My Post

I received the details about my final post and position description. I probably received one of the best posts, at least for myself! I am not allowed to provide extremely site specific information, but if you look at a map of Benin find the city of Dassa, which is at the top of the bottom ¼ of Benin in the center of the country (if that makes sense), cause I will be living about 7km outside of it.

Ok. I am super excited! I will be working for an NGO to develop and expand the area’s ecotourism. The reason they want me to do this is because this area is supposed to be one of the most beautiful in Benin. I will be developing an ecotourism business to attract rich Europeans and I will be living in the exact same area. You have no idea how many people are jealous of my post. The place is supposed to be gorgeous with woods, green savanna, large rolling hills, and endless walking/biking trails.

My two other responsibilities are environmental education and community development. Environmental ed is pretty self explanatory but for the community development I am going to try to increase the communities political activity. I am reading a book right now, written by someone born and raised in Kenya but educated in the United States, who talks quite a bit about the fatalistic attitude in Africa that contributes to their passivity and tolerance for bad political leaders. Therefore, thanks to WISPIRG, I might try to increase the awareness of the people’s political power. Wish me luck. That is not a small task in a country without any history of political activism where people are forced to spend most of their energy struggling to survive. It has to start somewhere, right? I know that with the Peace Corps, I am not allowed to engage in political activity, so I have yet to figure out my way around that one. Hopefully they will be ok if I simply facilitate others getting involved as opposed to involving myself.

Ok, back to my future post. I am the third volunteer that will be at this post, but the first one who will primarily be working on developing their ecotourism business. One of the things I asked for the ability to do was to combine environment and business, so this post is perfect. Since I am the third volunteer I will hopefully have an awesome house because it will have 4 years of collected stuff that the previous volunteers left there. I will have good cell phone reception, electricity, running water in my concession, a very short bike ride to the nearest market, and only 7km away from the nearest volunteer and post office. I will be able to buy a post office box so you all can send me stuff all the time! Ohh fyi, a concession consists of usually about three houses behind a small fence/wall. Peace Corps does that so that I get very close to my neighbors to help my integration and for safety reasons, aka they will look out for me and make sure I know any important info.

Feel free to send me updates about what is going on in your lives; I like reading emails from family and friends.