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.