Preparing for my first visit to Post

Greetings from Togo! It's hard to believe I'm in my seventh week here. Time seemed to pass so slowly at the very beginning but now, as I've adjusted to life here, it flies by!

Tomorrow all of the stagieres (trainees) will be heading off to visit our posts for one week! It's both exciting and a little scary for us at the same time; we will be completely on our own for the first time in Togo! Today we had a workshop during which we each got to meet our official homologue - the person with whom we'll be working most closely upon our arrival at site. My homologue is a 42 year old midwife who seems very confident and enthusiastic. I'm looking forward to getting to know her better; I'll have all the time in the world tomorrow when I pack all my stuff up in the car with her and drive up to my site. My good friend Emily and her homologue will also be in the same car as me since her site isn't far from mine, so it should be a fun car trip. This afternoon we're in a bigger village to do last minute shopping for things like cooking pots and food.


group picture of the CHAP volunteers and homologues

All of the stagieres got together for the 4th of July and made "American food". Somehow we found canned hot dogs in one of the bigger villages along with ketchup, which we used with bread rolls to make hot dogs. We also made fresh guacamole and mango salsa, though we were unsuccessful on our search for chips and had to use torn up bread instead (but it was still really good). We made french fries from scratch, which took a really long time, and one of the host moms creatively made chocolate frosting, into which we dipped beignets (which are kind of like doughnut holes). We all ate SO much. We attracted quite the crowd of kids as well; a few of us played soccer with them, and then we fed them all the leftover food, which they cleaned out. It was a really fun day!

I had a very fun birthday here in Togo too! All the stagieres from the CHAP and the SED programs made me really nice cards, and the formateurs (the trainers) sang me happy birthday in French and gave me a bouquet of wild flowers. I went over to Emily's house for lunch, where her mom had made me a feast. Her mom had also hired a photagrapher (few people own cameras themselves so they hire people to take and develop pictures on special occasions) to come and take pictures of us in pagnes (Togolese cloth) that she dressed us up in. We looked absolutely hideous and couldn't stop laughing, but her mom thought we looked great and was very pleased.