There’s no Ikea or thrift stores for purchasing furniture for our new house. However, wood is plentiful and there are dozens of carpenters in our town who custom make furniture. Here, the finishing touches are being put on our bed. It cost $60 U.S. dollars without the mattress. The other specialties of this carpenter, coffins (on the right) and school desks (on the left), are behind the bed.
Moving day! Jen in front of our new home for the next year.
Me and Jen in our matching swearing-in outfits (see yesterday’s photo).
Peace Corps’ training ends with a swearing-in ceremony where we officially become Peace Corps Volunteers. This is our group of Community Economic Development volunteers (in matching outfits as is tradition here) with, from the left: Benin’s Minister of the Environment, Minister of Education, Minister of Micro Enterprise, Peace Corp Benin’s Director of Programming and Training, the American Ambassador, and the Minister of Rural Health.
A visit to a different agricultural training center during PST (pre-service training). Songhai is an amazing place that is leading the way in sustainable agricultural training in Benin and West Africa. The farm is organic and produces almost no waste, reusing waste products as the input of other parts of the system. They have restaurants that use what they raise and a store that sells juices, dried fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy products, seeds and more. Students come from all over the world to study here.
Jen and I are both in the CED, Community Economic Development, program of Peace Corps Benin. Volunteers in our program are assigned to communities to help promote economic development.
This is a picture of our CED group talking with the founder and boss of the farm from yesterday’s photo. Pascal is a busy man – in addition to founding and running this agricultural training center, he is the president of Benin’s rice farmers’ trade group. Talking with Pascal gave our group a lot of ideas about promoting entrepreneurialism in our future communities.
This is part of a really interesting agricultural training center and working farm that we visited during training. In the foreground is a man-made pond used for raising fish – catfish and tilapia at this farm. There are banana trees in the background. This farm also raises coconuts, pineapples, manioc, sweet potatoes, rice, papayas, rabbits, snails, turkeys and chickens. They have an integrated model where nothing goes to waste – the chicken poo is used to raise maggots that are fed to the fish; aquatic plants filter waste water; methane gas is collected from other waste and used to partially power the farm. It is a teaching farm and has a program for people to come and intern while they learn the various sustainable farming methods.
This is a typical sight of a well packed vehicle. This is most likely a taxi cab helping someone get to the market. Those are tomatoes in the back and wood (probably to be burned for cooking) on top.
Behind the car is a local moto taxi. The back of moto taxis is the principal way, other than by foot or bicycle, that Jen and I get around. Luckily they never go that fast because of road conditions and traffic. But it can be a little dicey on the back if you are carrying groceries or something else.
I typically ride my bike to the center of our town, about five minutes from our apartment, and buy a fresh baguette every morning. Recently a heavy morning rain deterred me from going. Luckily I’d bought some eggs the night before and had a baguette from a couple of days earlier also. No egg sandwiches with this bread – too stale. French toast sounded good. The jelly we opened about a week ago, though, has been sitting in a warm cooler for the better part of a week. Our experiments with putting an ice block in the cooler each morning haven’t panned out as the temperature returns to normal (hot) by evening. Thus, no jelly for the french toast. We have a bottle of real maple syrup but until we work out the cooler system, I won’t risk opening it.
I decided to turn the french toast savory instead of sweet. My good friend Dan introduced me to za’atar several years ago after he spent some time in the Middle East. A spice mixture made of oregano, thyme, marjoram, sumac and toasted sesame seeds, za’atar is large in Arab cuisine and is commonly eaten with pita and olive oil or sprinkled on top of hummus. I added the za’atar and a healthy pinch of salt to the basic french toast batter of eggs and milk. I was in a rush and didn’t want to cook individual slices of bread one at a time. I roughly chopped the bread like I was making stuffing so that I could dump it all in the pan at once to cook it. I put the pieces in the batter and let them soak while the pan heated.
Usually I cook french toast in butter, but when I think of the Middle East and za’atar, I think olive oil. The olive oil went great with this french toast and helped it carmelize nicely, also. Crispy on the outside, the interior was moist and creamy from the soak in the batter. Not my Dad’s famous french toast, but tasty and different.
Za’atar French Toast
1 day-old baguette^ or other bread, cut into large chunks
4 eggs^
~1C milk^
1 T za’atar plus more for dusting the finished toast^^^
+ salt^
+ olive oil^^
^ Ingredient purchased in our town and used by locals on a daily basis.
^^ Ingredient purchased at supermarkets in Porto Novo or Cotonou that cater to wealthier Beninese and foreigners.
^^^ Ingredient sent courtesy of friends and families in care packages.
During our trip to our new town, we stayed with a local host family (a different host family than we’d been staying with during the rest of training). This is the outdoor kitchen behind the house. Lots of Beninese cook outside over a wood or charcoal fire. I particularly liked that this family cooks over three old engine blocks in a triangle (in foreground of picture). Dinner this night was inyam pile, a form of mashed potatoes made with the local yams where the cooked yams are pounded with huge mortar and pestle to bring out the starch in the yams. Our host family served the traditional Beninese spicy tomato sauce with fish over the yams.
Jen + Adam's Blog 