Hey everyone, I’m happy to say that I’m alive and well in Togo. The other trainees and I left the comfortable confines of Lome for our training sites about a month and a half ago. The Girl’s Education and Empowerment (GEE) folks are in a fairly large city, where all have electricity, a few have overhead showers, and one is lucky enough to have glass windows. Ridiculous, right? The Natural Resource Management (NRM) folks and I are in a smaller village. What we lack in electricity, we make up for in goats.
My day usually starts around 5 am when I wake up to rain pounding the roof, roosters crowing, and people singing and beating drums. It’s incredibly dark in my room, as there’s no light outside and no light inside. I wrap a length of cloth around my waist, and grab my soap, sponge (really more like a length of rough fishnet), small bucket, and larger bucket. I put my shower flip flops and walk across the yard (compacted dirt) to a concrete shower stall, where I dump water on my head and soap up. I didn’t use the “sponge” for the first month, and, as a result, the first time I used it dirt literally came out of my skin. But I’ve been vigilant about using it since, and I haven’t had any similar experiences.
As far as pooping goes, I have, in fact, been pooping more since I arrived. My toilet is basically an outhouse with walls made of dried palm fronds. The nice thing about it is that I always have company, especially at night. Today for example, in addition to the usual assortment of flies and spiders, I was joined by a gecko and a giant toad. The giant toad caused tons of confusion, as I couldn’t pronounce the word “crapaurd,” and I had to take my family on a hilarious night-time toad-hunt to clear things up. Crapaurd, for those interested, is pronounced “crap-ohh.” Very apt for the location. (Side note: I just killed a quarter-sized cockroach who was rude enough to interrupt my typing by climbing onto my desk.)
Back to the pooping. My increased frequency of pooping has nothing to do with parasites or amoebas… yet. It’s merely a product of the fact that my host mama has been feeding me mountains of delicious food that I’m obligated to eat as much as possible of. She only speaks Ewe (pronounced eh-vay), so I’ve been learning a bit of it, petit a petit. I know how to say “I’m full” (Meh-day-poe) and “I’m going to school” (My-ee-mah-vah), among maybe ten other phrases. I learned the word for snail (ah-bo-bo), after teaching my host brothers the trick where you make a peace sign with your hand when someone tries to bump fists with you, forming a snail. I have never had a joke received better than the snail joke was received in Togo. Nothing is funnier than a Yovo who knows the Ewe word for snail.
My host father speaks French and Ewe, and works at the Peace Corps training site, so I see him a lot. He has goats, chickens, and a field somewhere that I haven’t seen yet. It’s been raining a ton this year, so things have been good on the farm. There are 7 children in the family, one of whom lives in Lome, and four of whom are very small. Every night they sing and dance in the yard. My favorite song so far has been, “Je mange la Pate” or “I eat the paste.” They love the “you say potato, I say potato” song, and all other songs I’ve tried on them so far. My attempts to explain geology and astronomy in garbled French are less popular, but received patiently nonetheless.
All my days here have been pretty similar. I wake up at 5:30 or so, shower, have a giant egg sandwich and tea. I go to training from 7:30 to noon, have lunch, go back to training at 2:30, finish at 5, have dinner, and then relax until it’s time to go to bed around 7:30 pm. Training is awesome; I have French classes with a bunch of super smart and hilarious Togolese teachers. They’re all fucking brilliant, and Peace Corps is baller enough to employ them all. My French is improving really quickly; I can hold down simple conversations with ease, and can usually figure out a way to explain or understand more complicated points, especially if I’ve had a Togolese beer, which costs about a dollar and is twice the size of its American counterparts.
Technical training is led by a dashing duo of Togolese agricultural experts, Brad and Blaise, who also happen to be Togo’s greatest comedic minds. We’ve gone over a lot of different things like how to make killer bees give honey and why you should bleach your feet before entering a chicken farming operation. We try to learn in French as much as possible, but usually do things in Franglais, which has become the new mother tongue for all of us. There’s just no good English equivalent for “saluer.” During lunch it gets really hot and everyone tries to do as little as possible. I’m constantly dabbing myself with my handkerchief; I feel like an old British man.
We all spent last week at our future posts. About 10 of them are in the northern half of the country. Most are small (700ish people) villages, that need help with all sorts of things. There are loads of opportunities at all of them, ranging from beekeeping, mushroom growing, agroforestry, reforestation, food transformation, ecotourism, education, income generation, to all sorts of other things. The most desired post before they were assigned was “Monkey Mountain.” I think you can guess why.
I can now proudly say that my post is the most isolated in Togo. I’m in the western part of the Centrale region, but there are mountains cutting me off from all of Centrale. My trip to post is really long, in that I have to go north to the town of Bassar before moto-ing for four hours on what amounts to a cross between a BMX dirt course and a dry river bed. You can say what you will about it’s practicality, but it’s a great core work out. My village is awesome. There’s a cell tower, so feel free to CALL OR TEXT ME whenever you want. There’s also a guy with a satellite dish who shows European soccer games almost every night. Yam cultivation is the main game in town, along with occasionally eating one of the hundreds of goats, sheep, chickens, guinea fowls, ducks, or pigs that wander throughout the village at all times. The village is predominantly Muslim, and tons of people speak English, because we’re really close to Ghana. My chief, for example, speaks no French, but speaks good English. He also brought me bananas, which basically saved me from starvation during post visit. The people are excited to have me there, and even happier when I say hi to them in Tem, the language of the Kotokoli people. I’d tell you how what to say, but saying hi changes depending on the time of day and usually takes a minute or two because it consists of like ten questions about the state of someone’s life. I have some great neighbors (if someone four hours away can be called a neighbor) up in Bassar too, one of whom just discovered Jersey Shore, and one of whom had a beach house there growing up. I’d love it if one of you burnt and sent me season two. Now I’m back at training, and I love training, but I’m really excited to get back to my post. Once you get a taste of freedom, it’s hard to give it up.
To summarize, things have been great here. I’m adjusting well to the humidity, my host family is awesome, my post is sick, and my French is basically functional. It’s exhausting learning so many things all at once, but I’m compensating by moving as slowly as possible at all times, and sleeping ten hours a night, despite waking up at 5:30 every morning. Everything, from speaking, to walking, to drinking chorine-bleach-treated water, is a bit more difficult here, but it’s been well worth the effort so far.
I hope everyone reading is doing great, and that you’ll follow the directions on the side of this blog and call or write me!
Du courage!
