At the Peace Corps Bureau!

Bonjour mes amis! Je suis en Benin! And that’s about as much French as I know. Well, I can also say random phrases like, “It is NOT HERE!”. Oddly enough, these phrases did not get me very far in my language assessment the other day. You know what else didn’t help me? Falling asleep on the floor in the hallway outside the test and then being jarred awake by the test coordinator and led into her office and forced speak French almost instantly. I’m almost certain that half the words I said were a combination of French/Spanish/English/Nonsense sleep talk. I think she thought I was crazy. She asked me about my family and I told her I had a “30 year old niece” instead of a “3 year old nephew”. Despite my obvious lack of French skills, the lady continued to badger me an attempt to find any language skills. She was taping the whole thing on a little recording machine. At the very end she finally asked, “What are you going to do after this?” and I said, “Je voudrait (I want) to take a nap” half in French and half in English and then she quickly reached over and slammed the record button off. It was pretty pitiful. I got my results today though and it turns out that I am Novice Mid-Level and not classified as the village idiot so SUCCESS!
So I guess I have failed to address so far the fact that I am in Africa! My flight was not so great. It was 7ish hours from NYC to Paris and then about the same from Paris to Cotonou, which is the economic capitol. The first flight was ungodly hot. I tried to sleep but I was stuck in the middle of a set of 4 seats and was sweating profusely. At one point I followed the example of the girl next to me and literally took of my shirt so that I was only wearing an undershirt tank top thing. At that point I could care less if anyone saw my goods as long as they got some COLD AIR! The second flight was freezing cold and I watched A Single Man and about 20 minutes of Inglorious Basterds. When we got here we were greeted by a ton of volunteers cheering for us and holding signs. The same thing happened when we arrived at our hotel. They were cheering and greeting us and were so nice. They really got me excited for this. I was a little nervous once we got here but their enthusiasm was catchy. I did have a panic moment when my plane took off in NYC and thought maybe I was going to throw up on the annoying girl next to me but I quickly was distracted by the screen on the seat in front of me. Apparently Air France likes to use videos of flight attendants going through their safety speech instead of forcing the actual flight attendants present in the plane. The video wasn’t that great but in the bottom right hand corner they had a person doing sign language! I tried to figure out what she was saying and that was a fun game to distract myself from the fact that I was starting my journey to a 3 World Country.
So far Benin has been great. Everyone is so pumped for us to be here and it is hard to not be enthusiastic. It is pretty hot already and I guess this is the cool season, so you should expect some complaints over the next few months as it gets hotter and I start to melt and turn into one giant freckle. The people are really nice but I haven’t interacted with many Beninoise yet because when they speak to me they get a scared sad blank look and they think I am mentally handicapped.
I’m moving in with my host family on Wednesday and moving to Porto Novo so hopefully I will be able to buy a phone there and then get everyone my number. I miss everyone and love you so much!
Listening to: not much but some Coldplay. My roommate has a ukulele so we mess around with that.
Reading: Peace Corps manuals and French books. FUN.
Funny/random story: I found out today that 2 different girls in my group have been in the circus already! For those of you who don’t know, the circus is my back up plan and finding out that there are people my age who have already done it is both exciting and super depressing. They have already taken my secret dream back up plan and moved on from it! How is this possible! So, I am taking new suggestions for a backup plan starting now!