A short informational note

In my month and some change with the Peace Corps, I’ve found that my future tends to be handed to me in the form of a plastic spiral-bound notebook. 

When I first arrived in country, I was handed four of such notebooks: polices, training manual, medical manual, cookbook, eerily similarly to the manuals I’ve received at conferences in the past in the US. These however were nothing compared to the power of the manual that I received two days ago.

All the stagers were gathered under a grove of palm trees at the agricultural center where we have events that involve all 66 of us. Our training director Gisele, with the help of our program managers, was about to tell us the location in Benin where we would each be working for the next 2 years.

She called the first region of the country, her face full of excitement facing 66 faces wearing expressions of anxiety, worry and utter inability to comprehend what was happening.

Tom was the first stager called for northern Benin. He walked forward, kissed our TEFL coordinator on the cheek and then received the information packet about his site. After Tom, six more fellow TEFLers were called for the same region. I was not one of them.

My name was not called until three regions later. I was the third for the Collines, the mountain/plateau area slightly south of the center of the country.

I walked forward in the front of the group, shook my coordinator’s hand and was handed a green plastic spiral-bound notebook that contained about 20 pages of information about my city, house, community and school for the next 2 years. It meant much more than the words typed on those 20 sheets of paper.

I flipped open the first page.