Rita’s PeaceCorps Stories

Salut from la Donga! I have officially been at site for one month! And as promised I am giving you a quick monthly update. My site has been absolutely amazing so far. I got really lucky with my site placement because I am not only surrounded by an incredibly generous and welcoming community in my village, but I also have a fantastic Volunteer support system super close to my site. My site mate Laura and I make dinners together a few times a week. One night I made ramen with eggs and some soy sauce for us, another night she made fried rice! My close mates Jacquelyn (RCH) and Brandon (TEFL) have met up with Laura and I to go to Parakou and Djougou (nearby cities) as we attempt to furnish our new houses. Our houses are coming along little by little, and I promise to share before and after pictures when I'm all done with mine, though that may not be for a few months. My work at site for the first few months as an RCH volunteer is to integrate into my community. To do that, I have b...

Hey all! I apologize for the tardiness for those who have been wondering what I’ve been up to, but finally now that I have officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Benin volunteer, I have some time to sit down and write a little update. The first three months of service in the Peace Corps is called Pre-Service Training (PST). My PST took place in a larger town in the South of Benin called Lokossa. During those three months I lived with an amazing, generous, unbelievably hilarious host family which I described in my last post. We had training everyday in Lokossa, save for a two week site visit where we got to go live with another host family in our real sites all over the country. The last four weeks of PST were all technical training. Since I am a rural community health volunteer, I learned about specific health practices promoted by the Minister of Health of Benin which I will pass on to my community throughout my two years of service here. I won’t go into detail about everything we l...

Bonjour tout le monde! We left off with our arrival in the Lokossa Training Center Wednesday June 12, 2019. All three sectors, TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language), SAS (sustainable agricultural systems), and RCH (rural community health) stayed in the Training Center for the next three nights. On Saturday, June 15, 2019, we were separated into language classes within our respective sectors based on our French level coming into the program. SAS and RCH were then assigned host families (famille d’accueil) in villages outside of Lokossa and TEFL was assigned host families in Lokossa. I was put in a language class with five other women in RCH and we were all assigned host families in a village called Koudo, about 20 minutes away from the training center. We were also assigned a Language and Cultural Facilitator (LCF) named Raymond who lives (for the time being) in Koudo with us and teaches our language classes. My host family has never had a volunteer before, which is fairly u...

Hello everyone, Bear with me, I’ve never been much of a public speaker in person and I doubt that will change with a screen in front of me. Also, I managed to get access to WiFi on my phone but it doesn’t seem to work on my laptop, so I will be text typing these blog posts for the time being. Alors soyez gentils s’il vous plaît. I flew from Anchorage, AK to Washington DC on Sunday night, June 9th 2019. I flew from Anchorage to Chicago (6h) then Chicago to DC (2h) and arrived at 10:30 am on June 10th. From there I took a Lyft to the 4H Convention Center for registration and orientation. I found that carrying my backpacking backpack (42 lbs) on my back, my carry on backpack (~25 lbs) on my front, my duffle (50.2 lbs) in one hand, and my “personal item” (~5 lbs) in the other hand was extremely heavy and I couldn’t walk more than 20 feet without becoming winded. And honestly I don’t feel like I overpacked but we’ll see how I feel in a year or so. Anyways, we had meetings all day Monday...