Happy New Year from Cotonou Benin!

I owe you all an explanation.

When I was in high school, I used to joke that my plan after graduation was to disappear for a few years. My friends would all wonder where I had gone until one day, they'd see me in the background of a photo of some dusty African border town that had been published on the front page of the New York Times. (This was back when people still got actual newspapers delivered to their homes).

"Is that…Jake?" they'd ask. They'd look closer and sure enough--a lanky dude with a spot on his head and a doofy grin on his face. "Huh, I always wondered what happened to him," they'd muse, before turning back to their morning coffee.

Well friends, this isn’t a New York Times cover photo (have you ever tried photobombing one of those?), but is probably as close as I’m going to get to that dream (and frankly a lot closer than I ever thought I’d get). Here I am, coming to you live from Cotonou, Benin.

We moved here two weeks ago, right before Christmas and just as a raging global pandemic was hitting its third, and highest, wave in the US.

(I know what you’re thinking—are they morons? And the answer is, quite possibly yes. But Santa found us all the same. The guy really is magic.)

My wife, Devon, had landed a job as Deputy Chief of Party for a USDA-funded project supporting cashew farmers and processors in Benin. And despite the fact that we had both been working remotely since mid-March, supporting cashew farmers and producers is not really the kind of thing that you can do via Zoom.

So, not 24 hours after helping my parents dig out from the nor’easter that had dumped over a foot of snow on their small Connecticut town, the four of us (me, Devon and the two kiddos, 5 and 2) stumbled off of Air France Flight 804 and onto the tarmac at the Cotonou Airport. It was 9:10pm local time, and I was already regretting the flannel and jeans I had been wearing when we left.

We boarded a shuttle which dropped us in front of a large white tent. Inside, the four of us had our brains swabbed (at least it felt that way) and our fingers pricked for our COVID tests. Another shuttle took us to the terminal—a large stuffy room with linoleum tiles and painted cinderblock walls—where we waited and got our passports stamped (immigration kept them pending the results of our COVID-tests). We collected our luggage, loaded it up onto a couple of carts (we had a lot of stuff! Our shipment doesn’t arrive until mid-February) and stepped out into the night.

 We had arrived.

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A Note: I'll be primarily sending these out as emails (but also posting here in case anyone wants to drop by). My goal here is to send them out once every week or so—to pick up the thread of writing that I dropped when Devon and I moved back from Korea and share a little bit about life with a family in Benin. Hopefully these notes won’t be too long and hopefully they’ll be at least mildly entertaining. If this isn’t your cup of tea, if you have no idea who I am, or if you just don’t care (which, fair enough and no hard feelings), feel free to unsubscribe. If you think you know someone who might be interested in this, they can sign up to receive updates here.

Thanks for reading! And Happy New Year!

All the best,
Jake