Wellness Weekend

As volunteers we spend a lot of time (no matter our sector) talking about our host country's health. Malaria... malnutrition.. HIV.. parasites.. and so on and so forth.

Sometimes we need to all take a breather, sit back, and think about our health as volunteers.

Both physical and mental. --- So this weekend we (the southern PSN members) hosted a “Wellness Weekend” for new volunteers who wished to spend the weekend in Cotonou taking a break WHILE learning how to keep themselves mentally healthy at post. PSN usually hosts a wellness weekend every year – but this year we are hosting a whole series (one in each region) in honor of the Peer Support Networks 10th anniversary here in Benin!

Of course, Cotonou isn't the most relaxing place – it is a big city – and our workstation is more like a bunker than an house (other regions literally have houses) since it is located inside the Peace Corps Headquarters – but we still had some super advantages to play towards for making our weekend a huge success.

We have the beach. One of the southern PSN members is a yoga instructor. We have some amazing cooks on our southern team (and no I'm not even talking about myself!) – and when all else fails – we have the ambassadors swimming pool. So Beach Yoga and Picnic? – sounds like a stress free weekend to me.

One of the major reasons that PSN does wellness weekends, is that (world wide) Peace Corps volunteers tend to drink to combat stress, not to mention other habits that when you are in a village can tend to make the isolation worse (cause I know anything about isolation) – things such as sitting around doing nothing, hiding in the house, dwelling on homesickness, and not eating right.

With a wellness weekend (especially one with yoga and meditation) – we can talk about ways to exercise even if it is in the small spaces of your village house, food that you can easily make in village to provide yourself with a more well rounded meal, and of course things you can do other than drink to combat those really really bad days that come as part of the Peace Corps experience. These things are really crucial, in my opinion, to a successful and fulfilling Peace Corps Service.

We ate lots of good food – and I think that everyone had a wonderful time and headed back to post feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world (or maybe just bake some cookie bars) :)

This was our program, no we didn't notice the typo until after we printed it, yes we just let it be because it is funny – and what better for wellness than a good laugh?

Kick-Offs and Kittens

Today was my kick-off ceremony for Amour et Vie. I am not going to get into what it is again.. since I already posted about it HERE but feel free to go back and check it out.

Our ceremony fete was a success. We invited 80 people including the two groups of couturier apprentices we will be working over the next few months, and something close to 40 village chiefs as well as the mayor just to name a few. Less than 50 people showed up which was expected. Normally the presentations my team gives would be for groups between 10-20 people.. and during our practice run it was more like 5, so I think the number might have been a bit overwhelming. Especially since was their first time out in the community.

For the ceremony, my team did a demonstration on HIV/AIDS prevention including a condom demonstration.

There are of course a few things that we still need to work on (as is with most things in life) but I think that my team really did a great job at their kick off ceremony and I really look forward to working with them the during the rest of my service. I am proud of them!

***

In other news: 
This is my new roommate. 
His name is Papaya.
His pastimes include chasing ants and sleeping in cute places. 
He wanted to write his own blog post..
But he is too little and still speaks kitten. 

Z 

Amour & Vie

Amour & Vie is a program run by ABMS/PSI. The focus of this program is getting the message out to the Beninese population about health and sanitation issues, mostly by getting teens and young adults interested in these important messages. Using the project Amour & Vie – ABMS/PSI distributes a monthly magazine about sexual health issues for teens and they also do a radio show.. occasionally they also throw events and do tours of the country.

Peace Corps Benin partners with ABMS/PSI for what they call the “Activités Communautaires Amour & Vie” – aka community activities. ABMS  wants to reach out to villages and Peace Corps has lots of Americans living in these villages praying for something useful to do. Match made in heaven.

Every year there is the opportunity for 12 non-health volunteers to select a community team and participate in this program (all health volunteers do this program but their training is separate).

A community team is: 1 Community Counselor – someone who lives and works and is respected in the community.. and 2 Peer Educators – two “high school” students from the community between the ages of 18-24, one girl and one boy, who will be in charge of going out in the community and giving health demonstrations.

The reason (I think) this program is so great is that, while I organize the team and am here to monitor the team for the first year.. it is not MY team. It is their team. They decide what they want to talk to the community about and what groups they want to focus with. I am just here to report back to Peace Corps and ABMS on their progress. The program also gives an amazing opportunity to the two students who over the next year will learn to be leaders, become very comfortable speaking in public (about sensitive subjects at that!), and who will hopefully also become looked up to by their peers. People in the communities are much more likely to really listen to these community groups then to me (if I were to give the present the same discussion or demonstrations).. aside from the fact that they speak the local languages.. they also live in the village and understand life here in a way that I never will. They are the heart of this program.. the future starts with them.

This past week was our training (a very long week of training and all of the new Peer Educators were really really awesome!!) The community groups learned about HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Family Planning, Nutrition and also Diarrhea (specifically infant diarrhea) and how to present these topics to groups in the community. There were some amazing guest speakers who stopped by, and a really dynamic team from last year who came in to talk to the students about their experience as an Amour & Vie team. By the end of they were doing practice demonstrations... and we even went out into Parakou to practice working with real people (as opposed to just practicing in front of the staff and volunteers). Even the really timid students were comfortable and confident presenting in front of each other. This made me feel great about the training, since even if the teams fall through or don't go as planned, as occasionally (but only occasionally) happens.. all of the students learned some truly invaluable lessons this week. Lessons that will stick with them.

Now it's time for my team to start planning our Kick-Off Ceremony for August!!

I can't wait!
Z

Expectations

I spent this week staying at the Songhai hotel (a whole 15 minutes from my house) with about 13 other volunteers and our selected counterparts for what we all thought was going to be a training on how to add nutritional information/aspects to our current projects. While it is obvious that there are ways to include nutrition when talking about say... a vegetable garden. Sometimes it is really hard for us as volunteers to combat language and cultural barriers especially when something is as culturally loaded as the topic of food can be.

To all of our surprise.. this “Nutrition Training” that we had been invited to was actually focused on how to give formations and negotiate with women pertaining to to the health of new born babies. The idea behind this being (and for good reason) that the most important step in combating global issues with malnutrition is to teach mothers how to properly feed their babies for the first two years of their lives. During early development nutritional deficiencies can end up being life long irreversible problems if they are not dealt with properly. This is lots of really great information.. but we have four sectors here in Benin and the only volunteer sector that ever works one on one with babies is the Health Sector.

So you can imagine all of our surprise when we showed up at this nutrition training expecting to talk about our gardens and food pyramids only to find that we were going to spend our entire first day and most of the second learning the in and outs of breast feeding. - -

A major part of what it means to be a Peace Corps Volunteer is that you need to be flexible and make the most of any situation even if it doesn't meet up with your original expectations. Unfortunately, this week I felt that the group of us – myself included – took a little longer than normal to remember this. By the end of the first day I think that most (if not all) of us were agitated and felt as though we were wasting our time. By the end of the second day we were completely checked out. It wasn't until the third day of our three day training that we (as a whole) remembered what we were doing here.

This specific maternal nutrition mini-training was a trial run for Benin Peace Corps and is one of the newer Peace Corps world wide standardized training – still in its early stages. Since this was a “trial run” of a standardized training (I'm not going to get into whether standardizing PC training world wide is a great idea or not) we were lucky enough to have some observers at the training from Peace Corps Washington.

After a long talk with our Washington buddy in the evening after day 2 of the training where he was able to better explain to us the reasoning/goal behind the training.. and we aired some grievances.. we all showed up Wednesday morning feeling refreshed. Even if we weren't exactly ecstatic with the training we had a better understanding of the situation.. and we had gotten some of the negative feelings that were keeping us from being the best volunteers we can be off our chest.

I think that on day 3 of our training we really pulled together to show what Peace Corps is all about. We went to a village and did some practice runs of working with women to negotiate/discuss better feeding practices for their infants. Showing that even the volunteers who may never do exactly this activity at post got something really important out of this training – culturally sensitive negotiating techniques. AND later in the day – because they heard what we wanted – we were given a session on how to tie nutrition into the projects we are already doing.

Sometimes it is no fun being the "guinea pig" for a new training were no one really knows what to expect. However, as Peace Corps volunteers there are some expectations. Peace Corps expects volunteers to be flexible and to provide thought and feedback. The volunteers expect that Peace Corps will take their feedback into consideration and not take advantage of the position of the volunteer. 

In my opinion.. even if the training itself didn't meet expectations (and was kind of bizarre) I think that the facilitators and the volunteers did a really great job of wrapping up the training and meeting each others expectations. We were all able to show that we were listening and that we are capable of making good out of an otherwise painful situation. 

Z