When I finish my service on October 2nd, I'll have spent 1146 days in Benin.

One sentence summary: I failed to end poverty, but I'm glad I did it, even with all the bullshit from OMS.

I'll be back in Dallas sometime around October 31st, give or take a week.

This was sent to my phone recently:

Good morning, please show up to work on time. Message from the Ministry of Administrative and Institutional Reform.

I totally did.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Cotonou when this Chinese woman outside was going from person to person and chatting them up. It looked like she was panhandling, but I figured there was no way there'd ever be a Chinese woman begging in the streets in West Africa.

But then when I came back a few weeks later she was wandering around the neighborhood near the Peace Corps bureau. When I got near her she walked up to me and asked, in perfect English, "Excuse me sir, do you speak English?"

"Yes."

"So, I was wondering if you could please offer me a financial assistance."

I didn't, at the time thinking that, how did she even get here in the first place, and also, why does someone who speaks fluent English not have a job here? Though it was later proposed to me that she was exiled here.

So my Beninese friend met this German woman, and immediately seized the opportunity to tell her all about why he admired Hitler. She was less than sympathetic to his views.

The biggest downside to this conversation is that I'll probably never witness anything more ridiculous for the rest of my life.

I just recently scheduled my official COS date (the day I finish my service) for October 2nd, 2009.

Immediately after that, I plan on doing a tour of Ghana to document all six of their unvisited confluences. Then I'll cruise around Europe with Grandpa and fly home. So I'm planning on returning to the US sometime in late October or early November.

I have no idea what I'm going to do after that. Though I do know I'll be getting a latex mattress. Not space foam! Apparently they're just as comfortable, they don't sleep hot, they're not temperature-sensitive, and they're significantly cheaper. Also, they don't degrade into substances that are linked to cancer. An all-around winner.

So yeah, if anyone has a job for me starting in November, that would be totally cool.

I went to the final confluence in Benin at 10°N 2°E. Everything went well.

But then when I got back to Nati I looked at my pictures and realized that the GPS unit was set to a screen that displayed the coordinates but not the estimated position error, which is required to get it on the Confluence Project. So my entire trip was invalidated and I'll have to go back to the confluence to retake the picture.

After a failed attempt to find this confluence I went back and looked on Google Earth to find out why I had thought it was going to be so easy. It turns out that there is indeed a path that goes pretty much directly to the confluence, we had just tried to get to it from the wrong side.

The second time I programmed in a bunch of waypoints into the GPS unit to make sure I wouldn't get lost. It was a pretty easy ride. From Biro (a small town) it was about 7km on a dirt road to some village whose name I've forgotten, and then another 5km further on a footpath. The closest point from the path to the confluence was about 60 meters, so I just got off the moto and walked. There was even a tiny path going off into the field where the confluence was located.

All zeroes.

The confluence (+/- 5m) is in the exact center of this photograph.

The view from the opposite side.

Me on top of the confluence.

These flowers grow straight out of the ground. Like, without any stem or leaves. Not really sure how that works. But it apparently does, as they were all over the place.

The first of the three confluences that I visited is just a few kilometers from the Benin-Niger border, near Karimama. Technically it's inside Parc du W, a wildlife refuge that's not even remotely as developed as Park Pendjari.

Cow cart crosses the Niger River.

Tom, Kelly, and me.

The Niger River. The strip of land in the distance is Niger.

We paid a park ranger and a taximoto driver to take us into the park on their motorcycles. The park ranger was invited mostly for his gun in case of a lion attack, which turned out to be unnecessary as the only animal we saw the entire time was a single warthog. We did see a bunch of elephant tracks in the dried mud, though, and there were a lot of paths that had been created by them trampling everything in their way. The closest we could get to the confluence on the road was about 8km so we had to ride our motorcycles into the bush, which did not please the drivers. The vegetation alternated between extremely thick forest and empty, burned out patches. I'm still somewhat amazed that we got anywhere given how crappy the terrain got at some points. After about an hour we got to within 800 meters of the confluence when the park ranger's motorcycle got a flat.

We drove through this for an hour.

Me riding with the park ranger.

We walked the rest of the way and found the confluence under a tree, surrounded by the remains of what the park ranger claimed to be a prehistoric village. There were thousands of shards of old clay pots half-buried everywhere. We also found an old grinding stone which he told us was what they used before people invented the yam-smashing devices they use today to make pounded yams. The odds of this are pretty unbelievable - for the entirety of the rest of the trip we saw absolutely no signs of human civilization whatsoever.

Some pottery shards.

Half-buried pot.

The confluence (within the margin of error anyway)

12°N, 3°E is located exactly over in those dead bushes.

Me standing on the confluence. The park ranger insisted I wear a yellow shirt and not a white one so that lions wouldn't target me.

The grinding stone.

Park ranger, with shotgun

We took our pictures and returned to where the other guy was with the motorcycles. The park ranger claimed he knew a shortcut to a road, where we could then take the one good motorcycle back to Karimama. "It's only 3km away!" he said. After walking for three kilometers in the unbearable heat (it was well over 100 degrees), I asked him to show me on the map exactly where we were going. I put the coordinates in my GPS unit and it calculated that it was 14 kilometers away - six kilometers further than the park entrance we had come in through.

Just after we decided it would be better to cut our losses and hike back to the entrance, the other motorcycle got a flat. Up to that point we had been taking turns riding slowly on it as the others walked. So not only did we no longer have that option, but it slowed us down even more as the taximoto driver wasn't exactly in great shape and he couldn't push his motorcycle nearly as fast as the rest of us could walk.

About two hours later we made it back to the entrance. Our water had run out and we were exhausted. The taximoto guy pumped up his flat tire enough for him to take me and the other volunteer back to Karimama. We left the park ranger at the entrance and the taximoto driver promised to come back to bring him a tire (which he did). I downed about five liters of water when we got back but was still dehydrated. So dehydrated that it hurt to pee. The next day things were considerably better.

A little cliff

My favorite picture of the trip

www.confluence.org

So I was walking around the hospital on April 1st trying to find a radio when this girl starting walking with me.

Her: "Hey, can I see your helmet?"

Me: "Sure, here you go. Would you like to try it on?"

Her: "Nope! April fools!"

Then she gave me back my helmet and walked away.

One of the things I really love about Benin is that it's still capable of surprising me.

For example, my friend (who is an African) explained to me why he liked Hitler today:

"Well you see, when he killed people, that was bad, but he had an ideology. At least he believed in something. He just shouldn't have been a dictator. Like, he could've done like how they're doing now with the European Union."

You can't make this stuff up.

Alright, you've heard about (or are about to google) the tragedy that we experienced recently and you're hesitant to come to Benin.

That's natural. But consider: there are about 100 volunteers here as I write this, and there will be about 100 next week, next month, and next year. We wouldn't be here if we didn't feel safe.

I am probably the most cowardly person alive. In fact, you might say I have a "chronic anxiety problem coupled with severe paranoia". Yet, I feel perfectly safe here. I do not ever worry about my safety. Ever. Please, if you get blessed with the country assignment, you should absolutely come to Benin.

I would like to thank everyone for not being douchebags and telling me to come home. Seriously. When all the volunteers gathered in a room, we were asked how many of us had been pressured to quit from people back home. About 50% of the volunteers raised their hands. Fortunately, pretty much everyone is ignoring this advice.

Sometime late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning a friend and colleague of mine was murdered.

It would be an understatement to say that everyone here is pretty distressed.

Press release.

I'm writing this post just because I want there to be a permanent record on the Internet so that when I tell people "I totally called it" they will be able to verify it having totally been called.

The calling: there will be a cure for all types of human cancer on or before December 31st, 2018.

In other news, it's five in the morning and I haven't gone to sleep yet. I'm hoping that this way when I take the bus in a few hours I'll spend the entire trip to Cotonou completely asleep. I've been passing the time watching TED conference videos.

This video in particular is impressive. Almost as impressive as my ability to predict when cancer will be cured.

Next week the construction of my swamp cooler should be complete. If it works it will probably be one of the proudest moment of my service. But more on that next week.

The first picture was taken August 3rd, the second picture was taken February 12th.

I recently built a solar water heater for my house since another volunteer got one and I envied it a great deal.

Water goes into this 15-gallon black plastic barrel from a hose in my bathroom. The metal frame was custom-built by a welder and cemented in by a mason. A plumber installed a floater from a toilet on the top tube so the intake valve shuts off automatically when it's full. The clear plastic on top holds in heat and is draped so that when the barrel is full it touches the surface of the water. This prevents condensation from building up on the plastic and reflecting sunlight.

The tubes enter and exit via a small hole in the wall.

They then continue through the former exterior window.

The hot water connects to a copper pipe that is cemented into the wall and then goes into the faucet. The cold water comes from a separate faucet down below.

A close-up of the faucet.

The government lowered the price of gas at its stations by about 50% the other day, which is nice to see since for a while there I was convinced that Benin couldn't be influenced by the economic realities of the rest of the world. Other nearby countries have apparently not yet lowered their official prices so all the smuggled gas that was previously sold on the side of the road has been taken elsewhere and all the gas stations have incredibly long lines, when only a week ago they almost never had any customers.

Jimmy,

This is like a haiku.

Your life is becoming a Japanese poem.

How is my effort to wean you off dog progressing?

You clearly want to do what I have done. There is nothing wrong with this. Just come to Benin and I will take you to see the wonderful village of Tapoga, where minds are opened every Friday in the far back corner of the market. I'll even arrange for there to be no paws on display.

My laptop was having a lot of problems so I reinstalled Windows, only to discover that for some reason it could no longer detect my network card no matter what I tried. I eventually gave up and installed Ubuntu.

This is the third time I've tried Linux. The first time I had no idea what I was doing and it was too complicated for someone who knew nothing about how it worked. The second time it was much improved, but there were still a few annoying bugs and it couldn't download pictures off my camera. But the latest version of Ubuntu seems to have gotten rid of all the problems that bothered me, and now that I know a few basic things I'm able to do pretty much everything I want to do. I wouldn't exactly recommend it to my mom (no offense, Mom), but it works well enough that I'm not ever going to get Windows for my personal computer ever again.

So the day I got back to Nati, the shuttle ran into a tree a little while after it dropped me off at my house. No one was injured.

An opportunist dries his pants.

Then later that night a truck knocked down the power line to the house, ripping the electrical counter off the wall.

Then at 3am the generator broke. Eight days later, everything was fixed.

Thanks to the awesomeness of the Internet me and my postmates will be watching the election results come in live. The very first polls close at midnight my time but it should be worth staying up for.

Beninese people are split. About half want Obama to win because he's African, and the other half want him to win because he's young. Pretty much everyone is interested in the outcome. A bunch of old guys are going to stay up all night at the youth center down the street, drinking and listening to the results on the radio.

Thanks to the Dallas County Elections Board I got my absentee ballot in what must've been record time, which makes this the first election I've ever voted in.

Before I left for Benin I made four predictions about what things would be like in October 2008. Good thing I didn't predict I'd be in America:

1) Oil will be above $90/bbl.

I probably should've defined "October" but contracts for October delivery closed at $120 and were at no point below $90. I'll count this as a win despite the fact that prices are now below $90.

2) The Democratic nominee for President won't be Hillary Clinton.

I should've bet on this.

3) The Republican nominee for President will be John McCain.

I really should've bet on this.

4) It will turn out that Lost actually did have a coherent, well-defined plot since the beginning.

I thought the show would've been over by now, but I guess I was wrong about that. In any event, we'll have to wait another year to settle this one, though I'm pretty sure this won't turn out in my favor.

Mix the following in a bowl:

1 handful Salad

1 cup Spaghetti noodles

3 tablespoons Mayonnaise

1 tablespoon Vinegar

1/2 can Tuna

1 Small sauteed onion

1/2 Chopped tomato

1/2 Sliced potato

I'm guessing at the quantities since they make this in the dark with just a single ordinary spoon. In any event, the majority of the meal should consist of noodles and salad. This costs 500 CFA (about $1.10).

So apparently someone decided to start a project to photograph every location on Earth where a line of longitude and a line of latitude converge. There are nine such confluences in Benin, 6 of which have been documented and 3 of which have not.

http://www.confluence.org/country.php?id=59

So in March I'm going to go photograph them in order to complete Benin. All three are fortunately in the north and two are close to villages and dirt roads, at least from what I can tell from Google Earth. The one in the far north is only about 15-20 km from a volunteer's post but it's also in a wildlife park, so that may be difficult to get to.

A guy I know has had insomnia for a couple weeks, and he recently showed me the two medicines that were prescribed to him when he went to the clinic: Alka-Seltzer, and Ciprofloxacin (a powerful antibiotic).

Most electricity is diesel, but are there any renewable energy projects in your area? I saw an awesome post somewhere about building a solar and wind powered communication network somewhere in Africa.

Nope. In the South a lot of the power comes from the hydroelectric dam in Ghana but the North isn't connected to that grid and it's 100% diesel. There is such high demand for electricity in the South though that they had to implement rolling blackouts pretty much everywhere. To help relieve the pressure they've decided to connect the generator in the North to the grid in the South since it's not being used to full capacity yet (it was originally designed to power the entire country of Ghana before they built the dam - it's huge).

The government made a pledge to bring electricity to every regional capital and though I'm not sure I think they've got it done already. In any event, electricity is relatively widespread and it's just not cost-effective to use renewable energy since prices are subsidized. I don't know if it will make sense when they drop the subsidy (which they're about to do due to the diesel shortage).

I've been to a couple of health centers in villages that did have government-bought solar panels but they were only powerful enough to run the radio. The refrigerators they have to keep vaccines cool are run on kerosene. Anyone who can afford solar panels already lives where there's electricity so it doesn't really make much sense to buy them.

As for the communication network, it's not really that necessary. There are tons of cell phone towers in places without electricity which are run on diesel generators. Cell phone companies are just that profitable apparently.

Most everyone from the group I trained with is leaving over the next two months, which blows as I'll probably never see most of them ever again. On the plus side, it gave me an excuse to commission going-away paintings for my friends. I gave a painter who calls himself Picasso some really vague description of robots attacking a city with people fleeing, and this is what he came up with:

The sign above this tollbooth said "MTN welcomes you to Cotonou", until they realized that it's actually in another city and decided to paint over the Cotonou part.

There's still no diesel fuel to be had, but the government raised the price about 50% for whenever it starts getting sold again. No one actually knows what's happening, but the assumption is that since the government sells diesel at a subsidized price, they just couldn't afford to keep selling it with oil prices where they are.

This basically means we'll have wicked bad inflation soon since most goods are shipped by trucks and electricity is mostly produced by diesel generators. This is on top of already-rising prices for pretty much everything else.

I learned to weld, which was fun. I read online what all the safety issues were the day before, and then when the guy showed me how it worked he violated pretty much all of them. I kept asking him if it was a problem inhaling the fumes or holding onto the thing with the electrical current running through it, but he didn't seem to mind even though he was aware of the danger.

In other news there's literally no diesel fuel in Benin, which is bad as all the Peace Corps vehicles have diesel engines and our generators run on diesel. This is especially bad timing for a shortage since the new volunteers fly in tonight and they have to be shuttled around for the next three months. On the plus side, there's plenty of gasoline so taxis and buses are still available.

We taught some kids to play sudoku.

We started off with 4 by 4 grids.

Working in a group.

All together at the board. The hardest part is that they all kept making the assumption that if a number wasn't specifically forbidden, then it was correct, which is the worst possible assumption to make. Some of the kids started to get it towards the end though.

This picture was taken in a latrine at a high school:

"Don't allow our masters to fuck you. Whoever allow them will miss her life."

Essentially it's imploring girls not to sleep with teachers for grades so that they don't accidentally get pregnant.

I found this thing in Cotonou and planted it at the Workstation. I was later told that to make it reproduce you have to cut it and plant it upsidedown. This is actually true. I'm not sure how these things make it in the wild.

I'm flying to Dallas around November 1st and going back to Benin around the 30th. The dates may be slightly off since there are only three flights a week from Benin but that's as precise as I can get for now.

I start my welding apprenticeship tomorrow. Ever since I thought of the idea it's occurred to me that I could solve a lot of problems for cheap if only I had the ability to weld. My fear now is that once I get good at this I'm going to try to solve all my problems through welding regardless of its practicality. Also, I would just like to reiterate to my mother that, no, I will not blow myself up doing this.

Jim,

Now that you have broached the topic of eating dog, I think you owe your loyal blog readers more information. We want to understand more about this custom. Do people regularly eat dog, or only some people? Are these dogs similar to the critters we saw sharing the garbage with the pigs? I sit excitedly waiting for your reply.

Mom

For the most part, it's taboo in Benin, but anyone who's protein-starved will ignore that. I googled "typical West African dog" and this was the second image. It's those dogs.

I re-interviewed for my job and got it, so I will definitely be staying in Benin until September 2009. I get one month of required home leave and I plan on taking that this November if possible.

Apparently there's a village not too far from my town that serves dog every Friday (the market day). It tastes like a cross between goat and pork. Delicious.

25 cents of dog. The pink coloration was from the sauce. This initially disturbed us but it was brown on the inside so we figured it wouldn't kill us (update from three days later: I'm still not sick, must've been fine).

Me losing the ability to run for elected office.

There were paws in this pot a few minutes before I took the photo but someone ate them all before I could get my camera out.

There will be municipal elections held this weekend. I'm probably not supposed to talk about that much. All it really means for volunteers though is that we can't travel anywhere.

In other news, the government telecom company turned on the internet-via-cell-tower thing in the two biggest cities in the region. Already a new cyber cafe opened up which is 25% cheaper than the satellite ones (a satellite connection costs over $400/month, the new thing is slower but costs around $50/month). This is pretty cool because a lot of NGOs and government offices have computers but until now there's been no economical way for them to get on the Internet.

There have been some riots to due rising food prices in a lot of West African countries recently. A few volunteers in other countries got rocks thrown at them, but that was supposedly because they went out to go watch the riots. Benin has so far avoided anything like that, though prices are going up and there have been some mild shortages - notably of wheat flour. The government has started to sell subsidized rice but otherwise not much has changed other than rice ladies refusing to give me the normal four scoops for 100 francs.

I'm trying to start a call-in radio show where students can ask science questions, so I went over to the neighbor's house to get a few sample ones for the pilot. They were as follows:

Why are there mountains?

When it rains, there are all these clouds. Are they in the sky?

Why are there wild animals in the bush?

Why do people exist?