a waragni fete

just a little peace corps togo background before i share this story. there are five regions in togo and within each region volunteers are divided into clusters. i happen to live in what many would consider the best cluster in togo ;) the pagala cluster. one of my fellow clustermates, connor, invited me to a village fete (or party, for all you non frenchies), and this is where the story begins.

i told connor that i would be at his village before 8am since the day's festivities were supposed to start around 7. me being stingy or optimistic, i decided i would bike down. it takes roughly an hour to get to pagala on bike and waragni (connor's village) is about an hour further (just under 45k in total from mpoti). i set my alarm for 5 30 in hopes of heading out around 6. my alarm clock goes off and my first thought is: cancelling this early morning bike ride is only a phone call away. so i snooze. i eventually talk myself out of my laziness and get to waragni just around 8 30.

the vast majority of people in waragni are kabiyé (not sure on the spelling), and around this time of year they have a fete to celebrate young boys who are coming of age (about 18). they hold a series of informal wresting matches through out the day in which the boys will crouch in the middle of a circle of spectators and wait for another boy to come challege them to wrestle. there are several going on at the same time, along with people playing music. barrett (a fellow pcv friend of mine who was also there) and i decided to follow suit and wrestle eachother, which got a good laugh from people watching us. i won of course.

another part of the coming of age deal is having to eat dog. each of the boys taking part of the ceremony either buys or has a dog bought for them and they cook them throughout the day in low to the ground covered paillotes (kind of like a straw hut). we were invited into two different paillotes and were given several peices of dog to eat. i think i need to apologize to several people at this point, but i won't lie, it was pretty tasty. not so much the first time around because a couple peices were not tender at all and (at least one of my peices) still had visible fur on it. but i had already picked the peice up and i couldn't just put it back. i ate it before i could think too much of what i was doing. the second time around, though, the peices were very tender. i'll just leave it at that.

i didn't get to see the dancing part of the fete since i had to get back to mpoti, but all i can say is that i am so glad i got myself out of bed that morning. i didn't have my camera but i'll try to get pictures from barrett and post them as soon as possible.