First Package!

Wednesday is my Marché Day. I usually follow a routine when I go out to buy my food for the week. Before I leave my house, I walk my dog and then feed him and the cat. As I leave my house on my bike, he always howls at my absence. I park my bike at the post office and check the mail for my cluster. Currently there's two of us volunteers that get our mail here. The third finished her service and her replacement will swear-in to post mid-Nov. Every time there's a package, I never expect it to be for me. Today seemed no different. There was a box wrapped with our "Corps de la Paix" label. I totally expected it to be for my neighbor cause she gets tons of stuff from home. Nope! Addressed to me!

Thanks Wu-Tang and LBC K! I forgot to warn about how they open packages here. However, they are also superstitious, so if you put religious symbols like crosses and "Dieu te voit" (God sees you) they will deter them a little.

On the back of the package it said it was torn when the post office got it, which worried me that some unsavory customs person rummaged through it. But, everything looked fine inside.



Hooray for America things! Once thing that happens to you when you get village food here all the time is that you get used to starch based foods and hot pepper for flavor. Therefore, snacks from America taste so much sweeter or saltier. In theory, I will ration these, but I'd give it till the end of the week.

Here's Rampage and Nightmare, my dog and cat, respectively next to my bike. I was heading up to my roof to get a picture and snuck a shot of them.

This is the lady across my house. She sells fried manioc balls. A few months ago a storm blew away the shed covering. Since raining season is coming, I think that's why they're rebuilding another one again. My landlord said we could put a gazebo thing on my roof like that so people can hang out, but I don't really want to commit to major investments to my house when I'm gonna be here less than a year.

Last Saturday we had our post visit party in Agbelouve, which I'm guessing is about an hours north of Lomé . Post visit is a week when the new trainees visit their posts for the first time. I'm getting two new neighbors and they seemed really happy about coming to post and very upset to go through another 3 weeks of training. I remember those days... Anyways, this little playa kind of hung around the bar at the party. He's a little mentally handicapped so people kind of brush him aside and his parents kind of ignore him. He was dancing and following us all night. Someone put sunglasses on him and I told him to dance to Usher. I'm so cool.