Where does the time go?

Life has been busy. We just finished our third week of model school and our schedule is really demanding- 3 hours of model school every morning plus our own language classes and lesson planning in the afternoon and evenings. The first two weeks I taught the equivalents of 7th and 8th grade and this week I was with the 9th graders in their 3rd year of English. In every class there's a wide variety of ages, sizes, and skill levels though. For example, in my class now there is one boy almost as tall as me and one who can only reach half way up the board. I feel so bad when I call on someone to answer #1 and then they can't reach it! Overall, model school has been fun and really helpful, and we share a lot of creative ideas. We teach the kids lots of fun games like hangman and simon says and so many random songs with the day's grammar lesson in them. From Mr. Postman to Rihanna's Umbrella to the Itsy Bitsy Spider, songs are always a great way to end the class when the kids have been good enough to deserve it. I can't wait to get to post and really start getting to know my own students!

In other news...we killed a chicken! Two weeks ago during our cooking class we killed, boiled, plucked, cleaned, and cooked a chicken to eat with peanut sauce- delicious!! I wasn't the one to kill it, our fellow trainee Claire did the honors, but I did help pluck and clean it. This past Saturday's cooking class was an Iron Chef competition between all the English teaching trainees. The secret ingredient was coconut and our protein was turkey. In two hours my team made coconut milk basted pulled turkey, garlic cheese mashed potatoes, and sauteed veggies. Our dessert was a coconut pineapple cake covered in banana chocolate frosting (made by yours truly). While that might sound mildly normal to you, after 8 weeks of Beninese food it was amazing! It was also actually really reassuring that I'll be able to come up with some great recipes out of nowhere.

This past Sunday I visited a stilted village just ouside of Porto Novo. It was so much bigger than I thought it would be, complete with a hospital, a mosque, and a couple of different churches. There must have been hundreds of houses as well. Most were constructed with straw and wood, but some (like the hospital and mosque) were made of concrete on concrete stilts with really nice wooden doors and shutters. Pretty crazy to see...

It's amazing how people keep all sorts of animals in their stilted huts. They've got goats suspended in little 4 x 4 pens carpeted with straw and even dogs and cats laying around in their huts. I honestly don't see the point in the dogs and cats since it's just another mouth to feed and they wouldn't kill them to eat. We were kind of confused about what they do eat, but obviously a lot of fish and boats from shore probably bring in a lot of flour. I took a ton of pictures but I forgot my camera cord at home today...I know you want pictures but they take soooo long to upload!