Il pleut

Well, I’m now at my host family’s house in Benin. Everything is going really great. Actually, I’m writing this now because I can’t sleep. The rain woke me up. This is no ordinary rain. It’s like monster rain. And on a tin roof, man the stuff is really loud. It’s actually been raining about every 6 hours here. So this one falls right on my sleeping schedule. But even during the day, it’s so funny, when it starts to rain here, everyone, and I mean everyone, runs for cover. They are afraid of getting wet in general. You would think that since the rain is such a big part of their lives for like 5 months of the year that they would be ok with it. But literally, when it rains everything stops and nobody does anything. Today was the first day of training and my mama walked me back to class after lunch. It was raining. Which is really no surprise. And she wanted me to put my bike helmet on to protect me from the rain. I mean it wasn’t like coming down like cats and dogs, which that phrase doesn’t translate. I said that to my mama and she looked at me like I had lost my mind. Eventually she just said that I needed to say, “il pleut” which just means, “it’s raining.” So anyway, she told me to put on the bike helmet to protect me from the rain. I showed her the helmet and the holes in the top and she just laughed and laughed. Rosita, my host sister, was there too and she said something I didn’t understand to mama, but I imagine it went something like this, “Those stupid Americans can’t even make a hat right.” Anyway, everything has been really good and the rain has temporality stopped so I’m going to try to get some sleep. But we’ll see.

(This was typed on Sept. 27 and I put this up when I got to an Internet connection on Aug. 25)