Baby it's cold outside

The last week has just flown by. Today's Wednesday and I leave Saturday afternoon... all my time between now and then is packed with seeing people and buying last minute things...

Last week I got to do a few things. I visited a Kindergarten class in North Bay, just to get a feeling for being in a school... the teacher's globe said Dahomey instead of Benin, even though the name changed in 1975. The globe's older than I am. The kids were very sweet and very cute and very chatty - I'm eager to see how different the classroom situation is in Benin. I took the teacher's email address so that I can send the class pictures while I'm away. "Send pics of the animals," she said, "that's pretty much all they'll care to see."

I also had a few days of training with the organization I'll be working with. I feel a lot better about the trip - the org has great insurance and offers quite a few services. They're also just plain nice and I know they'll support me in my work, no matter what I need.

I was especially happy to have a nice long chat with Dr. Mark Wise (visit his website... tons of great information and he's really funny). I liked the way he asked me a lot of questions to challenge what I thought I knew about where I was going. "What do you know about malaria? What are the symptoms? What would you do if you were feeling really sick? What would you do if you were to get sexually assaulted? What would you do if you were feeling depressed?"

It was great because it's one thing to be afraid of disease or worry about being assaulted, it's another to have a plan to deal with it.

I got to talk to people in the organization who'd lived in that part of the world before about cultural differences, food, nightlife... but the one thing they did say is that they didn't want to tell me what kind of experience I should have - I'll figure it out on my own.

I had a little goodbye party and a friend was saying how "zen" I seemed. I think my brain is just shutting itself down so as not to get too excited or too nervous.

3 more sleeps til my plane takes off.

It's cold in Canada. Did you notice the BBC weather watcher for Cotonou, Benin in the right hand column of this blog? Toasty!