how's your aim in shitting in the hole? have you ever had the runs and shit all over the back of your shoes?

9/25/2013 4:58:56 PM

Son, you don't even count as a Benin volunteer until you've shit your pants. Giardia is the usual culprit. It isn't as uncomfortable as amoebiasis, but it is more...urgent. And I have absolutely shit my pants in Benin. And on the ground around the hole. And on the ground in the middle of nowhere.

9/25/2013 6:32:36 PM

Joke of the day, apparently in honor of grumpy

Quote :

"A man returns from Africa feeling very ill. He visits his doctor, who immediately rushes the guy to the Mayo Clinic. The man wakes up to the ringing of a telephone in a stark room at the hospital and answers it. “We’ve received the results from your tests,” says the doctor on the other end of the line. “Bad news—you have Ebola.” “Oh, my God,” cries the man. “Doc! What am I going to do?” “Don’t worry. First, we’re going to put you on a diet of pizza, pancakes, and pita bread,” says the doctor. “Will that cure me?” “No, but it’s the only food we’ll be able to get under the door.” submitted by CrazyJ on Monday, August 6 at 6:58 PM"

9/26/2013 5:37:33 PM

august 6th was a tuesday.

9/26/2013 5:43:08 PM

Not in 2001 it wasn't.

[Edited on September 26, 2013 at 7:29 PM. Reason : or last year]

9/26/2013 7:29:35 PM

just an observation. (and being that crazyj submitted, i'm assuming it's the 2001 date.)

[Edited on September 26, 2013 at 7:58 PM. Reason : ]

9/26/2013 7:58:04 PM

Did you get an invite to the oral assessment?

9/26/2013 10:43:21 PM

yes i was banned for MONTHS. it was an injury that i didn't deserve. worse still is that i was threatened with a MUCH longer ban by a user named synapse if i even come in here. a topic i am clearly interested in and have been a major contributor to.

with regard to my "targeting" gop in a "bisarre" manner: lets look back a few pages at where grumpy directly threatened me with real life harm. did he get banned? no. yet i got banned for "trolling" when nobody in this motherfucker is qualified to even assess such an accusation let alone sanction anyone.

also fuck you lord of the flies motherfuckers for not even asking around what happened to me. i have zero love for TWW.

10/3/2013 5:20:05 PM

you were acting like an ass. this thread was not intended to be your personal war on the peace corps or the people in it. many of your comments were extremely incendiary and you just kept on going and going and going.

i don't know the official reasons for banning someone, but TWW isn't a free country, there are rules of decorum, however loose, and if you've been told to chill out and you don't, then the moderators don't have to let you play here. you aren't the first person to get suspended or banned and you won't be the last. there are certain attitudes that the mods feel shouldn't be expressed here, and apparently you found out what some of those attitudes are.

10/3/2013 8:04:18 PM

and you're cool with that? I'm not. also where are there rules you speak of? [inb4 link to some god damn badly enforced site policy that is just copypasta from ebay and never updated] and I was never warned of anything. I just woke up one day and was banned.

with regard to me saying incendiary things, if gurmpy or anybody else can't handle it, they can fuck off back to their own private blog. This is supposed to be a space for open communication restricted to a shared ncsu background.

i dont go to the motherfucking internet for polite or to make friends. express you real opinion and feels.

oh and before ppl bitch me out and blame me for derail: every single thread i have ever posted on TWW was derail too so STFU

DON'T REPLY TO THIS SHIT in here. go to the feedback forum thread i started called censorship on TWW: in here, talk about grumpy's misadventure

10/4/2013 5:39:07 AM

Are you a 12-year-old girl?

10/4/2013 9:20:47 AM

I think the banhammer is going to come out again. And it should.

10/4/2013 9:53:40 AM

Quote :

"Did you get an invite to the oral assessment? "

No, I got a "regret to inform you." Which sucks, but it would free me up to extend for a third year, which looks increasingly like something I want to do.

The past few weeks have been a bureaucratic clusterfuck on a level beyond all understanding. USAID and my boss continue to be anti-latrine and want me instead to focus on teaching people to wash their hands. You'll recall how well this works in the United States, where we believe in germ theory and have handwashing reminders everywhere and enormous numbers of people (including doctors, nurses, and food handers) don't wash their hands on a regular basis.

But in spite of their opposition I was able to submit a modified version of the grant just in time for three things to happen:
1) Peace Corps decided to retroactively revamp the grant submission process, forcing me to go back to square one
2) The fiscal year ended
3) The government shut down

All of which essentially mean that everything here is on hold until November at the earliest.

We also had a three day training to update us on all these bureaucratic changes. This was about as exciting as watching the grass grow (which here would actually be mildly interesting, since grass is so rare we normally stop and stare whenever we find some), but nobody was complaining. The venue was at the closest thing Benin has to a beach resort (read: some of the rooms have air conditioning and the pool was not green) and we were fed like kings. Barbecued rabbit, couscous, rice, actual vegetables...I'm getting hard just thinking about it.

10/21/2013 3:03:28 AM

I've been pretty lucky when it comes to traffic accidents, but that ended today. I boarded a bush taxi for the capital this morning and it almost immediately hit a woman with a baby strapped to her back.

Needless to say I almost shit my pants but they got right back up. The mom was dazed and the baby looked indignant. I got out of the taxi; the driver said, "No no, it's OK, get back in, we're going." No, asshole. So far you've run over an average of one person every fifty yards. It's thirty miles to our destination. I do not like that math.

I got into another taxi that promptly ran over a family of pigs and then fled the scene of the crime, because people get lynched for that here.

Almost had to suck some dicks to make it happen, but the funding for latrines finally came through. For the first time ever, the lovely village of Oko Akare will be equipped with holes in which to shit.

Also, we're about to start a radio show, which sounds much more impressive than it is.

11/20/2013 8:18:28 AM

I watched the Top Gear Africa special last night, so it's pretty much like we have identical experiences now.

11/20/2013 8:25:51 AM

Only if their vehicles were filled with 150% more people than they were ever designed to hold.

And not just people, either. Earlier I saw a motorcycle with a driver plus 12 live (and unhappy) goats. Yesterday there was a monkey riding on top of a taxi. And I have seen live cows both in the back of taxis and tied to the backs of motorcycles.

11/20/2013 10:03:29 AM

This thread is gold. GrumpyGOP's posts are awesome to read.

11/20/2013 10:21:20 AM

Alright, you win. James May is only equivalent to about 6 live (and unhappy) goats. The taxi monkey and Richard Hammond are an even trade though.

11/20/2013 10:25:42 AM

^^They really are, and I'm happy to hear the latrines are a go.

11/20/2013 10:34:22 AM

Quote :

"the baby looked indignant"

i'm still laughing at this

11/20/2013 10:45:42 AM

Oh, I forgot to mention the school garden project.

The World Food Program is working on a project with schools in Benin to get them to set up gardens to supplmement the lunches that are available to students (these are usually plates sold by women who get permission to set up outside of the gates). To encourage them, they provide technical help, build a cistern to collect rainwater, and provide sacks of beans for the lunches.

Peace Corps wants me to help out with one such school near me, which is a pity, because this is one of the dumbest programs I've heard of in a long list of dumb programs.

1) The students are taken out of class to work in the gardens. That is, to do manual agricultural labor, which is exactly what they would be doing if they weren't in school. They don't get a decent education as it is, and what little they get is their sole chance to not end up as subsistence farmers.
2) The cisterns are nowhere near big enough to get through the dry season, which is also the school year.
3) When the program ends, the bean supply ends as well, and the whole thing will collapse.
4) The gardens are not large enough to make a difference, nutritionally-speaking, for the number of students involved.

So the whole thing is pretty fucked, right? Damn straight it is. So now I'm on a ridiculous and ill-fated personal crusade to salvage it. We're in talks to dig a well. I'm building a big composting system to fix their shitty soil. I'm even trying to use the omnipresent garbage to make a sort of inorganic mulch to deal with the weed problem, because that is more efficient than sending out 8 year olds with machetes to cut down weeds (which is their usual go-to plan).

All of this sounds pretty good, but I've already got a feeling that the well won't happen, the composter won't get used, and the mulch is just going to be thrown into garbage piles because, "It is not beautiful, what." (Motherfuckers like to add "quoi" to the end of sentences and they are very concerned with beauty amidst their piles of burning refuse)

At least it is good, hardy work out their in the fields, so I feel like a man when I come home. Sadly I feel like a man whose hands have been reduced to tatters by inferior tools and the shards of broken glass hidden in the soil, but still. It's good to be productive.

11/20/2013 10:57:13 AM

lol my friend works a lot with teaching stuff like this. Do you have any kind of link to the garden project I can send them?

11/20/2013 12:27:25 PM

et ton français écrit, comment ça advance, quoi?




Es-tu jamais allé au Mali, à Bamako? Mon mari parlait recennement de se présenter comme candidat au poste d'ONU là-bas (pour les régions du Mali et du Nigeria). Doit-on l'éviter?


[Edited on November 20, 2013 at 1:20 PM. Reason : ]

11/20/2013 1:06:58 PM

Minka -- a link? Are you crazy? Hell no, I ain't got no damn link. Benin's relationship with the internet is limited to yahoo and Nigerian e-mail scans.

And GREEN JAY, my community has about a 35% literacy rate. My written French is pretty appalling. I can't spell shit, a state of affairs not aided by the fact that in French you don't pronounce half the letters.

But I can tell you that PCVs are not allowed to travel to Mali, nor to Nigeria. Both are considered too dangerous. Should your spouse avoid those countries? I dunno. I know that you could not get me to set foot in Nigeria for love or money (and I only live about 10 km away from the border). Perhaps UN employees have adequate security, but I sure as shit don't.

Speaking of dangerous, we recently ran into a multinational group of Marines (including USMC and their British and Dutch counterparts). They are not allowed to go into markets and are only allowed to shop at Erevan (basically a Target), and they are not permitted to ride motorcycle taxis.

11/20/2013 8:35:06 PM

that may or may not mean anything.

risk aversion in the military, even in the Marines, can be downright silly. All it takes is one dumbfuck commander to set an absurd policy. When I was stationed at Cherry Point, all personnel assigned to Cherry Point, New River, and Beaufort, SC were not allowed to travel outside their respective local areas during hours of darkness, by order of the General in charge of all East-coast USMC aviation units.

Seriously. If I wanted to drive from my house in New Bern, NC to Raleigh on a Friday evening after work, I wasn't allowed to. Of course, everybody ignored this shit.

My point is that the military (even the Marines) avoiding something "because it's too dangerous" may or may not be an indication of anything.

11/20/2013 8:52:35 PM

I'm aware of all of this. It still entertains us that the central features of our day to day lives are considered unacceptable for you people.

11/21/2013 1:24:51 AM

I'm happy for you and your shit hole.

Also, why not change the bean/garden thing to a crop that will return from year to year or that you can have some of the product with held to start a new crop next year...and something that does will in poor soil conditions like sweet potatoes, turnips, onions, beets, okra and especially peas.

11/21/2013 1:54:22 AM

They already have several suitable crops in the form of okra and local leafy greens that don't have a name in English. The rest aren't an option because there are no seeds. Turnips and beets, for example, are unknown and unavailable. Peas are a delicacy that come in can Onions won't grow in this particular soil type. Sweet potatoes are theoretically possible but the diets of these kids is already way too heavy on those and other starches.

The problem is not so much keeping the crop going from year to year, it's being able to grow enough of anything to make an impact, nutritionally. Even if there's enough land at the school, the only way to have enough labor would be to employ the students a lot of the time.

Oh well.

11/21/2013 4:40:22 AM

^^^ oh I misunderstood. I thought you were referencing the prohibitions and limitations on the Marines to illustrate how dangerous Mali and Nigeria are.

Yeah, any way you slice it, it's funny/telling/sad that the things you do every day in the Peace Corps are prohibited by the Marine Corps because they're perceived to be dangerous.

11/21/2013 6:23:07 AM

so, what are your plans for when you get back?

11/21/2013 7:22:33 AM

Right now the plan is actually to extend for a third year, but we'll see how that goes. I may change my mind; there's time yet.

If I have to move back home, then I guess the plan is to work shit jobs while searching for a good one and working on a side project that I have some tiny sliver of hope for.

11/21/2013 7:43:37 AM

Hay grumpy. If they cant grow efficiently, why dont they just leave and be "guestworker
s? Oh right, they called it slavery and banned it. Thanks obama

12/14/2013 2:21:10 PM

Now we're starting this big anti-malaria program that is going to be uphill fighting for several reasons.

For one thing, the average Beninese is convinced that malaria is caused by exposure to the sun and/or peanut oil.

Second, a bunch of higher ups who have apparently never set foot in west africa want us to have all the kids at local high schools fill out a survey that requires very precise formatting of responses. Precision is not really a thing about the 2,000 students at my high school, and even the simplest questions cause problems.

"How many siblings do you have?" you ask. Kids then want to know what you mean by that. Should they count the children of their father's other wives? Should they count the children of relatives who are sort of unofficially adopted by their parents for various reasons? should they count siblings who have died?

And so on. Based on the information from these surveys we are then supposed to help the government distribute mosquito nets (which will then invariably be sold to Nigerians or used to make fences for garden plots) and conduct trainings on the nature of malaria (which will then be ignored because we don't say anything about the sun).

Now, a list of funny names from Benin:
Uterus (child's name)
Oso Yamamoto (man's name)
Okono [Placenta] - name of a movie
L'escargot dort mais on croix qu'il est mort (The snail is sleeping but one thinks he is dead) -- the name of a bar
Invest Drink -- The name of another bar

12/16/2013 8:28:16 AM

they will value the mosquito nets a lot more if you sell them for a little bit instead of just giving them away.

read about microlending and related economics topics.

12/19/2013 6:19:55 AM

OK, been a while.

Jcgolden, I know you don't believe this, but I'm not a total buffoon. Your last post is not news to me. Alas, I am not in charge of the project. I was told to distribute the mosquito nets for free, so I sigh and distribute them for free.

In the project I am in charge of, we're doing something more along the lines of what you suggest. It's a big push against the garbage problem in my village. One element of that involves "selling" wastebins to people who participate in the trash collection service. The fee doesn't even approach the actual cost of the cans, but it should help them feel like they have some skin in the game.

I await your next uninformed criticism/thinly veiled insult with bated breath.

Meantime, we're just getting into the hottest part of the year and you motherfuckers have snow.

Also, the latrines are almost finished. Just waiting to throw the doors on and paint my name on them, and they're open for business. There are hundreds of people in Oko-Akare who will think of me every time they take a shit. My mom's really proud.

1/30/2014 11:46:38 AM

The other day I had the runs, which wasn't pleasant but wasn't totally debilitating. I eventually ventured away from the latrine to go buy medicine.

On the way, I was accosted by this guy, a teacher at the high school, who wants me to help set up a school garden there. I tried this a year ago and found no teacher interest whatsoever, but OK, fine, let's do it. But let's do it next week, man. I gots to pee out of my butthole.

No no, he says, we need to sit down and discuss this. And to entice me he brings out a bottle of moonshine.

On the plus side, alcohol really did kill germs this time -- the next day I was fine. On the down side, he went from presenting a cogent argument for the importance of horticulture education to claiming that there was a certain plant that, if you kept it in your pocket during a court trial, would guarantee a verdict in your favor. I don't know what happens if both parties carry the plant. I guess the universe ceases to exist, like in Dogma or whatever.

---

The temperature in my village has not dipped below 80 F at any time in the past week. I gather you guys are buried in snow. You can go fuck yourselves, and my guess is that you'll invite me to go fuck myself, too.

---

In my cluster of residences, there is this cute little girl who is always very excited to see me when I come home. I would have guessed she was about five. She's super sweet, and that would be great, except yesterday I saw her penis. Seeing naked children here is not rare, but for 17 months I have been unshakably certain in her being a her. Between my apparent inability to determine gender and the universal inability to tell how old a Beninese person is, it's a good thing I have a "no dating locals" policy. And, you know, a girlfriend.

2/13/2014 6:25:18 PM

hahaha

2/13/2014 6:26:44 PM

lol for sure

had to relay that one to my gf

keep the stories up GOP!

2/13/2014 6:29:43 PM

what's the name of this magic plant?

2/13/2014 6:30:07 PM

Marijuana.

2/13/2014 6:39:15 PM

Quote :

"You can go fuck yourself"

2/13/2014 6:45:59 PM

I don't know. Between the slurring and the local language name, I didn't catch it.

The latrines are done. We had enough money left over to build a "bonus" one, as well. I was one of the last people allowed to do this sort of project -- PC wants to move away from them because they haven't figured out how to monitor their success. In my effort to defend the thing, I came across some scholarly articles talking about why latrines get adopted in Benin, specifically.

None of the reasons are ones you would think of or expect.

A lot of it was supernatural mumbo-jumbo. People worried that sorcerers will find their poop in the bush and use it to make "gris gris," which basically means a charm designed to do evil to you. Also, if you see a snake while defecating, it means a family member will die imminently. Latrines make it way less likely that you'll see a snake and pretty much totally remove the threat of magical shit thieves.

Then there's the prestige aspect -- latrines are associated with big city living and the Fon royalty. The last one is also for weird supernatural reasons. The royalty (and boy, is there a shit ton of that) has to live in special compounds because they aren't allowed to be seen by the people for a large portion of the year. That pretty much necessitates having a latrine on hand.

Then there's concern that, walking out into the bush, you'll get stung by scorpions, or just dirty from walking through leaves.

None of the people interviewed in the article said, "Just taking a dump out in the open is bad for your health." Nobody mentioned anything the acknowledged germ theory.

Health volunteers do "shit shaming" excercises, where they take groups of villagers out and demand that each individual show them where they last defecated. Then they berate said villagers. It's barbaric and offensive and by far the most successful strategy they employ.

2/13/2014 6:49:05 PM

Quote :

"Magical Shit Thieves"

2/13/2014 7:38:29 PM

you're terrible people

2/13/2014 7:42:51 PM

do they smack the villagers on the nose with a rolled up newspaper?

2/13/2014 7:45:19 PM

Hahahahaha, there are no newspapers here. Maybe in the capital.

2/14/2014 12:35:21 PM

NO! BAD VILLAGER! BAD!

2/14/2014 1:24:29 PM

still planning to stay another year?

2/14/2014 3:16:48 PM

Think he wants to right? Waiting for it to get approved maybe?

2/14/2014 3:29:01 PM

So, yeah, just got a little more information on that.

Peace Corps policy on third year extensions is...fluid. It depends a lot on the admin in your country, I think. Last year, 15 people out of about 60 extended, which is a freakishly high amount. Not just that so many people wanted to stay, but that admin let them.

You can stay on in one of three ways:
1) You can stay in your post if you can show there's some reason why you need to see something through, rather than a new volunteer replacing you. This is a possibility because I've got a major garbage-collection thing coming up. I love my village and my organization, but it isn't my preferred choice.

2) You can take one of the PC-created third year jobs that are full time. We have three, two of which I am wholly unqualified for and one of which will be taken by my girlfriend, who is vastly better suited for it than I am. So neither of those work. A few of the other jobs are options, but aren't full time -- you need to have something else going on to justify your stay. One of these (water and sanitation leader) is a job I would like, but it presents some difficulty. It requires some beefy internet access, which I don't have at post. So I would need to...

3) Create your own position with a host organization. These are critical because they pay your rent, for one thing (you can't just hang around and work alone. we don't get paid enough for rent). I could conceivably create a position in Porto Novo or Cotonou, which would give me the internet access I need for the sanitation job.

The water and sanitation position has the benefits of travelling all over Benin, helping to run projects and trainings. It's also something I've worked with in the latrines and other small projects.

But now a lot of my hopes are pinned on another option, which is taking over for a departing volunteer working with the CDC and USAID in a real office job on a big malaria research project. It's suited to my skills, looks great on a resume, involves plenty of travel, and would put me in the city. But there are some hurdles.

OK, sorry for the long post but that explains some of the third year options. Yes, I want to stay. The issue now is picking the right job. I can't just apply to several; admin doesn't like it. So I need to pick one that I'm likely to get.

2/14/2014 6:29:54 PM