1. You drive down the road, dodging enormous potholes, and see a chameleon crossing; then you have to turn around and pick him up, amazed that he actually made it across.
2. It takes you 2 days to drive to your vacation spot, approximately 470 miles/750km away. (Mainly because the roads are so bad that it's physically exhausting to travel more than 6 hrs at a time.)
3. Each village along the "highway" has put up their own obstructions to slow traffic down as it passes thru (ie huge tree trunks or large branches across ancient barrels).
4. At every town you pass thru some kid shouts, "Yovo-yovo," (a local term for white people) or its equivalent, as if they had never seen one in their lives.
5. Countless trucks, which are terribly overloaded, have broken down in the road and, if you're lucky, are marked by branches in the road some hundred feet or so before as a warning. And, all occupants have set up camp under the truck knowing it'll likely be a while before they set off again.
6. Your kids think "swimming" in the run-off ditch of a small dam, in the "middle-of-nowhere-Benin", is the best thing they've done. (Has a lot to do with the fact that they were surrounded by a bunch of other kids, which is rare for them here.)
7. Finding that there is almost as much water rushing OVER the only bridge connecting the north of the country to the south as there is rushing UNDER it. But finding that same bridge still intact on the way home a week later. Whew!
8. Noticing that there is no real connection to the large red line on your map indicating a highway and the road you're traveling.
9. Stopping to eat your picnic lunch in a place you were sure was "secluded", only to find a dozen kids watching your every move, within 3 minutes of getting out of the car.
10. Being too cheap to go to a hotel (or perhaps there isn't one) so you stay in other peoples' houses--even tho they aren't there (right?) =)
And finally...
11. You see some amazingly beautiful scenery and wonder that God has allowed you to live in such a place.
Just a few thoughts from our great holiday visiting friends in Benin.
We all thought of something nice to say about her:
Sydney: "I liked Pip."
Fiona: "She could have been my grandmother. She was so old."
Elena: "She had such sad eyes."
But April is not herself today (which is actually nice for a change). She is so sad that her mother has gone.
We buried our dog yesterday. I didn't know what to expect, since I've never interred a bigger animal in a city. We put her into a sack and carried her through a garden, over a wall and into another garden. The owner had agreed to have a grave dug among his maniok plants (for a price, of course).
7. Finding that there is almost as much water rushing OVER the only bridge connecting the north of the country to the south as there is rushing UNDER it. But finding that same bridge still intact on the way home a week later. Whew!
