ET? Phone home.

Happy Halloween!

I have bad news, good news and great news from the past couple of weeks.

The bad news is that my friend and postmate Andy went home. We call it ET’d, which stands for Early Terminated. Early Termination is a purely personal choice and PC does a great job of supporting people who decide to go home. There is no “penalty”; you don’t get a black mark next to your name in the PC ledger or anything. In fact, it is possible to return to PC later to re-apply after you’ve ET’d – many people do. That being said, I’m disappointed both personally at having lost my nearest fellow PCV and professionally because I don’t really think he made a good faith effort to make it work. I won’t go into details because it wouldn’t be appropriate, and I don’t want to judge because as I said ETing is a very personal decision. But I am disappointed.

The good news – though I am perhaps a little ambivalent about it – is that I now have a house full of furniture. Why? Because when Andy left he gave me all of his. I inherited a dining table with four chairs, another coffee table, an end table and three set of shelves: HUGE ones for the living room, medium ones for the kitchen and tall skinny ones for the bathroom. I also got his stove (both his burners work while only one of mine was working), a pagne (PAHN-ya) chair – basically a canvas deck chair – and his single bed frame, but not the mattress. Now I just have to set up the spare room and other volunteers can stay with me when they come to Cotonou. Actually, a few have already done that although the spare bed is currently doubling as my couch. What I really need to do is rearrange the whole place, move my kitchen into the house and use the kitchen space out back for storage – it will make living much easier. So, I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend.

More good news: It looks like I’ve found a secondary project to work on. There is a business school here in Cotonou that is looking for someone to teach some classes on Leadership/Management and the like. One of the other PCVs is going to be teaching some tech classes and she introduced me to the woman who runs the place and it looks like I’ll start teaching in December. That should be fun and it should put me in touch with a different crowd of people; good for broadening the horizons and all.

The great news is that we finished the business plan! Why is this great news? First, it means that LOTS of aid money will now start flowing to the project. We will be able to move into our new office space (getting me out of the lobby) and start hiring and training people to actually DO arbitrations. Second, it means that we can stop operating in “crisis” mode and start working a normal routine. Now at this point I have no idea what that looks like because we’ve been working on the business plan since I got here, so this may or may not be a good thing. I have only a vague idea of what my role will be under normal operating conditions, so we’ll have to play it by ear. Ca va.

Everyday news: Sunday I’m leaving Cotonou for the first time (officially) since swear-in. The Small Enterprise volunteers are all getting together in Natitingou (just like it’s spelled) for our Early Service Conference (ESC). ESC is out first real opportunity to check in and see how things are going for our sector. We’ll get some additional info sessions on funding sources for projects, applying for them, finding secondary projects, etc. But mostly we’ll get to share our experiences with our fellow PCVs. Plus, Nati is way up in the north of Benin, which is totally different from the south. Everyone says it’s just beautiful. I’m REALLY looking forward to a change of scenery right now! I’ll be driving up with a couple of other volunteers and our APCD in a PC vehicle, so instead of cramming into a bush taxi for 14 hours we’ll be riding in a nice, comfy, air-conditioned SUV for 8 or 9. There are some good things about living in Cotonou…

Next time, more pictures!