Wesan-lo!

10 octobre 2011:

That much Ewé I do understand – Welcome! Whenever you are arrive somewhere, even if it’s your own home, people greet you with these words letting you know they are grateful you arrived well. You respond, Yooo, thanking them for their acknowledgement.  So wesan-lo October! Thank-you for the rain showers and clean notebooks.The school year has started and students as young as 4 and as ripened as 21sport the khaki uniform of public school. I walked past the lycée on the first day of classes and saw what appeared to be the whole student body working on grounds’ maintenance. Kat and the Social Worker we were with explained how maintaining the school is very much a part of public education in Togo. This was unexpected for me. My comrades in high school had to be reminded not to leave cigarette ash on the toilet seats in our bathrooms, let alone mow the school’s lawn.  The kids sit for classes in the mornings and then every so often are required to do manual labor in the afternoons.

My stage is preparing for a week at In-Service Training (IST) at the end of October.  November 6 will mark the end of the first three months at post – yet another stripe of PCVism. I’m looking forward to spending a week with my fellow stagaires. They quell my mounting anxiety, which can be only partially ascribed to malaria drugs. We’re to present the work we’ve done with PACA and a report on our site that enumerates the demographic, physical, and social details of our current residence au Togo. True to form, I’m just getting started on these.I might take a trip down to the beach afterwards to check out Lucian’s swanky pad and wave at the ocean.

During this past month I hope I’ve become a real person to those I live with – something more than a <<voluntourist>>. Sharing a meal validates you in a way that no SWOT session ever can. My neighbors invited me to dinner a couple weeks ago. I was happy to receive the invitation – going home to a solitary meal can be harsh sometimes. And while I hadn’t gained much appreciation for Togolese cuisine during training, I sincerely enjoyed the pate and ademe sauce that was prepared. It’s proven true that eating with your hands makes a meal of pate taste better. I ate inside their small room with dad and a brother from Lome – mom, as is irksomely customary, sat outside. The meal was spent with everyone urging me to eat my body weight in pate – thanks, but it’s not everyone that enjoys the paralyzing bloated belly that accompanies a large Togolese meal. By material standards, they are a poor family. The three live in a space about half the size of my living room.  The parents are still students – although only mom is attending high school now. Dad continues to study in hopes of passing the BAC exam at the end of May. High school students need to pass this national exam in order to progress into university.  They have both failed to do so three times, but yet the motivation remains. They have a three-year old son named Eve who pays me a daily visit. Sometimes we’ll sit on my stoop and share a few bananas.

Ahh, my constant supply of bananas! Someone is always handing me a bunch, a cadeaufor a new amie. I have become friends with a young girl named Chimen (not the same as my neighbor).  Her family lives in a village about a 15 minute moto ride outside of Badou. She spotted me in the marché one day and asked if she could pay me a visit. On one of my biweekly trips to Atakpame, she dropped a note by my house telling me she had some cassava to give me. Upon my return, she paid me another visit with a bag full of cassava and bananas.

You realize I live by myself and that there is no way I can eat half of this before it goes bad? I told her. She laughed and said that I needed to eat more.

 A person needs to eat upon every hour, being hungry is not good, she replied.

 So we prepared one of the 5 large cassava (manioque) she brought me. We fried it in small pieces and ate them like fries, with ketchup and mustard, à la Togolaise-American. I ended up giving the rest to my neighbors.

I was invited to have brunch at her house last Sunday. I took a moto out of Badou and after about 10 minutes we ran into a girl who pulled my driver over.

Chimen sent me to pick you up, she told me.

Alright, I said. Where is it exactly that we’re going?

Oh, we just need to walk a little further.

Knowing all too well that <<a little further>> means something very different to Togolese, I asked her to be a little more specific. She told me the house was about a kilometer up the mountain. Well then, I’m glad I’m wearing my Tevas.The climb was beautiful – you could see far out onto the surrounding mountain sides, many of whose forests remain untamed. I felt like a hobbit, walking along the mountain.

When we finally reached the compound, I was drenched in sweat thinking regretfully about the half liter of water I’d brought with me.  Chimen was still preparing the meal so I sat with her uncle for a little while. Like many farmers, the man spoke not a word of French so our conversation was composed mainly of smiles, nods, and pointing… then silence. The compound consisted of three mud structures – two for bedrooms and one as a kitchen. The family cultivates their own food. Alongside the compound grow a number of fruit trees – banana, orange, guava and mango. They produce cacao and coffee to sell.

Most Togolese cook with charcoal over clay stoves.Chimen prepared pate with sauce arachide (peanut sauce). She also wanted to make noodles, as a safe backup if the pate disagreed with her guest’s tastes.  I told her that the full plate of pate in front of me was more than enough. And it really was – I kept eating despite the growing discomfort around my waistline.  Afterwards, we visited her neighbors, who offered me fufu. I told them I had just finished a big meal of pate chez Chimen. Well, yes that was pate and now you eat fufu with us!Insert nervous laugh...In the end, they accepted my refusal to fufu but there was no escape from sharing a calabash of local brew with the fam. Chuque – fermented palm juice or something. Anywho, considering I was somewhat dehydrated to begin with I ended up offering most of my calabash to the dirt floor. I came back home with a full belly, thoughts of a good friendship, and very tired from a day that started off with an ambitious run, in anticipation of a big meal and no knowledge of a mini-hike.

A month au village

10 septembre 2011

Salut, tues la?

Greetings from a Togolese melting pot. I’ve met people in Badou from Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, and from all over Togo itself. Marche days bring in marche mommas across the Ghanan border and I find myself speaking broken English as I buy my tomatoes and onions. 

Music springs from the barbershops that occupy every inch of town. The other day, I got a bit nostalgic as I heard Daddy Yankee blaring out from one of these deafening speakers – Gasolina seems to haunt me however far I travel.

Religious sounds carry through all of Badou-meme. From my porch, I can hear a couple calls of prayer – I can clearly see one mosque from where I sit but the voice of another reaches me. The two calls do not play simultaneously, making it sound as though one is responding to the other. And, most thrilling for me (I can assure you) is the church service that takes place next to my house. It really gets going when my bedroom light turns off and I climb under my mosquito net.  The drums and the faithful chanting battle my IPOD as I close my eyes to restless sleep. But religion in Togois not something you grudgingly concede to on Sunday mornings. Christianity and Islam exhibit new qualities – colored by their African environment. As the SED APCD (Assistant Peace Corps Director) said, Togo is 50% Christian and 50% Muslim but 100% Animist. During Ramadan, the faces of Muslim women were done up elegantly – their eyes appearing the more astonishing with heavy black liner. The children were dressed in the liveliest medleys ofpagna patterns. In the marche I saw a group of matching siblings – all four children were wearing the same purple green pagna, personalized only by their chosen accessories .  I’ve attended one service in my three months in Togo. I went with my host family in Tsevie who belonged to a Pentecostal assembly. Of the three hours I sat on the pew, I can confidently say that about 2 of them consisted solely ofsinging, dancing, and drums.  As for me, this is a part of Togo that I am appreciating more as an observer than as a participant.

This past month my mind has moved past sensory overload and has begun to comfortably settle down, although it still receives a jolt every once in a while. I have now added a couch, chair, rug, and bookshelf to my living room – whoop for having a place to sit! The girls next door, Chimen and Gabriella (13 and 18 respectively) come over occasionally. I was painting the other day and Chimen just sort of joined me in my living room. We had a nice conversation about the beginning of the school year. She’s 13 and has just started the Togolese equivalent to middle school.

My walk to town involves very robust greetings from a handful of little ones.  The calls of Yovo are now, thankfully, interspersed with Yawa (my name au village) and Tanti (a term of endearment for a woman here). “Vanessa” comes out more like Eessa or Vaneesa. There are two really little ones who live in a compound about half way down that run up to me (still screaming Yovo), and wrap their tiny arms around my legs. On cloudier days, this has been smile producing.

I’ve been slowly getting into work. This past week was exciting for me – with little things, yes, but they make life seem more normal. Kat invited me to work with Club de Mere (Mothers Club) organized by the Red Cross. She’s done work with them before; this past spring they organized an event in celebration of International Women’s Day. Together, we are going to help the club start a “Village Savings and Loans Association.” As the title implies, this functions as a group in which the women can save money as well as take out small loans from. The money is all their own thus the members themselves finance their own loans. Along with the Loan fund, there is a small Social Fund in which the women deposit a small amount each week and is used for emergencies arising in the group. The money from the Social Fund can be given as a grant or as a loan. I got to run the informational meeting this past week. And while I stumbled through some of it, it helped push me out of the proverbial PC nest and get the wings flapping.It’s heartening to see how growth can come from the simple step of a community’s self-awareness.

I’ve recently become involved with animal raising…and I can’t say I know much about it although I have now become acquainted with the town’s goats, chickens, and turkeys. Animal husbandry in Badou is picking up, especially as those ambitious few have noticed that there is very little meat sold in the market although there is demand. A member of MUREC and a friend took me to see their own animals. They raise turkeys, goats, and chickens. We decided that it would be good to have a technical session for those interested in starting their own farms and also to teach some financial literacy. Later that night, he stops by my house to tell me that there are other people interested in our session and I tell him to invite them along. They all want me to visit their farms. And so over the course of a week I visited a hand full of goat and chicken farms in neighboring villages. I had little to do half the time besides smile to myself, as very few understood French well, I didn’t have a good translator, and I had no technical advice to offer them.  I guess I will be reading up on goat elevage. Maybe I can also learn how best to keep my friendly goat visitors off my porch (and put an end to the gifts of pellet poop I open my door to each morning).

Notwithstanding my misgivings about motorcyclists in this country, the moto rides were surprisingly enjoyable. Once you leave town you can see the depth of farming in themilieu – monoculture has yet to reduce the area to plainness. Cacao, maize, coffee, plaintain, cassava, mango, rice, and so many others reach my eyes from the road.  Most awesome of all, my hosts gave me fruit and I have since been enjoying some lovely guayaba with my oatmeal J