Hello Togo!

Saying Goodbye

2010-07-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

After having lived somewhere for 2 full years, saying goodbye is not something that can be accomplished in a single day. My goodbyes started as early as May with my belongings. It was decided that I would not be replaced this year, meaning all of my household possessions needed to leave the house. Peace Corps reclaims most everything it lends its volunteers for their service, meaning that the volunteers are responsible for bringing everything back down to the capital on their own. In my village, where cars are not readily available, this meant I had to take everything out via moto. This took careful planning months in advance - planning what I'd take with me, little by little, every time I left my village between May and July. Other items, such as household furniture, I sold to people in my village who wanted them. And I ultimately gave a lot of things away for free as well.

Next came saying goodbye to volunteers. During my service, I'd only see some volunteers who lived up-country once every several months. While many of my closest friends made an effort to meet me right before I actually left, I had to start saying goodbye to others who lived further away months before my actual COS (Close of Service) date.

While my last month was filled with goodbyes, the last week was the most intense. It was very important that I personally say goodbye to all of my contacts in village for the sake of not offending anyone - which meant a lot of walking around those last few days. I was touched by how many people from other villages went out of their way to call or come and say goodbye to me too. The nurse, midwife, and pharmacist with whom I'd worked organized a goodbye lunch for me and gave me a thank you gift, teachers with whom I'd worked took me out for drinks out of thanks, and people were constantly flowing in and out of my house over the course of the week to thank me, wish me well, and spend as much time as they could spare visiting with me for the last time. I was moved by everyone's words of appreciation the most; I was grateful for their recognition and appreciation of my work, and touched that so many people were begging me to stay a third year. On the morning I was going to leave, one of my neighbors came by with a live chicken for me as a final thank you gift. Thank goodness for host moms; mine killed it, cooked it, and prepared it as a meal for the trip (it was delicious). Even though she'd already said goodbye twice the day before, my water girl came by one last time that morning with her younger sisters to spend some time with me. (We colored). My host mom was the hardest person for me to say goodbye to. I'd made it through all the other goodbyes without shedding a tear, but as soon as my host mom started crying, I couldn't help but tear up as well. She's one of the people I'll miss the most.

The day I left village happened to be the same day that the older volunteers threw a welcome party for the new volunteer trainees, who had just finished their first one-week visit at post. The party was held at one of the transit houses, where I was stopping through on my way down to Lome. A lot of people were there and it was a fun night of good homemade food, dancing, and good company. A number of my friends stayed up until 4 AM to wave me off when the taxi came to take me down to the capital.

The last few days in Lome were spent primarily in the Peace Corps Bureau. I had a whole checklist of things to get done before I could earn the status of an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer). Luckily it wasn't too overwhelming as I had done a lot of the paperwork months beforehand. When I finally finished everything I felt so libearated! My last night in Togo, I went out to dinner downtown at one of my favorite Lebanese restaurants with some of my good friends who happened to be in Lome as well. The owner of the restaurant, who knows me well since I frequent his place so often, filled our table with amazingly delicious Lebanese food for only a fraction of the cost as a goodbye gift. I was so touched by his generosity and we waddled out of there with full bellies.

In heading back to the States, I flew out of Accra, Ghana since the ticket was cheaper and saved me money. I crossed the border with Jorge, the husband of one of my closest volunteer friends (he was heading home ahead of his wife), and with one of my best volunteer friends in country, who came just to spend a little more time together before having to say goodbye. I couldn't have asked for better travel buddies. Since Jorge's and my flights weren't until around 11PM, we spent most of the day roaming around the Accra mall. We checked our luggage into the parcels' department at the mall's grocery store and then ate food and watched 2 movies in a row at the upstairs theater until we had to go.

My layover was in Rome, and the flight between Italy and the States was 10 hours long, but luckily I had a great seat-mate (don't you love it when that happens?) who asked such genuine questions about my experience and patiently listened as I pondered the inevitable challenges of my impending transition back to life in America. While I'd been excited to go home for months as I neared the end of my service, it was on that last flight that I began having mixed feelings. I think it finally sunk in that I'd just left my home of 2 years along with my job and my friends - all to go to a place where I'd have nothing besides family for the moment; I was leaving a place with which I'd become completely comfortable to go somewhere else where I was homeless, jobless, and essentially a fish out of water, due to my most recent experience. It was a sobering and somewhat melancholy realization.

But it was so good to see my family at the airport gates. And we all had a nice celebration that evening. Unfortunately I only had one week left with my Dad before he left for his sabbatical year in Japan, so most of my first week home was spent packing up the house to prepare it for the renters who would move in at the end of this week. As for me, I've just recently found an apartment and am now looking for a job. Little by little I will adjust to this life again... until I pack up for my next adventure :-)

Thank you to all who followed my blog throughout these 27 months. I so appreciated your support and encouraging comments. Goodbye for now... A la prochaine! (Until next time!)

Home!

Camp Espoir 2010

2010-07-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Having been a summer camp counselor for four years for first graders back in the States, I was amused to discover that there are a lot of similarities between camp in America and Camp Espoir, where I volunteered as a counselor for 8 year-olds this year. For example, it is not unusual for beads to fall out of a counselor’s hair when undoing one’s ponytail at the end of the day. The processes of getting the kids to brush their teeth, get dressed, shower, and go to the bathroom (especially with #2) take at least 10 times as long as they would for the average (older) individual. And for both American and Togolese campers alike, balloons can be an available saving grace when it comes to distracting them from fighting with each other, and a curse when it comes to trying to get them to pay attention.

[ bathroom break (no bathroom available)]

But there are certainly cultural differences as well. For example, the girls would sit on the toilets (which many of them had never seen before) with their rear ends half buried in the bowl and their legs dangling off because they’d always put the seat up as well. With more food available than they’d ever eaten before, my eight year-olds would eat up to four plates piled with food per meal – and then we’d all have to book it back to our cabin so they could do #2 (little Ruth would always say, “I need to poop – my stomach’s too big” and then eye my own stomach, pat it and say, “You should too”). In more than one case, Taylor (my co-PCV counselor) and I had to address how, after meals indoors in the cafeteria, the remaining food scraps CANNOT just be dumped on the floor, and hands should be washed after dinner using the outdoor sink instead of by pouring remaining drinking water over one’s hand onto the plate. In taking bucket baths, the girls would always start by washing their underwear (culturally, underwear is washed in private and not along with the rest of one’s laundry), so little panties always adorned the windowsills in our cabin, where they’d be hung to dry.

The one other big difference is that these kids are sick.

Of the almost 100,000 HIV/AIDS orphan and vulnerable children (OVCs) living in Togo, fewer than 10% receive any type of external support. Within the definition of OVCs there are three sub-groups: 1) Children who have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS, 2) Children who have an infected parent, 3) Children infected with HIV/AIDS. Camp Espoir’s primary goal is to provide a fun, comforting, and educational environment for these kids, who are faced with the most difficult of circumstances. Because of stigma and discrimination, kids are unlikely to open up to anyone about their daily struggles with HIV/AIDs. Camp Espoir is often the first time the children have left their homes and been surrounded by other children facing similar challenges. Camp provides the perfect opportunity for AIDS care association staff to reach out to the campers and really explain what living with HIV/AIDS means. The campers leave having made friends and confidants from their home association with whom they can discuss problems they may be facing. Each camp is staffed by a combination of Peace Corps volunteers, AIDS care association employees (including nurses and psycho-social counselors) , and youth leaders, all of whom contribute to making Pagala camp ground a great place for the children (ranging from age 8 – 17) to forget about their problems for the first time in their lives.

The way camp is set up, it’s easy to treat the kids like the kids they really are and not like sick kids – which is our main goal as counselors. Apart from the educational sessions, there is lots of time for sports, art, and lots and lots of songs. This year’s camp’s theme was the World Cup, so all of the different age groups (divided into different cabins) represented different countries (my cabin was Japan). There is a mock market day where kids from the different age groups sell products they’ve learned how to make (including juice, bracelets, popcorn, and peanut brittle). There is also a carnival day which the kids obviously love, and a dance night as well.

(above: skit on self-confidence)

Sometimes though, it was hard to completely forget that these kids struggle with an incurable disease. All but one of the little girls in my cabin was actually infected. While I often just tried not to think about it, it was hard to ignore when our girls would knock on Taylor’s and my door early morning to ask for drinking water to take their ARV medication. Another one of our girls fell sick for the first couple days of camp and had no appetite or energy to participate in activities, which broke my heart to see. We had to constantly keep an eye on a gaping wound one of our girls had from falling to ensure that it was always covered and protected. Yet another one of our girls struggled from major psychological issues (having lost both her parents and being sick herself) and would experience extremely dramatic mood swings. We also found out late in the week that she’d been skipping her medication on purpose. In the past, other counselors have recounted stories of having difficulties encouraging their campers to take their medication because their campers dread it, saying that they've seen their parents die after having taken the medication in the same way. And at the end of camp, saying goodbye was something else… Because the sad truth is that many of these kids won’t ever make it through their adolescent years. What’s hard about it all with these kids is encompassed in how Taylor, who works a great deal with AIDS in her village, phrased it: “It’s just not their fault…”

But for the day by day fun we had, it was a fantastic time. Yet another great experience I’ve had during my Peace Corps service. And, without a doubt, it was obvious that the kids had a blast as well – and that’s what’s most important.

World Map Project (and more)

2010-06-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

During my last months in village, I decided to do a World Map Project for which members of the community get together and paint a world map on a wall. The idea for the World Map Project got started back in 1988 by a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic who came with the idea as a means of getting students interested in world geography. The idea caught on with other Peace Corps volunteers as it's a fun project which instills pride and accomplishment in the participants, encourages cooperative problem solving, and builds community. I thought it'd be a great way to bond with my community members and leave a sort of memory of my presence before I go.

The goal is to create an accurate hand-drawn map of the world. To do so, you first draw a big grid on your background surface. Then you transfer information block-by-block from map section sheets onto this proportionately larger grid. One of the hardest parts was making the grid (which was approximately 5x3 meters) straight and even considering we only had a meter stick to create the entire thing. In the early days of making the grid, I stopped by a local carpenter's workshop one day in the hopes of finding a longer ruler or measuring tape. There was an older man, who I often see sitting outside the shop with the apprentices, sitting there who greeted me by name. I assumed he was the head carpenter. I asked him if he had a long ruler, but he didn't seem to understand what I was asking for, so I broke out the World Map Project manual and showed him the mini picture of the map on the grid, explaining that we were going to recreate it on the elementary school wall. He looked at me with wide eyes and said "That is way too small to draw on the wall!" After I clarified that I was going to enlarge it, I tried asking again for a large ruler to use to do so, but he still didn't seem to understand what I was asking for. So I said, "OK - say for example I come to you today and ask for the measurements of this wall [pointing to the wall next to us]. How would you go about measuring this wall?" He looked pensively at the wall, stroked his chin and hmmmed, saying "Ah yes - I understand now". After a couple nods he turned to me and said "Ok - and when would you need those measurements by?" After 15 minutes of a conversation that went nowhere, I found out that the man wasn't even a carpenter. In the end, I ended up making do with the yellow meter stick I already had.

Although it requires a lot of steps, schoolkids from all over the world succeed in drawing the map themselves. To select the kids who would help me, I went around to classes in the local middle school and invited those students who were interested in the idea of the project to participate in a preliminary "training" of this process of recreating images using the grid method. I was initially worried that the students would find the project too time-consuming and tedious, but I was pleasantly surprised by how intrinsically motivated they were. Overall, about 10 kids helped consistently, showing up on time and, at the end of every day, anxiously asking what time we'd start working again the next day. It was so heartwarming to see how excited they were to create this map! I was careful to check their work and often had to make some corrections, but overall the kids did a great job. I could tell they were encouraged by any positive praise I gave them. One day when we were painting, I was working on the right side of the map with some kids and another kid was standing on a bench on the left side, painting the countries that were green. I heard a noise and saw that he had slipped on the bench and had caught himself, but he was gawking at the wall. A little suspicious, I got off my ladder and went to go see what the problem was. When I got over there, I realized that when he'd slipped, he'd spilled his paint, and an enormous blotch of green was covering the Pacific Ocean. He was looking at his toes and I could tell he felt bad about it, so I made as little a deal as possible out of it, even though I was sighing in my head. Good thing I had extra blue.

I spent a total of approximately 80 hours over the course of May working on the map. I'd work in the mornings starting at dawn, sweating like crazy under the sun which blazed on the eastward-facing wall. In the evenings, I'd work more productively in the shade with the kids who'd help after they got out of their classes. Kids and adults alike would love to gather and sit on the grass to watch us as we worked. One day, as I was working on the Northwestern Territories, I noticed the director of the school walk into the building with a man who was carrying a big tube attached to a plastic gallon bottle of liquid. Minutes later he came out and said that they were going to be spraying to get rid of the pests who were making noise in the roof and suggested that I might want to stop working for a while. Not wanting to lose any time, I said that I'd continue working and if it bothered me, I'd stop. Not long afterwards, I started smelling a raunchy stench emanating from the holes in the roof and then heard a high pitch screeching accompanied by clattering coming from the inside. The kids who were sitting on the grass were getting all worked up and excited, and they started standing up and looking for sticks in anticipation of whatever was going to be escaping from the roof. Thinking twice, I scrambled down the ladder and in the nick of time too because just then HUNDREDS of little bats started streaming out from the small holes between the wall and roof and filling the sky. I felt like I was in a Hitchcock film. I fled for cover but the kids screamed with delight and whipped and flailed their sticks in the sky trying to knock down as many bats as possible. Once I was at a safe distance and didn't feel I was at risk for getting knocked in the head by a diving bat, I found the whole scene absolutely hysterical. Too bad I didn't have my camera that day.

Many Peace Corps volunteers often look for external funding to produce the World Map, but due to time constraints (since I was to be leaving in less than 3 months at the time of planning this), I decided to go ahead and fund the project out of my own pocket. My PCV neighbor, Michelle, graciously contributed as well - both financially and manually, biking down from her village for a couple days to help out with the drawing and painting. It was fun to have this to do as a collaborative project with her before leaving as well. In total, the map cost us about 60 USD to produce. Reasonable, we thought, since it should now ideally last a few years and should contribute greatly to the global education of the young students in my village.

Even before the map was finished, I already started seeing the ways in which the map is challenging my villagers' views of the world. When I originally started the project, people had trouble with the concept that it was a map of the world instead of just Africa. As hard as it is to believe, many people in my village did not understand that there are other continents in the world besides Africa! You have to remember - there are few, if any, books available for students who live in the remote villages like my own. Most students in my village had never seen a map of the world drawn all on one page. The school wall on which I painted the map was right next to a path that many farmers follow in going to and from fields, so at dusk I often attracted a fairly large crowd of farmers who would stop and stare and ask questions with their hoes propped over their shoulders. The biggest attraction was little Togo, which "is so small!", they'd exclaim. But they loved jumping up and pointing to it; the little yellow-painted country was already covered in fingerprints before the map was even finished. However, the villagers were even more blown away when I'd point out little islands and explain that they too were countries. "Someone lives THERE?" they'd say. In painting other African countries, I took advantage of the focus on the countries to explain historical events such as the Rwandan genocide and the civil wars in Sudan. My villagers were astounded that such big countries could still have such serious problems. "So Togo is actually doing well!" they'd exclaim in understanding. "Bigger isn't always better after all" they'd reassure themselves. I'd always smile to myself too when I'd be working and I'd overhear schoolkids rehearsing the historical facts they knew about the countries in the world, now using the map as a visual reference. Many adults would come up to me and thank me, saying how grateful they were for this huge service that I was providing in improving the knowledge of the kids and adults in the community. The map was truly an appreciated project.

The day we finished, I could see the kids who had helped practically bursting with pride as we wrote their names on the wall as I'd promised them. A big crowd gathered to admire the map and lingered even after I'd gone home. It's such a good feeling to finish a project that you know is appreciated by your village and will benefit them in some way. The craziest thing to me was that during the entire month, I had prayed that the rain would hold off and not erase or delay my work before I'd finished it. There were a couple close calls, but no huge rainstorms ever actually came during the time I was working on it. I was so relieved. The day that the rain finally came was the night I finished. What luck!

And that was my last big project in village! I am done with my work and am preparing to leave soon!

Enjoy the pictures below~

Making the Grid:

Drawing the countries:

(Finished the drawing!)

Painting:

Writing in the country names:

Finished!

MORE PICTURES FROM MARCH - MAY:

(above and below) Me doing a sensibilization on how to make lotion that contains insect repellant made from Neem tree leaves.

Mango season! How schoolkids use sticks to bring the mangoes down to their level

Dancing during Cultural Week at school

(above and below) Culinary contest during cultural week; the director and I were the judges

me with the current and old middle school directors

Planting Moringa with middle school students

Model Teacher Conference I organized, led by one of my former Peace Corps Trainers, Ismael

(Below) My Homologue's daughter's graduation ceremony from hairdressing school

Distributing the Moring we planted

Baby Weighing

COS Conference

2010-05-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

These are the last ever pictures of my Peace Corps stage group. Starting at the end of May, people will be going home one by one! We just came back from our Close Service (COS) Conference for which, as a congratulatory gesture, Peace Corps put us up in a nice hotel with hot showers and good food. We got information about all the official paperwork we need to fill out and finish before we can leave and officially become RPCVs (Return Peace Corps Volunteers). They also gave us useful information about how to reintegrate back into American culture again, and we got our official COS dates (in other words, the day we're each going home)! I am leaving Togo July 22nd. I will see you all July 23rd! Can't wait.

me and Emily

Receiving my certificate for having completed 2 years of Peace Corps service from the Ambassador

Above: The remaining members of my stage, including both Community Health volunteers and Small Enterprise Development volunteers. We came in with 31 people. We lost a good third since then.

Below: The Community Health and AIDS Prevention volunteers (CHAP)

I can't believe we made it!

Burkina Faso

2010-05-02T02:18:00.001-07:00

From Easter Monday, April 5th until Sunday, April 11, my friends Heather, Taylor, Nikhil, (all members of my stage who swore in with me in August 2008) used the final vacation days of our services to go to Burkina Faso, the country just north of Togo. We met up on the Peace Corps vehicle that travels the entire extent of Togo (up north then back down south) once a month, and spent the night in Dapaong (one of the most northern big cities in Togo) before getting up at 5AM to take an early bush taxi to Cinkasse, where we crossed the Togo-Burkina border.

The first big difference I noticed was the difference in climate and terrain. The change actually started in Togo – I had just never been that far north before to notice the difference. Though small in size, Togo is longitudinally divided into 5 different regions that each have relatively unique landscapes and climates. The most northern region, for example, is vastly different from the most southern region in that, while the south has humid weather with lush vegetation, the north experiences constant dry heat and suffers from extremely arid terrain.

As we traveled further and further north in Togo, and eventually crossed the border and continued on to Burkina’s capital, Ouagadougou (pronounced Wa-ga-doo-goo – who doesn’t love that name?), I took in the scenery with awe. The dusty ground was burnt dry to the color of golden tan. The earth was so parched in some parts that the ground was cracked into what seemed like a million little puzzle pieces. Paths snaked through desiccated grass stubble, and dehydrated riverbeds carved through the land. The land was so flat in areas that you could see for miles until the horizon blended into the sky in a haze. The living compounds, containing thatched roof huts enclosed by clay walls, were sun-bleached to a hue so resembling that of the ground that they look like they’d erupted from the earth itself. The monochromatic expanse was only broken by the ever fluorescent garb of the people, who, in their daily activities of biking the distances with babies strapped to their backs, or driving donkey-carts toting oil tanks of water from the nearest water source, could be spotted from a great length away. Of course the bland background highlighted the trash littering the ground as well; the small black plastic bags used in nearly every commercial interaction were so abundantly scattered over the more inhabited areas that my how their prominent presence disguised the true beauty of the land.

The pleasantness of the Burkina people, more commonly known as the Burkinabe, also came as a welcomed shock. Habituated to the unfortunately generally impolite, aggressive, and often crude nature of Togolese strangers (particularly Togolese men), we couldn’t believe that just one country away, the treatment of foreigners could be so different. When the border guards processed our passports efficiently, with smiles, and without a single pestering word or ‘come-on’ to us girls, we almost stood there at the end in disbelief that we might actually be able to walk away from such an interaction without experiencing a single instance of harassment. Though, granted our time there was short and we stayed primarily in the capital, we did not feel targeted as white foreigners and our ears rang with only the echo of the taunting “yovo, yovo, bon soir!” song that Togolese children sing when they see a white person, which thankfully seemed to be left behind at the border and did not follow us into the country. Even street vendors so graciously backed off after a single sign of disinterest that I felt inclined to ask, “Really? You’re not going to hassle me more than that?” Again, I will make the disclaimer that our experience may in no way represent the experience of foreigners in more rural areas of Burkina, for example, but it certainly did contribute to the stress-free atmosphere we enjoyed during our trip.

That said, I apologize to admit that I don't have many more remarks to make about Burkina culture or sights. Aside from the different climate and general atmosphere, the country itself wasn't that different from Togo. Given that I'm now habituated and desensitized to what might make these West African countries so fascinating to foreigners, not much else stood out to me. Remember, we are 2nd-year Peace Corps Volunteers now who are missing America very much, so would you really be surprised that we spent most of our time at the American Cultural Center and International School in Ouagadougou eating hamburgers, drinking milkshakes, and swimming in the pools? It was, after all, our last vacation. So try not to judge when you see from my pictures that these activities occupied most of our time in what is so far my favorite francophone West African country :)

Riding north on Easter Monday (I made cookies for the occasion)

Bus rides (below, there was no space for nikhil's enormous bag so he had to carry it on his lap the whole 3 hour ride)

I don't think I've ever gotten a shot of this before in Togo; vendors run up to buses and sell their products to people through the windows so you don't even ever have to get out of the vehicle

Our first meal in Ouagadougou - at a Tapas bar!

The big mosque in downtown Ouagadougou

The Peace Corps Burkina transit house where we stayed, sleeping on mattresses we pulled onto the floor

clockwise: Nikhil, Heather, Taylor, me

Below: GOOD FOOD! Not exciting to you, I'm sure, but VERY exciting to us

(strawberries and cantaloupe - can't get these in Togo!)

Swimming! I relearned my back dive from high school

Our last dinner in Ouagadougou on our last night; we went to a fancy French restaurant and all ordered lamb, and then they gave us yummy hot mint tea as a free dessert!

Pictures from February - March

2010-03-28T23:42:00.000-07:00

A sensibilization I did on how to make enriched porridge in a village of 400 people 7 km outside of my village

A typical classroom if there's no cement available

Those darn mice...

Michelle's and my Valentine's Day cake

"Piler"-ing rice (straight from the field) to separate it from its hull

Separating the rice from its chaff

This day I came home and my host family was making bat for dinner. Not kidding. This one was killed with a slingshot - and it was pregnant.

My middle school peer educators' first sensibilization! I was so proud of them.

Cows coming home from the field. These are the ones I'm kind of afraid of. When they roam free, they'll occasionally run from the fields across the road in the morning when I'm running and I have a secret fear of getting trampled.

Munchkins! (My host mom's apprentices' kids)

First big storm of the season (yes it flooded my house)

I had to get a shot of my host mom with that bag on her head because this is how the Togolese ladies protect their hair from the rain and it cracks me up every time.

Aftermath: thatch roof destroyed from the wind

Calm after the storm (shot taken by my well)

This is the cot I sleep on on the unbearably hot nights; I had it made for the equivalent of 5 dollars, and my battery-powered fan from Momma literally saved my life this season

The Family Planning campaign I worked really hard to organize in my village. Ultimately we inserted IUDs and implants in 56 women for free! That many fewer unplanned pregnancies this year!!

A talk I gave on Adolescence and Puberty for Michelle's apprentices in her village

Togo Election Day, March 4, 2010: Michelle and I hung low together. This is me trying to find BBC on the radio to hear what's going on downtown

A Saturday morning run with Michelle's apprentices

A bouillie (porridge) lady. Breakfast!

How you roast a goat

A mother pig in my village gave birth to an "elephant" according to my villagers. They had difficulty believing me when I told them that it was just a deformed piglet and wasn't actually a real elephant.

Ragu! (yams in palm oil sauce with spices) yum

World Women's Day 2010 - the parade

The World Women's Day skit my women organized. The day went so much better than last year! (refer to last year's entry)

(above) Me and my actresses, (below) the backside of my World Women's Day pagne dress which everyone was supposed to have made this year but for some reason didn't

A cute village I biked out to for a meeting.

My second FARN (refer to the November '09 entry for information about it). My boss, Tchao (far left), came to see a day of it and took pictures.
Hazards of diarrhea demo and how to make a rehydration drink

Serving food (Clarisse was trying not to smile for some reason)

Cuties

I love this shot of Clarisse cooking

FARN Group picture

Make way for ducklings Togo-style

At At Michelle's house right after a visit to the post office

These next pictures are for you, Momma, so you can see how excited I was to get your package!

Happy Easter!

Giving to the World

2010-03-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

With every push, the woman’s veins bulged out of her chest and incredibly muscular arms. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her teeth gritted together as she employed all the oxygen she’d inhaled to contract every muscle in effort to expel her baby from her uterus. Lying supine on flat, hard, tile-covered table, she clutched its sides, her legs bent with her feet flat on the surface, and her back raising ever so slightly off the table as she pushed. Her bulbous bellybutton protruded even further from her enormous belly as she pushed with all of her might. Sweat streamed from her naked body, soaking the single crumpled pagne (wax-print cloth) on which she was lying. With an exasperated cry she finally relaxed and gasped for air, her eyes opening and tearing from the pain. She had been pushing for nearly 3 hours now and it had gotten her nowhere. As her chest heaved in effort to help her catch her breath, she looked up towards the ceiling and whispered an exhausted plea: “Essosinam” – “God help me”.

While I have never actually seen a live birth in the States, I’m quite sure that the conditions are fairly different compared to births here in Togo. I’ve never been to hospitals in bigger cities here to see births, but I hear they’re fairly “modern” – and therefore more expensive. Women may pay up to 25,000 cFA (more than $50) to get better care in a large city hospital during deliveries, but in smaller villages like mine, 25,000 cFA is more than most people earn in a month. The delivery fee at my dispensaire (local health clinic) is 500 cFA (just over a dollar) – and even that sum keeps villagers away as they complain, “lidiye fei” – Kabiye for, “there is no money”. Against specific direction to come to the dispensaire to give birth, many women end up giving birth at home – a practice which leads to many deaths and/or health complications among both babies and mothers.

My only experience is what I’ve witnessed in my own dispensaire, although it seems that these expectations exist nearly everywhere – at least in village clinics: Women who show up to give birth at the dispensaire are expected to bring with them family members, a little plastic chamber pot with a cover (used for storing the placenta which they ultimately bury in a ritualistic procedure), Vaseline (used to wipe the baby down after it is born), and numerous pagnes (used for soaking up blood, cleaning off the table and floor at the end, and wrapping the baby after it’s born). Family members are important because they will clean and wipe down the area after the delivery is finished. They also cook and bring food to the new mother who is expected to stay in the dispensaire for up to 3 days in a room that is barren except for plastic-covered foam mats on the ground. If no family members come, the new mother herself is the one who cleans up the mess immediately after having given birth, and she may go hungry. It sounds appalling but it actually happens from time to time.

During the actual delivery itself, women lay on a hard, flat table. They are given nothing for the pain – there just is no medication available (or affordable) to give. Crying out too much from pain may elicit a slap from the midwife who may then proceed to yell at them for being weak. Women also get slaps and yelled out for not following the midwife’s directions or simply for not spreading their legs wide enough. If the woman tears over the course of the birth, she is sutured with a fish-hook without any local anesthetic and is chastised if she even winces. Once the baby actually comes out, the midwife cuts the cord and carries the baby to the opposite end of the table, above the woman’s head, cleans it off with the Vaseline and wraps it in a pagne where she then leaves it wailing. In all the births that I’ve seen since coming here, I have sadly never seen a woman excited about the baby immediately after it comes out. Often, after the placenta is removed, she’ll limp out of the room without even a single glance at the child. No one seems eager to know (right away anyways) if it’s a boy or a girl (contrary to Americans), and many women even have to be forced to breastfeed immediately afterwards (a necessity if the baby is to get the most out of the yellow, nutrient-rich colostrum that comes out of breasts immediately after the woman has given birth) because they don’t want to put the still “dirty” child close to them yet. It’s hard to say whether or not a lot of this seeming apathy is a result of the sheer exhaustion from giving birth, or if it’s just a result of the fact that, to these women, “it’s just another child”. It is common for women to have up to 9 children, partly because many children are a sign of honor, and partly because (and these are words I’ve heard verbatim from their mouths), “that way if some of them die, there are still some left over.” It is unfortunately very common for women to have some of their children die. But it’s surprisingly difficult to convince them to have fewer children so that they can have the means of supporting their survival. The fact of the matter is: big families mean everything to them. But a child tends to represent less an individual than simply a number to add to the family. Other times (too often, in fact), the pregnancy is unexpected or unwanted, so the baby only represents the start of more difficult times. And thus, births don’t tend to be extraordinary events. It is largely for this reason that even months after the baby is born, you can ask a woman what her child’s name is and she’ll look bewildered and then just shrug.

But, my goodness, these women are strong.

To get back to the woman from the beginning of my story…
She had been pushing, and though the baby was fully crowned (the head had fully dilated the cervix; the midwife let me put on gloves and feel for myself), something was obstructing its exit out of the uterus. My midwife was getting worried that even if the baby finally came out, it wouldn’t even be alive after being in that position for so long. “Son basin – c’est trop petit!” she reasoned, pointing out the skinny woman’s small waist; the woman’s hips were too small to permit the baby to pass through. She needed a C-section, meaning she needed to be evacuated to the hospital up in the village 15 km north of me. Hearing that news, the woman sobbed and pleaded for the midwife to do anything so that that didn’t have to be the only option. But there was nothing more that could be done. And so, wrapped in a single pagne, at that stage in her labor, the woman was helped onto the back of a motorcycle that would take her on the 30 minute ride across a bumpy, unpaved dirt road to the hospital, where she could get help. We later found out that the baby was miraculously born alive and healthy.

Another time, I was in the dispensaire helping the midwife finish up paperwork before we left to go eat lunch. There were no other patients and we were almost ready to leave when a very pregnant woman showed up at the front entrance and collapsed on the floor. She was helped to the birthing table and my midwife quickly put on gloves to see how far dilated the woman was. With one hand on the woman’s knee and another in her vagina, I saw the midwife’s eyes widen. She pulled her fingers out and ran into the adjacent room to change into her delivery smock, saying that the baby was coming – that very second. I was standing in the doorway between the two rooms and when the midwife was down to her undergarments I turned and saw that the head of the baby had fully emerged between the young woman’s legs. “Emma! It’s coming, it’s coming!” I alerted the midwife, but then just as suddenly, the whole baby popped out, luckily not slipping off the table. We later found out that this woman was from a village even tinier than mine, 8km further “into the bush”, as we say, and she was getting ready to come to the market in my village that day when her water broke. Being from such a remote village, there were only two men with motorcycles available to take people into my village, but when she asked, they refused because they had already been “rented” to load their motorcycles with yams to bring to the market. So this woman had no choice but to walk in the heat, while in labor, the 8 km on the rough, tiny path that connects her village to mine to get to the dispensaire, where she arrived just in time.

Yet another time, I walked into work to see a woman who I’d known had been pregnant for a long time walking around with a ‘deflated’ stomach. I congratulated her on what ended up being a new baby girl, who was lying wrapped up on a mat in the recovery room. But when I looked in the woman’s carnet de sante (health book) to find out what the baby’s weight was at birth, I found that section to be empty – meaning that the woman had not given birth at the dispensaire, even though I’d counseled her to do so for months. Disappointed in her, I scolded her and asked why she had given birth at home instead. “You don’t understand,” she explained to me, “I didn’t even give birth at home – I was in the fields”. It turns out that one morning, 9 months pregnant, she left to go work in her fields by herself and went into labor. Five kilometers away from home and with no one around to help, she lay down on a pagne, gave birth to her 6th child, and then walked home. My mouth was hanging open by the end of her story. “You mean to say that you gave birth to your baby by yourself in a field?” I asked. “That’s incredible!” My soft-spoken, humble friend just lightly smiled, looked at the ground and shrugged. “What other choice did I have?” she said.

A common expression Togolese women use when they talk about giving birth is mettre au monde, which translates to “giving to the world”. Their stories and that which I witness continue to astound me when I realize what “giving” can really mean for them.

Re-entering hot season ... and what that has meant

2010-02-05T05:59:00.000-08:00

Harmattan season is coming to an end which is a shame because with it goes the cool nights through which I was sleeping like a rock. I've started tossing and turning again and waking up drenched from sweat as my bed seems to do nothing but absorb the the heat; it literally feels like a hot pad when you touch it. Since it hasn't rained in months, the mosquitoes have disappeared for the most part, so I think I'll start sleeping on the cot I had made so that there can at least be some ventilation flowing under my back. Leaving for my moonlit 5AM runs (the sun doesn't come up until about 6:15 these days), I'm sweating from the humidity before I even begin.

I came back from Zanzibar to find the well in my compound pretty much dry. The little bit of water that remains on the bottom is filled with sediment, and you have to let it sit for hours to settle before you can actually use it. So hence began the problem of finding water; there ARE pumps in my village but they're a distance away from my house and with my schedule, I don't have the time to go fetch it myself (my neck strength is also questionable I suppose). The problem was: for whatever reason I was having problems finding girls who were available or responsible enough to come consistently to get me water - even though I pay well! It was an enigma to me considering how some other volunteer friends of mine in other villages have kids practically knocking down their doors willing to help get water - and here I couldn't even find one person. My host family in my compound use their little girl to fetch water for them, though she can only do it when she gets back from school, and then the lines by the pump are dozens of people long. So I felt bad asking that she get me water too, although my host mom would be generous enough to give me a share every now and again.

With the little bit i found, I learned to get satisfyingly clean on less than 2 liters of water when I showered. Dishes I'd use to cook with could be rinsed off with a minimal amount of water and then reused, making it possible for me to hold off washing dishes for a full week. To do laundry, I'd pack my dirty clothes into the saddle bags on my bike and bike 15km north to wash them with water from my closest volunteer neighbor's well (which is luckily still full); I'd spend the morning waiting for them to dry (the one nice thing about dry season is that clothes dry on the line almost 10 times faster) then fold them all up, pack them back into my bags, and bike back down on the now throat-choking dusty roads. On Tuesdays (market day in my village), I would stock up on the 500ml plastic bags of drinking water that the woman who comes in from Atakpame sells, though I was still drinking far less than I should.

About a week and a half ago, I was doing a talk in a neighboring small village of about 300 people on the topic of good nutrition. I was feeling dehydrated and exhausted and while the talk went well and I got a good response, the local school director who had invited me out there seemed to notice and, to his great concern, I told him about my problems finding water. Later that night, I felt unusually exhausted, my body felt achey, and I was running a small fever - all signs of dehydration. I chugged as much water as I could but the thing about being dehydrated is that there's no quick fix.

But I got a miracle the next day. I came back from working at the dispensaire to find 3 big plastic containers of water sitting on my porch (a total of several gallons of water). I nearly shrieked with delight - glorious water! As it turns out, after having dropped me back off at my house the previous day, the director of the school in the village where I'd taught had gone to the house of one of the local school directors in MY village where he had spoken with his wife. The next day she had sent her 2 youngest girls to fetch me water, which they have been doing ever since - getting me even MORE than I need! The abundance of water I've had since (which I pay for generously and gratefully) has allowed me to share with my host family as well, making life a little easier for them too. When I went over with brownies and a million of words of thanks to the wife of the school director who had pretty much saved me, her reaction was: "I just can't believe I didn't know you were suffering! I could have helped even sooner!" I was truly touched by the cooperative efforts of my village friends to help me out. Now I'm all set until once again the rainy season comes and we endure the opposite extreme of almost drowning in the abundance of water that falls from the sky.

And so, while I know many of you may be wishing for a quick end to the winter, don't forget what a blessing cool air and running, available (and especially cold) water can be! After my experience here I don't believe I'll ever take it for granted again.

Tanzania and Zanzibar

2010-01-12T23:06:00.000-08:00

With all the holidays, I've been traveling a lot lately, but I'd planned this 10-day trip to Tanzania and Zanzibar since last summer. Drew, my good friend from high school, has been working as a general manager at GOSESO (an environmental NGO) in Kigoma, Tanzania for the past year, and so I used my tax refund money from last year to plan a trip out to visit him before he leaves in April.

Since my ticket flew me out of Accra, Ghana, I planned the trip in such a way that I could get my GREs out of the way at the same time (Accra has a legitimate testing center for the GRE test). So the day after New Years, after months of studying by lantern light and roosters' crowing serenades, I took a bush taxi to Accra, took my test the morning of the 3rd, and then got on a plane that evening!

Drew met me at the airport in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. We spent the first day and a half in Dar just wandering around the city, but most of the rest of the trip was spent in Zanzibar. We took a 2 hour ferry to get to Stonetown, Zanzibar which is a fantastic city. Zanzibar gets its electricity from Dar, and apparently the electricity had just recently gone out and was going to take months to repair. Luckily, being habituated to our living situations back in our villages, I think Drew and I suffered less than the average tourist. My favorite part about Zanzibar was that, in spite of the large tourist industry there, I didn't feel harrassed as a foreigner as I do in Togo, for example. Instead of hearing the yells of "Yovo!" (white person) that I hear all the time in Togo, people and kids would just say "Jambo!" (how are you?) which I preferred greatly. It was also nice not to be stared at, and everyone in general just seemed so much more chill and welcoming.

Stonetown's streets fascinated me because the multiple-storied buildings and houses are largely crowded together, and to get around you often have to navigate through twisting alleys. It was fun because while we would often just guess which alley to take, we never really got lost because all the alleys eventually end up on a main road. The architecture has this beautiful rustic feel to it, and the city seems to be especially renowned for the ornate doors on its buildings. It made me wish I'd read up more on the history of the city before I'd arrived.

We ate a lot of seafood and curries. Zanzibar is known as the "Spice Island" for all the spices it produces. One day Drew and I went on a "spice tour" where we went to a farm and saw all kinds of plants and trees including those that produce spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, turmeric, vanilla, cloves, pepper, and lemongrass, and fruits including pineapple, jackfruit, starfruit, and dorian. During our stay we also took cheap trips (by way of the dalla-dallas - Zanzibar's equivalent to bush taxis) to the beaches on the northern and eastern sides of the island. The beaches all have pretty turquoise water and white sand. My one biggest complaint about Zanzibar was the overabundance of cats that roam the island; I've never seen so many wild, begging cats in my life! In spite of staying at hotels and eating out frequently, the trip was pleasantly affordable, and the trip overall was a welcomed, relaxing time spent away from village.

Stonetown market

Zanzibar is 90-something percent Muslim

Finding our way

Tunnel

Our first dinner on the island - fresh seafood and curry!

Every night in this garden in Stonetown, chefs sell fresh seafood and you can go and eat buffet style

Our tour guide from the Spice Tour talking about the vanilla bean

Did you know pineapple grew like this?

Cinnamon tree; the bark actually smells and tastes like cinnamon!

Drew with kids

Spices

Nutmeg

Jackfruit

Cloves - Zanzibar's primary cash crop

Starfruit

The tour provided lunch

The beach we went to at the end of the tour; it had warm water but it was really rocky.

Dalla-Dalla; this is what Drew and I used to get around the island.

Men selling fresh tuna by the side of the road

Kids playing soccer on the beach. The ferry in the background is the one we took to get to the island.

Stonetown beach (that's me on the wall)

One of the coolest restaurants we ate at in Stonetown

Pretty scenes from a beach on the eastern side of the island

Relaxing and reading

I got a cheap massage although it wasn't especially relaxing; I think having a legitimate license makes a significant difference....

A cool, cheap restaurant we went to that had great food
Check out that beach in the background!

More alleys

Eating at a cafe we found in one alley

Snack-and-rest time

A view of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania from the ferry

A view of Zanzibar from the plane

My layover was in Dubai. I got a shot of the new tallest building in the world!

Christmas 2009

2009-12-22T05:52:00.000-08:00

To celebrate Christmas this year, my friend Heather and I started our Christmas week out by going to visit Annie - a friend of ours who lives on the western side of Togo, just 10km from Ghana. Her region is lush with vegetation including lots of banana and cocoa trees, and there are a lot of hiking trails that lead to waterfalls! We all went on a little hike to see one of the biggest waterfalls there.

Afterwards, Heather and I met up with Emily and went to a nice little oasis on Lake Togo where we stayed in a cute little hotel for Christmas. We ate well and got to go swimming and even got to go out and do some activities on the lake. It was a nice relaxing Christmas.

Me at the beginning of the hike; the landscape reminded me so much of Jurassic Park!

Heather and I on a bridge on our hike

A neat tree

The beautiful waterfall!(that's me below)

Trying to cross the falls to get to the waterfall

Heather and me in our Santa hats at the bottom of the waterfall

We all ended up jumping in to the cold water... in our underwear :) We were all just girls and no one was around so we just did it

Annie figured out how to do a black-and-white mode on my camera; Heather, Annie, and me below

When we got back, we made snickerdoodle cookies in Annie's Dutch oven while listening to Christmas music!

Inside our hotel room

Our balcony

Catching up on American gossip magazines that are only 3 months old

Me and Heather relaxing in the hotel mini pool

On our way across the lake to Togoville in a canoe......with Santa hats

Heather and I watched a Charlie Brown Christmas on her computer on Christmas Eve

Me swimming in the pool

Heather

Emily, Heather and me in a paddle boat we rented .... for some exorbitant price for only 30 minutes of use ...
... But we enjoyed ourselves enormously

Emily went fishing with a bamboo stick and a piece of string that she bought off of a Togolese fisherman. We didn't catch any fish though. I tried and all I caught was Heather's hair.

Heather and Emily coming back from fishing on the shore. You can see a canoe in the background that the Togolese use to traverse the lake.

Thanksgiving and my trip up north

2009-12-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

This past Thanksgiving was the last Thanksgiving my stage group would spend in Togo since we’ll be leaving the country next August. So my friend Emily and I decided to go all out this year and kill our own turkey for a Thanksgiving feast.

We wanted this to be somewhat of an authentic dinner, and thanks to packages from our generous mothers, we were able to collect packets of instant stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie filling, etc. to help make such a dinner possible. All that remained was finding a turkey. Now, believe it or not, they actually raise turkeys here – huge, scary ones. With the help of Emily’s host mom, we were able to acquire a sizeable one for 15 mille (about 30 dollars) – which is quite a large sum of money here. I can’t tell you how much it weighed, but I picked it up by its wings (see picture below) while it was still living and it was pretty heavy. We named him Don the Dendon (dendon = turkey in French).

Early Thanksgiving morning, Emily and I along with our friends Drew (another Peace Corps volunteer) and Isaac (a friend of mine from high school who just arrived in Togo and is working for the Clinton Foundation in Lome) went over to her host mother’s house where Don was tied to a piece of wood and waiting for us. Emily and I had decided that we were going to kill him as a team effort, so her host brother held him down while Emily and I grasped the knife together. Well, we went at it, sawing away at the neck but the blade was too dull so we ended up having to switch knives (that poor bird). On the second attempt, we succeeded but were unprepared for the blood that squirted out onto our arms and legs, so I admit we did squeal then. Emily’s host mom teased us for that later. Since we had been explaining the Thanksgiving story to her earlier (we even did a mini skit for her where Drew and Emily p
layed Indians – with turkey feathers in their hair – and Isaac and I played the Pilgrims; see picture below), we simultaneously responded to her saying, “Oh but the first Americans squealed too.”

After boiling some water, Emily’s host dad poured the hot water over the turkey to make the feathers come out easier. The plucking process took a while, but at the end, the turkey looked just like what you’d buy at the supermarket. At that point we threw plucked Don into a cement bag and brought him to the bruschette guy (a vendor of skewered roasted meat) who we’d arranged to have roast our turkey. We brought him prepared stuffing and provided him with the needle things necessary to close the turkey up after stuffing him. He was baffled by the idea of stuffing the turkey, so Drew ended up having to do it for him. Then we left him to his work, but only after having him again reassure us that he’d do a good job. “Oh the turkey will turn out great, I guarantee it,” he said. “I can’t say as much for what you stuffed it with though.”

So we left him to his work and went back to Emily’s house to start the other dishes. Everything went pretty well (with the minor exception of half of one of the uncooked pumpkin pies spilling onto the floor). We started up the charcoal to have an extra “stove” to work with so that everything would be hot by the time we were ready to eat. When we were informed that the turkey was done, we sent Drew back to the road on his bike with a big basin bungee-corded to the back. And thus our roasted turkey came to us wrapped in foil and resting in a metal basin on the back of a bike. Emily de-stuffed him and I “carved” him, which was not the easiest task. We were all quite amused that the bruschette guy had given us the neck and head of the turkey as well. After having fun taking pictures with it, we ended up giving it along with what remained of the cooked carcass to one of Emily’s Togolese friends.

Thanksgiving dinner was absolutely delicious. All in all we had turkey (which turned out amazing), mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean and sausage casserole, corn casserole, salad, cornbread, pumpkin pie, and apple crisp. In going around the table saying what we were thankful for, the first thing we said was, “Thank you to our moms for helping us put this together!” We couldn’t get over how well everything had turned out. There were 5 of us in total (the 4 of us I mentioned before and then Ben, another one of Emily’s closest volunteer neighbors). Originally we had planned for 6, but Emerson (another volunteer neighbor) had unfortunately gotten in a moto accident the day before and had to be sent to Lome for medical care. Thanks to Isaac’s help though, we were able to send her a plate of leftovers the next day. We also made sure to send Emily’s host family a little sampling of all the food to thank them for their help during the turkey butchering process. What was left over after that, we all shared for breakfast the next day – with the exception of the pumpkin pie, which Emily and I greedily finished in bed early in morning while the boys were still sleeping. Early bird gets the worm.

So we had a great Thanksgiving!

Don the Dendon

Weighing the turkey by hand

Emily and I with the killing knife

Emily and I killing the turkey; you can see the blood on the knife below.

The conquerors and our victim

Isaac and Emily's dog, Fenway

Our Thanksgiving skit

Little Indian Drew and Emily's host mom boiling water for plucking the turkey

Pouring hot water over the turkey to facilitate plucking

Plucking

Fenway and one of the pigs in Emily's host family's compound

Me and the plucked turkey

The bruschette guy who roasted our turky; (below) the turkey stitched up after being stuffed with the stuffing

Isaac and Emily cooking

Making mashed potatoes on charcoal

Isaac and the cooked turkey head

Green bean and sausage casserole and scalloped corn on the gas stove

Removing the stuffing from the roasted turkey

Me carving the turkey

Indian Emily and Indian Drew and the turkey head

There weren't enough bowls for everything so we had to put the salad and carved turkey in the laundry basins

(thanks to the self-timer) A picture of all of us

Yum! This was our Thanksgiving food!

Drew and his drumstick

Apple crisp and pumpkin pie(s) for dessert

Leftovers for breakfast

Random extra picture: Drew and a Togolese child who was subjected to a permanent marker

I also wanted to briefly write about a week trip I took up to the northern region of Togo. Togo is made up of 5 regions which all relatively differ in climate and geography. From the south to the north, there’s Maritime, then Plateaux, Centrale, Kara, and Savannes. To give you some perspective, I live in the northeastern corner of Plateaux, and for this trip, I went and visited 3 volunteer friends of mine who live in villages in the northeastern corner of Kara region. This time of year is called Harmattan and is characterized by dusty winds that blow down from the Sahara desert. The northern regions of Togo logically suffer more from these dry, dusty winds than does my region, for example, and that was one of the first things I noticed in going up there. My skin and lips were always chapped and I found myself suffering from a dry cough while I was up there. By the end of the day, my skin was also just covered in dust. The general terrain was also fascinatingly different; it was much rockier and there was less vegetation.

First I visited Taylor, one of my friends from my stage. Taylor does a lot of work with an AIDS organization in her village, which is more a large town and big truck-stop for vehicles going north. It was interesting talking with her about her work just because, even though we’re both volunteers in the health domain, due to the absence of similar resources in my village, I don’t have the opportunity to work a lot with AIDS. Her experience as a volunteer is thus very different than mine in that she encounters a lot more death, which is obviously very difficult. Just the previous week, in fact, she had lost her best friend in village to AIDS, a tragedy which she was still recovering from while I was there.

On a more positive swing, Taylor has a very motivated Togolese counterpart with whom she works who created a huge community garden and employs local orphans to work the garden, using the profits from the sale of the produce that grows to pay for their school fees (which they otherwise have difficulty finding the money to pay for). What a great sustainable project! I enjoyed roaming around the huge garden and seeing plants from which produce like pineapple and ginger grow – things I’d never seen before.

After Taylor, I went and visited Karen, who was in the stage that came in 3 months after mine. Karen’s village is actually a World Heritage site, as it is home to the Batammariba tribe, who are renowned for the unique architectural structure of their huts, which are called la takienta, or more familiarly, the tata’s. I enjoyed touring some of the tata’s (which you’re able to do if you pay a fee to the families who live there) and learning about them with the help of one of her friends who served as a guide. I wanted to share some of the fascinating things I learned:

The architecture of the tata’s is original and elaborate and corresponds perfectly with the culture and belief s of its inhabitants. Nothing is accidental; everything either has a function or symbolic value. For example, the tata represents a male-female duality separated by the east-west axis. The southern part is the sacred side of the man, and the northern side is that of the woman. This appropriation of sides is significant when it comes to grain storage; certain grains, like millet, sorghum, and rice have masculine connotations and are therefore stored on the southern side of the house, while the grains with female connotations (beans and peanuts, etc.) are stored on the northern side.

The front of the tata is always oriented towards the west to protect it from the dominant rains and Harmattan winds, and also in order to face the “village paradise” of Kuye (the Batammariba are animist, and their beliefs are cultish and centered around ancestors who are believed to rise up to the level of the creator God, Kuye, incarnated by the sun). Sustaining relationships with dead ancestors is absolutely essential to the Batammariba, which they accomplish by sacrificing to the fetishes which are located in large number both outside and inside their houses.

The tata’s are constructed primarily with wood, straw, sand, and clay. If they need to be renovated, renovations are done during dry season (for obvious reasons). The upper terrace is the principal part of the house; it is where grains are stored, where one cooks, and where one sleeps (the “room” on the top of the house where they sleep is more of a low-roofed cave). The ground floor houses more ancestor fetishes and has designated space for the different animals (cows, sheep, chicken, and guinea fowl – all under one roof!), as well as access to a turret where there is a covered kitchen in the event of rain . There is only one door to the house, which was historically designed as a defensive feature. It was all really fascinating to learn about - especially because the historical traditions of the Batammariba tribe are carried on today by the descendants of the original families.

After Karen, I went and visited Brittany, another friend from my stage, although we unfortunately didn’t get to spend enough time together for me to see her work. We did continue on south together to meet up with a bunch of volunteers at our friend Nikhil’s house though. Nikhil's parents, who were in Togo for a few days, had arranged to make Indian food for any volunteers who could come visit. So we were treated to delicious vegetarian Indian food along with some other treats brought from the States – like truffles, which arrived in a completely melted state, but which we thoroughly enjoyed nonetheless with the use of spoons. It was a fun trip!

The arid north

Taylor in her counterpart's garden next to the ginger plants

They found and killed a snake while we were there.

Me and Taylor at the garden entrance

Karen walking through the fields in her village

Inside one of the Tata's; that's our guide in the kitchen area.

Going up onto the roof of a Tata

Me looking into a grain storage area (the grains are pictured below)

The sleeping "cave"

A Tata from a distance

Karen and I on the top of a Tata

I was trying to get a shot of cockroaches in one of my co-volunteer's latrines but I took this in the morning when there weren't that many; the night before, they were coating the walls and crawling all over the latrine lid. Yum!

Melted truffles from America!

Nikhil's family cooking dinner

All of us spoiled volunteers eating delicious Indian food

FARN

2009-11-10T01:37:00.000-08:00

I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to update my blog lately. This entry will make up for it though; bear with me because it’s really long, but I think it’ll be interesting for those of you who are interested in details of the kind of work I do here. It also includes pictures at the end!

For the entire month of October, I was busy in village preparing for what is called Foyer d’Apprentissage et de Rehabilitation Nutritionelle (FARN). I am at a loss for how to translate that title word for word, but essentially it is a program designed to teach mothers how to rehabilitate their malnourished children. The structure of the program is based on the notion that the best way to promote behavior change (on the part of mothers that will help improve their children’s state of health) is to actually practice certain behaviors over the course of the sessions; the idea is that they will gradually become habituated to what we practice and will therefore bring the behaviors and helpful things we do back into their own households – meaning sustainable behavior change.

This was absolutely the largest project I have attempted to undertake since starting my service in village last year. I was motivated to do it by the recognition that there is a large problem of malnutrition where I live. To get rough statistical evidence for my claim, I kept track at our weekly baby weighing sessions of how many malnourished and severely malnourished children came in for a month. To explain to those of you who aren’t familiar with baby weighing, it’s a way of tracking the growth of a child for the first two years of his/her life; mothers are supposed to bring their baby in once a month for weighing, and the weight of the child is plotted on a growth chart supplied by UNICEF, which uses drawn-in lines to demarcate whether the trajectory of the child’s growth is following that of a healthy, malnourished, or severely malnourished child. If a child is identified by this means as one who is not growing at a healthy rate, the mother can be informed as what steps to take to increase the child’s weight.

It seems simple enough, but not long after coming to post, I became aware of and disturbed by the fact that mothers were not always informed about the status of their child’s weight after weighing and – what’s worse – didn’t seem to care for the most part. If babies are weighed and their weight, plotted, but their health status is not understood by their mothers, quite frankly, baby weighing is a useless activity. As our health facility is understaffed (there is only 1 nurse and 1 midwife who serve my village and the 10 small villages surrounding it), I eventually took over the actual process of baby weighing so that the nurse and midwife could do all the vaccinations that occur simultaneously. Although I now tried to take advantage of my new position to explain each child’s status to each mother after weighing, I encountered 3 problems:
1) Sometimes the women come in such great numbers that they are overflowing out of the dispensaire (health center) and there is not enough time for me to carefully explain the growth chart of every child to every mother myself if I also want to weigh every child in a reasonable amount of time. Even though I often try to take time to do so nonetheless, how much important information can you fit in on the spot? Not much.
2) Even if the dispensaire is NOT terribly busy on baby weighing days and I DO have the time to discuss each chart with each mother, often the mother does not understand French, and there is no one available to translate for me. Or what I hate more is – and this is a very cultural thing – I’ll ask if the mother understands French (in local language) and she’ll nod yes, and then feign comprehension as I explain things to her, but really she understands nothing at all.
3) Even if the mother DOES understand French, and I can successfully explain a problem of her child’s growth rate to her and advise her as to how to proceed, she may understand but, more often than not, will not put my advice into practice at home (which is proven by the consistent underweight status of her child in following months).

After keeping track of the number of healthy vs. malnourished babies that came in over the course of a month (which is roughly supposed to represent the number of children in my village, as every one of them is supposed to be brought in once monthly), I calculated that nearly 40% of those children were malnourished to some degree. And those were the ones of parents who actually understood the importance of making use of the local health facility! I could only imagine how many more malnourished babies lived way out in the farms and were never brought in for healthcare purposes.

I decided that the FARN program was a good one to undertake because it would allow me to identify and work solely with mothers of children who had been consistently malnourished for an extended period of time and therefore give them the appropriate amount of necessary information in less time-constrained situations. I was worried, however, because, as many of you know, one of my greatest obstacles over the course of my service has been a lack of motivated counterparts with whom I can work, and FARN was absolutely not a project I could do on my own.

I brought my rough statistical evidence of the problem of malnutrition in the village to the next monthly meeting of the ASCs (Agents de Sante Communautaire) or local health workers (who, quite frankly, are not usually the most motivated people in the world, which is what made me nervous). I gave a general explanation of my idea of the FARN program and asked if anyone would be willing to work with me. I got nods, and so I scheduled a meeting which would give more details for the following week; I asked those who said they were interested to show up (although in my head, I worried that no one actually would – it has happened before).

But the next week, they actually showed up! It ended up being just the first pleasant surprise of many. The ASCs ended up successfully helping me actually locate the mothers of malnourished children that I’d identified during baby weighing sessions (but for whom I only had names and their general “neighborhoods” in the village), collect the fee we’d established that they’d pay for the week of food and activities (we decided on 300 cfa per woman for the entire week; that’s roughly about 75 cents), and then the ASCs themselves actually showed up for the training sessions I arranged for them (again, showing up doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is)! I was so pleased with the ASCs’ cooperation; I absolutely could not have done everything without them.

Let me explain a little more about the actual FARN program. Normally it’s a program that takes place over the course of 2 weeks or up to a month. Women meet in small groups at someone’s home (they’ll all take turns hosting; the importance of having FARN take place at a home is so as to provide a comfortable environment) once or twice a week for about 2-3 hours each time. Local trained health workers meet with them and lead what we call a sensibilization, or informative session on an important topic (it’s important that local trainers teach these sessions; if it was always just me, this wouldn’t be a sustainable project!). After that session, the women cook together to prepare a nutritious meal for their children; cooking together allows them to actually learn how to prepare such a meal (all the food is bought with the money that each woman contributed before the week started). In addition, there is a maman lumiere present at each session who helps teach and cook. Maman Lumiere stands for “Mother of the Light”, and she’s a very key part because she represents a model mother who is at the same socioeconomic status as the rest of the mothers, but who has at least one healthy baby at the same age; this proves that even if you are poor, you can still find ways to adequately care for your children. If women actually put what they learn into practice, their babies will actually gain weight by the end of the program (FARN is a well-known program that has been used in many underdeveloped countries in the world and has consistently shown positive results).

I had to make a few changes in the program. First of all, I was under a time constraint. Thanks to what I learned last year, I knew that beginning in November, women would be occupied in the fields because November is bean harvest month. And then in December, they’re busy earning money to prepare for the many end-of-the-year holidays, so they’re inaccessible then as well. This meant that I had to finish FARN by the end of October, which left me only a little time to prepare and train the ASCs, and I had to condense the program into one week with daily sessions, which I planned to take place the last week in October. I also didn’t have time to arrange “hosting” houses, so we planned for FARN to take place at the dispensaire. My idea was that this could be a practice FARN of sorts which would address the malnourished cases before the end of the year, and then we could actually do the real thing next year.

I organized a different topic for each day of FARN week. The following is a summary of what we taught the women (Excuse the rough titles; it was hard to translate them directly from French). I’m also including the meal we prepared each day, and pictures from each of the sessions:
Monday – Good Hygiene and Sanitation
The importance of washing your hands with soap, drinking potable water, and covering and protecting your food from flies. This presentation included a demonstration for which I rubbed my hands with fresh ginger and rinsed them with water (which is usually what the Togolese count as “washing your hands”); I showed them how even though my hands looked clean, you could still smell the ginger which proves that there are sometimes things (bacteria) on our hands that we can’t see, and rinsing does not suffice. Only using soap gets rid of the unseen. This was the first subject we taught of the week because we wanted them to understand the importance of and get in the practice of washing their hands with soap before eating/preparing food over the course of the week.
Meal of the Day: Enriched porridge made from corn and soyIn this picture and all the ones you see below similar to it, the people standing up teaching the seated women are my ASCs

Washing hands; by the end of the week, the first thing the women were doing upon their arrival was washing their hands and their kids' hands with soap. I was so proud of them!

Eating the porridge. The kids in these three photos (above) are among the most severely malnourished (with the exception of the kid on the right in the bottom picture; he's a nice fat brother)

Tuesday – Good Nutrition
The importance of breastmilk and well-balanced meals (for children under age 2). In Togo, for simplicity’s sake, development workers teach 3 food groups: Energy foods (i.e. grains and fats), Construction foods (i.e. protein foods), and Protection foods (i.e. fruits and vegetables). I drew a large diagram with pictures of these 3 groups and, after explaining what each group does and that an ideal meal contains at least one food from group, we had the women come up and give us examples of “well-balanced meals”.
Meal of the Day: Enriched porridge made from corn, beans, and peanuts

The ASCs who did a FANTASTIC job on the nutrition section.

My wonderful "Maman Lumiere", Clarisse

Clarisse's kids (above and below)

Wednesday – Good Childcare
How to prevent prevalent illnesses but what to do if your child actually gets sick. The 2 most prevalent illnesses we see among cases of children at this age who are brought into the dispensaire are malaria and diarrhea. We talked about preventative measures but I also did a demonstration with a “thermos baby” (I drew a face on a thermos); I poked a hole in the bottom and patched it up with tape for the first part, for which I showed that when you hydrate the baby (pour water into it), most of the water stays inside. But when the baby is sick with diarrhea (I took the tape off the hole), water comes out fast and if you don’t rehydrate a lot and more frequently, the baby can become “dry” and die. We also taught them how to make a rehydration drink that will stop up diarrhea with clean water, sugar, and salt.
Meal of the Day: pâte (a corn-based dish) with baobab leaf and bean sauce
We always had the mothers help Clarisse prepare the food so that they would learn how to prepare the nutritious meals themselves - in case they didn't already know (we used common meals with local ingredients so many already knew).

Thursday – Good Motherhood
The importance of vaccinating your child, following your child’s weight/growth chart, and practicing family planning (spacing your children). Again, I used more drawings and had the women try to interpret various growth lines. I also brought in physical examples of family planning methods to show the women, who were fascinated and interested by the idea that you can actually do something to prevent getting pregnant all the time; though knowledge of family planning is growing more and more widespread, there are still many cases of women who don’t know anything about it.
Meal of the Day: watchi (rice and beans) with a tomato and fish sauce

My favorite picture of Clarisse and her daughter

Friday – Review
Because most of the information we taught these women this week was new to them, I thought it was important to do a review session of all we had learned. I made up little “question cards” and posted them on our chalkboard, then had the women come up and choose a question that reviewed something we had learned this week (for example: How do you make a rehydration drink if your child has diarrhea?). If they answered the question right, they got a gift of bar soap. I was so impressed and proud of my women; overall, they rattled off the answers with no problem, and I could see that they were happy and proud of themselves for what they had learned. It was amazing.
Meal of the Day: pâte with peanut and okra sauce

The group picture we took at the end of the week. Most of the women wanted to hold up their gifts of soap for the picture - if you look really close you can see the yellow bars.

Overall the project turned out incredibly well. I was absolutely exhausted by the end of it all, but it was so worth it for a number of reasons: I was so encouraged that the ASCs actually pulled through with their part (it gave me hope that they’re not an entirely unmotivated lost cause; I think they became even more motivated too to see the positive results); everything came together thanks to their help. My Maman Lumiere was absolutely fantastic (a couple weeks before, I had been trying to think of who I could use for this role. I thought of this woman who I knew only because she came occasionally to baby weighing and always had such a positive energy and was always interested in the weight increase of her baby, who was always nice and fat. The problem was I didn’t know her name - I only knew her daughter’s first name, and that she sometimes sold oranges and cheap used clothes at the market; using this information, I went out to the street one day, told someone all I knew about her, and this person asked someone else, who asked someone else, and within 10 minutes, this woman was standing by my side. Talk about advantages of a small village, huh?) Her name was Clarisse and she was always in a good mood, always on time, was an incredible facilitator of the food-making, always stayed to clean up, and did all of this out of her own good will – never asking for compensation (which is so rare for a Togolese person). I could not have been more blessed to have her help me. Overall, women came on time (which is incredible); I reinforced that behavior by giving out gifts of enriched porridge flour or bananas to those who came before 7AM (when we started everyday). A lot of participating women also came to baby weighing that week and we already started seeing an increase in weight in their children, which really encouraged them and made them proud. And then I just got a lot of great feedback from the participating mothers, the nurse and midwife at the hospital, and the ASCs about what a great project it turned out to be. It made me feel good, but especially because I saw how they recognized that their participation helped make it a success. That was my greatest reward: to see the people of my village begin to recognize their own capacity. That is the start of sustainable change!

I think of other villages where my peer volunteers are, and I think of how, if this project had taken place there, it wouldn’t have been that outstanding a thing. But every village is different. And for mine, where there has been a constant struggle with getting people to participate and be motivated and actually pull any kind of project together, the success of this project represented a big step in the right direction.

OTHER RANDOM PHOTOS FROM OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER
Me and the gingerbread man Danielle made for me at our "autumn party"

Me and some other Peace Corps friends, Chrissy and Brittney

This picture truly represents the epitomy of my relationship with Danielle

nap time

fabric fall leaves from mom - the closest I get to Autumn around here

The welcome meal Danielle and I made for Danielle's replacement, Michelle, when she came for her post visit. We made homemade tortillas with bean and chicken filling, nacho cheese sauce, fruit salad, and cake with white chocolate and cranberry cookies (thanks to ingredients sent from the States).

I made Michelle a cake; that's her below!

Me and Danielle, sweaty and gross - but it's our last picture together at her house, so I had to put it up.

Kids studying by lamplight in my compound. Every night they use the chalkboard in my compound to study and I like to join them and help them with their homework when I can.

Watermelon that I found in my market! It's a rarety!

Michelle spent one night at my house during her post visit week and my gas ran out so I taught her how to use the charcoal. We made pizza!

Danielle, me, and Michelle (below) at Danielle's goodbye/ Michelle's welcome party

The president of the NGO where Danielle worked gave her a nice going away speech and gift and we took a group picture with everybody she's worked with.

This is a shot of part of the (horrible) road that leads out of my village.

A few weeks ago, an 8 month old baby died, and the cause was determined to be sorcery. The "sorcerers" held accountable were identified, and there were huge meetings that took place with hundreds of spectators to determine what steps should be taken to avoid any further deaths. The consensus was to "dig up the souls of living people that the sorcerers hid" under the palm bush you see in the picture above "to free them before the sorcerers can kill them too". I snuck a picture of the digging process; I unfortunately couldn't fit in the MASS amounts of spectators watching from my compound.

My neighbor boy in his cute overalls

Solim (my little host sister) helping me pick baobab leaves for one of my FARN meals

Small world! Me and Isaac Gross (both from Belmont High's graduating class of 2003); Isaac is working for the Clinton Foundation for a little while in Togo (just arrived last week) and we went out to lunch to catch up.

Some Amusing Anecdotes from Togo and Ghana

2009-09-10T03:14:00.000-07:00

Talk about the occasional culture clash :) ....

The Phone Conversation

At the end of July, I went on a short vacation to Ghana. I returned to Togo only to realize that I’d left my beloved headlamp at New Haven Hotel in Accra. The following real conversation is the one I had (verbatim) with the desk clerk(s) when I called the hotel to see if they’d found it. (Note: The official language of Ghana is English, but with the different accents and terms for things, miscommunications occur frequently)

Clerk: Good evening. You have reached New Haven Hotel. How may I help you?
Me: Yes, hello. My name is Kristina. I was a guest in your hotel last night. I stayed in room #2, and I believe I left my flashlight on the bed. I’m calling to see if it was found.
Clerk: Ok well what day do you want a reservation for?
Me: No – I don’t want a reservation. I was just there – last night.
Clerk: Ok well you can’t make a reservation for last night.
Me: Yes, I know that – Look, I don’t want a reservation. I stayed there. Last night. In room #2…
Clerk: Yes
Me: …And I left my flashlight on the bed.
Clerk: Yes yes yes.
Me: Was it found?
Clerk: Yes yes yes.
Me: ….So you have it?
(silence on the other line)
Me: Are you following me?
Clerk: No, I don’t think I am.
Me: (sigh) Ok look…
Clerk: Hold on, I’m going to transfer you to someone else.
Me: Ok.
(babbling in local language on the other line. A different man picks up the phone)
Clerk #2: Good evening. This is New Haven Hotel. How may I assist you?
Me: Hello. I was a guest, last night – Sunday night – in your hotel. I stayed in room #2 and I left my flashlight there. I want to know if you found it.
Clerk #2: So you want a reservation for Sunday.
Me: No – I DON’T want a reservation. I lost my flashlight at your hotel and I’m trying to locate it.
Clerk #2: You lost your flash …?
Me: FLASHLIGHT
Clerk #2: Flash …. Light?
Me: Yes – you know – a light, you use – at night – when it’s dark?
Clerk #2: Flashlight?
Me: Look – it’s black. Did someone find something BLACK on the bed in room #2 this morning when they cleaned the room?
Clerk #2: Ok you are going to have to call back tomorrow.
Me: Well can’t someone just go look in the room right now?
Clerk #2: That man isn’t here right now.
Me: What man?
Clerk #2: The man who goes in the room.
Me: Well did the cleaning man turn anything in this morning?
Clerk #2: That’s who I’m talking about – He isn’t here right now. You will have to call back tomorrow.
Me: (sigh) Ok, what time?
Clerk #2: Any time.
Me: Ok – I’m going to call back tomorrow.
Clerk #2: Yes, have a good evening. And thank you for calling New Haven Hotel.

The punchline is: Another 2 conversations (and a couple mille of phone credit) later, I discovered that they miraculously did find my headlamp after all – at which point an almost equally absurd and repetitive conversation ensued in my effort to convey to them that I wanted them to hold it at the front desk until the next PCV who was going to stay there could retrieve it for me. Special Thanks to Larissa, a fellow PCV, for ultimately recovering it.

The Post Office

My personal post box is in the post office of a village 15 km north of my village in Togo. It takes me 45 minutes to get there on bike. There are only 2 personnel who work there; we know each other very well. They're actually quite the amusing pair. In addition to knowing me (because I, in addition to Danielle [my closest PCV neighbor)], receive the most mail out of any of their clients), they know that I have to bike a ways in order to even come and check my mail (mail arrives on Tuesdays and Fridays so I'll often bike all the way up at the end of the week just to check). Nevertheless, the following true anecdote demonstrates how their need for routine necessarily overrides their ability to extend any customer service that accomodates that fact.

I arrive on bike at 7:30AM. The post office has just opened. I check my post box but nothing is inside. I go inside to double check because sometimes they do not get the mail into the boxes in a timely fashion and it's still at the front desk.

me: Marius, Eugene, Bonjour!
M&E: Bonjour! Bon Arrivee (Welcome)!
me: Et le travail? (How is your work?)
M&E: Ca va. Et la maison? (It's fine - and your house?)
(I approach the front desk)
me: Oh ca va. Hey so no mail came for me or Danielle yesterday?
E: Oh, no. None came. (He goes back to shuffling through papers)
me: (disappointed) Oh... Ok. (I'm about to turn away when suddenly I notice a flat rate box with the familiar American eagle on it sitting on the floor against the wall behind the desk) Wait - what about that box?
E: (turns around) Oh ... yeah (laughs awkwardly and then turns back to his papers)
I stand there for a couple seconds, confused about exactly what's going on.
me: So.... can I have it?
E: (looks up surprised) Oh - you want it now?
me: Well ... if I could, yes. See, I did only bike up here just to get the mail...
E: (looks a little stressed) Well, you see, we just opened.
me: I know...
E: It's just that we have things we need to do first. Do you mind waiting a little while?
me: Oh. No, I'm not in a rush I guess. I can wait.
I go and sit down on a bench against the wall. Eugene and Marius now pick up some towels and beginning dusting down all the tables and folders. They pull out pens and line them up on the table. They rearrange chairs and open the side door to let some air in. They sweep the floor.

20 minutes later they motion me over, and then hand me my package over the front desk.

The Worst Bush Taxi Ride Ever

I am in the front passenger seat of a 5-placer bush taxi. I am the only one in the car. I was transferred to the car after the original driver who was going to take me to my final destination decided not to since he couldn’t find any other passengers who were going that far. So I was swindled into making the (once in a lifetime – never again) mistake of paying the full fare (to my final destination) so that the first chauffeur could figure out how to split the earnings with this new driver [1]. “There’s no one in the car,” I remarked apprehensively when I was moving my bags. The new driver waved the remark off saying “Oh – on va partir, toute de suite, toute de suite!”[2] I know that’s what they all say, but I’m hoping it’s true in this case since it’s market day in this particular village and there are a lot of people milling around [3].

No time exaggeration: 2 HOURS later, I am still sitting by myself in the stationary car. For the first hour of this time period, the driver had disappeared. Irked, I had finally climbed out of the car and spotted him across the street eating beans and garri [4]. He happened to look up and saw me glaring, at which point he wolfed the rest of his meal down, rushed over, and motioned for me to get back in the car, saying we were going to leave. “You weren’t even looking for passengers!” I scolded. “Yes I was,” he lied. “Get back in the car – I’ll get one more person and then we’ll leave.” He disappeared into the marché [5] again.

Now he has reappeared. He is standing in front of the car, yelling at a vendor of silly bumper stickers and car trinkets because he just bought a plastic butterfly for a ridiculous 400 cFa, which he had the vendor put on the hood of his car, but is now enraged because the vendor didn’t put it on symmetrically enough for his tastes [6]. He has now removed the antenna and is using it as a measuring device to prove that the plastic thing is not precisely in the middle of the hood. The driver is obviously ticked off enough from the argument, but I can tell he’s avoiding my eyes, which are emitting the Glare of Death through the windowshield as I’m sitting on the other side with my arms crossed.

I can’t take it anymore. I get out of the car and grab my bags, which – when the driver sees – makes him all flustered. He drops his argument and motions with his hands for me to get back in the car, saying again that we’re going to leave. I tell him it’s too late, I’ve already been waiting 2 hours, and I want my money back – I’m going to look for another car. He says we’re leaving. I repeat my previous statement in a louder voice. He says to just give him 5 more minutes to look for one more passenger. I yell my repeated statement, now drawing attention which embarrasses him. He approaches me and hushes me saying, ok ok – if I just give him 25 cFa, we can go. I tell him I’m not giving him any more money and besides what does he need it for? He says he doesn’t have any more money and he just wants to buy a cigarette and then we can go. “You know why you don’t have any more money?” I scold in a loud voice, “It’s because you just wasted your money on a pink piece of plastic! I mean – what is that anyways?” I wave at the butterfly on the hood, exasperated. He hushes me, grabs my bags, throws them in the car, swears we’re leaving, guides me back into the seat, and then gets into the driver’s seat – at which point he pulls out and lights a cigarette as he starts the ignition. I didn’t even waste my breath asking why he dared asking me for 25 cFa when he already had a cigarette; I’m just glad we’re finally leaving.

Ten minutes later we pull over to a house on the side of the road because he says he’s arranged to pick up someone. He gets out of the car and then comes back solo 15 minutes later. “He’s not coming?” I inquire, to which the driver responds saying he’s just not ready yet and since I’m so pressée-ed [7], he’s just going to take me ahead first. We get on our way and start mulling over the meaning of his last statement, especially since I’ve become aware that he’s not appearing to look for other passengers. “You know,” I say very calmly, “I’ve already paid.” “I know,” he says. A couple seconds go by. “Meaning,” I further clarify, just to be on the safe side, “I’m not paying you anymore.” Sure enough – his next statement verified exactly what I’d been afraid of. “Well,” he said, “this is like you’ve loué-ed the car now.” [8]

That was the last straw. I went off on the tirade of a lifetime. I started berating this guy at the top of my lungs about how he was a cheat, how he’d wasted my time, and on and on and on. In the seconds I’d pause for air, he’d interject, saying that well, maybe I could at least cadeau him a couple loaves of bread … and some money [9].

“NO CADEAU!” I yell. And now I’m at the point where I’m threatening him with the lie that if he asks me one more time for any kind of extra compensation, I’m going to bring him to the chief of gendarmes (police) in our destination village (who I claim to know personally) and I’m going to have him imprisoned. The driver totally falls for it and waves his hands, saying that isn’t necessary [10]. I finally finish my diatribe and revert to glaring out the window. I'm still fuming, but I'm trying to calm down. In my head, I’m daring him to say one more thing.

He does. After about 5 minutes of silence, I can see him looking at me out of the corner of my eye. He asks, calmly but completely seriously, “Are you mad?”[11]

My head turns slowly towards him in disbelief that he’s really asking me this question. My eyes meet his and he smiles, then starts wagging his finger at me as if he’s just thought up the best idea in the world. “You know,” he says, “You and I should make babies together.” [12]

Cultural explanations
[1] The reason you never do this is because if something happens (such as the car breaks down or you’re not leaving quickly enough), the driver already has your money, and you’re obligated to stay with him – unless you can succeed in getting your money back from him, which is very difficult to do. You always pay only after arriving at your final destination.
[2] Translation: “We’re going to leave – right away, right away!”
[3] A bush taxi will never (or I should say, rarely) go on its way until the car is filled to capacity (meaning 7-8 people in a 5 passenger vehicle). This is why, when you look for bush taxis, it’s better to get in one that already has people in it. Otherwise, you may be waiting for a very long time.
[4] garri is manioch powder. Delicious with beans.
[5] marché is French for market. Every village has a designated market day once a week (or more than once a week if it’s a big city).
[6] The Togolese LOVE car trinkets. Every bush taxi will be ornate with beads or dirty stuffed animals hanging from the broken rearview mirrors, flags from random countries – especially the U.S. flag since they love America, bumper stickers with random euphemisms written on them, overpowerful car fresheners, you name it. They spend a ridiculous amount of money on these things – but then complain about how they have no money.
[7] To be pressé –ed is a term Peace Corps volunteers use, mixing the French and English language, meaning: to be in a rush.
[8] Togolese taxi drivers will often try to con foreigners into louer-ing, or renting, a car. This means that you pay for every empty seat in addition to your own. The advantage is that you can leave right away and don’t have to wait around for other passengers. A disadvantage is that sometimes you’ll agree to louer ahead of time, but then the driver will pick up other people and allow them to occupy the extra seats (which you’ve agreed to pay for) but then still demand that you pay the full fare at the end – which always results in a huge argument. The other thing is, drivers will often try to trick you into it; they’ll take you to your destination and then say that since they had extra seats, you should pay for those too. It’s absolutely absurd, but they’ll fight with you over it and you have to end up yelling to get your way. If you're too meek, they will absolutely take advantage of you (I had to learn to yell at taxi drivers when I came here - it was very difficult for me to do at the beginning, which meant I got cheated a lot at first). This is why you always have to be clear that you’re paying for your seat alone.
[9] To cadeau someone something means to give them a gift. The Togolese make really funny logic out of it. They’ll say that you don’t have to pay, but you should cadeau them something of equivalent value. They are never ashamed to ask for cadeaus.
[10] In this case I'm slightly ashamed to say that I took advantage of a stereotype; the Togolese believe that white people are incredibly powerful and have very high contacts. For example, people here believe that, since I come from America, I know Obama personally. In this particular case, I was lying to scare him, and he found it completely believable.
[11] The thing about taxi drivers is that arguing and yelling is their lifestyle. They do it without ever really taking it seriously. It’s all a game. They’ll yell and scream at someone one day and then be laughing and joking with them the next. It is for this reason that they won’t be able to tell when we’re actually mad because they think we’re just going along with how things just are.
[12] Welcome to my life, and to the life of every other female foreigner around here. You won’t know someone for 5 minutes and they’ll already be talking about marrying you and having babies with you. They’re not always completely serious, but it gets really old, really fast.

Apprentice Training and Camp UNITE - Now with PICTURES

2009-08-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

The first week in August, I was busy preparing for a 2-day training of apprentices from various trades on the topic of sexual health. I may have mentioned this in a previous entry, but my closest volunteer neighbor, Danielle, is nearing the end of her service, and we wanted to do a project together before she leaves in November. So we put together this training session for apprentices, who normally drop out of school to follow a trade and therefore are not well educated on the subject. We chose 2 apprentices from each workshop with the idea that, after the training, they could bring the knowledge they gain back to their respective workshops and share it with the other apprentices, thereby serving as peer educators of sorts. We did the training for Danielle's village at the end of June, but weren't able to get around to doing it in my village until just a few weeks ago. The training in my village was made a little more complicated due to the need to translate into local languages (thankfully we got by with only having to translate from French into Kabiye and Ewe - in spite of fact that there are more than 6 dominant local languages that exist in my village). The Monday prior to the Thursday and Friday training, I had to walk around my entire village to personally hand out invitations to the 17 workshops, which was a little draining to do in the hot and humid weather - not to mention, I was coming down with a bad cold. But pretty much everybody I invited turned up, which made it worth it. I will admit too that the training did end up going better than I thought, although it's always hard to say how much new knowledge stayed in the apprentices' heads after walking away. I did have other villagers come up to me later feeling left out and asking why they hadn't been invited. It's always hard to please everybody.... I'm glad they were at least interested though.

The Saturday immediately following the training, I left to go up north for Camp UNITE; Peace Corps collaborates with local NGOs in Togo to fund a camp every vacation for boy & girl apprentices, and boy & girl students. Peace Corps volunteers from all over the country nominate motivated adolescents in their villages to be picked to go to camp, and then volunteers themselves work as counselors along with other motivated Togolese counterparts (who are nominated just as the kids are). This year I was a counselor for the girl students' camp week. We had a total of 50 girls and about 16 counselors (Togolese and Americans combined). As the camp is organized by Peace Corps Volunteers, it is very much like camp in the States - songs, dancing, recreational activities, etc. But everyday there were also sessions (led by counselors) on topics such as self-confidence, good communication, puberty & adolescence, HIV & AIDS, rape and sexual harrassment, etc. My 2 sessions to teach were on self-confidence and puberty & adolescence - the latter of which is a personal favorite of mine to teach because Togolese kids always have a ton of questions to ask (since it's kind of taboo to speak about at home). We also had "challenges" which girls worked on in small groups, encouraging them to learn the value of teamwork. Over the course of the week, we additionally took time to work on and present skits and traditional dances. At the end of the week, we had a special visit from the U.S. Ambassador in Togo and the Togolese Secretary of State. One of the groups of girls I worked with pulled together a skit on self-confidence and its role in defending oneself against sexual harrassment as a part of the welcoming ceremony for the special guests. My girls were absolutely HILARIOUS in their skit - they could have won Oscars in my opinion. I was so proud of them.

The first day of camp, the girls were all a little timid and quiet, but by Saturday morning - the day we were all leaving - they were all bawling their eyes out because they didn't want to leave. I guess that means camp was a success! My voice was pretty much gone by the end of the week from all the singing and shouting I did with the kids, and I collapsed from exhaustion on Saturday night, but I really did have fun. I'll definitely do it again next year.

P.S. I now have officially finished 15 months and have exactly 1 year left of my Peace Corps service in Togo!

PICTURES!!
The apprentices in my apprentice training

Me explaining the menstrual cycle

Edwige, my host mom - but also the President of the Association of Seamstresses, translating

A carpenter apprentice taking a turn explaining the reproductive systems

Danielle leading a small group discussion

Emma (the midwife at the dispensaire) and Odile (the intern there) presenting Family Planning methods

CAMP UNITE! Girls working on a challenge with us cheering them on

This is Paggie, a character we invented during stage who was supposed to represent obstacles and discouragement. He was a local peer educator dressed up in a way that frightened the girls but made me laugh.

My presentation during camp on Adolescence and Puberty

Another camp session (every volunteer presented a session in collaboration with a Togolese homologue)

Traditional dance night

Me and the girls in my dorm building explaining the traditional dance we presented. How do you like my traditional outfit? :)

Camp UNITE parade through the village on the last day of camp

Me and Martine, my Togolese homologue during camp

Dancing in the middle of the village

Lots of dancing at camp!

Another challenge

Larissa, me, and 2 girls on our Yellow team

Dances for the closing ceremony

Curious onlookers

The Yellow Team

The Ambassador giving her speech at the closing ceremony

My Yellow team girls' skit on self confidence and its role in defending oneself against sexual harrassment

All the camp participants

The presentation of the end of camp certificates; The certificates were given out in order of dorm building - This is my building doing a little jig after we received ours

Candelight ceremony

Bonfire dance the last night of camp

Some sad campers who don't want to leave

Dave's visit

2009-07-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend, Dave, came and visited me for the month of July. We had a blast! I felt especially lucky because he was here for my 24th birthday (my 2nd out of the 3 birthdays I will have in Togo). The pictures below are from his visit.

Welcome to Togo, Dave!

Birthday package from mom

4th of July Smores-making over the gas stove (we were too tired to light the charcoal and do it the real way)

a very hot 4th of July 2009 (Dave's first day in my village)

Birthday pancakes on July 5th

Kids playing soccer in my compound with a very attentive audience under the gazeebo shade

Dave eating comme at my market

Cooking at home

Dave helping out at baby-weighing

a view from my village

cute kids on the way home from the dispensaire after a rainstorm

my "neighborhood"

Reading on my front porch

me & Dave, credit to my little host brother's amateur photography skills

Solim and Fofo (my little host family siblings) giving Sudoku a shot

shot from my back window (I just liked this picture)

Dave doing dishes

Rainy days (it rained the first solid week Dave was here - This is why we call it rainy season)

bush taxi full of Peace Corps volunteer yovos on the way north to Kara

Fufu for lunch in Kara

Danielle, her boyfriend Nate, and Dave on the search for our hotel

dinner with real salad!

On the way to Danielle's friend's home village in Kara region where we were invited for lunch

Danielle's friend's family

We met up with some other local volunteers in Kara

>Evala- the coming of age ceremony for young Kabiye boys. The events were packed. In this last picture if you look closely, you can see the man in the grey suit at the desk; that's Togo's current president, Faure Gnassingbe

Soccer game in Emily's village

Dave, Emily, Fenway

Togolese doing laundry in the river

Dave with Fenway & Wrigley (Emily's pets)

the whole ensemble

Dave on a moto on the way to my village

Bike ride up to Elavagnon (Danielle's village)

Our garden is growing!

Lunch chez Danielle; courtesy of Nate, we had enchiladas with real cheese from America

Nap time on the cool cement floor

Look familiar? (refer to pictures from Dad's visit) My little host brother later asked me why American men don't like wearing shirts.

Making peanut butter

Eating coconut after I finally got it open

Dave's new Togolese outfits

This is how I get water during rainy season

The last step of peanut butter-making: grinding the peanuts into butter at the mill

My youngest host brother, Fofo, volunteered to fix my latrine door which was falling off because the nail had rusted out. It was really cute and I had to sneak a picture.

The cute kids in my compound (notice Solim dancing by herself in the background)

Dave's goodbye pictures with my host family (in the last picture though, I don't know the kid on the far right; he was just a neighbor kid who decided to jump in last minute)

These last pictures are just of Green Turtle Lodge in Ghana, which is an isolated "resort" by the ocean where we spent time right before Dave went back to the States.

June activities

2009-06-30T03:55:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! This'll just be a quick update because I don't have a lot of new news, but I haven't written an entry in a while now...

Since Dad left at the beginning of June, I've been trying to adjust back to solitary life in village. I felt a little unfocused since I was in the States for most of May on vacation, and then Dad came out right afterwards, so I felt a strong need to be productive again, but the biggest adjustment I needed to make first was getting used to being alone again. I will say though, contrary to most warnings I got from people, it was not that difficult to come back to Togo after having gone back to the States. It was hard to say goodbye to everyone again, but the thing is, I don't currently have a place of my own in America; my house and my work and projects and current friends are all in Togo. So interestingly enough, I almost felt like I was actually away from "home" while in the States.

A new stage, or Peace Corps training class of volunteers, came in at the beginning of June, which kind of smacked me in the face with the reality that I only have just over one year left of service now. Time flies. It'll be really hard to say goodbye to all the volunteers who are ending their service this year, leaving in August, and being replaced by these new people.

Over the course of June, I've been focusing on a select few number of projects. I gave several expositions and sensibilizations on the importance of the Moringa tree in my village, and then successfully distributed about 150 of the trees that we (the middle school environmental club and I) planted back in April on Earth Day. I distributed them to students who sat in on the sensibilizations - the hope being that once they understand what an essential tree it is, they'll take good care of it. I also sent each kid home with one to give to a neighbor, instructing them to pass it on along with a verbal summary of what they now know about the tree. My goal is to eventually give a Moringa tree to most families in my village and equip them with the knowledge of its benefits.

My closest Peace Corps volunteer neighbor, Danielle and I have also been working hard organizing a training on sexual health for apprentices in our villages. Most apprentices have dropped out of school in order to devote all of their time to learning a profitable trade. The disadvantage to that is that they are therefore not exposed to information about different sexually transmitted illnesses, how one gets pregnant, the significance of the changes the body undergoes during adolescence, etc. So Danielle and I, with the help of some of homologues, organized an intensive 2-day training on the material; we went around to all of the ateliers, or workshops with apprentices, in each of our villages and selected the 2 most dynamic apprentices from each workshop. The idea is that after the selected adolescents are trained, they will go back to their ateliers and spread the message to the other apprentices - thereby serving as peer educators of sorts. We already did the training in Danielle's village last week, and it seemed to be very successful. The apprentices seemed very eager to learn all the material. The training in my village is scheduled for next week - and I'm a little more nervous about mine than I was hers because my training will have to be in local language (and so much information and effect and time is always lost in the process of translation), my homologues aren't quite as dynamic, and my kids are a little quieter too. But I'm hoping for the best.

I've also started planning a really big project for the end of August/ beginning of September based on a frustration I've developed over the fact that there are malnourished children of a number of women who've been coming to the baby-weighing sessions and have not shown much improvement (i.e. gained a satisfactory amount of weight) for months now. It's always a difficult situation for me on Thursdays, when we do the baby-weighing at my dispensaire, because there are usually so many women, and then there's the language barrier (the midwife and nurse are usually in the other room doing vaccinations, so I'm usually on my own), so I don't have the time or ability to convey detailed messages to the mother concerning what she must do to get her baby to achieve a healthy weight. And then sometimes, even when I do do that, the mother will give me an understanding nod to appease me, but then she'll go home and do nothing. It's that same frustrating fact I always allude to that I can only do so much, and then it's all in their hands. But I came up with the idea to do a training over the course of several meetings per week for a month with the mothers of all these consistently malnourished babies. The way it would hypothetically work would be that 3 times a week for 2 hours or so, we would all meet together and actually cook a nutritious meal to give them a demonstration of the type of food they should be feeding their child. While the food is cooking, I, with the help of some homologues and a maman lumiere (a mother in the same socioeconomic status as the rest of the mothers with healthy living habits and a healthy child - i.e. a model mother) would give one sensibilization per day on subjects such as the importance of hygiene, what to do when a child has diahrrea, the essential food groups that must be incorporated into a child's diet, etc. etc. The children are also weighed at the beginning and end of the month-long training, and the hope is that, if the mothers start incorporating the information into their behaviors at home, the child will ultimately show an improvement in weight by the end of the training. It's an opportunity to finally give exclusive attention to the women who are obviously struggling to support the health of their children. I'm really excited about the potential for success with this project, but I still have a lot of planning and work that needs to go into the organization first before this can all get pulled together.

So that's what I've been working on, and I've been glad to feel busy again. My boyfriend Dave is coming out in 2 days for a month, so I'm really excited about that too. He'll be bringing me a replacement camera so hopefully by the next entry I'll be able to post pictures again too.

Dad's Visit

2009-06-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

From May 5 - May 21, I went home to the States for a brief vacation! I had a blast but unfortunately lost my camera during the trip, so I can't post any pictures from the trip or from the several weeks in Togo just prior to leaving. However, a few days after arriving back in Togo, my Dad came for a 10-day visit. Thanks to the use of his camera, I've been able to post some pictures from his trip.

Dad's first day in Togo; a picture of us in front of the Peace Corps headquarters in Lome.

Taking a nap at the hotel, exhausted from the long trip and the heat.

Fabiola and me at the Grand Marche in Lome. This is my last picture with Fabiola before she ended her service this past week :(

On the way to Notse with some other volunteers for a Peace Corps organized festival advertising the benefits of the Moringa tree to local Togolese (Dad's first bush taxi ride)

Arriving at the hotel in Notse.

Setting up the charcoal at my booth for my presentation on the transformation of Moringa seeds into oil.

Grinding the Moringa seeds

Kids' Corner

Unloading Moringa trees to sell

Moringa advertisement poster

Moringa parade

Explaining oil transformation to interested Togolese

me and Dad!

Teaching the Togolese how to play musical chairs

Our audience

View of the marche from Dad's and my hotel room in Notse

Breakfast of bouillie the morning we left Notse

Gas station - bush taxi style

Walking to the Atakpame Peace Corps transit house with some other volunteers on the way back to village

Hanging out/Talking on the phone at the transit house

Dad and the little friends he made on the way to the Atakpame marche

Stocking up on vegetables - because I can't get them in village!

street food lunch

Dad's first moto-taxi ride in Togo - the last leg of the trip before we finally got to my village

nap time at my house

On the way to visit Danielle (that's me on the moto up ahead)

Chez Danielle

Touring Elavagnon (Danielle and Dad)

Now that rainy season is starting, Danielle and I wanted to try planting a vegetable garden. Dad helped plant.

Dad drawing water from the well

Dad and his favorite part of my village: the pigs

Visiting the school where I teach during the school year

The mill outside my house

Cooking and eating dinner - courtesy of the self-timer feature (The sign on my wall in the above picture is the sign Danielle made and put up for my arrival back in Togo - it was really sweet)

Dad's first taste of Tchouk (the local beer)

We went to the fields to show Dad what that's like. On the way we crossed paths with some Fulani cows being herded off to the market to be sold.

At the fields

Helping my host family plant peanuts

We stopped by one of my village neighbor's houses on the way back from the fields because he wanted to show off the skin he had kept from an alligator he caught

Dad watching pigs eat scraps I threw in the bushes

Playing with American toys!!

Laundry time

Thursday baby weighing

I still love holding babies!

Torn

2009-04-24T03:14:00.000-07:00

A storm was coming. Lightning was illuminating the cumulonimbus clouds every few seconds as they rolled in faster and faster with the increasing wind. I was in the thatch-roofed cooking hut with 10 year-old Solim, who was at work making dinner - the usual meal of pate (corn and manioch flour boiled and stirred into a consistency similar to that of play-dough). The hut was dimly lit by a lantern hanging on a nail on the wall, but Solim had propped a weak flashlight between her cheek and shoulder to better see into the pot as she used both hands to stir with a wooden spoon half her size. She was thinking about and calculating out loud the difference in our ages: 23 and 10. We had just been talking about birthdays; as is the case with the majority of children in the village, she doesn't know her exact birthday - only that she was born on a Wednesday (the Togolese use the days of the week to determine the name of their children), and that sometime this year, she will turn 11. Outside, a handful of men were wandering into the compound, weary and still dressed from their all-day work in the fields. Now that it has started raining regularly again, everyone is hurrying to plant their fields of corn. The sooner you plant, the sooner it grows, and the sooner you can sell it for money. But the rush can mean taking a risk; if you plant your fields immediately after the first rain of the season, but then it doesn't rain again for a while, you could waste an entire crop - and that's a serious consequence for someone whose main source of income comes from the yield of their fields. I don't know a single farmer who doesn't immediately go get a drink upon arriving home from the fields. Even the threatening storm couldn't keep these men from crowding into my host mom Edwige's one-room boutique to take a shot or two of Sodabi - the local equivalent to vodka.

"So that means, when you were 13 years old, I was born!" Solim said triumphantly with a grin.
"That's right," I confirmed. "Now see if you can calculate what years we were each born in," I challenged. But right then we were interrupted by shouts from outside. Solim and I looked at each other and then jumped up and sprinted out of the hut to see what was going on. The wind had really picked up by now and was whipping sand into the air. I squinted and tried to shield my eyes with my hand to see. Then I saw him and my heart started pounding. He was dressed in a light grey suit and was moving slowly, putting one foot just in front of the other, heading directly for my porch. The way the light from the flashlights of the shouting men illuminated his suit made him look like a ghost. He stopped about 5 feet from my porch gate but still refused to turn and face the men and Edwige, who were quickly approaching and yelling at him in Kabiye.

I mentioned in my last entry that, only recently, I'd started having problems with this village fou, who was coming and hanging out on my porch during the days. It was a little annoying, but he seemed harmless - just a little crazy is all. Edwige or somebody would usually chase him away right away. Truthfully, I felt sorry him. As the story goes, he had been a student and was going to enter his last year in high school when, after coming back from summer vacation with his Dad in the north, he started acting differently and was never the same since. He only continued to spiral downward, affected by an undiagnosed mental illness. He's my age.

So I pitied him more than anything. But then he started stealing stuff from my porch. Everything was retrieved and he was forbidden to come back again, but he kept returning anyways. The first time I really began to feel anxious about his visits was when one day he showed up and no one else was in the compound and all of my neighbors were at their fields. As harmless as I believed him to be, I realized that if he did try anything, no one would be around to help me. After that visit, he was seriously warned by members of the village who were intervening on my behalf - and with the support of his parents- that if he showed up one more time, he would be gravely beaten.

And yet here he was again. I don't know if my heart was beating fast out of fright for wondering what his true intentions are for coming back again, or out of anxiety from seeing Edwige break off a large branch from a tree and hand it to the burly mason who then advanced quickly towards the fou. I knew what was coming.

Bolts of lightning were tearing across the sky directly above us now. I couldn't help but feel as if I was in the middle of a scene from a horror movie. The mason stopped only inches away from the fou's face and, yelling, waved the big stick above his head, but the fou didn't budge. The mason then pressed the stick against the fou's chest and pushed it hard enough that the fou stumbled back a couple steps before regaining his balance and planting his feet firmly against the ground again. That was it; the mason raised the stick high and, with a loud crack, brought it down hard against the fou's chest.

I immediately cringed and turned away, hearing myself whimper. I could not for the life of me understand the entertainment that the crowding observers saw in the beating that followed. I turned to look again only when I heard loud shouts from the crowd. The fou had started fighting back! Now, I can barely handle fight scenes in movies much less in real life. I was on the verge of tears.

The fou was so strong that he was beginning to gain advantage over the mason, so other men now jumped in. The fou was wrestled to the ground, and his arms were pinned behind his back. One of the men grabbed the stick and brought it down twice on the fou's face. Horrified, I turned away again, praying that this would all just end. The women were rushing about trying to take down part of the clothesline to use to tie the fou up.

Right then, a big drop of rain fell on my nose. It was followed by another - and then another. And then the rain started coming down in sheets. Solim and I rushed to take everything in from outside and put it under cover. In all my haste, I lost track of what was going on with the fight. It was only 10 minutes later, when I was catching my breath under the shelter of the porch in front of Edwige's boutique, that I saw the dim lantern light over under the gazeebo about 10 meters away, where everyone seemed to be seated. I couldn't see where they'd put the fou. Then the lightning lit up the sky and the compound and I gasped; the fou was standing outside under the pouring rain, his arms tied behind his back with a rope whose other end was tied to the wooden pole of the clothesline. "Are they forcing him to stand outside in the rain?" I exclaimed angrily. Solim looked up from the cuvette of freshly prepared local tchouk drink that she was in the process of filtering and sucked her teeth as an expression of disapproving confirmation. "They've already beat him, and now they're going to make him sick too?" I was furious from the inhumanity I saw in the situation. But a wall of rain separated me from the people to whom I felt I needed to express my feelings that this was going too far. Suddenly, one of the men emerged from the downpour, on his way into the boutique. I yelled my concern to him as he passed, and, half drunk from the shots he'd taken before the whole incident, he only scolded back, "He could have been trying to kill you and you're worried about the rain?"
"But he wasn't trying to kill me!" I shouted back, irritated by the exaggeration, as he disappeared into the boutique. But my voice was lost to the thundering rain on the tin roof.

The rain finally let up and the fou was escorted back to his house where, I later found out, he was thrown and locked in his room for who knows how long. He hasn't come back to visit me since, which the Togolese who helped me find a triumph, but everytime I ask about whatever happened to him, my question is dismissed with a wave of the hand - as if I'm ridiculous for even still considering him. After the incident, whenever I tried to express my disapproval over leaving him in the rain, I received laughter as a response. "He deserved it," the Togolese would say, and then smile into the distance, as if recalling the 'luck' they interpreted the storm to be in contributing to the punishment they gave him. Even Edwige, who I normally find so understanding, wasn't sympathetic. If she and I couldn't see eye to eye on this issue, how much further, I realized, I was from being on the same page as the rest of the community.

Even using story form, I find it difficult to express exactly what my emotions are regarding this whole event. It was, hands down, one of the more horrible things I've witnessed since coming to Togo. It was a situation in which I felt completely torn. On one hand, I was being being protected by my village. To complain too much about their approach would be interpreted as an insult to their help. On the other hand, while I did appreciate their act of intervention, I did not agree with the way they treated the fou, whose case, complicated by his mental state, only I seemed to consider as delicate. Even if I did say something, convincing the others of the basis of my plea seemed hopeless; I'm just the naive American who doesn't understand how things work in Africa.

I felt utterly helpless.

Happy Spring!

2009-04-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

The end of March marked the end of the second trimester at the local middle school. It was finished off by what Togo nationally celebrates as "cultural week" - a week during which the students performed the traditional dances of various ethnic groups (my village is a good mix of at least 6 major Togolese ethnic groups), held a number of soccer matches, played numerous games and activities, and organized a picnic and dance (which scarily reminded me exactly of high-school dances in the States- except now I was one of those creepy teacher supervisors on the side). It was a fun little break and interesting for me to participate in though, in spite of the pre-scheduled time schedule for the events, everything panned out on "l'heure africaine" (African time). Translation: nothing started any earlier than two hours late, which unfortunately ended up negatively affecting some of the sensibilizations I was scheduled to give a few times that week. The American that I am, I showed up at precisely the scheduled time for each event - but with a book, as I anticipated this would happen. I've become very good at waiting.

After cultural week was "spring break", which ended the Tuesday after Easter. For Easter weekend, I went down to Kpalimé with a number of other volunteers for a fake traditional Togolese wedding between 2 Peace Corps volunteers who had started dating at the beginning of their service. It was all just for fun, although it's hard to say if all the host moms who came didn't think it was real - even though I'm pretty sure they were informed. In any case it was really fun to see a bunch of volunteers who I rarely get to see and my host family from stage (training) as well. My host mom was so excited to see me that she immediately ran out and got a whole bag of oranges and made a fresh jar of peanut butter for me as a gift. The wedding was on Saturday, and the next day, Sunday, was Easter. I spent most of the day crammed in a bush taxi with other volunteers heading back towards village, so, for the first time in my life, I didn't get to go to an Easter church service. I missed it. The closest thing I came to a sunrise service was at the street-side rice and bean shack where we were all grabbing breakfast; a couple other volunteers and I were reminiscing about Easter services/celebrations back in the States, and we were all trying to remember the traditional Easter hymns and then belt out as many verses as we could recall - usually dissolving into laughter at the end because we couldn't usually remember much past the first verse of any of the hymns, and because all of our off-key voices together didn't sound too great. I think we may have annoyed the rice and beans guy but, I have to admit, it was nice.

The most eventful parts of this past week were my numerous encounters with one of the village "fou"s ("fou" is the French word for "crazy", and the title the Togolese use for the mentally ill, who are not usually institutionalized due to a lack of facilities in Togo). This particular "fou" is about my age (I'm not sure but I think he's schizophrenic) and, all of the past week, decided to hang out on my porch and refuse to leave. After the family in my compound chased him away with a stick so many times, he seemed to become aggravated and to "punish me", made off with my running shoes, which I always leave out on my front porch. He then proceeded to wear the shoes around village for 2 days, locking himself in his room with them whenever anyone went after him to retrieve them. Finally, some young men were able to successfully tackle him to the ground and remove the shoes by force. Due to his various other (failed) attempts to steal other items of mine, such as my bike and cell phone, and his refusal to obey to stay away from my house, the village people have decided to punish him with a good beating. Needless to say, I am not very pleased with this decision, but I am at a loss for any other effective solution. I have to say though, it is was really nice to see so many village members intervene on my behalf; it was a true testament to how well small villages take care of their volunteers.

I'm in Atakpamé this weekend because Peace Corp's bike mechanic, Paul, is passing through all the major villages in Togo (as he does twice a year) to fix up any bikes that volunteers bring by. My bike gets a lot of use and was in need of a good tune-up and a few reparations, so I rode it in for that purpose (if ever anything goes wrong with your bike in Togo, the worst idea ever is to take it to a local mechanic; they take a hammer to it in effort to fix it, so Paul's services are highly valued and appreciated). I'll be biking back to village this afternoon, though I'm not looking forward to it too much because I've picked something up and am having intestinal problems again - something I'm very used to by now but which is nevertheless still annoying as it always interferes with planned activities.

I'm getting excited because in only two and a half weeks now, I'll be on a plane headed for the States for a 2 week vacation to see my boyfriend, family, friends, and my sister Laura's graduation from college! I can't wait!

Behavior change - for myself

2009-03-23T05:05:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was young, I have 1) been a perfectionist, and 2) liked being in control of things. In certain situations, these characteristics have helped me succeed; in other situations , (by my own fault) they have only brought me frustration, stress, and tension between myself and others. And sometimes the answer to the question of whether or not these characteristics of mine have been a good thing or not isn't quite black or white; it depends on the perspective. For example, when working on team projects in high school, I can think of a number of times when I'd insist on taking on more than my alotted share of work - not just to be chivalrous, but because I felt that if I was in charge of a large portion of the work, I could be more in control of what the outcome would be. And being a perfectionist meant that I'd often end up putting more time and effort into an aspect of the project than any other reasonable person might have. But it generally resulted in an impressionable product. One could argue that the usually good final grade made all that anal behavior a good thing. But then again, I hadn't been a very good team player, had I?

Do you see what I mean?

Being dropped off in a village by myself in the middle of Togo and told that I could work on or start whatever project I deemed necessary on my own timeline thrilled me. Having the freedom to do what I want, when I want, to the extent I want struck me as a perfect match for my particular characteristics, and I envisioned amazing results in store for the future. Until I was smacked awake with the reality that accomplishing Peace Corp's greatest goal - 'sustainable development' - has far less to do with me alone than I was anticipating. You see, the thing about mobilizing a community and bringing about behavior change is that you can run around and educate and sensibilize and organize projects, but at the end of the day, if you don't get a response from the people you're working with or if they aren't quite motivated enough, nothing will happen. It's the same idea as running a relay race; you can put your everything into your sprint and run your heart out, but if, when you pass the baton off to the next receiver, the person just stands there, then nothing evolves. The finish line can't be crossed because of your efforts alone.

I'll give you a very basic, small-scale example of this. I recently organized a community-wide celebration for World Women's Day, including a parade with people wearing the same 'uniform', dancing, speeches, skits, and a dinner at the chief's house. For the skits, I tried organizing two - one performed by the village women, and one performed by some middle school kids. Let me preface by saying that trying to organize Togolese to meet a number of times to practice something is no easy task. The students were not as punctual or reliable as they promised to be, but they were far better than the women, who, if showed up at all to the meetings, were NEVER earlier than 3 hours late. Still I put SO much time, money, and effort into gong-gonging (organizing a man to go around the entire village at 4 AM in the morning and yell the announcement for the meeting; that's how you notify people in these small villages with no media), planning meetings, helping the women come up with ideas for what to present and how to organize the day, preparing food, etc. etc. etc... Anyways, using the women's skit as a small example - in spite of practicing and everything, last minute (and I mean - I was on stage announcing their performance), the women decided they didn't want to do it. Now, as annoying as that was, it was nothing - it was just a skit. But it's the idea I'm talking about; I did everything I could to help them, but when it was left fully in their hands, they ended up deciding not to do anything, and that was that.

The concept of it all seems so obvious, doesn't it? One person can make a difference, but it involves more than just that one person. But it's hard to really come to terms with at first, because you enter into this tiny community in this remote village as a celebrity - literally. Villagers pay attention to you; they notice and watch you wherever you go, and if you start speaking, they'll approach you to hear what you have to say. And so it's easy to initially get caught up with the boastful thought that you can easily transform a community single-handedly.

I now laugh at myself for my initial, naive pride. But don't get me wrong - I'm not a total pessimist now, thinking, "what's the point in even trying?" No, not at all. Because sometimes someone does listen and does act accordingly. It can be rare, but when it happens, it's the most satisfying part of this job. I would say I have become much more realistic though. This is one of those situations in which I have to suck it up and admit that I just can't take full control of this project; I won't accomplish diddly-squat long term if I try to take on all the work myself. Because the point of this whole deal is not what was finished by the end of my service; it's what continues on after I'm gone.

So what does that mean for my current projects and approach to things? Well, most importantly, I'm learning to be a better team player. I've learned the importance of having homologues in everything I do, because if they see and learn from what I do, they (hopefully/ideally) will continue after I leave. For example, this past year, I alone taught my girl's club. Next year, I'm planning on turning it into a peer educator's club (to include boys, as I've come to realize how many are actually interested) and having a co-teacher, which will hopefully provide sustainability, but which I anticipate should also improve attendance, decrease tardiness, and ameliorate scheduling with other teachers. Peace Corps did stress the importance of having a homologue in everything from the beginning, but I was a tough, independent control-freak nut to crack. I'm just glad, now that I've eaten some humble pie and learned important lessons first-hand, I have a whole nother year to improve; 2 years of service makes a whole lot more sense to me now.

Smart thinking, Peace Corps. You anticipated having stubborn people like me.

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RECENT (not terribly exciting or but nevertheless) PICTURES!

Emily (grossed out) trying to remove the lizard that her cat decapitated and then brought into her house.

These are the ridiculous helmets we are required (but I'm more than happy) to wear when riding motorcycles in village. This picture was taking at Emily's house - aka: The menagerie.

This is the solar oven Danielle and I made out of scrap wood, a mirror, a piece of glass, cardboard from care packages, foil, and LOTS of duct tape. It's a work in progress; we're currently trying to make improvements to it to improve it's effectiveness.

This picture was taken the day after Fabiola's birthday party, which we celebrated at Emily's house. We gathered together a bunch of trashy girly magazines that we'd received in care packages and indulged in new celebrity gossip; it's kind of disturbing how enthralled we were, but hey - it's something from America!

I love this picture. That girl is the 2 year-old daughter of one of my landlady's seamstress apprentices. She's such a ham. That dog was praying for a piece of dropped breakfast and Solim was teasing him.

The start of the gathering for the parade for World Women's Day

Dancing after the parade

The drummers

I made a little introductory speech in Kabiye!

The chief of my village giving his speech.

The middle school kids' skit. They were so cute.

I was a little disappointed with World Women's Day as it didn't quite live up to my expectations, but the women definitely enjoyed it at least. This picture was taken the next day when they came over (still in their 'uniforms') to thank me for organizing the celebration. It was very sweet of them to do. *Note: they brought that big bucket over just as a prop for the picture - there was nothing in it.

Sorry - this isn't a picture for those of you who are queezy - or animal rights activists. This is a picture of the neighbor cutting up fresh meat for lunch for the men. I was interested in watching until I realized it was the family dog.

It's avocado season now so on Emily's last visit, we made homemade guacamole and corn tortilla chips for dinner. It was SO hot - we were sweating our brains out (I couldn't even handle clothes - I was just walking around in my shower pagne).

My favorite thing about Togolese babies? The mothers are more than happy to drop them in your lap and you can play with them as much as you want.

Solim - one of my favorite kids in village. She's such a little troublemaker.

Emma (my homologue/the midwife) giving a sensibilization at a baby-weighing session.

RAIN!

2009-02-27T03:37:00.000-08:00

I noticed the clouds rolling in on my way back from the market. "Rain would be nice ..." I thought as I wiped the sweat dripping from my face with my shirt sleeve. But I wasn't going to get my hopes up. It had been months now since we'd had any substantial rain in my village. I can think of 2 times when a rare drizzle had passed through, but - aside from those exceptions - I'd grown used to waking up everyday expecting nothing else but the usual weather forecast: sunny and hot.

Harmattan season was nice. It started in November and was marked by cool mornings and evenings (which the Togolese hated but I loved). Sometimes it would get so cool at night that I'd even need to sleep with a sheet. And some mornings the chill would linger long enough that my regular morning bucket bath (which was usually refreshing) would get me shivering and I'd have to throw on a sweatshirt and sweatpants until the water on the charcoal finished boiling and I could warm up with some hot bouillie. The rain stopped falling and the air became very dry, which was a nice break from the oppressive humidity. It was a glorious change of weather.

The one downside was the dust. Harmattan winds blew in dust from the Sahara, but days on end of a baking sun transformed our own soil too; the ground, which used to get packed down by rain every couple days, now became heated and dry and easily churned up when you walked on it. The slightest breeze would whip up a cloud of dust that would then inevitably find its way into your house and settle on your bedsheets and books and couches and floor. I couldn't go more than 2 days without sweeping and dusting my whole house - although even that didn't do much because sweeping would often just stir a lot of the dust up into the air before it'd settle right back where it started in just a couple of minutes. The roads turned into piles of pure sand, making biking very difficult, and contributing to more motorcycle accidents than I'd care to witness in a lifetime. Helmet-less moto drivers would wear nose and mouth masks and sunglasses to keep the dust from getting into their eyes, teeth, and lungs. But nothing could be done to keep the dust from settling on your skin - something that I think annoyed me more than the Togolese, mostly because it was much more noticeable on my white skin (it's always the most horrifying when sweat drips down and carves a trail in it, leaving streaks all over).

Harmattan seems to have ended now though, and the Togolese are starting to brace themselves for what they call the "real heat" that's supposedly coming in March and April. "You think this is bad ..." is the phrase that has to come to characterize the start of the warnings they offer me when they catch me fanning myself in the shade. The humidity has noticeably risen again, though rain (in its regularity) is still weeks away. I'm mostly wondering how in the world I'm going to sleep during this supposedly imminent, deathly heat wave considering how, even now, I'll wake up and stay awake for hours in bed, dripping with sweat, fanning myself with the same straw fan I use to fan my charcoal, praying for even the smallest breeze to blow through my window and break up the stale, 100 degree air that weighs down me in my poorly ventilated room. Even the mice in my ceiling seem to have grown lethargic with the heat, making much less noise these days than they used to. I'll lay there in bed, fantasizing, Bigger/more windows ... electricity and a fan ... just one rainshower to cool things down ...

Be careful what you wish for.

By dinnertime, lightning was lighting up the clouds in the distance, eventually becoming so frequent that it was like a strobe light, illuminating the sky every 2 seconds. And still I doubted. Heat lightning, I thought.

It was only after I got into bed that the wind started up, and then suddenly I heard it - the pitter patter of rain on the tin roof. I couldn't help but smile as I felt the temperature drop. I'll finally sleep comfortably tonight, I thought as I grabbed my sheet and rolled onto my side. A couple minutes passed and the rain and wind picked up, so much that raindrops were now traveling far enough through the screen on my window to touch my toes. I wondered for a second if I should shut the windows, but I dismissed the idea, thinking that the rain probably wouldn't last. And besides - I'd been meaning to mop anyways.

And then all of a sudden it was really coming down - or sideways really. The sound of the rain on the tin roof became deafening. I turned over in my bed and my feet landed with a squish on the foot of my mattress, which I realized, as I sat up with a start, had become sopping wet from the sideways rain. Annoyed, I grabbed my flashlight and turned it on, quickly realizing that my wet bed was the least of my worries considering a small lake of dirt (I hadn't swept for a while) had formed on the floor under my window and was creeping towards the center of my room.

"Oh, Great," I said out loud as I jumped out of bed (splash) and ran to check on the other room, where an even bigger dirt lake was waiting for me. My couch cushions were soaked and my coffee table books were dripping wet. It gets worse: that wall that faces the back of the house is made of mere clay with just a thin layer of plaster on the inside - meaning, it's not very waterproof. So water had actually soaked through the wall and was staining it in wet stripes. Under the window, the rain had puddled on the sill and was now streaming down the wall, dragging dirt with it. So much for my beautiful paint job, I groaned in my head (once dirt gets on these walls, you can't get it off unless you take the paint off with it).

I had to close the windows. To close them from the inside meant I had to take out all the little pieces of sponge that I'd stuffed in the cracks between the screen and the frame to keep lizards/mice/bugs from coming in - which was a huge hassle. But I did it, although the job first required putting my rainjacket on backwards to protect me from the now hail-like rain that was shooting through the window, and sloshing through the inch of rainwater that had collected on my floor. Before I could then open my screen, I had to slam my hand against the screen multiple times to force off the dozen lizards that were clinging to the other side (the screen opens inward, you see, and the last thing I wanted was for all those lizards to fall onto my floor and scurry around my house - wouldn't that be the icing on the cake?). Finally I was able to reach outside and pull the wooden shutters shut. I was absolutely soaked, my house was a disaster, and I was going to have to give up my morning plans to now mop up my inundated floor. I found myself suddenly laughing though; I had completely forgotten that this is what rain in Togo is like!

Tropical climate, anyone?

January Pictures and a reality update

2009-02-07T05:39:00.000-08:00

As of January 21, I am now into my "teens" in terms of months of service left in Togo (down from 27 months to 19). I'm not counting down the days until I get out of here or anything, but it was just something that I realized. Sometimes when I think about it, I'm amazed that I've already finished 8 months, and then other days, I think "I still have so long to go!". Whenever I think of the time I have left in terms of work though, I always get anxious in feeling that it's not enough time to accomplish everything I want to get done. I guess that's the reality of development work: everything just goes so slowly.

In that vein, I have very dramatic ups and downs/highs and lows. I was re-reading some of my past blog entries and was thinking how they make me seem like I'm happy ALL the time - which isn't quite the case. That's not meant to be interpreted as: I wish I wasn't living here. I just mean to say that the reality is, behavior change comes about very slowly (if at all), and in the meantime, the kinds of issues I encounter in my work can sometimes be very difficult to deal with.

A couple examples:
-HIGH: I got really excited this one day when the mother of one of my neighboring families approached me about getting herself and her 15 year-old daughter on some method of birth control. I had been trying to talk to them both for a while about it because the Mom has 6 kids and is still fertile and could very easily get pregnant again, but doesn't want to, and yet isn't using protection. And the daughter had run away with a local boy at the beginning of the month to who-knows-where before finally coming back, and was now obviously sexually active, and the mom was terrified that she was going to get pregnant. After first discussing the options with the two of them and what the process would likely entail, I agreed to first accompany the daughter to the dispensaire as moral support.
LOW: It turned out that the girl already had an STD. Worse: after asking her questions about when the symptoms began, we found out that she'd contracted it in 2005 - which means she was 12. But there are no health classes here (even if there were, she'd dropped out of school anyways) so she didn't realize it was something abnormal, and moms don't talk to their daughters about these kinds of things (usually because they themselves don't even know!), and kids don't have physicals, etc. etc... So she just plain didn't realize. The second part of that morning thus involved me going back and sitting down with her mom and talking with them about the consequences of this and what her responsibilities are now to prevent her from spreading this to others (although the likelihood is that her current boyfriend is probably already infected), while in the back of my mind, I couldn't help from doubting that she was actually going to follow my advice. That incident alone depressed me for the remainder of the week.

-HIGH: Not long after arriving permanently at post, I met the director of the CEG (middle school) who was incredibly friendly and flexible and supportive of all of my projects. His support helped me get a lot of my initial projects underway.
LOW: A couple weeks ago, while meeting with him over work, he made completely inappropriate comments, suggestions, and gestures that proved himself to be just like the other men I know here who disrespect women. I had thought he was different but he wasn't. I was disappointed to the point of tears over that one.

-HIGH: In response to their complete ignorance/lack of knowledge about their bodies and puberty, etc., I started using my girls club sessions to talk about things like why girls get periods, how (biologically) a girl gets pregnant, what type of birth control exists and how they work, etc. I was really encouraged by the girls' reactions because they were completely enthralled and participated with a bunch of questions that they had never had the chance to ask before. They just plain didn't know! Some older girls (some of whom already had children) even later approached me about helping get them on birth control methods, now that they knew they existed.
LOW: When they realized that they had to consult with the midwife in the dispensaire rather then with me about what method to go on, their response was "Oh...Never mind". The problem (I realized)? The midwife has such a bad attitude and temper that girls do not want to approach her about getting put on a birth control method because she'll just YELL at them for being sexually active so young. And YES - being sexually active is obviously not the ideal life choice for these girls at their age, but - realistically - her yelling at them is not going to make them stop, and what instead happens is she scares them to the extent that they AVOID the dispensaire, and then they don't use ANYTHING, and then they get pregnant. This is a problem I am still trying to resolve.

There are also just a lot of other things I encounter all the time that are hard to deal with, including incredibly malnourished babies (the worst cases are the ones where the mothers don't seem to care), induced abortions (once a girl came in to the dispensaire with an infection that came about because she had tried to abort her pregnancy by sticking a bicycle wheel spoke up her vagina to burst the umbilical sac; I've also known girls who have died from trying to induce abortions by drinking homemade herbal mixes), EARLY pregnancies (once a tiny 13 year old girl came in to the dispensaire with her mom because she'd been throwing up and thought she had the flu; it turned out she was pregnant), and serious wounds (a woman once came in after having been attacked by her husband with a machete and had deep cuts all over her head and shoulders).

It's heavy stuff. And I'm so grateful for the experience and the chance to do what I can to help with the things that I can, but sometimes it can be really overwhelming! Thank you to those who serve as the people I vent to when I need to - I don't know how I'd make it otherwise! I am also grateful that my work here does involve as many highs as lows because it helps me to keep going.

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NEW PICTURES!
Lizards cooling off on my window screen at night (this happens every night). Notice the blue foam stuffed around the sides of the window frame: I did this so that the lizards would stop coming INTO my house that way.

Making enriched bouille with girls from my girls club on the porch in my compound.

Some girls from my girls club selling enriched bouille at the market and showing off their new shirts (the club name is "Filles en Action" (Girls in Action) )

Danielle came back from her vacation in the States! Fabiola came and visited and we celebrated.

Danielle and I doing an Enriched Bouille sensibilization in a neighboring village

Baby-weighing at the dispensaire. The women weigh the babies on the scale on the left, and I record the weights along with demographic information in the babies' health books and in the dispensaire's record books.

Danielle and a HEALTHY baby at my baby-weighing

Me and the Pharmacist in the pharmacy at my dispensaire

Teaching my environmental class about the moringa tree

Starbucks Togo-Style; Emily and our home-made coffee cake

Emily and her new puppy, Fenway

In-Service Training; I hadn't seen a lot of these people from stage since swear-in!

December in Togo and Christmas in Ghana

2008-12-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! This is just a quick update as I'm en route back to village after a wonderful vacation in Ghana for Christmas. Thanks to family and friends' very thoughtful cards and care packages and presents, I had a quiet early Christmas celebration by myself at home in village, but on the 22nd, I left with 2 of my friends (Emily and Fabiola) to first go visit host families from training and then head on to Ghana for a little vacation. We had a blast! Our eyes were bugging out as we entered Accra and saw actual highways and a mall (!!!!). We ate great food (ice cream, mexican food, chinese food, etc.) and saw a REAL movie (Australia with Nichole Kidman, etc.) in a REAL movie theater. After getting out of Accra we went to a cheap resort where we went on a canoe ride through mangroves and where I got to swim in the ocean ... It was all so relaxing and wonderful. Getting from place to place was a little stressful and tiring, but all in all everything went smoothly and we had a great time. And now that I'm rested and refreshed, I am happy to be back home in Togo!

My Christmas decorations at my house

Tea time with peach tea crystal light and peanut butter cookies during Emily's first visit to my village since she dropped me off at post visit

making peanut butter pancakes over a charcoal stove (Danielle's gas for her stove ran out) on Danielle's porch

Edwige and I by her sewing machine

The garden of the uncle who lives in my compound; I'm experimenting with green beans and lettuce here

Lunch at Emily's host family's house

We bought chickens as Christmas gifts for our host families (they don't look excited here but they were!)

My host mom killing the chicken we gave her.

The best breakfast we've had in 7 months - with REAL toast and butter! This picture was taken our first morning in Accra, Ghana

Emily and I in front of the Christmas tree at the Accra shopping mall on Christmas Day. All the other stores were closed but we were excited anyways to be inside a mall!

Ice Cream and a Movie!

On our canoe ride through the mangroves

A view from the canoe

Emily and Fabiola lying out on Green Turtle beach

Green Turtle Lodge

The cute little hut we were staying in

On the beach with Emily

Drinking out of a coconut that some vacationing Germans gave us

Breakfast on the beachfront the morning we were leaving

To Belong

2008-12-22T05:20:00.001-08:00

The man lifted the lid and I bent over and squinted through the smoke from the blazing wood fire to look into the pot of boiling sauce. I saw scales - patterned with diamond shapes. I looked up at him. "Is that....snake?"
"Viper," he specified with a grin, his eyes glistening. "Very special meat."
"Where did you get it?" I asked.
"I killed it! This morning - in the bush," he declared proudly.
"Did it try to attack you?"
"No - I was digging a hole. I came across the snake's hole. The snake was inside. I killed it with my machete."
"What were you digging a hole for in the first place?" I was curious.
"Yes."
"No - why were you digging?"
"A hole!" he replied emphatically.
Ok - we were clearly having some communication problems. I dropped the question and peered back into the pot. I noticed about a dozen white balls bobbing up and down with the bubbles. "What are those circle things?"
"Eggs," he said. "Snake babies - inside!"
"The eggs were inside the snake?" I asked.
"Oui!" The way he replied made me feel like I'd asked a silly question. The man's French wasn't very good but he rambled on excitedly. "You eat eggs, you need to drink water at same time." He made a face and a smacking noise with his mouth. I assumed he was referring to something about the taste. "But very good! You'll try, no?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "Sure, why not? I'll try a little."

It was actually really good! You could pull the snake's muscles out in long strips - kind of like string cheese - and they were chewy and kind of reminded me of chicken. I confess I didn't try the eggs. The were the exact size, shape, and texture of human eyeballs which somehow made them unappetizing to me. But the Togolese men who had gathered for the special occasion of eating snake meat were excited enough that I'd even tried the meat itself. I noticed that none of the women were eating the snake. There are some meats (like dog, for example) that men will eat but women won't (or can't? I don't know. Foreigners like myself seem to take exception)- viper must be one of them.

Thanks to my large appetite and my open-mindedness for trying all kinds of food (an attitude for which I thank my parents and their efforts to encourage me to try different cultural foods as a child), I've succeeded in pleasing a lot of Togolese by "Eating like an African!" as they put it, and especially by even acquiring a strong affinity for certain local dishes, like pate. It pleases me to please them. Isn't that the way it is though? I've been thinking about that a lot lately: the longing a foreigner feels to somehow fit in.

What does fitting in mean for me? Well, I still haven't successfully balanced a big bowl of corn on my head yet (I'm still trying!), but I love that I'm at least now known by name. Every time I go out, the kids in my village run out to wave to me, calling out, "Davi Kristine!" until I'm a long way down the road(Davi is a title used for young women). Others have mastered "Kristina" while still others (usually younger ones) call me "Sakina" or even "Sissine". I know what the younger ones mean though and I'll take it (Please - anything other than "yovo")! Sometimes when I'm making the 45 minute bike ride up to Danielle's village on the dirt road that's a direct route between our two villages, I'll pass someone on a moto who will call me, if not by my own name, at least by my village name in salutation as they drive by. I love it too when I'm at another market in a neighboring village and I'm approached by someone who recognizes me as Kristina. Slowly but surely I'm getting a hang of the Togolese names too and learning who everybody is! I can tell they feel just as good as I do when addressed by name. There's nothing like being recognized and acknowledged to make one feel at home here (against all else)!

I was walking home from my girl's club the other day with 2 of my favorite girls who had insisted on helping me carry all my materials. They're older and confident and really pleasant to be around. As we were walking and chatting and laughing, one of them suddenly clapped her hands together and exclaimed, "Oh - the other volunteer left, which is sad, but now we have Kristina and she's one of us!" She couldn't possibly understand how good that made me feel; To be accepted like that - I couldn't ask for a better Christmas present from Togo.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody - I just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving! In the spirit of the season I just wanted to say I'm very thankful that I have all of you family and friends who I love and who care enough about me to follow my stories... All of your comments and emails and calls mean more to me than you can imagine.

This'll be a short blog; I just thought you'd be interested in what I did for Thanksgiving since people have already started asking. Every year the Togo Country Director has people over to her house in Lome for a big prepared/part-pot-luck feast. It was the most unique Thanksgiving dinner I've ever had! The following is what was on the food table:

Turkey
Goat
Couscous
Cucumber Salad
Sweet Potato Salad and various Potato Salads
Mushroom Gravy
Pita bread and Hummus
Rice and Beans in Coconut milk
Green Beans
Coleslaw
Corn Fritters
Assorted nuts
Chili

for dessert
Pumpkin pie
Banana cake
mini pecan pies
pound cake
other little sugary cookie things

There were a LOT of volunteers there so the food went fast (the dessert didn't last 5 minutes). For those of you who know me well, it may not be a surprise to you that I was among the people at the front of the line and had 3 servings of the main course, helped Emily finished her (first), and then was also there at the front of the line for the pumpkin pie - which is all I really wanted for Thanksgiving. From 3:30 in the afternoon on, I was in a food coma, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking on the phone with family at home. It was a great day!

Emily and I before dinner

Just watch the sunset at the end of the day

2008-11-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

IMPORTANT INFO
1) I've posted pictures! See this entry and the ones entitled "Pictures","A true story", and "AIDS Ride" for recent photos.
2) For those interested in sending mail: Due to some problems with missing mail, I opened up a new B.P. with my neighbor Danielle, which seems to be working MUCH more reliably. The address (which I would recommend you use, although the other B.P. will remain functioning as well) is:

Kristina Jacobsen
B.P. 17
Elavagnon, Togo
West Africa

Three months into living permanently at post and I was taking pride in how busy I was keeping myself, thinking, "I don't understand the PCVs who complain that there are some days when they have nothing to do"! Well, I must confess, this past weekend I felt the first pangs of boredom. I'm currently in Lome - a trip that has been planned for some time now as I'd been planning on coming down to the PC Country Director's house for her Thanksgiving dinner (which she offers annually to volunteers), taking advantage of the trip down to simultaneously pick up some work-related supplies from an NGO here, to get a Ghana visa from the Ghana Embassy (for my anticipated trip to Ghana for Christmas with some friends), and to go personally file a complaint with TOGOCELL about my phone's now long-term inability to receive texts (I learned fast how completely useless trying to fix the problem through the customer service line was, as, to put it briefly, customer service does NOT exist in Togo as it does in the States). In any case, I didn't have anything to prepare for this week in village, and this last week was similar to the other weeks in November - somewhat slow due to the absence of people to work with. November is bean harvesting season and my village is literally a ghost town during the day since everyone is in the fields. As a result, my sensibilizations at the dispensaire have been put on hold as the midwife and I agreed that the few women who come and go between 9 and 11 (but not all at the same time) do not constitute a substantial enough crowd to bother with a sensibilization. The last couple weeks have been exam weeks at the local middle school, so my girls club meetings have been put on hold too. My house renovations are now completely finished so I don't have any of that to tinker around with anymore either... So I've been frequently finding myself with a book, sprawled out on a wooden arm chair under the gazeebo in my compound, fanning myself with a bookmark and reading the hot afternoons away.

Of course there's always work I could do: preparing for future presentations and meetings, sorting paperwork, etc....But as proactive as I pride myself in being, I do have a procrastinating side to me as well. And especially when it's just so darn HOT during the day these days, my heat-induced lethargy finds support in the thought: "Well I can always do that later". In that sense, my boredom is my own fault. My boredom this past weekend was certainly short-lived though. I've been so busy here in Lome that I can't even keep my thoughts and plans straight. And when I get back, my weeks will be busy again with a number of PCV visits and as I get back into the full swing of things with the onset of December (I can't believe it's the end of the year already!).

The last chance I got, I was reading some of my fellow volunteers' internet blogs, and their creative and humorous writing made my blog seem so comparably dry and boring! I'll tell you - the greatest thing about being in country with a number of other volunteers with whom you can meet up with every once and a while is that you can laugh your heads off with them over situations that were probably frustrating and stressful in the moment, but somehow, in the presence of a sympathetic camarade, become hilarious. [To better understand my meaning of this, please read my recent blog entry entitled "A TRUE STORY" for an example of such a situation]

As a foreigner in this country who hasn't quite yet grasped an understanding of the reasons for everything that goes on, I can't emphasize enough how important it is (I've discovered) to have a sense of humor about things. Sometimes I think someone could crazy here if they couldn't just laugh things off (Emily - my best laughing partner - agrees). It's become my favorite thing about those "every-once-and-a-while" times when I can meet up and share stories with other volunteers.

As for the time in between ... I'll tell you something: As exhaustingly busy and stressful some days can occasionally be, or, in contrast, as bored as I can feel on some other seemingly endless days, there's something about those sunsets...
Especially when I'm over at the dispensaire, which is set far enough away from the heart of the village that all I hear is the chirping of the crickets, and I'm watching that sun turn from yellow to orange to hazy pink as it sets over the cornfields, with the stalks swaying in the cool breeze that's finally providing respite from the heat of the day... In the sheer utter peace I feel in those moments, I will never deny that I'm glad I'm here.

PICTURES!

2008-11-25T09:56:00.001-08:00

I finally got the chance to post pictures from the last 3 months! See "A true story" and "AIDS Ride" blog entries for more as well.

my compound

Andre, Michel, and Sylvere (sons of the family with in front of whom I share my compound) in front of my house

Andre in the boutique the family owns

Edwige and Mondano (mother and daughter in my compound) preparing roasted peanuts

Edwige and Solomn grinding pima (hot pepper) for the sauce for lunch

(sorry it's blurry) Edwige, Florence, Solomn, Sylvere and me in front of the cooking hut

me and Michel in front of the fence we made around the moringa tree we planted

Yvette (another daughter), Andre, and Sylvere dressed up in their pagnes for church

Me and the family under the compound gazeebo

my porch

the mill in front of my house under the Harmattan mist

Mr. Pelenguei (the Dad of my compound/my landlord) grinding corn flour at the mill

more huts in my village

another scene from my village

market day (the busiest day in town)

The CEG (middle school) at sunset

The CEG during the day; I spend a lot of time here

the local elementary school

the road on the way to the dispensaire

the village dispensaire (health center)

my homologue, Emma (a midwife) giving a malaria shot

The nurse (Mr. Beleyi) and the pharmacy manager (Mr. Kezie) doing paperwork. They are some of the nicest people I've ever known.

The wound treating room, the prenatal consultation room, and the delivery room where women give birth at the dispensaire

Mark (a college student who helped me translate during my first sensibilizations). This picture was taken one evening when we were seeking out the CEG director in his fields -There was such a beautiful sunset!

bagging enriched porridge flour on my porch

One of my favorite village women making corn porridge, and then me taking a turn at it

I love this picture: This is Danielle, one of my best PCV friends. She lives in a village just 15K north of me. This is her new puppy Tache, which means "Spot" in French.

Doing laundry

Visiting Emily; cooking dinner by candlelight (not like we have a choice - she doesn't have electricity either), taking a nap on her cement floor one afternoon (it's way cooler on the floor in the hot afternoons), and Emily drinking Tchouk - a popular local beverage that one of her neighbor girls brought by for her - after having spilled half of it on herself

Talking on the phone in a local church building, one of the few places in my village where I can get reception and where I usually have privacy - although this photo was taken by a child observor who was lucky enough to be trusted by me to take a few pictures when he saw my camera and asked if he could...

A True Story

2008-11-25T08:31:00.000-08:00

When I first permanently arrived at post, I decided to repaint the walls in my house because they were badly in need of a new paint job. Upon mentioning this to my landlord, he offered to seek out the village painter to come do the work for me. Even after I insisted that I could do the job myself - and actually preferred to do so in order to save some money - he continued to urge me to at least get the painter's opinion on how much paint I would need for the job. As I'd painted many a room before, I already had an idea of how much I would need, but it seemed as if it was going to hurt his pride if I refused again, so I agreed to meet with the painter.

The painter showed up the following day when the landlord wasn't there; he was an elderly man of few words, but who was clearly honored and content that the village YOVO had called on him for advice. I showed him into my kitchen/living room where he stood for a solid minute, "hmmmm"ing and scratching his chin as he looked around. I told him the other room was absolutely identical to this one, but he wanted to see it anyways, and there again he entered into a deep train of thought. When he appeared to have finished thinking, I asked him, "So how much paint do you think I'll need?", to which he replied, "Well I'd rather wait until the landlord comes back to discuss that since he was the one who told me to come here". Not quite understanding his logic, I felt mildly irritated - especially because all of this seemed unnecessary in the first place. But I bit my tongue and suggested he come back in the evening, when the the landlord would be there.

After dinner the painter came back, when the landlord and I happened to be chatting together under the gazeebo. After finishing the normal lengthy salutations, the landlord sat down in a diplomatic fashion and proceeded to recount in detail the entire situation (regardless of the fact that all parties present were well informed): specifically - how I had approached him about painting, how he had asked the painter to come, how the painter had showed up in his absence, how the painter had left and then come back, and now we were all here awaiting his advice.

The following was the real conversation I then had with the painter:

K: So how much paint do you think I need?
P: Well ... it depends
K: (confused because he had already seen the size of the rooms - I thought that was the entire point) Depends on what?
P: Well what color are you going to paint the rooms?
K: With all due respect sir, I don't understand what difference the color would make on how much paint I need.
P: It's just that - while you said you know how to paint, I'm worried that they might do things differently in America than they do here.
K: Ok well how about I tell you what we do in America and you can tell me if it's the same thing here.
P: Oh excellent!
K: Ok - well in America, we determine how much paint we need based on the size of the room, then we buy that amount in white paint, and then we mix in the desired color.
P: (clapping his hands and exclaiming to the landlord) She really does know how to paint!
K: Thank you. So according to your expertise, how much paint do you think I should get?
P: Well that depends.
K: (sigh) On what?
P: Well you see, the amount of paint you need depends on how many coats you want.
K: (growing impatient now) Yes I know that - but can you at least just give me a general idea of how much paint I'd need to do just one coat?
P: Well I don't think I'd be comfortable doing that.
K: Why not?
P: I wouldn't want you to blame me if it was too much or too little.
K: (clenching my hands together out of frustration, I stared at him at a complete loss for words, not believing how ridiculous this conversation was. He sat there, his hands folded in his lap, perfect posture, smiling and blinking back at me. How could it be that I was so irritated with such a cute old man? Finally I said:) Ok (long sigh to calm myself) How about: I'll get the amount that I think will suffice, and if I run into any problems, I'll come to you for advice.
P: Oh wonderful! Yes I'd be happy to help you out with anything you need>
Landlord: (clapping his hands together) Fantastic! I'm glad this worked out so well!

And so I ended up buying the amount of paint I needed based on my own judgment - which was precisely what I had planned on doing in the first place. I later found out that the village painter was titled such, not because he had been trained in the profession, but because, years ago, he had been the one hired to whitewash the village elementary school.

This is what my house looked like before (photo taken during post visit)

After I painted, redid the floor, and got furniture (complete with the collapsable cardboard turkey my mom sent for Thanksgiving):

(me with my bouille enrichie that I make for the women in my village)