Parties, Salt, and History

One of the things I love about my life in Benin is that I'm never sure about what's going to happen next, but my schedule is never tight, so it doesn't really matter.
For example, I've been wanting to volunteer at an orphanage here, and I talked to Jules, the exchange manager about it. He said he would talk to the man who ran the orphanage and then he would let me know. Friday evening Jules took me to the orphanage, for what I thought was just going to be introductions. After greeting everyone, Jules left, and I ended up helping 45 orphans wash their clothes by hand.
3 hours and a dinner of rice covered with thick, salty, spicy sauce later I went home, where I was informed that a group of us would be going to the end of the year party at the local high school. My first thought was, 'Aren't we a little too old for this?' But since it's common for students to repeat grades or take time off from school if their families are having financial problems, a lot of students are in their early 20s when they graduate. The party consisted mainly of a talent show, where a lot of the students sang or danced, but my favorite act was the skit performed by the English Club in which one of the actors cried out, “I am winning you!”
The next day I had another opportunity to be flexible when, without warning, I got dropped off at the house of two girls I had met the night before in order to help them practice their English. We had a great time talking in a mix of French and English while eating raw peanuts, drinking coke, and watching 24 (in English):

The next day I ended up at a celebration of Sita's (the Ivoirian woman who makes me delicious attieke and alloco) daughter's baptism, where we sat around and ate while the DJ played really loud dance music.
The DJ can always be identified as the cool guy wearing sunglasses:

Sita dancing:

That was followed by a tour of the Rue des Esclaves, a 4 kilometer route with monuments explaining the process the slaves went through during the weeks prior to leaving Africa.

Along the way we also stopped at a village where salt is produced. The women who make the salt collect the watery soil in these large baskets, drain the water, then boil it for three hours, and voila: salt! The process is a little more complicated than that, but I'm sure you get the idea.

The tour ended at the beach, where we all sat around and watched the sunset. All in all, a perfect weekend.