Monday, March 28, 2011

A through E

Hey everybody, all is well in Togo these days. Just to keep things interesting on the blog, I’m starting a themed series today, the A-Z’s of Togo.

A: Animism

Voodoo, gri-gri, sorcery. Whatever you want to call it, animism is the generic term for the wide variety of local religious beliefs you’ll find almost anywhere you go in Togo. For example, in my village, the religion, to all outward appearances, is Islam. But there are still plenty of people who practice traditional religion. The other day, the chief of the village was complaining to me that he has to do the ceremony for the big village holiday in secret, because the serious muslims don’t like it. The ceremony involves sacrificing an all black sheep under a giant tree where the first chief of the village pronounced his own imminent death and promptly vanished into the earth. He also told me that they used to throw suspected sorcerers off the cliffs in the mountains behind the village, but assured me that they don’t do that anymore.

B: Bush-taxis

Bush-taxis are the standard mode of long-distance travel in Togo. There are two general varieties, 15-seaters, which often hold more than 20 people, not including children under five, and people sitting on the roof of the car. It’s basically a large gutted minivan with 4 rows of seats for 3 people, onto which 4 people are crammed. I’ve seen a driver’s apprentice climb out the window and onto the roof of one of these while moving at full speed, because it was too crowded in the car and the roof was more comfortable. The roof is typically covered with all sorts of baggage, including live goats, which is, of course, preferable to the goats staying in the car. The second kind of bush taxi is a 5-seater, which is basically a small hatchback. My personal record for people in a 5-seater was ten, with two men sitting in each seat in the front (the driver reaches over the other man to shift) and 5 women and I crammed into the back three seats, four of us on the seats, and two smaller girls sitting on the women’s laps. Bush-taxis are not fun, for obvious reasons. It should also be mentioned that you’re almost guaranteed to break down at least once on a long voyage, and that the roads are full of potholes and enormous, slow trucks that are exceedingly difficult to pass. Once passed, you can rest assured that the driver will soon stop to pick up more passangers, buy water, or argue the price of yams with roadside vendors, and the trucks will pass you again. In this fashion, on a day’s voyage you may pass the same truck 5 or 6 times. I try not to travel much here. Luckily, Peace Corps Togo sends a well-maintained, well-driven, air-conditioned vehicle up and down the country twice a month, and if you’re near the national highway and smart, you’ll plan your travel around its schedule.

C: Cinq cent francs

Cinq cent francs, or five hundred CFA, is about equivalent to one dollar. What you hear about people living on less than a dollar a day is definitely true. I don’t know exactly what the people around me live on, but I think they’d be doing better than they are if they had a dollar a day. And that’s not even thinking about if they had a dollar a day for each of their kids. I can buy breakfast for 100 CFA, and a beer for 500 CFA. Togo supposedly has pretty good beer by West African standards. There’s a lager, called Lager; a pilsner, called Pils (pronounced “Piss”); and there’s a dark beer called Awooyo. You can also get Guiness, but that’ll cost you more than 500 CFA. The saddest thing of all is that 500 CFA is about the average going rate (it can be more or less depending on where you are) for a prostitute in Togo and by prostitute I don’t mean someone who makes a living selling sex, I mean any girl who needs some money. There’s a lot of work to be done in the area of women’s rights here. All volunteers, not just Girls Education and Empowerment volunteers, see this stuff and take it upon themselves to at least talk with their Togolese neighbors about why it is that women have it so tough here and what we can do to make it better.

D: Doucement

Potentially the most popular word in Togo, doucement translates to “softly” or “gently.” It basically means “careful there” or something like that, and chances are I’ll hear it doing just about anything, because people assume that I am suffering horribly here as an American. I’m constantly being told to get into the shade, because the sun will give me malaria if I don’t.

E: Existential Crisis

A common dilemma faced by volunteers, at least three times a day. If you don’t have cell reception, don’t have any work to do, and have been sitting on your porch watching the rain all day while your entire village takes shelter in their houses, do you really exist?

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