Welcome to the North

This week I was in Parakou for a week of training. Parakou is located in the Northern half of the country... not the far north.. but it was a nice 6 hour bus ride from Porto Novo for me to get here.

My first impression of Parakou was that it was insanely quite (since it is a city I was expecting it to be similar to the cities I am used to in the South).. Secondly I noticed that the heat was much dryer.. Third I noticed that the landscape isn't nearly as green. This made me glad to be posted in the south I like the more humid heat.. I like the greenery.. and I love being so close to the Ocean. I have already grown accustomed to the faster (more crowded?) life of my area. That being said there is A LOT of north – the north is much larger than the south.. and Parakou is only one tiny city. [Note: If you had told me months ago that I would have called life in the south faster than anything I would have laughed at you]

There is a workstation here in Parakou. It is much different than my workstation at the Bureau in Cotonou. Obviously the biggest difference is that it is not attached to the main office – but it also has a bigger library and kitchen. It is more homey (really just a big house as opposed to an extension to the office with bunks in it). This also has its negatives however – there is only one computer and it doesn't get kept quite as tidy. I like that I can go to the workstation and actually take care of work with administration in Cotonou – but I definitely see the draw of having an escape that is completely separate from all of that.

In Service Training (IST) was interesting. Our pre-service training was filled with language and cultural sessions and many many hours of technical training for working at our sites.. the IST was focused more on the Administrative sides of things. The hotel that the environment sector stayed at “Le Princess” fed us really well for breakfast and lunch and really well done snack bars twice during the day.

During the first two days we had talked about our problems and successes.. had a security session.. and a medical session (information about what to do if you fall sick while out of the country) – half of the first two days was taken up by our individual reports on our communities – this gave each of us a chance to share our stories and some pictures with each other (and probably allowed us to stay more focused throughout the rest of the week).

We had an informative and important session on how to report our activities to Peace Corps. There is a whole system in which we have to enter project descriptions.. participants.. outcomes.. etc. In theory this allows Peace Corps to monitor the actual effect our programs are having and how many people we are reaching (this is actually a fairly new concept/system in Peace Corps). There is also a section where we write about our success stories (and frustrations). After we submit these quarterly reports to our administration they forward them to Peace Corps Washington. These reports are the source of all of the feel good stories that Peace Corps uses in advertising – these reports are also used by Congress for filibustering.

On Wednesday our work counterparts joined us for the rest of training. The sessions with our counterparts included planning projects and we had a session on the stages of habit changing (getting people to change their gardening practices reads similar to addiction counseling) and the ever entertaining topic of cultural differences. Mostly we had discussion and brainstorming on projects and ways to implement our new projects.

It was really really awesome to get to visit another part of the country.. but now that the week is over I will be very glad to be back in the south. I would say “time to get to work” but the whole country goes on break for the fete season (Christmas and New Years)... so I guess that will have to wait until the New Year!

Volunteers and Host Country Work Partners -- Parakou

Feeling more positive about things than I was a week ago.

Z