By the time I’m done with this project, I’ll be eating PHP and MySQL for breakfast.

The first of two dry seasons has begun in Cotonou. The ground is no longer cooled by daily rains and that during the day, the sun beats down through humidity that isn’t quite thick enough to cause rain fall. Like during the long dry season, everyone suddenly remembers why there’s a two and a half hour break in the middle of each day. The punishing heat from the sun impedes work and enjoyment alike. But before the sun comes up, and after the sun goes down, the air is fresh and cool. You can breathe in, and just for a moment, let yourself fall into sentimentality and clichés.

It’s dawn, the beginning of a new day. You wake up, stretch, and push aside your mosquito net. You wrap yourself in your pagneand push your hair out of your face. Sleep still in your eyes, you stretch, enjoying the cool breeze over your bare shoulders. You pad to the door, wincing at the loud clink ca-chunk as you open the deadbolt. You sweep your hand along your table, looking for cigarettes and matches, then step outside onto the balcony.

You’re an early riser, but not the first awake in your building. The sun is rising over rooftops and you can hear the sound of sweeping as hundreds of wives and girls across the city wake-up and begin their daily chores. You wave to the girls already drawing water from the well for the day’s laundry. They wave back, as used to your morning routine as you are. As you light your cigarette, you pause and thank the Lord that you were born American. The nicotein is coursing through your system, and you smile wide.

It’s a new day. You’re living your dream, and whatever may come during the day, you’ll have the peace of each morning to get you through it.

Everyone at work is telling me I look nice today. The only difference between today and any other day is that I’m wearing dangly earrings, my hair is clipped up instead of being thrown back in a ponytail, and I put on mascara and lipgloss.

Essentially, I took 5 minutes out of my morning to put on the gloss. Apparantly, those 5 minutes make all the difference. I’m not sure what thay says about my personal grooming habits.

Nobody’s job actually depends on showing on time, so as you can imagine, nobody ever does. My favorite part of the day is between 7h30 and 9h30. The first 45 minutes of that is terribly productive. I draft emails (for later feview by a native French speaker), finalize work I did the previous day, prep for meetings, occasionally work on secondary projects, etc.

Starting around 8h15, the rest of the office starts trickling in. Everyone stops by my door to say hi (just as I’d stop by theirs had they arrived before me). We ask how things are, if we slept well, and generally just make sure that the initial contact of the day has nothing to do with business.

Usually, everyone’s at the office by 9, but not always. Because so much of my work is online (site maintenance, research, etc), if the man responsible for opening up the cyber and turning on the modem (I’m trying to get a key, but really, who knows if that’s ever going to happen) doesn’t show up until later, occasionally I even have time to write for SVO.

The kind of work I’m doing this week involves an awful lot of FTP-ing thousands of files back and forth between my computer and the server (backing up; upgrading the CMS, but this time a French version, yay;). It’s a hassle, but hopefully waiting on the transfers will allow me some time to get caught up here.

Stage is going well. The stagiaires are so fucking enthusiastic, sometimes, I just don’t know what to do with them.

Marjie and I were talking the other night, and she pointed out how incredible it is that we’ve come so far. Sometimes post is incredibly frustrating, even for those who are in love with their communities (like Marjie), and it’s reassuring to see how many things we’re comfortable with, compared to where we were when we arrived.

We can catch zems. Hell, we can ride zems. We can bargain in the markets. We’re comfortable catching bush taxis. We know when street food is going to make us sick. We drink (or don’t drink) the water. We’re confident asking for directions to find the local hooch. We can tell the difference between a well tied and a sloppily tied pagne, and the quality of the fabric (and probably how much it cost). We can joke around with barmaids and know how to diffuse uncomfortable situations with men.

Most obviously, though, we’re not afraid to express our wants and desires. We may not always be bien integeré, but each and every one of us has spent the last year navigating Beninese culture and figuring out how to live here.

It’s also a great reality check. I’ve only got a year left, and I’ve got SO FAR left to go. I’ve been here a year, and I’ve accomplished a lot, but not nearly as much as I wanted. So I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get it all done in the 13 months I’ll have at post when I get back from working stage.

I think it’ll be fun.

P.S. Yes, I am still alive. Clearly.

It’s really fucking marvelous to be home.

Seriously.

That said, some things are already driving me nuts. Like men who crow about how supportive they are of women’s equality, then do nothing but interrupt every woman at the table to correct them, or worse, change the subject into a story about how cutely wrong the woman was at another point in her life.

There’s more to equality than just talk. It’s respecting woman as equals and giving their opinions equal weight. It’s not treating a woman with kid gloves when she’s wrong, but explaining to her the correct answer and expecting her to not make the same mistake again. It’s hiring for competence and skills, not looks. It’s not designating certain jobs and tasks as “women’s work,” and standing up against those who do. It’s allowing women to stay home with their children if they want to, but not making marriage at an early age a cultural expectation.

It’s not making comments when women wear pants that don’t limit them to driving scooters because their skirts don’t allow them to straddle a larger moto. It’s not expecting a woman to let you flirt with her, even if she finds your advances disgusting. It’s respecting waitresses, secretaries, and those in service other professions that keep them in the public eye. It’s recognizing the value of educating girls, not just so that they can educate their children, but also so that, if they choose, they can have a career.

But most importantly, it’s respect. Don’t respect me because I’m a woman. Respect me because I’m smart as hell, I work hard, I have interesting things to say, and I’m doing a lot with my life.