Happy (a little belated) Holidays to everyone!
Heres a little update about whats been happening with me recently:
My Christmas season has been spent with the local NGO that Im working with, which has kept me busy organizing and preparing for a huge Christmas party they throw for the village orphans in the surrounding area every year-we've been making food arrangements and coordinating donations and wrapping tons of presents (which include a melange of things ranging from bags of rice, to clothes, and toys), so despite ever increasing heat and a general un-Christmas like environment, it definitely helped get me in the holiday spirit. I went on a sort of orphan-fete tour-making my way to 4 other orphanages across Benin to serve food, hand out presents, and play with the kids with a group of other volunteers. So from the 22nd of December through the 26th I was traveling around working-a different type of Chrismas but probably one of the most gratifying holidays I've spent yet. It was really interesting, albeit depressing to see such an array of living facilities and physical conditions of the orphans in Benin. Equally intriguing was getting to meet the Beninese Papa Noel (Santa Claus)-who ended up being a much more frightening version of our Ole St.Nick (think a much thinner, much whiter, Chinese Opera masked guy wearing a florescent red fuzzy costume being toted around in a spruced up wheel barrow). The kids proved to be much happier, and braver (considering their gift bearer and the striking resemblence he had to a crazed psycho maniac) than I ever could have hoped to be under their circumstances. It was really fun to play with them and be affectionate with the kids though, especially upon seeing how attention deprived and hungry they are-but also daunting to realize how many challenges theyll be up against as the years go by-both health and education wise.
New Year's feting involved me and some other volunteers getting together for festivities based on-what else but food! Cotonou-a city of filth and chaos does prove to be good for one thing-an abundance and wide array of all the food that is never available in smaller towns and villages like my own. So in our quest to scrounge up enough food for 6 American food craving volunteers-we had to set off early in the morning. Finding food in Benin is no easy feat. It involves dodging cars and motorcycles coming at you in all directions, fighting with zem drivers and barking down ridiculous prices people try to pull on you. Then there's the trudge of walking from vending lady to vending lady across multiple winding neighborhoods and incredibly dangerous highways hugging large, cumbersome, and scratchy cement bags full of your accumulating purchases to your chest not knowing if the next vending lady your in search for and have walked 45 minutes to find even has any of the produce your looking for left to sell. Never would I have thought I'd ever say this-but man oh man do I miss Wal Mart and all its consumer convenience some days. So while simple food shopping is incredibly tedious and exhausting work requiring high levels of patience and cooperative weather, its absolutely rewarding when after 4 hours of laborious cooking without a real oven or kitchen sink, to have homemade eggplant marinara sauce, 7 layer bean dip, banana bread, chocolate fudge cookies, and guacamole awaiting you for your full consumption. So despite being eaten alive by bugs while sharing a single mat with another person and sweating through the same dirty clothes for 3 days straight to wake up to dead cockroaches surrounding me, New Years Eve in Benin, even compared to my last in Italy, was definitely another fete to remember.

Oh-almost left out the most interesting part of my New Year's Eve-our befriending of a cosmopolitan Rastafarian named Alex-one of the most intriguing characters I have ever met. Alex and his beautiful locks of dreaded hair was the most polished and decadently dressed Rasta I have ever met-wearing a leopard print turtleneck, fake Prada sunglasses, black crocodile skinned boots, and an amazing fashion runway belt that had a buckle whose pictures changed to different models sporting different designer labels. Absolutely fabulous. We (the other volunteers and I) had the pleasure of hanging out and sharing some drinks with him where he proceeded to preach to us about his Rasta spiritual beliefs, alternatingly reciting Celine Dion lyrics that were playing in the background of the seedy little dive bar we were in, and trying to provoke intellectual debates with me. The best part of our rendezvous was when he blessed us with his beer-pouring it on to the ground and dipping his thumb into the beer and bar floor grime mixture and slabbing it onto our foreheads into a symbol I couldn't accurately make out for lack of concentration as my attention was focused on what types of people come to this bar, what they might be carrying on the bottoms of their shoes, and how these germs had just been transferred to my face. Nevertheless making the acquaintance of our new friend Alex was yet another memorable experience to our holiday journey through Benin.
So thats my most recent holiday news from West Africa-a little bizarre as always, but did you really expect anything else from me?