do it]

4/4/2014 6:14:13 PM

Well funny story, after he finished his service in 2011 a PCV invited a friend from home to Benin, and they started a moonshine business. It has recently become legit -- they have promotional events, official bottles and labels (rare in Benin for most drinks), ads up all over the city...

But it's destined to fail. A liter of their Tambour Sodabe (sodabe being the word for moonshine, tambour being the brand) costs 9,000 CFA. A liter of village moonshine -- which won't make you go blind, if you know you're buying it from the right guy, which isn't hard to do -- costs 600 CFA. Nobody in Benin is going to spend that much to get brand-name moonshine. Nobody outside of Benin will want the moonshine whether it is brand name or not. The stuff tastes like death and it smells like AIDS.

They aren't total fools; they know all of that. These guys are hoping that some Nigerian or Lebanese guy with too much money will buy the business from them, and they'll either make a small profit or even out for the time they've lived here. In the meantime, I benefit from going to their events (I was out the founder's birthday last weekend) and drinking for free.

[Edited on April 4, 2014 at 6:24 PM. Reason : http://tambour-original.com/about/ is the address for them]

4/4/2014 6:18:58 PM

You're in the 25th poorest country in Africa and posting on the internet.

That's pretty spectacular, I think.

4/4/2014 7:29:28 PM

I've talked about it before, but the mobile revolution and the associated "leapfrog" technologies are huge here. I couldn't post from every village in Benin, but I could post from a fair number -- villages where there is no water, no electricity, very little food. And Beninese people are interested in learning about the internet -- rarely in learning the things you'd want to teach, but hey.

It's also out of the question for most Beninese people, even assuming they have the devices to access it. All this posting I've done lately? I paid 6,000 CFA -- $12 -- for a gigabyte of data to last one month. I have NEVER known a Beninese person to buy more than 200 CFA of phone credit at a time. 6,000 CFA is unheard of for any individual expense that doesnt' involve a vehicle. It's less than my power bill a month. It's probably comparable to my rent.

4/4/2014 7:37:17 PM

Are you on a phone or laptop? If you're using firefox or chrome, i'm pretty sure you can tell them to not download any images at all, might save some bandwidth.

I would imagine that if people are interested in the internet, pointing them to articles on sanitation and food safety would help? Or just even more basic things like how to make an electromagnetic, or how the LCD screen in their phones are made/work might spark some curiosity? Do you ever see any effect of the internet having this type of impact? There's an enormous amount of free instructions on the Internet that i'd imagine people in poor countries can build businesses around...

Also, relating to a comment you mentioned in the other thread about tithes... Do you often see any Beninese that you find attractive, or if the coloreds aren't your thing, someone a reasonable American might find attractive?

4/4/2014 7:46:04 PM

I've said before on here but I'll reiterate, there are gorgeous women in Benin. Heartbreakers. If it weren't for cultural and linguistic barriers (and, nowadays, the relationship) I'd have hopped on any number and happily had success because ridiculous-looking though I may be, I'm American, and here that is the equivalent of having unlimited credit and a 12 inch cock. The problem with attractive women here is that they don't stay that way long. It's rare to be unmarried by 23 or childless by 25. I'm already 29; every woman close to my age is already taken and has a kid or two. Plus, if you're a woman who has lived her whole live with minimal bra use and maximal children, those tits get to be...lengthy.

I'm on a laptop -- with a giant black scar down the screen from when it was damaged -- and I'm using firefox. I'd love to know how to disable images, I don't know how.

Quote :

"Do you ever see any effect of the internet having this type of impact?"

Honestly? No. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, but in terms of what I see, 100% of Beninese internet usage falls into one of three categories:

1) Looking up images. Just random images. My Beninense facebook friends love to just post random images. If they find a picture of a duckling saying happy birthday, they will post it and say, "For everyone whose birthday is today!" even if they have four facebook friends and none of them are even born that month. Also, they love to go through images on their phone. They do this on public transport. Picture of house, picture of yard, picture of dog, graphic porno picture, picture of sunset, picture of a cock, and so on.
2) Flirt. In this, they are not too different from us.
3) Nigerian e-mail scams. I do not joke, I have stood in cyber cafes and looked at what people were doing and seen all of them sending Nigerian prince e-mail scams.

Why don't they look up sanitation or whatever? Simple. People here don't like to read. They don't want to read. They will go to some length to avoid reading. When they have to read, they move their lips as they do so because they've never done it just to do it. The Beninese school system all but discourages reading. My closest secondary school has a library. I have never known anybody to use it.

And why would you look up a real issue? The article will be written in vrai French, which you don't really understand, again because your education system fucked you.

The one time I have heard of or seen a local using the internet to look a thing up, he was typing "Who is Matthew Kerekou?" Kerekou was president of Benin from 1972-1991 and 1996-2006. He was, in short, president for most of this guy's life. When I asked the kid why I was looking the guy up, he said, "To see pictures of him."

4/4/2014 8:02:47 PM

block images in firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-block/

It's a really tiny download, if you can get through the images on the page itself...

click this for a quick/easy download: https://velocity.ncsu.edu/dl/gW5UMdi/145526

Once downloaded, open it with Firefox.

[Edited on April 4, 2014 at 8:22 PM. Reason : ]

4/4/2014 8:17:09 PM

ebola?

4/4/2014 9:27:15 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/magazine/06-pieter-hugo-rwanda-portraits.html?hp&_r=4

People forgiving and asking for forgiveness for murders during the genocide.

4/5/2014 4:08:17 PM

Ah yes, the truth and reconciliation model. Started in South Africa, spread to Rwanda, and only used once in the US that I'm aware of -- in my hometown, Greensboro, for the Klan shootout in 1979.

I didn't work real well in Greensboro and it's not working great for the Hutus and Tutsis. For Rwanda itself, maybe. They've been calm. But Rwanda continues to support militias in the Congo civil war -- the most horrific current war that most people have never heard of -- and they're doing it because of the events of 1994 (and the long, long series of violent incidents leading up to it)

4/5/2014 5:29:08 PM

Well, I mean, what "truth and reconciliation" was need in Greensboro? The people who were bitching the loudest about it never wanted to hear the truth that everyone already knew: everyone involved in the incident was from outside of Guilford County, and few, if any at all, wanted any of those fuckers to demonstrate in Greensboro in the first place. I'm just sayin...

4/5/2014 8:16:25 PM

Didn't it take the police an extra long time to show up and do something?

4/5/2014 8:48:44 PM

that's what people say, but didn't it basically always take a long time for the police to show up to a black neighborhood in the first place?

4/5/2014 10:02:25 PM

The police were aware that something was going to go down and didn't anything about it. Two of them showed up just to watch.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/09/weekinreview/the-nation-civil-convictions-in-greensboro.html

The problems in the area went beyond some out-of-town protestors gettin' rowdy.

4/5/2014 10:22:48 PM

Quote :

" (and the long, long series of violent incidents leading up to it)"

4/5/2014 10:33:37 PM

Where do you see benin in 100 years?

4/5/2014 11:11:51 PM

Africa

4/6/2014 1:19:56 AM

Pictures are still the dominant use of the internet here. The internet is evolutionary, not revolutionary

4/6/2014 1:39:54 AM

You'd think a poor country devoid of education, but that has internet, could develop an education system organically around the internet.

On the other hand, we are both developed and relatively educated, but a majority of Americans supposedly don't acknowledge evolution as reality.

4/6/2014 12:19:39 PM

^What do you mean by that?

^^Made me laugh.

^^^The 100 years question is an impossible one just because of technological advances that have nothing to do with what's going on internally here. I'm 29 years old. Not exactly ancient. But I remember that for a big chunk of my life, the only "mobile phone" I ever saw was a briefcase-sized unit my uncle kept in the car for emergencies. My grandmother still had a rotary phone. The first computer my family had used the giant floppy disks, had no hard drive, and had a five-by-five black screen that showed green letters which could be printed, laboriously, on a dot-matrix printer. If you had told my parents then that I would posting on the internet (what "internet?"), from a village in Africa, using a laptop that is significantly smaller than that mobile phone...they might have believed you, but it's not something they'd have predicted.

Broadly speaking, I think within 100 years we'll solve malaria. I don't know if we'll kill the parasite or the mosquito, but either way, that will relieve a pretty substantial burden on the people and government of Benin. Communications infrastructure will continue to advance much faster than physical infrastructure (which, in Benin, is actually getting worse rather than improving). Probably within 20 years internet access of some kind will be available to every person in Benin. Increased access to outside information will, hopefully (even necessarily) cause massive education reform here.

Benin will be dependent on foreign aid probably for most of that 100 years, if not all of it. The only thing with the potential to change that would be major oil discoveries. I pray to God that doesn't happen. 99% chance it would end in disaster. Nigeria has plenty of oil, and it also teeters perpetually on the edge of civil war, is disgustingly corrupt, and still has tens of millions of incredibly poor people. Nigeria is so bad that it's one of four countries that still has polio. Even Benin doesn't have polio.

Probably the best realistic hope is that Benin's stability continues, and continues to draw businesses to invest here. One of the country's strong suits is that its big cities are only an hour or two away from Nigeria, so if you have to work there but find it too dangerous, you can set up shop in Cotonou or Porto and enjoy the proximity.

I'll think of more, I'm sure.

---

As for Greensboro, the 1979 thing is all shit. Every side is covered in shit. The KKK are obviously shit. The communists were only slightly less obviously shit. The police were shit. The news coverage about it was shit. The truth and reconciliation thing is widely recognized as a joke.

4/6/2014 12:28:03 PM

Grumpy I don't want to make you waste data to stream it on youtube, but everytime I hear this Action Bronson song: http://youtu.be/M6DvNCydRHg I think of you and this thread

and which is itself sampled by Party Supplies from this African Jazz Pioneers track: http://youtu.be/X8rKFHxnOe8

but which is still probably unlike anything you're listening to in Benin.

4/6/2014 12:35:02 PM

Quote :

"You'd think a poor country devoid of education, but that has internet, could develop an education system organically around the internet. "

I was born in a 3rd world country but my family left when I was 3, but I've been back 3 times since college. They have a school system that seems better organized than what you have, but even in the early 2000s, people had computer schools, that we're after school programs that private individuals ran that taught computer skills for fairly cheap prices. On dial up.

This was before khan academy, udacity, iTunes U, google docs, Moodle, etc. it seems with very little resources and an internet connection you have everything you'd need for someone to run a school where kids can learn all the same stuff as an industrialized nation. There's tons of instructionals on simple at home science experiments, pictures of bacteria since students don't have microscopes. Things like duolinguo to teach formal French, or teach English to students somewhat familiar with French (or just any of the free online translators).

There was a story a while back of the African kid who built an electric windmill just by digging through old textbooks. This could be more common in remote areas if people could harness their access to the sum of all human knowledge correctly. I know this is easier said than done, but there are so many great free online education resources that it's a travesty when a place with internet is still plagued by poor education.

4/6/2014 5:19:34 PM

You have to excuse me here, when I wrote the message the ^'s were correct but apparently you posted before I did. So add one "^" to everything I said -- I did not want to know what you meant, because I understand it. It's easy to think of the internet as a one-stop education tool. I still think of it that way, mostly. God knows I use it all the time for that purpose.

Quote :

"They have a school system that seems better organized than what you have, but even in the early 2000s, people had computer schools"

A pack of bonobos could design a better education system than what I have hear (and that's not racism -- I blame the French for it). And there are computer schools here. The organization I work with teaches computer skills. The problem is that they are very, very basic and formulaic. My boss, who trained in IT, doesn't know any of the shortcuts in MS Office. So he can't teach them, either. He is frankly astonished by my typing speed, which is only around 90 wpm. You don't build a supremely computer literate population out of people who hunt and peck.

Quote :

"it seems with very little resources and an internet connection you have everything you'd need for someone to run a school where kids can learn all the same stuff as an industrialized nation."

You're 100% correct. This is true. The info is there. But Beninese kids are, from a very young age, raised to follow a very limited kind of thought process. Critical thinking isn't just avoided, it's maligned. Problem solving is totally subservient to rote memorization. And even if you have rich parents who want to teach you in a better way, it's no use. Your educational future in Benin is decided based entirely on standardized tests that require verbatim regurgitation at least to university level and probably beyond.

Let's remember as well that internet access, even when available, is extremely price limited. It costs between 200 and 400 CFA an hour for access in a cybercafe, and that's enough for two or three meals in a country where eating necessarily comes first.

Quote :

"there are so many great free online education resources that it's a travesty when a place with internet is still plagued by poor education."

I'm reasonably intelligent. I have a master's degree. I can competently speak and fluently read three languages. I would almost certainly fail the final exam in Benin, because it requires you to repeat exactly what the curriculum says in many cases. In others, the "correct" answers are straight up wrong (I've seen this, with English).

When the government decides your fate, it doesn't matter how good you are, it matters how in line you are with the government. I've never been a raging libertarian, but I'm damn sure more of one now that I've dealt with Benin. Government involvement has benefited approximately nobody.

Yeah, a kid built windmills (we're familiar with the story, and one environment PCV has made it his life's work to recreate it). But there are a billion people in Africa. About 600 million of them are what you and I would call "kids." Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes.

The colonial powers made the mistake of assuming that africans were dumb, and they left in place educational systems for dumb people. Africans aren't dumb. The average Beninese speaks 4+ languages. A man can repair any vehicle of any problem using a wrench. I don't know how. It doesn't matter what size the wrench or what problem is being fixed, most of the time they just bang on something and it works. And so on. The education system has failed everyone tremendously, as has -- I can't believe I'm saying this -- conservatism.

4/6/2014 5:58:46 PM

Do Beninese look forward to Fridays and weekends? I notice your posting seems to drop off on weekends...

4/6/2014 7:48:03 PM

do they say "putain" every other sentence?

4/6/2014 9:48:25 PM

Haha, that's ironic because I thought TWW had fewer posts and thus nothing for me to respond to.

The weekend is when most of the parties happen, and Beninese do love to party, but on average I'd say they're much less excited about weekends than we are. Saturday is pretty much like any other day. Sunday a lot less work goes on (and it becomes a lot harder to find certain items for sale) because everyone is in church. Except the Muslims, obviously, but they seem on board with the "nobody do anything on Sundays" rule.

And I don't hear "putain" ever.

[Edited on April 7, 2014 at 3:25 AM. Reason : ]

4/7/2014 3:24:31 AM

The people at the NGO job are getting impatient with me and the PC office still hasn't finalized the malaria job. It's stressing me out a bit. I'm giving them until noon tomorrow at which point I will just say "Fuck it" and go with the money.

4/8/2014 4:05:35 AM

These are all common Beninese beliefs that I have heard before, but they were reiterated in conversations today and I thought I'd share:

"African people can live to be 125 years if they don't eat bullion cubes."

"Black skin makes you comfortable with suffering" (an argument that did NOT work well when white people tried using it)

"There are twice as many women in Benin as there are men." (another variation holds that there are three times as many, either way, it's an excuse for why men need multiple wives or need to cheat on their wives -- to satisfy all the extra women who don't, you know, exist or anything)

"Nelson Mandela was only 95, he would have lived much longer if America hadn't given him tuberculosis." (My counter argument of, "Maybe he only lived to be 95 because he was a world-famous president, and also America didn't do that" fell flat)

"Old people refuse to die until their kids have kids." (Which may be true if you ask my mom)

so the kid tells me all these ludicrous, false things, and then keeps going with "You educated a lot of young people here." It was cruel, really.

[Edited on April 8, 2014 at 6:35 PM. Reason : ]

4/8/2014 6:34:32 PM

Hello Grumpy, Is it OK if I make a similar thread about my experiences living in Germany? What should I call it?

4/8/2014 7:19:59 PM

So, in my job search for a post-USMC career, I've discovered that there are a lot of companies, uhhh, providing services throughout much of Africa. I mean, the continent has been a mercenary stomping ground since forever ago, and I've known a few friends who've operated out of Djibouti in recent years on active duty, but I was not fully aware of the level of private military/intelligence involvement there. I'm getting the impression that maybe even the majority of our involvement across Africa is of the private military contractor variety. Certainly a large portion of it is.

4/8/2014 9:28:17 PM

Quote :

"Is it OK if I make a similar thread about my experiences living in Germany?"

People ask for permission on the wolfweb now? Knock yourself out, hombre. Call it "boy there are remarkably few Jews here" here or something.

Quote :

"I'm getting the impression that maybe even the majority of our involvement across Africa is of the private military contractor variety. Certainly a large portion of it is."

It's possible. I've seen no evidence of it here, but Benin is a fairly stable country. I'd guess that any American company operating in, say, Nigeria would have PMC-provided security. Meanwhile in Congo you've got an eternal civil war in research rich territory, meaning there is the desire and the means to get mercenary help.

4/9/2014 3:42:22 AM

Oh, I'm not even talking about private security contracted by private companies to protect their employees and business interests. I'm talking about government sponsored paramilitary activity, going after Al-Shabaab in the north, and God knows what dirtbags and/or enemies of 'Murica elsewhere. (Kony, for example).

Some of it is probably in support of actual military; some of it is partnered up with African forces to provide capabilities they wouldn't otherwise have. Some of it may even be a CIA front or something. I would guess that it's partly done for deniability purposes, and partly done because all these companies (some big, some fairly small) can field needed technologies far more rapidly than DoD...and DoD doesn't want to fully "buy in" to the counterinsurgency, small-war stuff we've been doing lately. They'd rather "rent" some of the capabilities, particularly in terms of hardware (i.e., they don't want to buy thousands and thousand of little propeller-drive surveillance airplanes, just in time to largely get out of that business and need F-35s for big-war stuff).

Anyway, I think this stuff sort of runs in the shadows, but I just wondered how much of it you'd seen or heard of, being a few fewer steps removed from it, even if Benin isn't really in the middle of the mix.

4/9/2014 9:36:32 AM

lots of independent contractors and security firms in Africa. I'd imagine a good bit of OGA as well.

4/9/2014 9:44:27 AM

forget banjoman's thread then, i say theduke goes to africa and makes a:

"guess im going to kill things in africa for two years" thread and takes cues from grumpyGOP on storytelling.

even if banjoman in germany was interesting the dude cant write 2 coherent sentences.

4/9/2014 10:39:27 AM

Saw this a few days ago: http://time.com/35078/us-intensifies-hunt-for-ugandan-warlord-joseph-kony/

4/9/2014 10:52:18 AM

The malaria job didn't get posted in time so fuck it, I'll work with the NGO and get paid $Togo (which is much less than $texas but more than the $burkina faso I get as a PCV)

And no, the only mention I've ever heard about real merc stuff came from the drunken ramblings of a weird old state department guy who cornered us at a bar and refused to believe that my buddy and I (a hippie from Vermont) weren't with a PMC. He was unhinged.

4/9/2014 11:17:51 AM

Quote :

"even if banjoman in germany was interesting the dude cant write 2 coherent sentences."

This aggression will not stand. Man.

4/9/2014 3:49:04 PM

y0willy0 rules for writing:

1. new paragraph for each sentence (or sentence fragment)

4/9/2014 3:56:08 PM

So you know that party I was involved in planning, sort of? It just finished. At first I was surprised that it covered such a range of emotions, until I realized how long it lasted. It began with prep at 5:00 PM local time and ended just now at 1:30 AM. So, you know, a standard eight hour clusterfuck.

5:00 PM -- The women all begin to work hard at cooking, the men gravitate out front and eat oranges and talk shit, mostly about women. I feel guilt and try to help, the women politely inform me that I would just fuck up their system. So I take pictures of people.

6:30 -- Prep is still in initial phases. I notice we have no music. For a party in Benin, this is blasphemy. I ask if people would like music, they are all ecstatic. First I bring out my dinky mp3 speakers. No. Then my laptop. No. Finally I remember that I inherited this tiny but powerful speaker system that can run off of USB keys. I throw some music on one, a healthy mix of African songs they know and American songs of a similar style, to ease them into it.

6:45 -- as soon as a non-African song comes on (or rather, a song they don't know by heart) they start asking me how to stop the music, how to change it, how to do anything but keep playing what is on. I'm crushed. In similar situations here, people were excited to hear new songs. They loved some of them. But this crowd instantly rejected any song they didn't already know all the words to, even if they didn't understand the language those words were in. (Every Beninese can sing "Ai se eu te pego" or whatever it's called, a Portuguese-language pop song popularized by a Brazilian boy band)

6:50 -- I unplug my music and begin to pout. Seriously, I'm hurt.

7:30 -- someone notices that I went from being happy to hating all of them, and to my astonishment one person even figures out why. I exploit their sense of guilt to make me feel better because now I'm enraged that 2.5 hours on there's no food or booze.

8:00 -- popcorn provided as an appetizer. The guy responsible for the booze shows up, greets everyone and leaves. Boredom reaches epic proportions if you ignore the banal commentary about how Beninese I act, and I do ignore it.

10:00 -- The booze shows up, in the form of beer and palm wine. Then we are told we can't drink it.

11:00 -- all of the food is finished cooking. I am forced to photograph it several times and told I must print these photos of a not-terribly-impressive meal to share with everyone present. But I am not allowed to eat.

11:30 -- Part of the food and a little palm wine is distributed. I am told not to partake until the prayers (conducted sequentially in two languages) are finished.

11:50 -- Finally I can eat.

12:00 AM -- As the meal commences, a neighbor and I discuss swimming pools. he fancies himself quite the swimmer even though he can't support himself in more than five feet of water. This led to a discussion of pools that went HORRIBLY awry.

I managed to quickly suppress everyone's stated conviction that you could get AIDS from pools. But then people started talking about whether a woman could get pregnant from swimming in a pool, and I swear to God they almost came to blows. There are Irish and Ulstermen in Belfast that get along better than these 8 people did, and between them they had 8 wildly varying opinions. These people, by the way, represent the educated elite -- every one of them is a teacher. When I tried to interject with some knowledge, they said "You're not a doctor." This, from people who have what Americans would call a high school education.

The debate lasts an hour, and isn't so much resolved as stopped...

1:00 AM -- Someone motions that we each have a turn to express our opinions and suggestions regarding the party. It was a roundtable discussion on the subject of a 10-person get-together that, in North Carolina, could easily be an impromptu cookout except with shittier food. There was much complaining about how late things had run (Benin's two national sports are "being late for everything" and "complaining about how late everything is"). For my turn I said, "Isn't everything late here?" and got dirty looks. Also, everyone's commentary had to be translated, so it was said twice.

1:30 -- They still aren't done but I am, so I say, "I'm tired," and come in and post this.

4/9/2014 8:44:54 PM

Best party ever.

4/9/2014 9:31:20 PM

I wanna hear more about these PC Fuck Fest parties.

4/9/2014 10:46:01 PM