What I've learned so far:

Walk around, leave your house, do not watch that next episode of the West Wing; Never underestimate the value of greeting someone; Start projects early, things will rarely work out as they planned; Do not try to put another food object in a plastic container after you have repeatedly put fried fish in that container; Someone will always answer your question, but you have to be willing to ask first; Determine what you think is your capacity for patience, then double it; Your attitude that day will be directly reflected in the actions of your students; Take advantage of what resources you can get your hands on; Sometimes, you just need to sit in your house, drink red wine and stalk your US friends on Facebook; Regular dreams about food are not something of which to be ashamed; Be strong; You are the teacher, and you are in charge, which means that sometimes, you have to walk out of the classroom before your students walk all over you; A song is a powerful incentive; Sweating while not moving is possible; Emails from home will always come when you need them most; It is easier to waste time on YouTube Mobile than it is to waste time on full-bandwidth YouTube due to loading/downloading.bandwidth issues; Pounded yams. Eat them; You will become accustomed to three-inch long cockroaches in your latrine faster than you would think; After about four months, you tend to forget what you don’t have; You will be surprised at the people who you miss; Some of the best things can be purchased from atop a person’s head; People’s perceptiveness will surprise you; Just dance; Tragedies in the US will still reach you even if you are six time zones away; You will learn as much, if not more than, what your students learn from you; Don’t spend so much time doubting that your colleagues will come through; Surround yourself with good people, with them you can do anything; You can do this.

Time won't let me go

I regret my lack of posting in the last week, and my excuses could be listed as follows: my electricity extra unreliable, leaving little battery power for blogging; I’ve been spending a lot of time with volunteers lately, and in Cotonou, which leaves me mainly with “I love my friends” stories, which would be be true, but not really what I want this blog to be about; and I’ve been so well-integrated that I haven’t had the time to blog.

The truth, though, would be that I’ve been too tired to get all the things I need to finished before vacation, let alone find the brainpower to write words that aren’t meaningless on here every night.

If you had told me that there would be a time that I would be this stressed during my service, I wouldn’t have believed you. But not just me, every one that’s about to hit the one-year mark is suddenly realizing how much the next four months of their lives are booked. And how much this schedule is going to put us suddenly at October with less than a year left, not quite remembering how we got there.

Most of the time here, I feel like I’m living in a time warp. Time just seems to pass differently here. It once felt like it would never end. Now it feels like  it’s disappearing without my permission. 

The new group of volunteers arrive in about a week. Those first three months felt like they were the longest of my life. Now, it’s weird to think about how they will be experiencing days that feel like they last 30 hours while the rest of us run around the country trying to to snag as much time as possible.