Hope the move went well and all your crap didn't fall off the top of that taxi.

8/17/2014 4:31:16 PM

I've only seen parrots sold in cages by the roadside in Cotonou. Nowhere else. One African gray. Didn't recognize the others. They are only captured to sell to white people. And Asians I guess.

The move went OK in terms of my stuff getting to Cotonou. I don't technically have a house yet.

8/18/2014 8:45:33 AM

The past week or so has been motherfucking brutal.

On Friday I move out of village but, because it was a holiday (Assumption, of all the damn things), nobody from the office would lift a finger, and because they're idiots, they hadn't gotten my key before then. So I had to move all my shit into my girlfriend's house. She's stressed out because, hey, she's moving the same day I am, with the same vehicle. She has a cat. I have a dog. We had not intended to force them to cohabitate.

So we get in, I'm all stressed to shit because I don't know if I have a house, but good food and abundant beer helps. Then on Monday I show up. "Oh, Ian, great! Look, we promise we'll have you in a house some time this week."

No. Uhn-uhn. I don't want to be a primadonna and I hate the stereotype of the millennial kid who wants his employer to bend over backwards for them, but this organization has exactly ONE duty to me: putting a roof over my head. They don't pay me. Hell, from the organization's point of view, I'm even cheaper than slave labor. You have to feed slaves.

I didn't deliver an ultimatum but I did manage to guide them into making my house a priority. At least, that's what they said. At 4:30, I'd heard nothing. So I asked what was up.

"Oh, yeah, we've got the check. We can't actually sign your lease because the landlord lives in France, but the property management company will give you the key and you can just kind of move in."

OK, great. We go to the property management office, which is, for some reason, located in Benin's only naval base. The Beninese navy consists of 200 people operating two ancient Chinese patrol boats. Anyway, we spent an hour there waiting for the lady to take the check and give us the key. Oh, she doesn't have the key. It's at the house.

So we left and promptly got stuck in a traffic jam caused by Benin's only train. The tracks used to go halfway up the country but they were mostly stolen so now the train can only go a mile or two between the port and a warehouse. This train, you may be surprised to hear, is slow.

Finally we had the key and inspected the house. Then the moving truck came to get my stuff. The moving truck had a shattered windshield that was not attached to the truck frame. It was propped up by wooden slats. The truck could not turn left.

By the time I got moved in, it was 9 PM, and I had to get up at 6 the next day because my boss said, "Americans don't need to get warmed up, they like to just start off running."

So the next day I arrived at the office at 7 AM and proceeded to drive around southern Benin for no discernible reason for the next 13 hours. I contemplated quitting and going home. There's cheese at home. Also a minimum wage and roads that don't turn my kidneys into ground beef.

To summarize, I spent the last two years making my own schedule, which was necessarily light, with an organization that had my house ready a month in advance and loves me. I transitioned from that directly into working 12+ hour days for a lady who greeted me Monday morning by insulting my dog and pointing out that I did not have a house.

8/20/2014 6:18:24 AM

What was the reason you driving around?

8/20/2014 6:52:25 AM

I was with the two other guys in the "Programming Department," which does not mean the same thing here that it does there. Basically we're the technical program end of things, rather than financial or management. They were going to visit three sites to inspect and ask questions: a rabbit farm in Cove, a soy processing place in Bohicon, and a small animal farm in Adja Ouere. A quick glance at google maps will reveal that none of these places are very far away, or at least they wouldn't be in a country that had mastered the art of road construction.

This is all well and good, but there was no reason for me to be present. I learned nothing and contributed nothing. The time would have been much more productively (if not much more pleasantly) spent hunched over the reams of program information I need to know in order to do my job. I was sent solely because my new boss wanted to throw something miserable at me on my first day.

In the event, the rabbit farm wasn't bad. It's like a dream version of my own, much smaller rabbit project: a facility specifically for disabled people to raise rabbits. The president of the organization didn't have feet. He walked around with flip flops on his hands. It was a grisly set of disabilities but they were all happy as hell and running a pretty good operation. It was heartwarming shit. Plus, I'd slept on the three hour ride up there, and all of this was keeping me out of the office and away from my senile lunatic of a boss.

We spent an hour driving around looking for the soy facility, only to discover that it had moved. Apparently nobody had thought to call the place in advance of our visit. When we did find it, nobody was there. Then the oldest guy in the car said he had to go to the bank. I'm given to understand that he goes to a bank every single goddamn day. There was another hour wasted. Then we went looking for gasoline. Because we work for a proper organization, we're required to buy gas from real gas stations. Except none of the six gas stations in or around Bohicon had gas. They just had "gazoil," which I think is diesel but at any rate doesn't work in regular cars. We spent an hour going to all of these places. I don't know why. Evidently we had more than enough to get us back to Cotonou, where gas is plentiful.

So there we have three hours that were just pissed straight down the drain.

8/20/2014 7:09:33 AM

wasting time on meaningless bullshit? welcome back to society!

8/20/2014 7:37:07 AM

8/20/2014 9:29:00 AM

What if you got ice bucket challenged?

8/20/2014 12:15:12 PM

a better question would be "how often do you actually see ice?"

my experiences in south america would suggest "rarely."

8/20/2014 12:22:55 PM

Haha, so ice is actually not that hard to find. Assuming of course you live somewhere with electricity, which I have had the luck to do.

The weird thing is how you get the ice. Water bottles are expensive here, so most water that's purchased comes in "sachets" -- little self-contained .5 liter baggies of water. You bite off the corner and drink. I posted a picture of the machine that makes these in the instagram thing and will follow up with a video later.

So, to make ice, they just freeze these .5 liter bags. That's a big chunk of ice. Then if you want to mix a drink or whatever, you take a hammer to it and break it into manageable pieces.

Now as it happens I have been ice bucket challenged, and I think that I might fill a bucket with these big blocks (they only cost 25 CFA each, which is about a nickel) and dump it on my head, then act as though I have been knocked out or killed. We're working on the special effects now. By which I mean it's never going to happen because every time somebody says, "Should we use tomatoes to make it look like you're bleeding?" somebody else says, "That's an excellent idea, but let me pour a drink while I think about it," and next thing you know everybody is drunk and complaining about the new class of trainees.

I wish I could convey to you how drunk, as a rule, Benin PCVs are. This isn't just me blowing smoke. Every year there's a worldwide volunteer survey, and every year Benin comes back as one of the drunkest countries on by far the drunkest continent. I'm also not sure why Africa is that continent. God knows it's not the liquor here, which is vile.

8/21/2014 4:05:58 AM

One thing we found out on the clusterfucky trip on Tuesday was disheartening. Most of what the Beninese think about ebola is laughably off base, but unfortunately the stuff that they kind of get right causes problems, too. They've heard that bush meat causes ebola. OK, great. That's true. But like DeltaBeta on the last page, they aren't always clear on what constitutes "bush meat." They have now decided that any animal not raised in their presence probably came from the bush, so they've stopped eating things like rabbits.

Of course. I finally get my rabbit project wrapped up, and the entire country of Benin develops a phobia for rabbits. But I shouldn't get too worked up about that -- this fad will pass before the "party season" starts around mid December. That's the high demand time for rabbits anyway, and most people in my project are holding off on selling their stock until that time comes around and brings higher prices

More frustrating is that it has now caused my senile lunatic of a boss to decide that our new project proposal should leave out rabbits and cane rats (recently domesticated and better known around here as bush rat, grasscutter, or agouti). I think it's dumb to let a temporary condition cause you to radically rework a multi-year, $9 million project, but nobody has asked me.

---

In other, lighter news:

-The other day the GF and I were at a bar near her house, grabbing a drink. Suddenly we saw a naked, middle aged man running in our general direction at full speed, with a very angry mob behind him. They caught him, roughed him up, and eventually the police came and took him away. Apparently he had stolen something out of a car, but the something he stole clearly was not pants.

-My girlfriend lives pretty much adjacent to the end of the Cotonou International Airport runway. If you were to stand that close to a runway in the US, the police would take you down, but here there's apartment buildings there. She's...not thrilled.

-My own apartment, however, is in a quiet corner of Cotonou. Other than the swamp and the family of aggressive pigs that live in it, the setting is pretty cool. My building has a guard, and my apartment has a bigger bathroom and kitchen than any place I ever lived back in the states. I'll try to upload some photos later.

-Benin recently passed a law saying that people on motorcycles have to wear helmets. That law was already on the books but they passed it again, and now they're actually taking it seriously. It isn't clear on what constitutes an acceptable helmet, though, so I've seen moto drivers wearing rugby helmets, equestrian helmets, bicycle helmets, etc. Pretty much anything they can get their hands on. It leads to a pretty amusing commute, or it would, if I didn't have the commute from hell. I live 2.5 miles from the office, but coming home at rush hour takes half an hour -- on a motorcycle.

You may say, why not take your bike? Because I would die. I would die the very first time I did it. Though I may try to walk it this evening.

8/21/2014 11:40:34 AM

Living in Cotonou is taking some getting used to.

Take the weather. It rained this morning. In village, rain might as well be a blizzard in NC -- it means you keep your ass indoors, regardless of work or school obligations. In the city, when you work for a "real" organization like I do, you're supposed to show up, rain or shine. Which, under normal circumstances, I'm down with. The problem is that, unlike my coworkers, I have to take "zemidjan" motorcycle taxis to work, and zems don't operate in the rain.

My coworkers all have cars or, at least, their own motos. Peace Corps prohibits me from owning or operating either. Interestingly enough, every other American organization in Benin prohibits its employees from riding zemidjans. They're too dangerous. Embassy, USAID, the military -- all banned from riding motorcycles and required to drive their own (usually provided) cars. And I'm in the exact opposite situation. It makes me intensely jealous of my father, who had his own motorcycle when he was a PCV in Ghana (where, I will add, it is now forbidden for PCVs to be on any sort of motorcycle whatsoever).

Long story short? I walked three miles to work today, in the rain.

On the flip side, I have to adjust to an embarrassment of choices when it comes to food. If I walk the half mile to my girlfriend's house from the office, I pass hamburgers, ice cream, Italian, Chinese, and two Lebanese restaurants. I want to eat all of these things. I can afford to eat falafel.

8/26/2014 5:35:24 AM

Did you get some cheese? Please tell me you ate some cheese.

8/26/2014 12:03:50 PM

Matter of fact, I made quesadillas last night. They were divine.

We had cheese in village, too, but it was wagaji, the local kind. It doesn't taste half bad but it's only barely recognizable as cheese to an American, and does not do any of the things we famously want our cheese to do -- like melt.

It was also really hard to find in my village. The only people who make wagaji are the Fulani, a nomadic herding tribe overwhelmingly concentrated to the north. We only had one family of them where I was at, and the girl who sold the cheese was elusive. She wouldn't just sit in one defined spot and sell it -- I guess that would violate the nomadic ideal. So she'd wander around. I hunted for her for months before someone finally told her where my house was. She then proceeded to come to my house every day for a year trying to sell me cheese. Nobody can eat that much cheese, not even me.

8/27/2014 3:07:59 AM

Oh man, I haven't been keeping up with this lately. I'm looking forward to the hilarity when catching up.

[Edited on August 27, 2014 at 3:43 AM. Reason : ]

8/27/2014 3:42:51 AM

So here's a funny story I forgot from a few months ago, when I still lived in village but was visiting the workstation.

The workstation is actually one half of the building that also houses the PC Benin office. Their side is kept in tip-top shape (at least, by Africa standards), whereas our half can be...neglected. Truth be told PC wants to phase workstations out of existence altogether, though how we'd function without them is beyond me.

Well, this particular weekend, all three of the bathrooms on our side of the building had problems. The toilet seat had shattered on one. The roof was leaking water of unknown provenance in another. And the third had a problem with the light that made it flicker so fast you could hold a rave and/or have a seizure in the stall.

Well I, being an enterprising young man with two degrees from NC State, figured out a brilliant solution: I would just sneak over to the office side to poop. During the day that Friday it worked brilliantly. Saturday night, I confidently grabbed a book off the library shelf and crossed over into the darkened office, which is not locked.

I sat down and unleashed the typically uncomfortable African dump, cheerfully reading my book -- it was a bunch of Jimmy Fallon jokes so it wasn't that funny, but hey. Then I reached over to the TP thing. Empty

OK, calm down, I thought. No big deal. There's another stall right next door, and this half of the building is empty. Just peek over there. I did. Empty.

This is bad, I thought. You may be thinking, why not use the Jimmy Fallon? Two reasons -- it wasn't my book, and the pages were glossy -- not ideal TP substitute. After two years in Africa I'm an expert.

I would later get on my knees and thank God that there are no security cameras on the office side, and that the guard did not pick this time to do his rounds. Either would have caught me shuffling all over the office, pants around my ankles, butt caked in shit, desperately searching for toilet paper. Here I am, in the outpost of America in the most modern place in Benin, and it is here that I have my worst crisis. Why?

Someone comes and hides all the toilet paper every Friday.

Clearly I wasn't the first to have thought of my "brilliant plan," and to keep cheapskate volunteers from just stealing all the office TP every week the custodial staff was forced to take drastic action. They won. Though I did get one lick in. That Monday, the custodian was treated to a trash can full of shit-covered pages from a Jimmy Fallon joke book.

8/27/2014 4:01:09 AM

Are you enjoying the city as much as you thought you would? You seem to be concentrating on the negative, but I can't tell if that's a PCV trait or if you actually hate it.

8/27/2014 6:09:49 PM

I like the city and I love my neighborhood in particular. If I've been grumpy (ha ha) lately it's because of money. Cotonou is an expensive place to live, at least compared to village and how much I got paid there. Fortunately Peace Corps knows this, and if you work in Cotonou you make a little extra. Actually, it's about half again what we made in village.

Problem was, you don't start getting that pay until the first paycheck you get after moving, and that's assuming you did all the paperwork right. Long story short, I was broke as a joke and having to borrow heavily from my sugar mama. That's a little embarrassing.

Fortunately I got paid yesterday, and the check reflected my new situation. It even included back pay for the 15 days I've already lived here. So I paid back my girlfriend and now am reasonably comfortable. More important still, today I come into a big chunk of cash to help buy me the things that will make my house superb instead of merely sweet. Top of the list: a refrigerator. Next up: curtains and rugs. Lastly: a couch.

Let me explain where this money comes from:

Every month, PC socks away some money -- I want to say roughly $250, it's public info but I'm too lazy to look it up -- for our "readjustment allowance." It's not in Peace Corp's interest to have us all go home and immediately starve in a gutter, so they want us to have a few bucks when we go home. Shortly before you leave, they give you a third of the total (said third being $2042) to help with your travels. You also receive this amount before you begin your third year, if you choose to do so. Then they give you the rest after you get back and they deduct whatever equipment you destroyed. This is all done through direct deposit to an American bank account.

I don't have such an account. When I came to Africa I was so poor I couldn't afford the $500 Suntrust wanted me to leave in there to keep it open. So they cut me a check, which they HATE doing. So I sent the check home, and my family Western Unioned me part of it back. The rest will await me in America so I can live reasonably well during my visit.

8/28/2014 3:55:32 AM

Yeah, being broke makes me grumpy too. Glad your girlfriend didn't let you starve to death and glad you're rich now, well "African rich" I guess. Hope things get better from here on out.

8/28/2014 12:03:57 PM

finally finished reading through this thread last night. I laughed, I cried, and then I laughed some more. You are SUCH a phenomenal writer, Grumpy. I truly, truly enjoyed reading this, and if you had a book I would buy it.

I had so many questions throughout but have been reading mostly on my ipad and I hate typing on there. I'll go back through and try to remember my most pressing ones.

Pllllleeeeeeeeaaaaassseeeee post moar pics. Can I paypal you some dollarbux so you can buy more wifi time?

8/28/2014 2:46:04 PM

I'll have free Wi-Fi at the office tomorrow so I'll post some old college pics and I'll try to take some city pics over the weekend.

8/28/2014 4:21:22 PM

you really should think about writing a book about your experiences over there.

8/28/2014 4:27:50 PM

Or, you know, stories about your life in general.

8/28/2014 6:09:13 PM

The thought has crossed my mind. The main thing that holds me back is the absolute glut of peace corps memoirs, most of which are crap. But maybe between my way criminal friend and Ebola I'll have a hook.

8/28/2014 6:26:44 PM

As promised I uploaded what pictures I could from my phone. Been stuck in the office all day by a downpour, meaning I haven't eaten today. I want to eat a big dinner buy my girlfriend is busy castrating her cat and everyone else is broke or busy.

8/29/2014 10:31:59 AM

slappy1's post:

Quote :

"finally finished reading through this thread last night. I laughed, I cried, and then I laughed some more."

reminded me of GrumpyGOP's earlier post:

Quote :

"One of the performers for an acting troupe at the school introduced himself and his character and said that he hoped their skit would make us "rier, crier, meme peut-etre chier." That is to say, "laugh, cry, maybe even shit.""

8/29/2014 11:26:28 AM

^^^ Don't make it a memoir...

You could even make it fiction, but based on the same stories.

8/29/2014 11:51:42 AM

^^i did almost shit a few times, but was able to control myself

8/29/2014 5:34:35 PM

Now that I live in Cotonou I can actually go to church, because the sole Orthodox parish in Benin is located here. Yesterday I went, and the experience was noteworthy for two reasons (not counting the weird African touches to the service, which I believe I have already described somewhere here):

1) The sermon. It was in French, so as soon as it began, I started tuning it out -- until I heard "ebola virus." That got my attention. You may ask how this worked its way into a sermon. From what I could follow, the whole thing was a treatise on "You should absolutely use prayer to combat the threat of ebola but also for the love of God please just wash your damn hands."

2) The "monsignor," as he was introduced to me; at any rate, the senior priest, because the Orthodox church doesn't have the title of monsignor. He made me hang out after the service so that he could give me an important message. He told me that God had a mission for me. I predicted that this would not be the epic Holy Grail where you battle dragons or at least rabbits. Nor would it be the cool Blues Brothers kind where you smoke cigarettes and Carrie Fisher tries to kill you.

I predicted right. Apparently God is adamant that I help build a health clinic in the densely populated and relatively wealthy neighborhood of Calavi, which I'm sure already has a good density of such clinics except perhaps in this one neighborhood, from whence I'm guessing the "monsignor" hails.

It was a little disappointing but not surprising. Then as we left I was introduced to a young woman and told she wanted a European husband. I was too tired to point out, for the ten thousandth time, that the US is not in Europe. I just said sure, I'd be happy to see if any of my friends back home wanted a 17 year old bride who doesn't speak English.

Also I am amused by the fact that three old Russian ladies are clearly in charge of the church, which is otherwise all Beninese people and me.

9/1/2014 3:42:28 AM

I have to kill one more hour at work and then a bunch more hours tomorrow. People have mentioned having questions that they then never asked. Ask them. Entertain me.

9/8/2014 11:05:19 AM

http://www.motard.ca/nouvelles/motorcycle-helmet-is-now-mandatory-in-benin

These pictures aren't quite the norm but you do see them around. My favorite is:

9/9/2014 7:16:45 AM

Quote :

"Then they give you the rest after you get back and they deduct whatever equipment you destroyed"

Is it normal for PCVs to destroy equipment? What equipment have you destroyed?

So now that you're flush with cash, have you had hamburgers, ice cream, Italian, Chinese, and Lebanese? What was the experience(s) like?

9/9/2014 9:25:42 AM

do you have your own zombie machete there?

9/9/2014 9:32:07 AM

I have a friend inbound with PC to Tanzania in Feb. Any country-specific advice you've come across for her? Fully aware in asking that Africa is fucking big and not one homogenous place, but I didn't know if you'd heard anything about Tanzania, specifically.

9/9/2014 9:38:31 AM

Quote :

"Is it normal for PCVs to destroy equipment? What equipment have you destroyed?"

Not usually through active malice, but life here is hard on a lot of items. I've busted a lot of parts off my bike through normal use, a lot of my PC-issued books were eaten by termites, lost one of my padlocks, little shit like that. Not having gone through the process of turning items in I'm not sure how strict they are about it.

Quote :

"So now that you're flush with cash, have you had hamburgers, ice cream, Italian, Chinese, and Lebanese?"

Ice cream and Lebanese, yes. There are a lot of Lebanese places in my area, and one on the way home serves a falafel wrap for about $2.25. The thing about Lebanese places (and many others here) is that they all advertise "chwarma." So far I've yet to discover one that is anything like a real chwarma. Usually they are a wrap with too much mayo sauce, some french fries, some lettuce, and an unidentifiable sausage thing.

I've eaten at the Chinese place, though not since I got my money. The place we went was good, but for the money we prefer Indian. There are three good Indian places, including one that delivers "Indian chwarma," which is just a chicken tikka wrap. But the king is Shamiana, a classy place with a comprehensive Indian menu and a really kind owner who will insist on buying you drinks to keep you from drinking the tap water. So far he's bought me one beer and two bottles of water.

No hamburgers since I've gotten the money -- nobody in Benin makes a really good one. The buns are always 200% too large, so they mostly taste like bread, and no force on Earth can compel a Beninese cook to refrain from slathering one with mayonnaise. I loathe mayo. That said, I'm sure I will eat one soon. Just because they're not really good doesn't mean they're utter shit.

And no Italian. If you serve two years in Benin you get sick to death of pasta. It'll be weeks before Italian appeals to me.

Unless you count pizza. I have had a pizza. The social center of Cotonou for PCVs and expats alike is Livingstone, which is best described as a classy sports bar. Saturdays from 6 to 8 they have buy-one-get-one drinks for happy hour, and it's one of the few places around with beer on tap. Just as importantly, they've got good food, including pizza. Also steaks. They'd be low-end back home, but they're the best you can find in this country.

Quote :

"I didn't know if you'd heard anything about Tanzania, specifically."

Well, I haven't heard anything from PCVs there, but I know their program is pretty advanced compared to Benin -- they've got American technical trainers (including a guy from NCSU). I also know that PCVs from my country who visit Tanzania consider it to be pretty cushy. Not that the volunteers' lives are -- that's a big country and I'm sure the villages are just as isolated as any in Benin -- but when you go to the cities, there's tourist-level stuff available. Which from our perspective mostly means good food and good alcohol. Benin has the barest trickle of tourists so we don't have that infrastructure.

9/9/2014 10:02:05 AM

Quote :

"Not usually through active malice, but life here is hard on a lot of items. I've busted a lot of parts off my bike through normal use, a lot of my PC-issued books were eaten by termites, lost one of my padlocks, little shit like that."

I can't believe they'd make you responsible for the replacement value of those things. All of that should be considered wear and tear and/or reasonable loss.

That puts a really bad taste in my mouth for the Peace Corps that they'd nickle and dime you for this stuff.

9/9/2014 1:16:23 PM

Maybe I should clarify. I don't think they nickle and dime us, and I hear that they're pretty liberal in interpreting "normal wear and tear." But there are grey areas where volunteer negligence is at play. Probably I should have maintained my bike better than I did, so if they take a few bucks out for repairs (like the luggage rack that fell off and accidentally got left outside to rust), I won't complain.

---

In other news I just posted two short videos of my morning commute onto instagram to give you some idea of what it's like, though the traffic is only about 40% of what it is during evening rush hour. In a bit I'll also have a short video tour of my house up.

---

Now for the story of my refrigerator. I finally bought one last Saturday, after two weeks of waiting while my African friends swore up and down that they had the hookup for nice fridges and then never came through. I went out of my house and walked until I found a minifridge for sale. I went about a mile.

The guy wanted $160, I got it for $80. Made them plug it in and run it, everything worked fine. Alright, sweet. They said they'd transport it to my house on a motorcycle, and then I just needed to wait 15 minutes before I plugged it in.

I have subsequently learned that after moving a refrigerator you should at least let it sit overnight before plugging it in, and that you should never, ever let a refrigerator be on its side. But of course you can't move a fridge on a motorcycle without it being on its side.

I plugged it in after about twenty minutes and it made a colossal racket, a banging noise coming from the compressor. It also got really hot and was not making the inside cool. I unplugged it and looked up how to deal with a minifridge online, where I learned the above.

So then I waited 24 hours and prayed. I plugged it back in and it still made the same noise, but it started getting cold inside and the overheating problem went away. Eventually I learned that if I prop the fridge back at about an 8 degree angle, the noise goes away and it works fine. My theory, based on my crash course in refrigerator maintenance, is that the bumpy sidewise motorcycle ride knocked the compressor off its springs, and some sort of internal part (sounds like a fan, or at least something that spins) has been knocked out of alignment and bangs on the compressor housing when it's level. Tilting it separates them.

Africa does not do "return policies," so I'm just going to shrug my shoulders and run with it. It's been running now since Monday afternoon and the house hasn't burned down, so I call that a win.

9/10/2014 3:37:57 AM

Your house seems pretty sweet. If you had a real bed and some furniture, it'd almost look Western.

Also, turn your phone horizontal for future videos...

9/10/2014 4:19:34 AM

Why?

9/10/2014 4:50:01 AM

Looks like Grumpy is safe:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/09/oxford-study-predicts-15-more-countries-are-at-risk-of-ebola-exposure/

9/10/2014 8:01:03 AM

Haha, dodged a bullet there, I guess.

9/10/2014 2:08:29 PM

^^^ In the vast majority of cases, it just provides a better viewing experience. You don't have that weird cropped field of view when viewing from a computer/TV/whatever.

Unless you NEED to capture something more vertically, there's usually no reason to take vertical videos/pics.

more info...
http://gizmodo.com/5697423/psa-please-turn-your-damn-cellphone-sideways-when-recording-video

9/10/2014 2:24:45 PM

You and the good people at gizmodo might consider that most people don't like being told what to do, particularly when it's about esoteric nerd shit. I'm sorry that the digital video beamed to you from goddamn Africa was not oriented to your exacting standards.

Sigh. I'm clearly in a shit mood this morning.

9/11/2014 4:17:48 AM

Quote :

"I'm sorry that the digital video beamed to you from goddamn Africa was not oriented to your exacting standards. "

LOLOLOLOLOL

9/11/2014 11:36:28 AM

There are drawbacks to working in an African office. The people I share it with are used to an ambient temperature approaching that of a white dwarf star and will not brook any attempt to use the fan or air conditioner. They give me nothing to do most days, and when they do it is usually a long, pointless, unpleasant trip. They assume I'll be happy because I get a per diem and Africans are great for finding and exploiting per diems. They also usually tell me at the last possible minute.

On the plus side, I can leave the office on the flimsiest of pretenses. All I need to say is "I've got Peace Corps shit to do" and they say, "OK, see you tomorrow." And because the whole country smells kind of funky I can sit at my desk farting all day and nobody notices.

9/11/2014 12:04:17 PM

So what are you "supposed" to be doing? Like what's the objective of your office?

[Edited on September 11, 2014 at 12:55 PM. Reason : ]

9/11/2014 12:54:35 PM

It is always interesting to me when I do video conferences to Africa. Most of the time when I do a test or setup a call to remote locations, the people on the other side are very nervous and want to make sure everything works just so. But somewhat like Grumpy has said, the people when we dial in seem to not give much of a fuck and expect us to fix any issues. Just a cultural difference I guess, but it is funny how most other places around the world are very excited and/or nervous when setting up these things and ready to try and fix issues, but Africa = No fucks given.

9/11/2014 1:06:26 PM

Quote :

"So what are you "supposed" to be doing? Like what's the objective of your office? "

So I work at an American NGO called Partners for Development, which works in Benin, Nigeria, Tanzania, Bosnia, and Cambodia. An eclectic mix. Each country office has different goals but the philosophy of this organization is that they come in and partner up with local counterparts to improve their capacity.

The main thing in Benin is this agricultural project in which we work with regional producers associations and...OK, even I'm being bored by this. We work with a bunch of farmers to help them do shit better.

So what I'm supposed to be doing falls into three categories:

1) Trying to expand membership in this market information service where you use your phone to find out prices for different goods at different markets, send and receive offers, etc. I'm mostly supposed to do this through networking with PCVs.

There's a couple of problems with this. One, at the moment it is logistically difficult for me to coordinate with PCVs right now because we're in that time of the year when everything is in flux. Everybody from my class is leaving. The new class is still in training and not at their sites yet, so I can't work with them. That means there are only two or three PCVs in our service area, which is deplorably small -- it only covers the far south of Benin.

This brings me to the broader problem, which is that I have serious issues with the whole market information system. The markets included in the service seem to be chosen at random, so that there's a huge gap in the middle of the service area (which is also where a lot of the people live). Only about half the vegetables included are relevant to farmers. The other half are "yovo vegetables" like lettuce and cucumbers that can really only be sold at two or three markets in the country anyway. The messages are in French and are formatted in a strange way that even I find difficult to understand.

But, anyway, that's thing one.

2) Develop training materials on farming and management practices. I've actually made a little bit of progress here because I've gotten access to all the PC economic development training stuff (that's a different sector, so I didn't learn any of it) and am refining their "accounting for illiterates" system to be more applicable to our situation. The main holdup here is that everybody is busy dealing with other stuff right now (we're closing out one project, submitting a new one, hiring several new people, and moving to a new office at the end of the month).

3) Basic office help like research and, above all, translating the French reports of my coworkers into the English of the home office.

Quote :

"Africa = No fucks given."

Hahahaha, I believe it. "Comment on va faire maintenant?" translates more or less into "So what do you want me to do about it?" or, more accurately in the spirit of the phrase, "Shit happens," and it's the standard Beninese answer to any issue, from them not having exact change to the teleconference not working.

9/12/2014 4:09:08 AM

I'm interested in the implications of these 'yovo' markets where better produce is sold. from what i can gather from reading some togolese blog, yovo means white. so in this context, does that refer to the seller, or to the buyer, or what?


keep up the translation work, it can be lucrative if you get good at it.

hopefully you have some resources at your disposal, but here's a list of the top three free services I use. linguee.fr can be really useful in finding translations for idioms. wordreference.com is also good for that, due to their discussion boards. and if you want to check something you've written in french, bonpatron.com checks grammar pretty well.

9/12/2014 9:21:09 AM

"Yovo" can be a charged word. White PCVs hear it constantly and we complain about it, which sometimes sets off certain hypersensitive black PCVs, causing some whites to respond that no no, it isn't about race, it just means "foreigner." I've also heard light-skinned Beninese people say that they get called "yovo," though I've never actually seen it happen.

But realistically, "yovo" means "white person" in Fon, Goun, and whatever other Gbe languages are closely related to them.

When I say "yovo market" I am primarily referring to a couple of markets in Cotonou and Porto Novo that serve white expats, either directly or through the restaurants that cater to them. Though I suppose that I should also include the border market near Nigeria, since some of that produce also goes there.

9/12/2014 9:47:54 AM