last thoughts for now

i am going to actually start the formal part of my work in the next couple weeks and next time i get to the internet i will a better job at explaining what my actual project is about. girls education and empowerment is as broad as it sounds and theres a lot of directions i can go. i'll keep you posted on what that direction ends up being.

there are a few things i wouldnt mind getting in the mail if you decide you want to send something to me all the way over here in togo :) these include: crayons/colored pencils/any kind of art supplies, small children's books or coloring books, crystal light packets, gum, gummy bears, news magazines, and pictures!

i've been reading a book titled the poisonwood bible which has been incredible . if you're looking for a good read you should pick this one up.

i can't thank you all enough for all your thoughts and prayers. please keep them coming. i love and miss you all dearly. i hope everyone had a very merry christmas and have a wonderful new year!!

in the spotlight

if you're a foreigner in togo you automatically get the spotlight on you where ever you are. i had gotten used to getting stared at or talked to on the street in bigger cities, but its been a little challenging to get used to being in the spotlight all the time in village. it feels like i am either under surveillance or a form of entertainment for people. it doesnt bother me all the time, i try to put myself in their shoes and understand where theyre coming from, but there are some days when it really wears me out. being around other volunteers, their support, and sharing the experience with them is probably what's keeping me sane. at the end of the day, though, i really do love my village. theyre transitioning to my presence as much as i'm transitioning to living with them.

pagne: the multiuse cloth

pagne is a cloth material you can buy to get things made, normally some kind of clothes. some people are addicted to buying pagne while others would much rather spend their money on other things. i tend to fall in the former group, although i'm more of a wannabe addict since i dont actually buy a whole lot. we had a pagne exchange for christmas which was a lot of fun. afterwards we were sitting around and my friend kassie was looking at her (really pretty) pagne that she ended up with and was wondering outloud what she could do with it. a skirt? a table cloth? curtains? a shirt? a blanket? a purse? so many possibilities. pagne is wonderful.

chores chores chores

my neighbor's name is tanti. she's been a great help as i try to transition into this lifestyle. she's been helping me with chores such as cooking, cleaning, and getting water/other things-- meaning she's cook almost all my meals, sweeps for me everyday, helps me with the dishes and laundry, carries about ten times the amount of water i carry from the river to my house, and is more than willing to run any errand i may have. its been nice to have this help and its weird to have to insist on doing things myself. i want to be able to carry more than the amount 5 year olds carry on their heads and i want to be able to do my own dishes and laundry. i dont mind her cooking for me though. she makes much better meals than i would be able to. i should make more of an attempt to learn how to make things so i can bring this fine african cuisine chez moi when i go back to the states.

who needs a babysitter?

half of m°poti's population is children under the age of 15. i believe this is the case in most parts of africa. and about half of the children in m°poti like to come and hang out on my porch. i really dont mind the, being around actually, most of the time i enjoy their presence. its when theres more than ten of them at a time or when they stay the entire day or when they fight with eachother or when they start to ask for things that i am forced to put my foot down (at least i try) and tell them they have to leave. its hard to do this because i don't like being mean and because the majority of them dont speak much, if any, french.

with so many kids around, ive made some interesting observations:

§ kids as young as 3 or 4 will be expected to help around with chores such as fetching water, carrying things from the fields, taking care of younger siblings, running errands, among other things. a lot of times i'll have these petits offer to help me do things around the house.

§ kids move around a lot and most dont end up living with both biological parents. a lot dont live with even one. there are many reasons for this, including ° limited resources, so sometimes parents cant afford to keep their children (which gives rise to child traficking) and they have to find someone else for them to stay with or the parents (normally the father) live where they can find work, ° death of parents, ° poligamy, ° other reasons i am not aware of because i dont understand half of what's going on around me.

§ kids can sleep through anything. children younger than about 4 hang out on the backs of women or young girls throughout the day. naturally, they'll fall asleep every once in a while and sleep through dancing and singing, water falling on them from basins women will be carrying on their heads, all the movement of working in the fields... not to mention all the noises from animals and people day and night. i wish i could do the same.

oh life in togo

i have a list of things i want to share but nothing prewritten so i'm going to do a series of posts on random things and hopefully get to update again sometime in january. here we go.

it's been a while

i've been meaning to update this things for a while and haven't for one reason or another... but now i'd going to let you all know that:

... my week at post last month went fabulously for the most part. i'm going to have to get used to not having electricity. getting water from the river wont be so bad but not having electricity kinda stinks.

m'potians are very nice people and i really liked all my neighbors. i taught then how to play spoons and we had a party playing it together.

i actually got cold in the mornings cause i live on a plateau and it gets cooler than ridiculously hot when the sun is down. that's wonderful.

... i'm officially a peace corps volunteer as of last thursday. hurray!

... it doesn't feel like it's almost Christmas and that makes me sad. too much sun and too little Christmas music. Not that that's what Christmas is all about but it helps the mood. happy holidays everyone!

... i need to do a better update but that'll come in another couple weeks.

some food for thought

Training has been pretty rigorous, which has made the time fly. I’m about halfway done with training already! I am so happy to be here doing what I’m doing and looking forward to putting into practice. I wish I had better means of communicating everything I’m learning with everyone but that’s just not going to be possible. For sure a lot of coffee dates will be had in two years. Last week, however, a current volunteer gave us a chapter from a book by Paul Farmer (this is the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains which is a fabulous book that you should read if you are able to) that I thought was really interesting and wanted to share. In the chapter, he tells two stories. Towards the beginning of the chapter he writes, “But the experience of suffering, is not effectively conveyed by statistics or graphs. In fact, the suffering of the world’s poor intrudes only rarely into the consciousness of the affluent, even when our affluence may be shown to have direct relation to their suffering…Because the “texture” of dire affliction is better felt in the gritty details of biography, I introduce the stories of Acéphie Joseph and Chouchou Louis.” I found that Acéphie’s story reflects the story of so many people afflicted by poverty, bringing into question the idea of freedom of choice for those stuck at the “bottom rung of the social ladder in inegalitarian societies.” It’s kind of long but I hope you’re able to take the time to read it all. And think about it. And pray for those who are dealing with the same kind of thing. I hope that’s not asking for too much.

Acéphie’s Story
On Suffering and Structural Violence
from Pathologies of Power
by Paul Farmer

Kay, a community of fewer than three thousand people, stretches along an unpaved road that cuts north and east into Haiti’s Central Plateau. Striking out from Port-au-Prince, the capital, it can take several hours to reach Kay, especially if one travels during the rainy season, when the chief thoroughfare through central Haiti turns into a muddy, snaking path. But even in the dry season, the journey gives one an impression of isolation, insularity. The impression is misleading, as the village owes its existence to a project conceived in the Haitian capital drafted in Washington, D.C.: Kay is a settlement of refugees, substantially composed of peasant farmers displaced more than forty years ago by the construction of Haiti’s largest dam.

Before 1956, the village of Kay was situated in a fertile valley, and through it ran the Rivière Artibonite, Haiti’s largest river. For generations, thousands of families had farmed the broad and gently sloping banks of the river, selling rice, bananas, millet, corn and sugarcane in regional markets. Harvests were, by the majority of the local population was forced up into the stony hills on either side of the new reservoir. By all the standard measures, the “water refugees” became exceedingly poor; the older people often blame their poverty on the massive buttress dam a few miles away, bitterly noting that it brought them neither electricity nor water.

In 1983, when I began working in the Central Plateau, AIDS was already afflicting an ever-increasing number of city dwellers but was unknown in areas as rural as Kay. Acéphie Joseph was one of the first villagers to die of the new syndrome. But her illness, which ended in 1991, was merely the latest in a string of tragedies that she and her parents readily linked together in a long lamentation, by now familiar to those who tend the region’s sick.

The litany begins, usually, down in the valley, now hidden under the still surface f the lake. Both Acéphie’s parents came from families who had made a decent living by faming fertile tracts of land—their “ancestors’ gardens”—and selling much of their produce. Her father tilled the soil, and his wife, a tall and wearily elegant woman not nearly as old as she looks, was a “Madame Sara,” a market woman. “If it weren’t for the dam,” he once assured me, “we’d be just fine now. Acéphie, too.” The Josephs’ home was drowned, along with most of their belongings, their crops, and the graves of their ancestors.

Refugees from the rising water, the Josephs built a miserable lean-to on a knoll of high land jutting into the new reservoir. They remained poised on their knoll for some years; Acéphie and her twin brother were born there. I asked what had induced them to move higher up the hill, to build a house on the hard stone embankment of a dusty road. “Our hut was too near the water,” replied their father. “I was afraid one of the children would fall into the lake and drown. Their mother had to be away selling; I was trying to make a garden in this terrible soil. There was no one to keep an eye on them.”

Acéphie attended primary school in a banana-thatched and open shelter which children and young adults received the rudiments of literacy in Kay. “She was the nicest of the Joseph sisters,” recalled one of her classmates. “And she was as pretty as she was nice.” Acéphie’s beauty—she was tall and fine featured, with enormous dark eyes—and her vulnerability may have sealed her fate as early as 1984. Though still in primary school then, she was already nineteen years old; it was time for her to help generate income for her family, which was sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. Acéphie began to help her mother by carrying produce to a local market on Friday mornings. On foot or with a donkey, it takes over an hour and a half to reach the market, and the road leads right through Péligre, site of the dam and a military barracks. The soldiers like to watch the parade of women on Friday mornings. Sometimes they taxed them, literally, with haphazardly imposed fines; sometimes they levied a toll of flirtatious banter.

Such flirtation is seldom rejected, at least openly. In rural Haiti, entrenched poverty made the soldiers—the region’s only salaried men—ever so much more attractive. Hunger was a near-daily occurrence for the Joseph family; the times were as bad as those right after the flooding of the valley. And so when Acéphie’s good looks caught the eye of Captain Jacques Honorat, a native of Belladère formerly stationed in Port-au-Prince, she returned his gaze.

Acéphie knew, as did everyone in the area, that Honorat had a wife and children. He was known, in fact, to have more than one regular partner. But Acéphie was taken in by his persistence, and when he went to speak to her parents, a long-term liaison was, from the outset, a serious possibility:

What would you have me do? I could tell that the old people were uncomfortable, worried; but they didn’t say no. They didn’t tell me to stay away from him. I wish they had, but how could they have known?… I knew it was a bad idea then, but I just didn’t know why. I never dreamed he would give me a bad illness, never! I looked around and saw how poor we all were, how the old people were finished…What would you have me do? It was a way out, that’s how I saw it.

Acéphie and Honorat were sexual partners only briefly—for less than a month, according to Acéphie. Shortly thereafter, Honorat fell ill with unexplained fevers and kept to the company of his wife in Péligre. As Acéphie was looking for a moun prensipal—a “main man”—she tried to forget about the soldier. Still, it was shocking to hear, a few months after they parted, that he was dead.

Acéphie was at a crucial juncture in her life. Returning to school was out of the question. After some casting about, she went to Mirebalais, the nearest town, and began a course in what she euphemistically termed a “cooking school.” The school—really just an ambitious woman’s courtyard—prepared poor girls like Acéphie for their inevitable turn as servants in the city. Indeed, becoming a maid was fast developing into one of the rare growth industries in Haiti, and, as much as Acéphie’s proud mother hated to think of her daughter reduced to servitude, she could offer no viable alternative.

And so Acéphie, twenty-two years old, went off to Port-au-Prince, where she found a job as a housekeeper for a middle-class Haitian woman who worked for the U.S. embassy. Acéphie’s looks and manners kept her out of the backyard, the traditional milieu of Haitian servants. She was designated as the maid who, in addition to cleaning, answered the door and the phone. Although Acéphie was not paid well—she received thirty dollars each month—she recalled the gnawing hunger in her home village and managed to save a bit of money for her parents and siblings.

Still looking for a moun prensipal, Asephie began seeing Blanco Nerette, a young man with origins similar to her own: Blanco’s parents were also “water refugees,” and Acéphie had known him when they were both attending the parochial school in Kay. Blanco had done well for himself, by Kay standards: he chauffeured a small bus between the Central Plateau and the capital. In a setting in which the unemployment rate was greater than 60 percent, he could command considerable respect, and he turned his attention to Acéphie. They planned to marry, she later recalled, and started pooling their resources.

Acéphie remained at the “embassy woman’s” house for more than three years, staying until she discovered that she was pregnant. As soon as she told Blanco, she could see him becoming skittish. Nor was her employer pleased: it is considered unsightly to have a pregnant servant. And so Acéphie returned to Kay, where she had a difficult pregnancy. Blanco came to see her once or twice. They had a disagreement, and then she heard nothing more from him. Following the birth of her daughter, Acéphie was sapped by repeated infections. A regular visitor to our clinic, she was soon diagnosed with AIDS.

Within months of her daughter’s birth, Acéphie’s life was consumed with managing her own drenching night sweats and debilitating diarrhea while attempting to care for the child. “We both need diapers now,” she remarked bitterly, toward the end of her life. As she became more and more gaunt, some villagers suggested that Acéphie was the victim of sorcery. Others recalled her liaison with the soldier and her work as a servant in the city, by then widely considered to be risk factors for a disorder brought on by her work as a servant: “All tat ironing, and then opening a refrigerators or other amenities as her family and caregivers stood by helplessly.

But this is not simply the story of Acéphie and her daughter, also infected with the virus. There is also Jacques Honorat’s first wife, who each year grows thinner. After Honorat’s death, she found herself desperate, with no means of feeding her five hungry children, two of whom were also ill. Her subsequent union was again with a soldier. Honorat had at least two other partners, both of them poor peasant women, in the Central Plateau. One is HIV-positive and has two sickly children. And there is Blanco, still a handsome young man, apparently in good health, plying the roads from Mirebalais to Port-au-Prince. Who knows if he carries the virus? As a chauffeur, he has plenty of girlfriends.

Nor is this simply the story of those infected with HIV. The pain of Acéphie’s mother and twin brother was manifestly intense. But few understood her father’s anguish. Shortly after Acéphie’s death, he hanged himself with a length of rope.

field trip to kara

a fellow trainee, anna, wrote an update for her blog after our field trip about two weeks ago and i thought it was funny so i asked her if i could just steal it from her. i made a few changes, but here it is...

Three Day Fieldtrip Up Country: Sept 18 – 20th, 2007
Or: "How To…" According to Me

How To Drive in Togo
While theoretically one drives on the right hand side of the road, in reality one drives on which ever side is more practical, which ends up being more often than not the left hand side, employed often but not exclusively for the purpose of avoiding potholes, circumventing mud, or passing other vehicles. This last in particular requires a certain technique, particularly on bad or curvy roads (although this does not automatically rule out risky maneuvers). You must drive very closely behind the vehicle in front of you, then tentatively drift into the left hand side in order to catch a glimpse of the road ahead to see what else is approaching. (Although again, no what matter is approaching, this may or may not have any bearings on your next steps. Driving is like a wild chicken mating dance, full of bluster and bravado.) You then either pass the car -- honking madly to alert drivers, pedestrians, bikers, and goats – or swerve back onto your side of the road. An example of when you would return to your side of the road would be when you see two huge trucks passing each other and coming straight towards you as they struggle for dominion of the road. Actually, you might want to consider pulling over until they decide to return to their side of the road…. Anything less than these two dinosaurs battling it out is fair game, though. Don’t forget to laugh at any Yovo’s who are making smart comments in the backseat, or are whimpering into their hands. Be ready to brake at any sign of a living creature scampering across the road (we missed a child, but hit a dog, and possible a duck – see How To Be An Animal Lover In Togo).
If you are not a scaredy-cat Yovo, you may choose to ride on the outside of an eighteen-wheeler, hanging from its back gate (photos to prove it) or on top of a bush taxi, or perhaps four to a motocycle. You may also choose to tie your goat on the top of a bush tax, or stuff your cow in the trunk of the car.
(NB: Peace Corps drivers are the best drivers and we love our drivers! They have been specially selected and they would never pull any dangerous stunts. )

How To Travel Like a PCT
Show up to meeting place with varying sizes of hiking backpacks and additional day packs to take in the van. Toss backpack up to van driver to be lashed onto the roof. Ask driver if you can ride on top to see his reaction. (Note: Only do this with a PC driver. Any other driver would say yes.) In your daypack, carry toilet paper, water, iPod or other entertainment device, hand sanitizer, and camera. (If you’re me, you will also carry sunscreen, bug repellant, book, extra camera batteries, and extra snacks, but you risk mocking from your comrades.) Take your place in the van or range rover. In the van, natural air conditioning is provided because the air rushing through the open windows is both strong and refreshing. Try and stay hydrated throughout your trip, although too much hydration has its disadvantages, and you can pass away much of your time deciding whether to continue to hold your bladder or whether you really want to be the person who has had to ask three times already to use the bathroom. But you better not hold it too long, because requests for bathroom stops require their own procedure and can take a few more miles/kilometers to complete The driver has a mysterious criteria, unknown to us mere PCTs, for which bushes are appropriate to use as toilets and which are not. However, ideally there will be a small goat path leading off the main road, with some handy trees or uneven ground a few feet into the bush. If you are me, and you are not on a trail, you stomp your feet loudly and wave your arms while yelling "Pas de serpents! Pas de serpents!" (Translation : Shoo snakes ! ) before continuing. (If you are not me, you may join in the chorus of: "You have to go again?!?")
When you stop for lunch or dinner, bear in mind there are really no rules in Togo. Thus, it is perfectly acceptable to go into a restaurant and pull out your packed sandwich from home and your bottled water. (However, as there are some great drinks, such as Cocktail de Fruits or LionKiller – sparkling lemonade – I encourage you to buy a drink and save the water for the road.) Always consider bringing your own food or having an arrangement with a restaurant to prepare the food ahead of the time, as food service can take two hours to materialize. Do not turn up your nose, however, at yummy snacks available either in gas station shops or on the side of the road (collectively, we purchased multiple pineapples, breads, beignets which are made from beans but are sort of like doughnuts, beans and rice, and a million packs of FanMilk. FanMilk is our obsession, and is sort of like icecream in a bag. It deserves its own blog post so more to come later about FanMilk.)

How To Be An Animal Lover In Togo / or, an Overheard Dialogue
Daniel: "Look! A duckling! It’s hurt! I think we might have hit it with the van when we pulled into the village and maneuvered our way through pebbly alleys. I knew taking a mini-van off-roading was a splendid idea."
Anna: "You should kill it now. Put it out of its misery."
Daniel: "I think its leg is broken. I’m going to make a splint out of floss and twigs."
PCVs: "Put the duckling down. We can’t take it into the school where we’re going to observe a Life Skills class."
Daniel: "I’m going to put it here under the tree. Oh look there’s a frog. They can be friends."
Anna: "Do not get attached like the baby goat. "
Daniel: "It was love at first sight. It snuggled right into my chest when I picked it up."

How To Be A Beautiful Country / Make A Roadtrip Pleasant
For a small country, Togo packs a big punch… From the mid-South, starting in Agou, the paved road is "paved", in glaring quotation marks that hang meaningfully in the air. Driving on the left hand side of the road, while surprising for the first few hours but soon becoming frighteningly normal, affords us the opportunity to get a close up view of the foliage (which itself changes from South to North). Palm trees, termite mounds, green grasses, and the hills and mountains rising above us. If you look carefully, you can see the white marks in the hillside which mark waterfalls, sprung from the caverns hiding in the rocky hills.
The hills themselves change too. In the South, they are bumps hiding under green quilts, villages nestled in between the folds. In the North, near Kara, the mountains appear again - absent after a perilous climb through the mountains to get to Atakpame, then the hills dropping away to reveal lush savannahs, watered by the rainy season and rumored to turn brown in a few months. But near Kara the mountains appear again, different from their southern cousins, these ones rocky and scruffy and somehow rather plucky-seeming. There are two paved roads, one of which runs through Kara, but to reach Sara-Kabou (Kassie’s village) we turn off the Route Nationale and pass through the red dust road passing the circular houses with thatched roofs or the children who look up from their activities and chase after the cars. (Substantially less romantic than it sounds.)
I feel like God, who looked upon the Earth and decided It Was Good. Except substantially less graceful.

How To Sing The Yovo Song
Note that this is only cute when you are four years old. A note on pronunciation : Yovo is with emphasis on the second syllable, which always makes its speaker sound vaguely surprised.

" Yovo! Yovo !
Bon soir! Ca va ?
Donnez-mois vint-cinq francs… "

[Yovo ! Yovo ! Good evening, how are you? Give me 25 francs…"
PS In the North " anasara " is the same as " yovo ". Yovo means white person, but it’s applied to strangers in general. Even our Togolese formateurs have been called Yovo, if they are hanging out with Peace Corps people or maybe they are lighter skinned than the local people. African-Americans and Asian-Americans also get called Yovos. (Conversely, yovos also get called chinois…)

How To … Visit Many Different Places…
From Agou, we drove north-east along the paved road that runs from Kpalimé to Atakpamé (where we stopped for lunch). This road takes us straight through the heart of the Plateaux region, and along the left hand side of the country, where there are many hills and mountains and long grasses and foreign trees and waterfalls in the mountain sides. We passed through all the towns that are directly on the road, including Adeta which is where the training site was held last year. We stopped at Amlamé where a current PCV works with an NGO (and met her dog, which was a rare cute bundle of fur and was excited to see more people that would pay it attention). We received yummy bissap juice (it reminded me of that ice tea that comes in the dragon cans … what’s it called) and kolico made from breadfruit and dipped in tomato paste. Yummy. After Amlamé we drove up a winding mountain, passing an overturned eighteen wheeler on the way. We stopped in Atakpamé for lunch where we got to sit on the restaurant’s terrace. Atakpamé is the regional capital of Plateaux. This is also where the two paved roads merge into one (the other one comes straight from Lomé), and which we continued to drive upon due north, smack dab in the middle of the country. It was fun riding in the car and seeing the turnoffs for the stagiares’ new posts. Later we passed through Sokodé, the capital of the Centrale region, and finally arrived in Kara. Our hotel was really nice (by Togo standards) and we took advantage of the pool a few times. Before Kara, we had picked up another PCV who would hang out with us for the week (I have forgotten to say that every week during PST a current PCV stays with us at the tech house). We got to see her house (with lovely sunflowers in her garden) which was two rooms and very homey seeming. This is also the village where Daniel finally got a chance to hold a petit chevre – baby goat – and fell in love. They are so cute. =) In Kara we went out to restaurants and had the chance to have Western food. We met many other current Volunteers in Kara. We also went to the maison de passage in Kara, all regional capitals have maisons de passage where PCVs can go to spend the night or exchange books or hang out etc. We also got the chance to use the internet which is when the last update was sent in. The next day we went to a COS-ing volunteer’s village. It turned out to be so beautiful and welcoming. It was surrounded by the rocky, scruffy mountains and has a huge mango tree under whose shade we sat. The house was great (two rooms not including a little entryway where the couches etc are; a yard with the shower and latrine and a space for gardening). We came back to Kara for lunch, and then we went to Bafilo, a town on the main road. There we visited AED, an organization where PCVs work, which is an organization for Togolese living with AIDS and nearly everyone who works there is also HIV positive. We were received with beautiful songs, and quite possibly the most beautiful child I have seen, less than three years old, who also is HIV positive. After Bafilo we went back to Kara. The next day, Saturday, some of us had the most delicious breakfast at the hotel (and was worth the price – croissants and coffee and fruit and hard boiled eggs…) and then we got on the road around 10am. We got back to Agou around 5:30pm, after several stops to use the bushes, tired but excited from the fun times we’d had and the beautiful and diverse things we’d seen and discovered about Togo.

getting posted !

15 Oct 07
It’s week four and I already know where I’ll working the next two years! So here’s how the process of finding out went… about two weeks ago, we got a list of the villages where the posts are, but we didn’t have any information about them other than where they are located on the map and what current volunteers have told us about those regions. You would think that no one could possibly have a strong preference for any particular post based on such limited information, but there was one post that immediately stood out to me. And the more I talked about this post, the more I felt attracted to it. I was really trying not to think too much about it, since I wanted to be excited for whatever post I would end up with and not limit myself. But then last week the project director gave us a presentation with more specific information about each site and went through each one. I tried my best to keep an open mind and be as unbiased as possible, but I just happened to pay the best attention when she talked about this particular site and was even more excited about it by the end of it. After the presentation and after talking some more with a couple volunteers, I went into my interview with the director almost certain I was going to get that site. And, voila, so it was.

Information about the site: It’s called M’poti. It’s located in southern centrale. It has a population of about 2,000. It has a paved road, which makes me happy since that makes getting around a lot easier. I won’t have electricity (sadly) or running water after all, but I’ll survive. I’ll be living in a compound with a woman and her kids-- this just means that they live right next to me, but I’ll be doing my own thing. I’ll have two rooms , a cooking area, and my own latrine and shower. I think this is going to be a great set up. I’m really happy I’ll be living alongside a family. The other great thing is that I have been able to hang out with two other current volunteers that are in the same area and who I will be seeing fairly frequently. They are super great… except during a soccer game this past week, one of them kicked a soccer ball in my face and the other one just about took me out when he slid to kick the ball. But they also bought me a drink at the bar, so it’s all good.

an african hiking experience

I went hiking my third weekend for about 5 hours. There were some amazingly beautiful views, but it was a little long and I got attacked by some humongous, African black ants. Luckily I had good moral support by the people I was with. Along the hike we also saw a crab. Who would have thought I would see a crab on the trail in the middle of an African jungle? I’m hoping to do a lot more hiking and biking while I’m here.

cultural experiences

The first weekend here, I went to a soiree where I got to dance (not nearly as well as everyone here. Oh my word everyone and their grandma—literally—dance soooo well) and watch a bunch of performances. There was one in particular that was really… interesting. Ask me about it sometime. I went to a funeral service the second weekend which was cool to see, although I was super tired and didn’t understand what they were saying since it was all in ewe. Interesting cultural difference—there was a lot of singing and dancing and the “service” lasts all night long. My host dad and I went for the first 2.5 hours. Right before I left, we watched two comedians and a circus type performer do their acts. Let me remind you I’m talking about a funeral service here. Well, I guess it was more of a memorial service? I’m not entirely sure. My host sister told me it was for a chauffeur that died about a month ago. What happens is that if someone dies and the family can’t afford to put on the funeral they wait to bury them until they have the money to do it. It’s been an interesting.

oh la la, le francais

My French is coming along. I have good and bad days. Current volunteers have been really encouraging, so I think I’ll be alright. I have to keep reminding myself that getting fluent in a different language doesn’t happen in just a few weeks. Go figure.

the living situation

My room chez ma famille is relatively large. I like it just fine except for the spiders and insects that like to hang on the walls and the few bed bugs I suspect I’m sharing a bed with. Can’t complain though. The outhouse, or latrine, hasn’t been terrible to use—it’s very clean considering it’s an outhouse. As far as showers go, I’ve actually enjoyed taking bucket showers. Except for one time when I took one at night and a fatty preying mantis decided to come in and hang out, which I did not appreciate at all.

il faut manger!

My meals here have been yum so far. I’ve eaten a lot (and I mean A LOT) of bread, rice, and pasta, along with different kinds of sauces (mostly tomato based), vegetables (mostly green beans and cabbage), and fruit (mostly oranges, bananas, and pineapple). My favorite meal has been rice with peanut sauce. Yum yum. I absolutely love carbs but I don’t think I’m exerting the energy I should be to justify eating them so often. Plus their portions are huge. I need to make a habit of running in the mornings. I’ve gone a couple times and it’s been nice but I just have to get up so dang early to do it. As far as cooking goes, I’m just a little worried about having to cook for myself. Though the PC gives us a good amount of equipment, one of them is not a microwave. Which I guess is fine since I don’t think I’d be able to find lean pockets or garden burgers at the marche anyways. I think the food I miss the most right now is cheese. I’ve only had it once and it just isn’t the same.

geography, weather, and bugs

A little bit about Togo geography… the closest region along the coast is Maritime, north of it is the plateau region, then centrale, then kara, then savane. Agou Akoumawou is in the plateau region—which I thought meant would provide us with less humidity than Lome, proportionate to the heat, but unfortunately that is not the case. It feels way hotter and just as humid, less the cool ocean breeze. And there’s a lot more bugs. Particularly spiders. C’est dommage. I've come to accept the fact that I'm going to permanently itch for the next two years.

faire-ing la conaissance de ma famille hôte

Getting to meet my host famille was amazing. When we got to Agou Akoumawou, we were greeted with music and dancing, and food. During the dancing part, there was a young man who was super animated and all over the dancing. He turned out to be my host brother in an extended kind of way which has been way cool. His name is George (funny thing… I thought his name was Josh until pretty recently when I saw his name written. I feel bad for calling him a name not his own, but in my defense, he looks way more like a Josh than a George, plus even now it still sounds like people call him Josh) He’s 23 years old. I saw George and Francoise (my host sister who is 16) a lot at the beginning but now I just see them every once in a while which is too bad. It took me a little bit (as in just a few days ago) to figure out the family situation because I initially thought that they were my host mom and dad’s kids but it turns out George is their nephew and Francoise is just a family friend who both live in different houses. Figuring out family relations has been somewhat difficult for a lot of us. In my compound is my host mom and dad with their two little boys (7 and 4yrs old) and a little girl (3 months), as well as a Peace Corps secretary named Monsieur Jean. My family has been tres super. They have been very patient with me as I try to practice my French and have been great about teaching my a little of the local language, ewe. Anyone I try to speak ewe with around here gets a kick out of me trying. I am going to start learning it in a more formal setting next week since I will be using ewe at my post (more about this later).

lomé-tion orienta-tion

Orientation in Lome was fabulous for the most part. It was a little tiring at times and I definitely did not like living out of suit cases, especially since me and personal organization don’t get along too well sometimes, but I was able to sneak in a few naps and did not end up losing anything. At least not anything I’ve noticed so far. Lome is a very beautiful city although, similar to Mexico, it has its fair share of crazy drivers and pollution. Other notable differences from the US are that the houses are cement based and there aren’t many paved streets. I wish I could upload des photos, but I think that’s going to have to wait till later. Lome has a fairly active night life. We arrived on a Saturday night and the streets were hoppin’ with people. I went out twice with PCVs and other PCTs to a couple different bars. It was fun. The best part was getting to talk to and getting to know some great people.

and don’t call me shirley!

The airplane rides were wonderful considering we got here safe and sound. Sleeping was a little bit of a challenge, especially on the first plane, but in retrospect, it was great getting to talk to fellow PCTs (PC Trainees) and playing around with the monitor each seat had. The monitors had games, movies, TV shows, news casts, cartoons, music, etc. Another really chouette chose that happened was that on our flight from NY to Paris, there was a lady sitting a few seats away from me who had been a PCV in the 70s. Get this—in Togo! She was as excited and surprised that she was in a plane full of future Togo PCVs as we were to meet her. It was a good sign.
I feel like I should make a quick note about the actual planes we were on since I know some of you ;) really like planes. Ummm… they were big and amazing. Who wouldn’t be amazed by a huge chunk of metal that can fly, right?! I wish I could say more about them, but that’s really all I know.

finally updating

Hello! It’s been amazing getting to experience the culture here in Togo, I feel like I’ve already learned so much in the short amount of time I’ve been here. I’m really looking forward to the next two years. This whole Girl’s Education and Empowerment thing is pretty sweet.

Getting connected to the internet is harder than I thought it was going to be so I’ve been in Togo for almost a month and I’m just now able to post an update. Alors, there’s a whole lot I would love to share with everyone. The last (and first) time I was able to get online about a week ago, I wasn’t able to figure out how to post what I had written before my time on the computer was up. I have been using a friend’s computer to type updates which means I have a lot to post, so for the sake of organization I am going to break it up and do a series of posts.

togo or bust!

i can't believe i've only been in philly for the past two two and a half(ish) days. i've done so much, learned so much, met so many people, it feels like it's been way longer. alas, here i am, on the the eve of my departure, feeling surprisingly calm.

highlights of the past two days:
9.19.07
-saw the liberty bell, betsy ross' house, independence hall, along with more cool historical stuff, i'm sure. philadelphia is a cool place in general i decided.
-had a philly cheesesteak sandwich for the first time. can't get much more authentic than that.
-met some more wonderful people. i've almost got all the names down now. there are about 30 people in the togo group altogether-- 16 in the girls' education and empowerment (gee) program and 14 in the natural resource management (nrm) program.
-talked about anxieties and aspirations as we anticipate leaving.
-had dinner at an indian restaurant. it was buffet style, which was fabulous since i got to try several dishes i hadn't tried before. i wonder if they'll have indian food in togo...
-stopped by an irish pub before heading back to the hotel. it was a good ambiance, although the music they were playing sounded like someone was singing karaoke, but there wasn't any karaoke anything around. kinda confused me for a little bit.
9.20.07
-talked about how to cope with getting unwanted attention in togo. it's hard to tell what that's going to be like.
-had a chinese lunch with a great group of people.
-talked about what tomorrow is going to be like-- it sounds like it's going to be a lot of sitting. we take a bus to the clinic to get some shots, take a bus to the airport, take a 7 hour plane ride to france, and a 6 hour plane ride to togo. fortunately i brought plenty of stuff to keep me occupied, not to mention a group of 30 people to talk with.
-when we were walking to dinner, we asked a guy on the street for suggestions of where to go and as he was leading us to bucca di beppo (mmm...), he randomly took us into a kinko's because there was a guy in there he knew who is from ghana. he was telling us how great ghana is, so i'm definitely going to be visiting some time in the next two years. anyone who wants to come along is more than welcome to join me.
-had an amazing dinner
-saw a ton of bats (we all decided they were bats) when we were walking back. normally i wouldn't be happy that flying rats (i'm not a big fan of bats) were all over the place, but they were just doing their own thing relatively far away from me and it was actually kind of neat to see it.
-saw a march/demonstration go by of people who want the boys of the jena six case to be let go(to read more about the case: http://www.whileseated.org/photo/003244.shtml).
- saw about a million and one motorcycles go by all at once.

all in all, it's been a pretty eventful last couple days. i'm so glad i've gotten to spend some time here, i'm for sure going to come back some day. i'm super excited to take the bus up to new york. i hope i get to see a lot on the way. i'll just tell the bus driver that i'm feeling nauseous so that he will pull over and i can sneak some pictures along the way. pictures never work as well when the bus is moving.

i'm all packed and ready to get poked tomorrow. please pray for safe flights.

good flights. settling in to hotel. making new friends.

after getting only 2 hours of sleep last night (2 more than i had planned on getting) i got to the airport on time and was out for most of my time on the planes. it made the day go by quick. even spending almost 3 hours in the dallas airport went by fast. i got to the airport and didn't know what i was supposed to do. i didn't know if i was supposed to look for someone or get a shuttle. i was half expecting someone to be there holding a sign that said peace corps or my last name but that wasn't the case. and getting on a shuttle wasn't really an option since i didn't know what hotel i was going to be staying at. luckily i had written down the name and number of someone i could contact. so after getting my luggage i took a cab to the hampton inn. the person i had talked to said that a cab wouldn't be too expensive since the hotel was fairly close to the airport. this cab driver apparently didn't know it isn't supposed to cost too much to drive someone to the hampton because he charged me $26. but on the bright side, i really enjoyed the drive there. from what i've seen, i decided i like it here. i'll see how i feel by the end of the week.

i checked in and by the time i got to my room, i had met 4 other girls that are here and going to togo. introductions out of the way, i told them i was hungry and was going to find some food before it got too much later. i brought some soup back and ate it while we chatted for a good 2 hours or so. i like them all. i'm looking forward to getting to know them better. it's really nice to be able to talk to people who have many of the same questions i've had for the past couple months but are just as excited for the experience. i think we're all equally unsure of what to expect.

one of the girls has a friend who lives in philly and is going to show her around the city tomorrow morning. i have to get up at 9am ... which is 6 am in normal oregon time. i'm not feeling super tired right now since i slept a decent amount on the planes, but i know i'll regret staying up tomorrow if i don't try to go to sleep soon. with that said, bonsoir!

africa's women: a journey of hope

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=86

here is an article that i recently came across. it makes me sad when i hear about economic disparities that exists throughout the world, but it's important to recognize that when we speak of poverty, we shouldn't limit it to economic hardship. here is an excerpt from the article:

"Materially, America may be very developed, but in other aspects of life, Africa has significant contributions to offer. In Africa, the elderly don’t die alone. If an extended family member is in need, others in the family with their own meager resources make sure the need is met. In the African context, there is no such concept as “inconvenience.” Unexpected visitors are blessings, and there’s always room at the table for one or two more. Older siblings help with school fees for the younger ones. Here people know how to celebrate, to dance, to sing, without spending a fortune to do so. Yes, life is hard, but people know how to find and express joy in the midst of what they have, with each other. People greet each other with “God is good…” to which is replied, “…all the time, and all the time…” “God is good!” concludes the first. Is this simplistic optimism…or is it a view of reality which addresses life from the perspective of eternal priorities?"

this is a description of the african culture that i've heard from a number of sources and i feel so blessed to have the opportunity to be going to a place that has a reputation of richness in the realm of community. i am going to "serve" this community, but know they will inevitably serve me more than i could hope to serve them.

in three weeks

i will be starting a new chapter in my life. i think of all i will be leaving behind and it makes me sad to think of how different things will be when i get back. people will be graduated. friends will be married. new jobs will be found. sisters will be older and almost done with high school. change is good, i just wish i could be around to experience it with those that i love. in the same breath, i have to say that i am super excited for the opportunity to experience life in a completely different way than i every imagined i would. i am going to live and serve in africa for over two years. !!. i've asked a lot of questions. i've talked to a lot of people. right now i'm at the point of just needed to experience it for myself. as this is my first post, i would like to invite you to share in my experience by reading my posts (which i'll try to write as often as i can... not too sure of what that will be at the moment) and responding as you feel moved. email, snail mail, and prayers are all highly encouraged and welcomed. merci beaucoup !