After my wild trip in from Burkina, a day resting up in Djougou after my late night arrival greeting acquaintances there and catching up with old friends I was off 6am the Thursday for a day’s work at Parakou.
I arrived by taxi before the office opened and was able to spend some time over breakfast talking to Alain from SIM France as I had hoped, a former Benin missionary who regularly leads short-term teams back, last year’s being over 80 strong.
During the day the office staff resurrected my keys and papers, I got a mechanic to start looking at my car for an estimate of costing repairs, and started sorting through some of my stuff piled high in the storeroom. I picked out mainly the fragile stuff and my ‘first months’ survival kit’ I had set up before leaving: my village cooking stuff and water filter; folding table, bed, and lounge chair; my tools, and also flat metal bookshelf frames if they could fit. Someone was coming for a few days from Benin from Burkina while I was going to be in Cotonou and could take stuff back for me, the reason for this one-day detour before coming back for two weeks to do the big sort-out. It was exhausting, but I had at least a car load of stuff sorted out before I left again at 6.30am the next day for the coach to Cotonou.
Having your own (even narrow) seat was relative comfort, and despite a lack of toilet stops (at least ones that would be useful to ladies) we arrived 7.5 hours later in the traffic chaos of my old stomping grounds, Cotonou.
