I asked my ninth-grade students to write, in English, an excuse note explaining why they hadn’t done a hypothetical homework assignment. (This is their third year of English and their second year with me.) Here are some highlights. Translations of French words are in brackets. … I am malaria, flu, cholera, after three day I [...]

Here are some photos of a funeral I went to a while ago. I’m close with the deceased woman’s son, so this is the first time I’ve been able to take photos of each stage of a Beninese funeral. . . . . . . . . . . . .. .

I and a few other Peace Corps Volunteers went to a reception in Cotonou to mark the 50th anniversary of USAID, which is a federal agency that gives away money to people in third-world countries. It was held on the lawn of what I believe is the USAID director’s house. The American Ambassador, the Peace [...]

Jacob handed me a folded scrap of paper. “A girl in the village sent me this note.” “What girl?” “A girl.” I unfolded it and started reading. “What does it say?” “Hold on.” I had an idea of what it said and so did he. She needed money. Her father refused to pay her school [...]

I’m in Natitingou, a town in northwest Benin, for a belated Thanksgiving with the other education volunteers from my training class. It took most of a day to get here but the town is beautiful, built on the sides of two mountain ridges and along the road that runs between them — white mosques and [...]

Late last year a pamphlet called Indignez-vous! became a bestseller in France. It’s written by Stéphane Hessel, who as a French soldier was captured by the Nazis in 1940, escaped a POW camp, joined the RAF and then de Gaulle in England, parachuted into France ahead of D-day, was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, [...]

Every few months I receive in my mailbox something called the Peace Corps Times. In the last issue they printed results of an informal poll of Peace Corps volunteers’ favorite books. The popular image of Peace Corps life may be full of adventure, but in reality you spend most of your time losing the struggle [...]

I have it. While I am not going to die or have permanent brain damage or anything like that, I can say that the reports of how bad it is were not exaggerated. A few days ago I got a high fever, and that night I had my first malaria attacks. This was an unparalleled [...]

Edouard came by my house to chat. I showed him the papers I’d just finished going through, the results of a literacy test I’d given my students that morning. I read aloud to them two short passages in French, one simple (“I am a student at CEG Kêmon. I am twelve years old”), and one [...]

That was one looooong post, Mr Bolin. But its good to hear from you -- it's been a while!

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. Me and the internet have not met for some time. Without further ado… ————— A year ago, on the morning of my second day teaching school in my village, I woke up to a downpour. The condition of the dirt road put riding my bike [...]

I’m in Parakou at northern Benin’s Camp GLOW, the girls’ camp, which will be going on for the rest of this week. I brought two of my students, both fourteen years old. Christianne lives in the house behind mine; every day she carries home several massive basins of water and she greets me in English [...]

It was wonderful to see everyone during my visit home earlier this month. You can’t really say in words how important support from family and friends is to Peace Corps volunteers. I’m back now, so here are the stories that have piled up. ————— Interplanetary travel I was at the airport in Cotonou, catching a [...]

Hi Michael, Very interesting story. Your taxi experience reminded me of a James Bond scene, with vehicles moving in all directions. Hopefully you returned the madman's keys, or else he may still be looking for you! Glad to hear that you received such a warm reception on your return trip to the village. Your host mother seems very friendly and the grandmother appears to be easy to talk to (with a small vocabulary!). Other than the dry weather, I hope everything else is going well for you. Best of luck!

Last April I went to Porto Novo, the capital, to spend Easter with my old host family from training. The trip involves first going to Cotonou, the largest city in the country, and then heading east for an hour or two. After ten hours of frequently interrupted motion southward in four separate bush taxis, I got to [...]

Hey Mike! This was an excellent story. I am so proud that a friend of mine can do such an amazing work of selfless service to humanity. You are doing great thing, with which no one can be anything short of awed. Keep up the great work!

Camp GLOW, the girls’ camp for which I begged for money in my last post, has been fully funded. Thanks to everyone who helped out. —– A few weeks ago I received letters from a sixth-grade class in America. The plan was to give them to my students, who would write letters back. First the [...]

Hi Michael! I tried to donate a small token in support of the girls' camp, but was informed that the project was already fully funded. It sounds like a great project that will give those 50 girls the support and hope that is otherwise missing from their lives. As I try to figure out what to do after I graduate (which is approaching faster than I would like to admit), I have often thought about you and felt admiration for the clear mindedness with which you chose to devote two years of your life to helping others. While the Peace Corps is in my tentative plans for the future, I will probably do it as part of graduate school, which means I have to find something else to do for the next year or two. I applied for Teach for America, and even got as far as a final interview, but ultimately did not get accepted, so that's one option down the drain. Anyway, I greatly enjoy reading your posts and hearing about your experiences in Benin. Daryl and I often commiserate over how much we miss you, but reading your blog lets us know that at least you're alive! And it gives some semblance of contact. I hope everything is well with you, and I look forward to reading more as time goes on. Take care, ~Micaela

Before I start, I need to make a fundraising pitch for a girls’ camp that I and several other Peace Corps volunteers will be running in August. Beninese society, especially in rural villages, firmly believes that girls should remain uneducated and have no choice about the courses of their lives. Girls work from 5 am [...]

I recently visited a nearby village, Akpero, for no particular reason. My neighbors assured me that it was on the road, just a few miles away. On the way I stopped at a village of the Pol, a tribe of cattle herders from Mali. This is the same place I visited and wrote about six [...]

Thank you for finding me. You still write as beautifully as I remember. I am in awe...of more than your writing. Well done, young man.

Black and white We’re four months in to the six-month dry season and water is becoming a problem. Cisterns are long empty and wells are going dry or bringing up water that’s more accurately described as thin mud. Now I have to get water for drinking, showering, dishes, and laundry from a manual pump about a kilometre [...]

Great pictures. The scenery has a melancholy look to me. I'm with Trudy, how about some pictures of you? Hope you're well.

Thank you for the updates on Kate Puzey. I am a former Benin TEFL PCV (01-03) and my heart aches for the loss of this young women. From all that I've read; it seems like better communication could have prevented it.

Very good pics, Mike! But I agree with Trudy -- we need proof that you're really there ;)

It’s unrelated to Benin, but I want to share this story from Slate magazine’s news feed. Egyptian Muslims Attend Christmas Eve Services as “Human Shields” Many Egyptian Muslims did something Thursday they’d never done before: celebrated Christmas. A week after a terrorist bombing killed 21 Christians in Alexandria, thousands of Muslims attended Coptic Christmas Eve [...]

Michael, Great photos. How about a picture or two of you next time? Take care.

  The wooded savanna west of the village, taken from the grande colline, with the petite colline on the left.   Sunset, taken from my front porch a couple months ago during the rainy season, when the world was still alive. The petite colline, Christmas Eve.

Hey it's good hearing from you again! As always, I enjoyed your update. You keep getting sick! I wonder what you have this time. Are you sure you didn't have your spleen removed? Good luck, have fun! Alex

If you tried to watch the 20/20 segment I wrote about last time, you probably noticed it didn’t happen. Our country director tells us that 20/20 told him that it will air some time in January. For real. We think. I spent Christmas in my village. On Christmas Eve my villagers decided to burn every [...]

It's good see this post. I was slightly worried since it has been so long since your last one. Jonathan is confident that you died despite my protests; it doesn't help that you have been sick several times. I'll try to watch Puzey segment if you are still alive. I now have 200 channels and still can't find anything to watch except sports and comedy central. You missed out on Jon Stewart's 'Rally for Sanity'. Just a quick spelling correction. You mention the 'shinest... SUV' ever seen in Kemon.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m back in Parakou for a week of training with the other education volunteers. Before I begin, there will be a report on 20/20 on December 3 about Kate Puzey, the Volunteer who was murdered in Benin last year. It might discuss the Peace Corps’ Kafkaesque reluctance to disclose information about the murder, [...]

Too bad you're away from TV! Glenn Beck has promised this week to reveal "the puppetmaster." We're all supposed to watch religiously and urge our friends to do so. I'm not quite sure, but, he seems to already be hinting it's George Soros. --John

Sometimes I wonder if Joseph Heller ever lived in West Africa. There's a story here about a volunteer who was trying to get some spaghetti and fries at a cafeteria. They had fries, but were out of chicken, and the fries were supposed to come with the chicken. The attendant could not conceive of a universe in which one could have fries without chicken. So the volunteer got no fries.

Hey, Michael: Your talk of the cuisine reminds me a tale told me by a friend who was in West Africa decades ago. He and some friends went to a restaurant. The waiter comes by to take orders, and one of his friends tries to order some item on the menu. The waiter says, "I'm sorry; we don't have that today." So he goes on to item two, again the response "I'm sorry; we don't have that today." After this happens several times, his friend says, "Well, O.K., what do you have?" The waiter replied, "We have nothing today. The chef didn't come to work." --John

I’m in Parakou, a city about 50 miles north of Kemon, at one of four Peace Corps workstations in the country. After spending nearly a month without leaving my village, I’m a bit taken aback by things like computers and toilets. And Americans. There’s only one computer here, so this will have to be a short post. [...]

Michael: I found your blog! How cool is that? Best wishes from California! Oh, and I'm sending you an email.

One night in Kemon I noticed that my right foot and lower calf were swelling to alarming proportions. My neighbors said it was the bug bites. I pointed out that my left foot had an equal number of bug bites and no swelling. They maintained that it was the bug bites. I called the Peace Corps doctor the [...]

Two months in Benin and I’m finally a real Volunteer. After some awkward schmoozing between the Americans who wear suits to work and the ones who don’t, we swore in at a ceremony at the Ambassador’s house in Cotonou, and afterward footage of us sitting and clapping and yawning was splashed liberally across Beninese television [...]

My training class swears in tomorrow and on Monday I leave for Kemon. I managed to pass the written test on Beninese culture, though I learned that “aborb large quantities of alcohol in order to validate masculinity” does not count as a “typical male responsibility” in Benin, nor is “petrol boofed from Nigerian pipelines” one [...]

As I’m writing this, there’s some voodoo something going on in the street outside. It involves what can only be described as a dancing pile of hay. Anyway, Friday was the celebration for the end of Ramadan, one of the holiest days in the hijri calendar. That morning there was a monsoon and I was [...]

It’s getting near the end of training. Tomorrow is the last day of real training, we swear in next Friday at the ambassador’s house in Cotonou, and we have to be at post by Monday night. And just when I had trained almost all of the children in my neigborhood to not yell racial slurs [...]

Yesterday the education trainees went to Gran Popo, a seaside town near the Togo border. In its heyday it was a major slave-trading port. Now it’s half ghost town and, thanks to the beach, half tourist attraction. Unlike Cotonou’s depressing beach, Gran Popo lacked large piles of trash, emaciated dogs, and children playing in the [...]

Everyone except the education volunteers are on their post visits now — we did ours a few weeks ago because we’re teaching this week — so things are quieter around here. In compensation, there’s a cholera outbreak in and around Cotonou, which is freaking everyone out. I’m not terribly worried because I already wash my [...]

Here are a few classic Beninese tropes that I’ve noticed. Phrase: [your name], toi-là. Literal meaning: you there. Actual meaning: used to punctuate the long pauses which are normal in Beninese conversation and which aren’t considered awkward in the least. Phrase: doucement. Literal meaning: gently. Actual meaning: if you step on someone’s foot, they say [...]

Three weeks until we swear in and move to post. Now that we’re in model school, the second phase of training in which we teach actual classes of actual Beninese students, training is getting slightly more bearable. There’s more work, but at least it has a point. I started a trend. Trainees are getting sick [...]

I spent the weekend in the sick ward in Cotonou. It’s an interesting story. Last week I wasn’t feeling well, so I did a MIF kit and sent it to the med lab in Cotonou. (If you don’t know what that is, you don’t want to.) On Thursday I was feeling worse and my temperature [...]