Hello and welcome back. Today we will talk about a phrase in French that I often heard from my students in Benin. That phrase is, you’re sick, or tu es malade. One example of this phrase is when I was at the football pitch. One student had a bad day because they played badly. They played poorly. So their friend said, tu ne sais pas jouer au football. And they responded, tu es malade. A second example is when I taught a class and I heard a student talking. I asked, who is talking? One student pointed to a boy and he said, monsieur il ne vous écoutait pas. And the other student said, non tu es malade. In French, tu es malade, is an insult. It is offensive to say to another person. In English the direct translation is, you are sick. Tu es malade. Or, you’re sick, if we contract you and are. You’re. But we don’t say, you’re sick, as an insult. We will say you’re sick if you have a maladie. You are coughing. We can say, you are sick. This is a literal use of the phrase. We might also say someone is sick if they do something that is wrong. So an example is we are watching television and the news is talking about a man who took his grandmother’s money so he could buy cigarettes. He stole his grandma’s money. He stole a hundred dollars from his family to buy cigarettes. That’s sick. He is a sick man. He is mentally ill. He has a maladie in his head. This is usually an exaggeration. We don’t really think the man is sick but we say he’s sick because he did a bad thing. The third way we use sick is positive. It means cool. We can say, wow that’s sick. He is a sick guitarist. And this use is very informal. It is street language. It comes from the sport skateboarding in the United States in the west. I am from the west coast of the United States, the Pacific coast of the United States. In my childhood I heard many people say that’s sick. That’s cool. It is not used frequently now. It is a phrase from my childhood in the 90s but sometimes you will still hear the word sick and it will be positive. If you want to insult in English, do not call them sick, because that is not a good insult in English. Instead you can call them a few names. You can call them a jerk. You’re a jerk. A jerk is a person who is rude and impolite. They say rude things. A jerk. You can call them stupid because they are not intelligent. You’re stupid! Or you can just tell them to shut up. Shut up! That is to close your mouth. A door can open when we enter a house and the door can close after we enter. To close to your mouth means to be quiet, so in French I heard my students in Benin say, tais-toi, and shut up is the same as tais-toi. None of these insults are explicit. They are not improper to say. There are other words that are much more rude that you should never use in a polite context. So I hope you understand better how to respond to an insult in English. You’re stupid. You’re a jerk. Shut up! These are all good ways to respond in English like you would when you say tu es malade. Thank you and I will see you in the next episode.

Hello again. It is still snowing and it is still Saturday. So I wanted to make you a second podcast. In the last podcast I told you about my daily routine, what I do everyday when I have work. And in this podcast I want to tell you about my likes and dislikes from my daily routine. Are you ready? Ok let’s listen. So first is the time I wake up. I like waking up at 5 or 6 on weekends, because I can clean my house. I can get some work finished before the sun even comes up. But during the work week, I do not like waking up at 6 o'clock. I need more sleep. I get tired. And so I would like to wake up at 6:30 or 7 but I must wake up at 6. Next, I like being an athlete. I like feeling in shape. I do many activities to stay in shape. I run. I play football. I do weight exercises for my muscles. I like running. I like how I feel when I feel when I finish running. I love football. It is my favorite sport. I can play football with other people but I can also train on my own, individually. I do not like going to the gym. I really dislike it.  It doesn’t make me feel in shape. I cannot explain exactly why, but I really dislike a gym, and I don’t think it makes my body stronger. I prefer to run and to use my own body to get stronger. Next, I love to work. Many people will say they don’t like to work. They like to play. But I love my work… IF my work has meaning. Meaning is significance. My work has meaning if I have a reason to do my work. If my work is important it has meaning. When my work is not important, or I don’t THINK it is important, I can be lazy. I dislike work that feels meaningless, unimportant. And finally I like being on time. I like to be punctual. But, attention, pay attention, because I am always on time to my work and to my football, because my work and my football are very important to my life. But if you invite me to come talk to you, to socialize. If you invite me to hang out. Hangout is when we see each other at a house and we play or we talk or we watch a movie -we hang out together. If you invite me to hang out with you I will be late because it is not as important to me. I’m sorry, but I am always late to hang out with my friends! My apologies! So I have told you just a few of my likes and dislikes. I have many more, but I will save them for later. We can talk about them in the future. Thank you for listening to my likes and dislikes. If you have a question for me about something that I like, or my favorite something, you can message me by facebook or whatsapp. Thank you and have a good day. 

Transcription venant

Hello. Welcome to the podcast and today I will talk about foods that I ate in Benin. Everyone has foods that they like and those that they dislike, so today I will use many different ways to express your preferences. I have chosen 5 different foods for today. Those 5 foods are pounded yam, red palm oil, soy, cow skin, and rice and beans. Before I start I want to say that in general the food in Benin was delicious. It was rare that I ate something that I didn’t like, and I never refused a dish because I didn’t like it. Let’s get started with a dish that everyone in Benin likes, pounded yam, or as I called it in village, agu. I usually ate pounded yam with peanut sauce but sometimes we would mix the peanut sauce with egusi sauce. I don’t know the name for egusi in English but I found it on the internet recently and it comes from a gourd. I did not know that it came from a gourd before coming back to the United States so that was a big surprise. But my favorite way to eat pounded yam is with peanut sauce and egusi sauce mixed. I usually would eat pounded yam with fish because I usually chose fish before chicken or another kind of a meat. Next is red palm oil. This is an oil which is a liquid fat, or in french l’huile. It comes from the palm tree and is very red in color. This oil was used to make many sauces and I didn’t mind the taste. That means that the taste was not bad, however I didn’t like how I felt after eating red palm oil. When I finished my meal I always wanted to burp. A burp is when air comes out of your mouth and it makes a sound. I will burp for you. Burp. Red palm oil made me burp and it gave me a stomach ache. If I played soccer or football on the same day that I ate red palm oil,oof it was painful to run, so for this reason I dislike red palm oil. I didn’t like how I felt after eating it. The next food is the one I disliked the most. Cow is the animal that gives us milk and the skin is the part of the animal that isn’t meat and is on the outside of the body. I didn’t like cow skin, first off, because of the smell. It smelled like bad animal. Second, the texture was slimy. A texture is the way the food feels in your mouth. Pounded yam has a wonderful texture like bread. Some foods have a hard texture, but cow skin tasted slimy to me. Okra or gumbo is slimy when you put it in water and the cow skin -it was disgusting. The taste was not good and the texture was slimy. Fortunately I didn’t have to eat much cow skin. One of my best surprises in Benin was soy. Soy comes from a soy bean and it is pounded into a brick, or as one of my village friends said, brick of fifteen. Brique de quinze. Because it used to cost 15 franc for a square, a brick. Now it costs 25 franc. I really enjoyed eating soy, even though Beninese people were surprised that I liked it. I think that it is associated with poor people in Benin, but in the United sStates it is seen as a healthy food and people think of it as a food for richer people. The reason why it was a surprise is because I cannot eat soy from America. I sometimes vomit or I get a stomachache or indigestion when I my stomach cannot digest the soy. So I was so happy to be able to eat soy in Benin. Ok this is the last food that I want to talk about and this was my favorite. That food is atasi, washe, wake, rice and beans. When I was in the United States very often I had rice and beans, but the special thing about Beninese rice and beans is the sauce that the people put on it. The sauce is delicious and I must say I preferred atasi or the rice and beans of the south. I really like to eat it with a good piece of fried cheese, what I called in village amo or wagashi in the south. I also would order atasi or rice and beans with an egg, a hard boiled egg. This is a food that I cooked very often for myself. Whenever I went to a restaurant, I would order rice and beans. Overall living in Benin was very easy and I think a big part of that was commonality of rice and beans.

La transcription viendra

This is the 3rd part of the New Year’s episode and in part 3 I will tell you about my personal resolutions for 2021. First I want to give context of what happened in 2020 because my resolution comes from some of my difficulties from this last year. In March of 2020 I lost my job in Africa. I was living in Benin when the coronavirus became a pandemic so my organization cancelled my contract due to safety and security. When I returned to the US I believe I caught coronavirus so I was sick for about a week and a half and 1 of the symptoms of coronavirus is a loss or a reduction of focus and memory. Since March I have had difficulties in focusing on my work. I haven’t finished a book since March when I came home on the plane. I was reading 2 or 3 books a month while in Benin. I have plateaued in my French studies. That means I have reached a plateau, or I feel like I am no longer learning in French. I am now working at a school in the US but because of these difficulties I think my resolution should be about self improvement and learning, because I have always liked to participate in daily learning. Learning something new everyday, and since I lost my job in Africa I have not been able to do this. My resolution for 2021 has two parts. My first resolution is to start learning Spanish. I believe I have learned French for a long enough time that I can begin a new language without too much difficulty, and I will use three tools. An application called Mosalingua, this is the first time I will try Mosalingua and the first time I will pay for a language application because I learnedFrench for free. I will use Mosalingua to study vocabulary everyday for 10 to 15 minutes and when I am comfortable, I will start listening to podcasts or audio in Spanish. The second part of my resolution is more professional because I loved my time in Benin but my contract is finished and I cannot return to my village and work the same job. So if I want to return to a similar work, I must better educate myself so that I can apply to another organization and be hired. The problem I have right now is I don’t know exactly what I should be studying, so my resolution is to find people I know, resources that I can talk to, to ask what skills would be most useful for something looking to work the work that I like to do. I am not sure if I should study education, international development, or management, or data collection and analyses. I don’t know if I should be studying more French or literacy or language acquisition strategies. I have many ideas but I would like to talk to an expert to ask their opinion of what I should be studying. When I identify a new area of study I would like to read at least 1 book per month to begin educating myself in that area. So that is my resolution for 2021. I am going to be learning Spanish and I am going to working towards another job, maybe living in Africa, so I can continue doing the work that I love to do and feel like I am an expert at my job. I hope that you all are thinking about your New Year’s resolutions and your plan to create a new habit on a daily basis so that you can make your resolution a truth of year 2021. That’s it for year 2020. Let’s say goodbye to it and I will see you in the next podcast.

So this is part 2 of the New Year’s episode and in part 2 I will tell you about New Year’s resolutions and different strategies to make your resolution stick, or last for the long term. A resolution is a plan for the future. To resolve means to solve a problem or to fix a problem so your resolution is the way that you plan to fix your problems or to self improve, to get better as a person. In America we often talk about new Years resolutions with skepticism because we do not believe that most people will complete their resolutions. That is because New habits and new behaviors are difficult to create and to sustain for a long period of time. However there are certain ways to make your resolution last for a long period of time. First we will talk about doing your behaviors or habits on a daily basis. Many people like to cram. This is a verb for when you wait until the night before an exam to study and then the night before you study for many many hours and you don’t sleep enough. What we know about brain science and memory is that cramming, or doing all your work at once, is not good for memory. Sometimes you can pass an exam by cramming but usually you will forget almost 80% of what you studied in 3 days, so if you want to pass an exam you can cram, but if you want to be a good students, and continue to learn, and to remember everything from the school year, you should study everyday. But here is the trick! You do not need to study for hours everyday. 15 to 30 minutes is plenty, so long as you review each day. Why is that true? A German scientist called Ebbinghaus did a research in the 1800s and he found that we forget 90% of information in 3 days. We forget almost everything in 3 days. Unless, we make ourselves recall the information. Recall means to think of the information again, or to test yourself on the information again, or to use the information again. So if I learn a new vocabulary word Ebbinghaus says I will forget it in 3 days unless I recall the 3 days unless I recall the vocabulary word in the first 3 days. And each time that I recall the word I will remember it better for a longer period of time.  So in conclusion, we can see that studying for a short period of time each day is more effective  than studying 1 or 2 times per week for a long period of time. In fact we know that studying for just 15 minutes a day takes less time than studying for 4 hours on a Sunday, and you will remember much much more if you study for only 15 minutes a day!  This brings me to intensity or how hard you study during the time or the period that you are studying, because we also know that the value of your study, which means the effectiveness or efficiency of your study is a result of the intensity of study and the time of study. This is a good thing because this means that you do not have to study for hours and hours and hours. We can study for 15 minutes, if we study hard, if we are 100% focused on what we are doing. Put away your phone. Stop talking to your friend. Don’t be cooking. Don’t listen to music. Don’t be singing. You do one thing. You study intensely for 15 minutes, and you will remember more. This year when you make your New Year’s resolution, make a plan for studying or for working on your resolution for each day. You can take a day of rest but you should be working on your resolution at least 5x a week. We know that it takes 66 days of devotion, of effort to create a new behavior or habit. So do not think that you can try to learn something new by studying for 1 day per week. When you make your resolution, think o f a plan that you can do everyday for 15 minutes. Ideally at the same time of the day. And then, after 2 months, 66 days, you will find that you have succeeded that you are successful in creating a new habit. That’s all for this part of the New Year’s episode. Keep listening. Byebye.

Happy New Year! Yes, today is January 1st 2021, so we will talk about the holiday season and the new year. I wanted to make this episode before New Year’s day but here I am recording it on January 1, so my apologies. You will get it 1 day late. I have a lot of topics that I wanted to talk abou for the New Year celebration so I will break this episode into 3 parts. In English to break up means to separate so I will separate this episode into 3 parts. The first part is about the holiday season in Benin and the holiday season in American because they are a little different. The second part will be about New year’s resolutions or plans for the new year., and some ideas for making your resolutions work for the long term. And the third part of this holiday episode will be my personal resolutions. This first part is about the holiday season. Often in Benin your English teachers will teach you the word like vacation, like vacances in French but in America we often say the word holiday for a day when we celebrate. Christmas is a holiday in America. New Year’s is a holiday and Easter is another holiday. So today we will talk about the time of the year from November to December when we have lots of holidays in America. These are some of the biggest holidays that we celebrate. The 3 big holidays in the American holiday season are Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. In my opinion, the 3 big holidays in the Beninese holiday season are Christmas New Year and Easter. You already know Christmas and New Year. Christmas is on December 25th and New Year’s is on January 1st, however we celebrate these holidays a little different than in Benin. In Benin New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year. Everyone celebrates New Years. But Christmas is a holiday for Christians and my friends in Benin often told me that Christmas was for the children and not so much for adults. It is true that in America Christmas is also for children because we give lots of gifts and the children usually get more gifts than the adults, but Christmas is 100% the biggest holiday during the American year. We spend a lot of money, and time, and effort preparing for Christmas because we put up Christmas lights and a tree and we buy presents, we play music, we have many special foods and desserts that are specifically for Christmas. So Christmas is absolutely the biggest holiday of our holiday season and New Years is actually the smallest of the three holidays. It is the end of the holiday season. In Benin New Years is not the ending of the holiday season because Paque is still to come, and I know that Paque is not close to New Year’s but when I lived in Benin I felt like Paque and New Year’s were still connected. I have not told you much about the first American holiday of the American holiday season called Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving happens at the end of November and it is a holiday for celebrating the harvest and saying thank you .The harvest is the time of the year when you go to a farm or your fields and you pick the rest of your fruit and your vegetables. There are many harvest times during the year but in America, November is the last harvest before full winter, before the end of the year, and before spring time when new plants will start growing. So we celebrate by having a big dinner where we eat many fall harvest, November harvest fruits like yams and corn and pumpkins. Pumpkins are these big round orange vegetables that we often make into a dessert with sugar. But you can also eat pumpkins in salty ways. You can make them into a soup or you can mash them like yams. There are many ways to eat pumpkins. Those are the 3 holidays in the American holiday season. Thanksgiving in November is a big celebration for families, but the biggest is Christmas, followed by the smallest of the holiday season, New Year.s This contrasts with Benin because Benin does not have a huge Christmas celebration but it does have a very very big New Year’s celebration.

Let me explain the words in the sentence before I answer the question. Equal is a verb used in mathematics to show that 2 quantities are the same, so 2 equals 1+1 or 100=50+50. Happiness is a noun that comes from the adjective happy. Happy is content or in a good mood. An example is I am happy when I play football because I love to play football. Happiness is the noun form of happy. So the question, one more time, was, Does money equal happiness? This is an impossible question to answer because there is no one answer. So today I will break this question into 5 different ways to think about it. Are you ready? Let’s get started. The first question I have is, What is happiness? Can we define happiness in different ways? One person might say that happiness is feeling good. Another might say that it is laughing. Another might say that it is reaching a goal or achieving something that you wanted to do. There are many different definitions of happiness, so before you can answer this question, you need to think about what happiness really is, and I think that we can see that happiness is defined differently by each person. Let’s also consider the differences between short term happiness and long term happiness. Short term is something that happens for a short time, something now and in the moment. Long term is something that takes many years or that we will feel at the end of our lives. If we are looking for short term happiness then we will do whatever we want to do right now. Usually this can involve money because money can buy us as activity or an object that will make us happy right now. But if we think in the long term, this happiness usually comes from another place. I can go and run for 60 minutes and I will probably not feel happy because I will be tired and my feet will hurt. But tomorrow I will feel happy because I will know that I am more in shape than the day before. Different people will have different opinions on this question based on the conditions of their life. One condition that can change the way a person thinks is their wealth, or how much money they control. A rich person can usually buy everything they need and most things that they want so 1 more dollar will not make a big difference. A rich person will be more likely to find happiness outside of money because more money will not make them happier. But a poor person who cannot buy the food they want or the house they want or the car they want may find that more money does bring them happiness. Another condition that can change a way a person thinks is their age. A young person, let’s say 25 years old, has lots of life to live and lots of time to use money to buy things or experiences, so for a young person having money will help them live a happy life. If I have money I can buy a plane ticket to go to visit a new country and this can make me happy. But for an old person, or an elder, they will have less time to live and money will affect or change their life in (fewer) ways. They will probably value different forms of happiness like their family or their children or their experiences and their memories of these experiences. When an old person dies, their money will do nothing for them. You probably already know my opinion about this question. It’s true I don’t think that money equals happiness, because of my definition of happiness. For me, happiness happens in the brain. It is a response to something that happens around us. Money does not change my emotions. Money doesn’t change my reaction to things happening in my life. This is just my opinion and I know that many people would agree with me, and many people would disagree. I'm asking you today to think about how different conditions and different definitions will change the way that people respond to this question. I have a proposition for this question because it's an interesting question, but I think we can change it to make it more compelling. What if we substituted the word money with power

What are you listening to? Well this is me practicing French using another podcast, and this is one of my favorite ways to study because I can listen to new podcasts and get new ideas while practicing my French. Today I am going to explain to you how I do this exercise and the way that this exercise helps my French. Let’s get started. When I choose a podcast for this exercise I look for a podcast that comes from a natural French speaker and a podcast that uses a French that is a little faster than the French that I speak. When I push play sometimes I listen to the episode one time before speaking. The second time I repeat everything that I can hear and understand. When I first started doing this exercise I whispered everything I heard in French, because I could not hear the podcast very well when I was speaking in my normal voice. But I have been doing this exercise for more than a half year, so usually I can now speak and repeat in my normal voice while I listen to a new episode. If I lose the meaning of the podcast and I cannot understand what the podcast is saying, I will stop speaking for about 5 seconds. This allows my brain to understand the meaning again, and once I understand what the podcast is saying I start speaking again. If you really cannot understand the podcast most language podcasts come with a transcript. A transcript is a document that has all the words of the podcast written, so if you are really lost and you do not understand the words you can get a transcript and read at the same time as you listen. This will help you understand sentences you find difficult and you can also use the transcript to learn new vocabulary that you didn’t know before. I really like repeating podcasts when I practice French because it helps my French in 3 ways. First, repeating a podcast makes me speak faster. It makes me more fluent when I speak French. The podcast speaks faster than me so as I listen I pay attention to say the words more quickly than I am comfortable saying them. Over time this makes me a quicker speaker of French. A second way this exercise helps me is by improving my pronunciation. When I listen to a native French speaker and then I repeat, I notice that sometimes my words do not sound the same, especially vowel sounds. I usually listen to the same podcast 3 or 4 times and this allows me to change my pronunciation on the second and third and fourth times that I repeat the episode. Over time, my pronunciation has really improved. The third way this exercise helps me is by improving my listening comprehension. Not only am I listening to a native French speaker that is speaking a little bit quickly but I am doing 2 things at the same time. I am speaking and listening. Do you remember dictations at school? I think this exercise is like doing a mental dictation -a dictation without writing- because I am not just repeating sounds. I am repeating sentences that I understand. When I listen to a podcast I can imagine a transcript of the words the podcast is saying and this helps me repeat the words. So when you do this exercise at home, try to imagine a running transcript of the podcast you are listening to and you will be doing a mental dictation. I hope you like this way of practicing French and that you try it too.

Hi and welcome back. In America I am an EL teacher. EL is two letters that stand for English learners. It is an acronym that means English learner. But when I was teaching in Benin I was called a TEFL teacher. TEFL is a four letter acronym that means teaching English as a foreign language. Many of my students in Benin asked me about studying English at an American university and I had to ask them a question. I am an English speaker who is learning to speak French fluently, and I would ask my students if Mr. Cody would go to a Beninese university to study and learn how to speak French. And they answered, “No.” No, universities are not for learning how to speak their host country languages. An American university will not teach you how to speak English, and so going to an American university to study English does not make sense. In fact, if you want to study at an American university you must prove, you must show that you can already speak English, and then you will apply for another subject area, like political science, or literature, or biology. Today, I will tell you about an important exam called the TOEFL exam. This is the exam that will show an American university that you already know how to speak English. Ok, let’s get started. TOEFL is another acronym that is made up of 5 letters, T-O-E-F-L, and it stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language. A test is another word for an exam and this exam will show your English competency in four language domains: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. There are two TOEFL tests. One is paper and written, and the other is called the TOEFL IBT, internet based test. In Benin you can only take the TOEFL IBT test so today I will talk about it and not the paper test. The TOEFL IBT test is scored from 0 to 120 points. So the maximum result is 120 and the minimum score that you can get is 0.  The four sections of the test are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. In the reading section you will read 4 or 5 essays, paragraphs, or small stories. In the listening section of the test you will listen to conversations and university lectures and lessons. In the writing section of the test you will write a short essay. And in the speaking section of the test you will record your voice responding to several questions. Remember that the TOEFL IBT test is mainly used by universities so most of the conversations, most of the listening and reading, come from a university environment and they use university level vocabulary. And so, what I know about the exam is that vocabulary is usually the most difficult aspect of the test. So if you are wanting to take the TOEFL I suggest studying university level vocabulary. You may be asking, “What is a good score on a TOEFL exam?” A score is a result or a total of points, so in sports we can ask, “What was the score of the Real Madrid Barcelona match?” “Oh, the score was 2 to 1.” The TOEFL exam has a maximum score of 120 but some universities accept scores as low as 70. 70 is the minimum accepted score, but if you want to go to one of the best universities in the US, you should get a score of 100 or even 110.  Unfortunately in Benin you can only take the test in Cotonou, so if you live in the Collines or in Borgou, you will have to travel south to take the exam. Another unfortunate aspect of the TOEFL exam in Benin is the price. The test is paid in US dollars and 1 dollar is equal to about 650 FCFA. The test costs 180 US dollars, and that is the same as 120,000 FCFA. Wow, that is really expensive in Benin, so that means you should really, really study your vocabulary before you take the test so that you can pass the TOEFL on your first try. When I say pass, this is a difficult word for French speakers learning English because in French it is used in a different context. In English to pass an exam means to succeed, to get the average, to have a good score. In French pass means to take the test, to do the exam. (Pardon, pas d'espace!)

When I lived in Benin many people asked me many questions. Some of them annoyed me. They made me feel angry and sometimes they seemed impolite to an American. One common question I heard from all ages of people. My students would ask me to take them to America, or to adopt them. This is naive, but adults asked a similar question too. Many men asked me to find them a job. They said they could pay for the plane ticket if I could just find them a job. And Many women asked me, well, they asked me to take them to America and that they had a passport. Unfortunately you need more than just a passport to move to America. So today I will tell you all about the visa, the types of visa, and why it is so difficult to get an American visa. Let’s get started. Usually when you travel internationally  you need three documents for the customs agents. Customs agents are workers in an airport who talk to international travelers. In French you call them douaniers. The first document you will give a customs agent is your passport. A passport is only an identity card. It is syour international identity and you get your passport from your government so it is easy to get a passport. The second document you might need is a record of vaccinations. When I moved to Benin I got several vaccinations in the United States before coming to Benin. The vaccination that I remember the best is a yellow fever vaccination. This proves that I am not carrying a deadly disease, a dangerous disease, to a new country. The third document is the most important or the most difficult to get. It is the visa, and the visa comes from the government where you are going. It does not come from Benin. It will come from your destination’s government and that is why it is difficult to receive. A visa tells the country why you are entering. Many many people want to move to America, so America does not allow, it does not permit all travelers to enter the country. If it did there would be too many people in America. So the US only offers a few kinds of visas.  There are two categories of visas. The first one is the nonimmigrant visa and it is for temporary travel. You cannot move permanently to the United States with a non-immigrant visa. To move is a verb that means to change location. I can move a football. I move the football from my car to my house, but move also means to change houses. To go to a new house. In French this meaning is demenager. So a non-immigrant visa is only for a temporary visit. The first non-immigrant visa is a tourist visa and this is for 3 months in the United States. The second kind of non-immigrant is a student or study visa. This is for going to university in the US and it lasts for 4 years, usually. The third kind of non-immigrant visa is an employment visa, but it is for temporary employment. Usually seasonal workers, and usually these seasonal workers come from bordering countries like Mexico.  The second kind of visa is an immigrant visa and this is for people who are moving permanently to the United States. These are difficult to get. The first kind is a family visa and you must have direct family living in the United States. The second kind i s a fiance visa and you must be married to an American. The third kind is permanent employment, but remember you cannot enter the country without the visa, so you must contact companies and businesses from Benin. You must be hired while you are in Benin to get this visa. YOu cannot move to the US and ten get an employment visa. The fourth kind is the diversity lottery and this is held through embassies, the US embassy in Cotonou. The diversity lottery is very very difficult because many Beninese people put their name on the list. So do you see why this question made me feel a little angry? I had no power to give a Beninese person a visa. There was nothing that I could do. I cannot give you direct family in the US. Your mother must live in the US to get a family visa. Pardon, Il n'y a pas d'espace !