Livin' It In Togo

Goin' the distance!

2011-10-13T12:39:00.002Z

Fast forward now in Togo. Lots of stuff going on and not much time left to do it!

The biggest event recently for me was the Accra International Marathon in Ghana. The past 6 months I’d been working on getting back into shape after having resolved to run this marathon as a grand finale to service. I spent lots of early mornings going on long runs through the country with a baggie full of peanuts and tchakpa waiting for me at the end to quench the thirst. I never imagined running could be as enjoyable as I found it to be during my training!

A strong delegation of Peace Corps Togo volunteers signed up for the full and half marathons so we had some good camaraderie on our side for race day. Some people paired off during the run (I ran for 17 miles with a friend I trained with before I had to watch him go ahead of me), but people respected their own capacities, trickling in at their own pace (after all, the goal for all of us was basically just to finish!). The day of the race there was a couple of bumps in the road to overcome. The race started an hour late, which gave the climate another hour to climb well into the 90’s (I finished at 10:30 which means a high African sun! My sunburns hurt way more than any soreness from the run the day after) and they ran out of water after mile 22, but everyone managed to hold their own! For me it was a very memorable experience and enjoyable in a tiring kind of sweaty way! Crossing the finish line was very satisfying (That is, once I caught my breath and found shade, water and the tchakpa that I had transported all the way from northern Togo!) and Accra was the right city to be in to spend hours satisfying a thirst and hunger that I built up over the 4 hours the race took me to finish! We indulged! And now I’m looking for training partners to improve on that when I get back home! I hear there’s a marathon next spring at Sugarloaf!

But with the end of the race, so ends my last big goal to accomplish in my service. Right before then I had wrapped up my Moringa campaign (the women wound up planting over 14000 trees!) and now I’m looking ahead to the arrival of my replacement (a girl from Colorado) and my close of service date, which is set for 3 November. That leaves me about 3 weeks now to say my goodbyes and finish my last paperwork before I am officially no longer a Peace Corps volunteer. After that my parents are coming to visit for a couple weeks in Ghana and Togo and the 25th of November I catch my flight off the continent and into Montreal, Canada. I wanted to take my time on my way home so once I get in Montreal I’ll spread about 2 weeks time between Montreal and Quebec City before someone can hopefully come to Quebec City and bring me home overland. Either way, the hope is to be home in Maine by December 12th!

Dead white peoples' yard sale

2011-07-09T02:23:00.000Z

Perhaps the last highlight of market day that I want to bring to you is what we volunteers call “the dead yovo” market. In Togo, “yovo” is the ubiquitous word for white person. It comes from the Ewe language, which is the most widely spoken language along with French and it means something like the “one who shines”. Normally, it might be a compliment, but thanks to it’s over abuse, especially by anxious singing children, it’s more or less a word we dread being called. Nonetheless, the word is just another cultural difference we’ve adapted to and even employ on our own at times, as is the case in calling used clothing “dead white people’s clothing”.

But I digress! Anyway, all over Africa, second hand clothing from the western world is shipped to Africa. It’s all donated, however the fees for transport make it so that the clothes need to be bought and sold for a price. It some senses, it’s a controversial business. The enormous surplus of old clothing from the West makes large amounts of perfectly useful clothing available to poor people across the world. Instead of being wasted, clothes are recycled by very eager poor people. Nonetheless, it has an effect on the development of local economy. Although Africa would benefit from the work of producing its own clothing, all this cheep clothing makes big clothing factories few and no doubt subtracts from the work of local tailors. In one way, the whole dynamic may be compared to that of Wal-Mart in local economies.

One way or the other however, I love this market, for the simple reason that it’s the closest thing I get to a dose of home in village. Only rarely do I not stop and take the time to poke around the piles of cheap clothing lining the main road on market day. T-shirts are especially fun, since I happen across some pretty hilarious designs, including one of my favorite shirts for a joint called “Lobster Louis’” in Orlando, FL, advertising “the best tail in town”. Other times, it’s just comforting to see familiar labels and logos I wouldn’t otherwise see. So on market say, the least desireable used clothing gets heaped in piles on the side of the road and sold for rarely more than 10-20 cents. This is the second picture I posted.

But like any yard sale, some “junk” is better than others. Typically, merchants scour the huge piles of clothing upon entering the port in Lomé. They take out all the best stuff and sell it like it was brand new (and sometimes it is). Hence, in Lomé an old stadium has been turned into a giant salvation army, where countless peddlers come out daily to sell the best second hand clothing for decent prices. When I wanted to find a Red Sox hat and soccer cleats, this is where I went. Sure enough, I got my quality Sox hat for about 50 cents and some beat up, but original, Adidas cleats for 8 bucks, then fixed up by a cobbler for another buck. And if you ask me no other new shoe I could find in country would be better!

In my village as well, there’s a version of this “organized yard sale”. Merchants set up stalls and display their quality pants, dress shirts, t-shirts, jackets and such in rows of hangers, where you can stroll through and see what you find. Of course, it’s very hit or miss to find the clothes you like and fit at the same time, but especially in the case of pants, tailors are used to retrofitting for small fees. I must say, almost all my favorite clothes I find in this way, but that’s because it’s a small important thing that helps make me feel a little more at home in this very different corner of the world.

Snake Lore

2011-06-16T02:41:00.005Z

One year into service I had not yet seen one live snake. Sure I’d heard stories of all the deadly snakes we’d probably have the chance to encounter over the course of two years, but I was well over a year in and I hadn’t come across one. The closest I had come was noticing a group of bustling kids near my house one day yelling after “le viper”, which fortunately for that particular snake, managed to escape into the teak forest right next to my house. Still, I hadn’t laid my eyes on it.

Well the past 6 months has put a definitive end to that trend! I finally got my first encounter biking back into village. I was on my normal 15K bike commute, coming back from traveling somewhere, which meant I had a particularly heavy load of baggage strapped over the back wheel of my bike. This afforded a good deal of momentum as I rumbled down the last stretch of dirt road into my village. I hit rocky patch of road that separated the high school on the hill to my right and a little rock mountain off to the left and there in the middle of the road I noticed a snake making for the rocky outcrop from the right, only at the last minute.

Well I strained hard on the breaks to kill my momentum and skidded to a stop within about 3 meters of this little critter, who decided to stop and size me up. I crept back a couple steps slowly but more or less waited for him to start again on his way and sure enough he did. Meanwhile another motorcycle, itself heavily weighed down by a load of grain that forced the driver up against the handle bars, was making its way up the hill. This guy couldn’t afford to lose his momentum and stop or else he had little hope of starting again without falling backwards. So instead he stayed his course despite the snake and indeed it seemed that he took aim at the small snake (maybe half a meter in length and little thicker than a tootsie roll) in his path. I was amazed by this bold move after hearing just how dangerous some of our indigenous reptiles can be. As I feared, he missed as the snake reared up from his advance at the last second, perking its head up in its wobbly fashion within inches of the moving bike. Nonetheless, the man continued on untouched by the young snake (you know they say it’s the small ones that are the most dangerous. They haven’t yet learned to control their venom).

Meanwhile I had drawn the attention of a Fulani woman (Fulani is the ethnicity of wandering cattle herders well known to all of West Africa) that caught up on my heels after I’d stopped and pointed at the little critter in the road. Realizing that I had skipped the pleasantries of normal salutations, her smile vanished when she set her eyes on the snake. Immediately she yelled back to another duo on a bike coming up behind her. This was another Fulani man pedaling into town, balancing along with a younger Moba man who was hitching a ride, seated over the biker’s back wheel.

Right away they sprung into action, dismounting the bike and gathering 2 or 3 large stones each, one making his way to the right of the snake (the snake was now heading quicker than before in a dash towards the outcrop of rocks) and the other hanging to its left. In pursuit on the right the Fulani didn’t hesitate in throwing his stones. One after another, all his stones missed leaving him in need of searching more stones. However, the snake was now intently fixed on this pursuiter.

Lucky for this guy, he wasn’t on his own, or it could have become just a little more precarious. But with the snake staring at this now stoneless first man, the second man was able to get particularly close to the snake from behind. He had already missed once, but this time he couldn’t miss again, and hit home. With the snake immobilized by one blow several other rocks were brought in to finish the job and not 30 seconds later the two were on the bike again and over it. I was startled, but more or less excited by what just happened. I immediately thought that I needed to find the name of this guy to know just what kind of snake I had just dealt with. Had I just stared deadly venom in the eye?

« Est-ce que lui la, il est dangeroux ? ». I asked simply if he was dangerous and in the normal African antics I get the response of « Bwaaa ! Johh! Il est dangeroux! If he bites you it’s over! » I wanted the thing’s name and what I got meant little at the time. “Waaojiemon.” When I broke the work down afterwords I understood. It basically meant “the fearful red snake”. In French, the name I got was “le Crachant Rouge” (the red spitter). The first thing I did upon pulling into my house was to get out my Moba dictionary (a one way Moba to French dictionary designed to help locals learn the French language) and flipped around till I saw the entry I was looking for. This was one of the few entries with a picture and it displayed a prominent adult cobra!

To say the least that makes for a bit of a wake up call! I talked straight away with friends and family about the incident, and they all thought it was more or less comical to hear my incredulous attempts to explain the account in Moba whiling calming my excited nerves over a calabash of Tchakpa. Well I got over it, but it got me curious anyway and let’s just say that now I wear a special ring on my left hand that leaves me immune to snake bites.

Well, I can’t deny that so far the ring has worked. However snake sightings have surged for me since and I’m not just talking about a string of bad snake dreams I had for a couple weeks there. Waaojiemon was one of the two snakes Moba fear the most. I hadn’t yet encountered the other one, the famous viper. For some reason, green mambas don’t seem to make their list of concerning snakes, though I don’t think that’s because their harmless. Wikipedia says their venomous and I don’t want to test their theory. Anyway this picture is one such green mamba that was killed 50 meters from my house. When I saw him and snapped this picture he was writhing in his last moments, himself the victim of a deadly stone. Right as I was getting back from one of my runs and starting to stretch, I heard the commotion of them going after him. This one, was coming out of the same teak forest the viper had disappeared into so many months ago.

Now besides one baby black snake (hopefully not a black mamba though I’ll never know) I’d come across on a hike and a python my Ewe host dad held to my face (fortunately, that one don’t bite) last time I was visiting them (along with a chameleon and a bag of scorpions he was planning to turn a penny on in Tsevie), both taking place down south, all my other encounters have been confined to one apparent haven for slithery reptiles. Got any guess where that is? Yeah, that would be the botanical garden I’ve been talking about.

Honestly, how do you wanna have it? The reality is, if we succeed in doing what we want to do we’ll have created a piece of “the bush” within one hectare with a lush array of healthy local plants, especially trees and bushes. Granted the village on its own could be already considered the bush, but between deforestation and bush fires, few habitats remain ideal for animals, and that includes snakes. So I’ll take it as a sign of success that vegetation and hence (for the sake of optimism, I’ll say) “wildlife” (we chased a bush rat just the other day too!) are already coming back in. As long as we clear our paths and stay aware I think I’m fine living in their company. Let’s just stay alert!

The last month I’ve spent a lot of time in this garden, working on tree nurseries, a vegetable garden and a compost system and I’ve got enough encounters to fill one hand. That’s kind of a lot considering how rare it is to see a snake. In three weeks, we’ve stirred up 2 harmless (though I didn’t know it at the time, and hence happily erred of the side of caution in encouraging their execution) meter long garden snakes (depending on you’re taste for snake, “ça c’est la viande ça!” Apparently it’s an edible variety) and 2 half meter guys called “Waalable”. Some people call them vipers. Seconds before my friend collected the hay that had hid the snake, I had grazed that very spot with my hoe. On this second occasion, we burned him on the spot. A week earlier we had elected to feed the first one to the ants. Since two different people killed them, the preference of burial ceremonies varied.

So let me digress even further as you may be wondering about beliefs and superstitions held in respect to these small creatures capable of ending the lives of grown men. You can interpret how you wish! Here’s a taste of what I’ve heard.

When I started asking folks if they might be able to explain to me why I’ve been dreaming of snakes, the response I got (this time not from a even a villager, but an older professional man in the city wearing classes and a blazer) was a question in return. “Do you have a wife and did it bite you?” Okay, admittedly, that might not seem like a response to take seriously. Some may have laughed, potentially uncomfortably, and it would have ended there, but folks got curious beliefs here and elsewhere and at this point I’ve heard enough weird things to keep a straight face in answering that question. I wanted the serious interpretation and didn’t hesitate. “No.” “Oh, well that’s nothing to worry about then.” “And if I did have a wife and was bit?” “Then your wife’s going to be pregnant.” He grinned slightly like someone who knew he knew something you didn’t.

Of course, if you’re bit in real life, the meaning of this is probably more like “Get medicine fast or you might die.” But, traditionally, there’s still a protocol to follow. If you were bit, the first thing you absolutely have to do is kill the snake and cut open its insides. The crucial point is to check and see if the snake’s intestines are there and if they’re there, there’s good news. If you find a healer, you can survive. And the villagers are capable of treating these things with traditional medicine, hence our belief in the project of the botanical garden and its medicinal plants. However, if there are no insides watch out! That means no anti-venom can save you because you’re now dealing with black magic that someone else has sent your way!

Oh and by the way, if you kill a snake, make sure to cut its head off and bury it off to the side. You don’t want to risk the chance you turn your back on the snake you thought to have been dead, but which scurries back into the bushes and returns to haunt you! Sparrow hawks have been known to carry off snake carcasses, but I’ll tell ya, the viper we fed to the snakes wasn’t there the next day when I came back. After all that, call me off my rocker, but I’ll take the piece of mind of burying the head.

(Oh yeah, and I added another cool picture of a dead bat! It's gotta be the same kind that fly out of my latrine every time I use it at night!)

Hubs in Huts

2011-06-16T02:30:00.006Z

So let’s not elaborate things, Togo isn’t exactly high tech. Tiny pockets of most cities may be considered up to acceptable speed in the minds of an average American. However, most areas are very far "behind". Surprisingly however, cell phone use is widespread, even in the smallest villages. Of course it’s always a question of means whether or not people are able to own a cell phone. Used cell phones can be found for as little at $10 (more complicated knock-off models with MP3s, cameras and such are still only ~$50), but it’s the phone credit that makes things tough. Every call costs about a quarter, and that’s if you’re quick and to the point, definitely not traits of a normal Togolese conversation, especially in village.

So cell phone use looks like nothing in comparison with Western levels, since still most families don’t have a cell phone. Nonetheless, most people at least know someone whose cell phone they could borrow if needed and it wouldn’t be considered unusual for an average villager to own one. Either way, everyone’s familiar with cell phones, and coverage is amazingly good for the circumstances. I’ve been to few corners of Togo that didn’t have at least an elevated location where reception could be found. While electricity and running water continues to evade most villages, cell phone coverage remains an exception.

And thus how we come to have little radio shacks, like the one shown in the bottom picture. After all, in a village without electricity, how do you maintain your cell phones and other choice electronic devices (usually limited to radios or perhaps flashlights)? On market day, you can find certain individuals hanging out to do just that, like this guy in his shack. He can pull off simple circuit repairs (note soldering tools in fore), sell you phone credit and colorful phone covers and runs a generator almost explicitly to charge phones (there’s also one other guy who has a solar panel and can charge phones any day of the week as long as it’s not raining). Just yesterday this man fixed my solar lamp which had fallen and broken. In the U.S., we might have thrown it away, but besides having a blemish, it now works again!

The other high tech feature of my village is the video club (see top picture). This is another feature that generally is reserved for market days only. But two days a week, a friend of mine cranks up his own generator, plugs in a TV and his dish, and charges an entrance fee to anyone wanting to watch music videos, soccer games or movies from rows of benches. He pays a subscription for about 6 channels with the dish (unfortunately, not including last years World Cup which they blacked out for him and everyone else who wanted to watch the tournament in village!), but over the course of the year he can turn a small profit anyway.

Other than that, that’s about it for technology in village. A handful of folks occasionally crank up generators to refrigerate frozen fish or beer and soda (other bars bring ice to village every day from the city in Dapaong), and the health dispensary has a solar panel to run a small fridge for certain medicines. There are 2 or 3 gas run grinding mills for making flour and most households own a radio and a couple flashlights, all run on cheap batteries. That’s it!

Out on the Town Moba Style!

2011-06-10T17:21:00.004Z

Welcome folks to the Tchakpa market! Long overdue, today you get the mini tour of the most significant part of a distinctly Moba market! It’s like the Old Port, St. Catherine’s St. or Bourbon St. of my village/county. Bar hoppin’ ain’t easy in Togo, but if you equate a bar with a tchakpa stand, you’ll think Bourbon St. ain’t so special once you’ve been to my market. Two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) over 40 women set up shop in my village to sell their local brew, from 8 a.m on until the drink’s done!

Of course tasting all 40 brews isn’t possible. Generally, everyone has their go to stands; women they can count on to come to market nine times out of ten with a successful brew. Traditionally, tchakpa is sold in simple round huts like pictured in the second picture. These are found everywhere, from remote villages, to pit stop markets along the roads, to the city of Dapaong, you can find such a “vrai cabaret” with the thatch roof, and circular mud or cement bench, which surrounds the marché mama selling the drink. You even find other women selling their drink under shady trees. In our market, some women post up in the more modern and industrial looking market stands made of concrete and tin roofing. Such is the case with my personal favorite stand that I’m pictured in above. I’ve never tasted a bad tchakpa with this women, and just like a favorite bar the people there make the atmosphere. I can count on meeting the same rough group of friends coming through this stand at some point in the day, to yuck it up over a pitcher of beer.

And just like home, you can indeed get pitchers, costing about 40 cents. Instead of coming out of tapped kegs, these drafts come to market in oversized plastic buckets, charged on the heads of women. Amazingly, some of these women will walk their drink with the help of their daughters and girl friends several kilometers in this fashion, and there’s usually 3 or 4 of these brimming buckets. Imagine going to the effort of carrying 4 kegs on your head 4 kilometers to run your bar. That’s on top of 4 or 5 days of labor just to make the drink beforehand. Once in the market, you have to keep track of running tabs in crowded, raucus stands of imbibing villagers. Just look at the pose of the marché mama in this picture. She can’t even take time out to pose for the picture because she has to serve the next thirsty farmer!

Believe it or not, tchakpa is made with little more than sorgum/millet and yeast. (The yeast is recycled from whoever you know that made tchakpa yesterday. With tchakpa, the fermenting yeast constantly rests in the bottom of the drink. Don’t drink it or you’ll be in trouble, but it can be taken and added to a non-alcoholic tchakpa to ferment it over night). The seeds of sorgum and/or millet are partially germinated, ground into a flour, and then brewed in water over 2 days in giant cauldrons. The only other ingredient is smashed gumbo stalks, which contain a coagulant that can help clear the consistency of the drink before it’s filtered through a sack.

When it’s ready it’s delicious and the Moba drink it like water! The tradition is, when you enter a tchakpa stand you’re entitled to taste the brew for free. That way, you know that the brew wasn’t botched (which happens, especially with some of the less experienced women) in case you were planning on ordering a lot! If it is bad, you can pay a courtesy 25 CFA, about a nickel, gulp it down or give it away and be on your way to the next stand. Otherwise, order up for you and your friends and settle in. Be sure to pour a taste out for the ancestors (it’d be rude not to tell them you were drinking without them) and hang out. You drink out of a traditional calabash that you hold in your hands. If you plan on being a while, sometimes the women have little drink holders made of rebar to set your calabash on, like in this picture. Others even have wooden caps to cover the drink to keep thirsty teams of flies out of your drink! Now enjoy your drink until only the mucky yeast is left and then plop it on the ground to try and make a nice “clack” sound. Other’s throw it out in a straight line instead, perfected like a tobacco chewers spit from years of habit. One way or the other, the ancestors will know the drink’s now done and you can be on your way. That is unless you’re sucked into entering another one of the 39 bustling suds shacks on your way out!

You can call it superstition if you want

2011-04-26T16:22:00.004Z

Tucked away back towards the Tchakpa stands is where one finds the local fetish market. That is to say, if there is any sorcery you wish to perform, you’ll probably need to make a visit here to find some essential ingredients.

Although foreign religions (namely Islam and Christian sects such as Catholicism) have been adopted by the majority of the population, a substantial portion of the population retains their traditional beliefs (generally known as animism), sometimes while at the same time practicing Islam or Christianity. In fact, when I was counted in the Togolese census and I told them I was neither Muslim nor Catholic, their best next assumption was to put me down as animist!

These traditional practices are often led by healers or notables sometimes known as marabous or charlatans. They perform a variety of healing acts, some based on a degree of science (usually revolving around plants, and hence the connection they have to the botanical garden I’ve previously talked about) and others based on what we’d probably call superstition. That is, it is superstition unless you think it’s real. In that case, you might call it animism, sorcery or gris-gris. This is all where the fetish market that is the topic of the day comes in to play

Understanding their superstitions has been a fairly complicated thing for me to do in my time here. This is in part, because most people have their own interpretations and beliefs for what traditional religion is. I’ll get one explanation from one person and then the next will tell me something slightly different. Yet, what I’ve commonly heard is that people believe that each person has an animal spirit or incarnation attached to their being. Sorcery affects these incarnations or spirits, allowing one to protect themselves from evil spirits/incarnations of others or in some cases inflict certain desired effects on others. But if I was going to simplify it, I would leave it that there is the basic belief that the traditional healers or fetish priests have the power to protect people through certain ceremonies.

According to each case or problem, certain ingredients are necessary for every ceremony, whether they are performed in family or by traditional healers. Some of these ingredients are not easily found and can cost a villager a decent penny. What’s done with the ingredients in the ceremonies one can never be sure of, unless he’s there. But we can marvel at some of the ingredients nonetheless shown in the close up picture. I can’t tell what half of them are myself, but among them are turtle shells, snake skins, rat skins, bird skulls, animal hair and various bones. In other stalls yet are fetish stones, rings, bracelets, shells and additional accessories. The ingredients aren’t the secret, but the ceremony is. If you ask me it’s in the fear of that unknown, from which comes the traditional respect for it, and part of the secret to it too.

Now these beliefs have less sway than they once did. This is evidenced by the fact that they now take water from, swim in and fish in the river and burn brush fires and cut trees that have destroyed countless sacred forests, among other things. These places were formerly very hallowed places and none of them would have been disturbed for fear of upsetting the spirits surrounding these areas. Such is no longer the case. Regardless, the tradition still remains to a degree. Even my favorite mango trees still have fetishes hanging from their branches to help ward of greedy kids from steeling the fruit. That, and the fetish market is clearly still in business as well.

The Village Deli

2011-04-08T23:05:00.002Z

Relative to the rest of the country, the savannah region is known in Togo for, among other things, its meat. While the south is well known for having abundant fruit, one strong suite of ours is animal husbandry. Our livestock routinely gets shipped down south where it gets a pretty penny. I routinely see bush taxis filling up in my village with guinea fowl. Other times motorcycles leave with crates full of guinea fowl strapped onto the backs of them. Pigs are another staple export of Savanes. I’ve seen moto’s go whizzing by on my road, the drivers pressed up close to their handle bars because they have up to 3 full grown, squealing pigs strapped onto the back, taking up most of the sitting space. Once in Dapaong, bush taxis take them south as extra cargo.

Fortunately for those of us up north, that same meat stays pretty cheap. Of course that’s relative. A live chicken cost $3-4. A goat can cost around $20. It’s still a privilege to eat meat with a meal in village and is by no means present in every meal for the average inhabitant. Nonetheless, we do eat our fare share.

With certain meats the way to go is to buy your animal live and whole and prepare it on the spot. This applies to fish (okay that one doesn’t come in live but it’s one of our biggest sources of protein so I have to mention it), doves, rabbits, chickens, guinea fowl, goats and sheep (increasing respectively in price). However, some of the more costly animals are more often killed by a butcher, brought to market and parceled out on the same day. And thus we come to the subject of this week’s blog; the meat market.

In general, the only day you can get a cut of raw meat in village to bring back to prepare at home is on market day (Beef is one exception, as they are only killed in village sporadically and on random days. Because it’s the most expensive, most steer are herded into Dapaong and slaughtered there). The butchers come in with their meat already cleaned and usually strapped onto the back of a bike. Once there they set up shop and parcel out the raw meat according to the desires of the customer. You can literally go to him, point at the piece of meat you want, tell him how much you want to buy and he cuts you off a slice and bags it in a black plastic baggy. As all other market purchases, he adds a “cadeau” (gift), in this case usually boney or fatty meat (to give your sauce more flavor!), as a gesture to gain or maintain your loyalty to him as your butcher.

On top of their raw meat, they also sell select parts cooked. So if you want a snack after your millet beer you can mosey over to the butcher and request some morsels of meat or innards (can’t waste anything!) dipped in some hot pepper powder to tide you over until the evening.

So what are the meats I can always get fresh in village? Well unfortunately this isn’t a market for Muslims, since they’re all banned for eating in Islamic faith. And for fair warning, two of the three might not agree with an American even if you aren’t Muslim. Anyway, pork is the first and probably the most common. The other two are donkey and dog. The pictures here are of the pig and donkey butchers, who happily abided to pose for us!

The Market's in Town!

2011-03-27T19:44:00.005Z

A central aspect to village life is the twice weekly village market. On any given day, people and various goods can be found in the village center, also known as the marché (market) or daag in Moba. Nonetheless, pickings are generally sparse on your average day, limiting you to more or less some simple foods and millet beer. However, every Tuesday and Wednesday the same barren market that was nearly empty on the other days comes to life. In local language, they term it as “the market giving birth”. If it was a good market, you can come home bearing “the market’s children” (aka the goods you found and bought) and safely say that yes, the market did indeed, give healthy birth on that day!

Some market days are better than others, but more or less you can count on a bustling center on these days. These are the days where everyone comes out, usually in their best dress to do what trading is necessary and oftentimes more importantly, to socialize with your fellow townsmen and women. Villagers trek in from the bush on bike and foot. Almost all your organic goods (meat, grains, vegetables, local beer) come in this way. Others from the village just wander in with some pocket change or a chicken to sell with the intention of indulging in market day food and millet beer, while in the company of friends.

All told, there’s quite the variety of sights. Tied chickens dangle from bike handlebars. Live goats or freshly killed pigs come in strapped onto the backs of bikes. Seamstresses walk in with their sewing machines on their heads. Market women bear tomatoes, onions, grain, fruit or basins brimming with millet beer. Random traders whizz into village with merchandise precariously strapped onto their motos. Cattle herders mosey in with their herds to present them in the side market to sell. Tradesmen open up their work shops with their apprentices, displaying their most recent works in full view. Generators fire up to charge cell phones, run the video club or chill the normally warm bottled beer. On some days, you’ll see a hustler taking bets on a shuffling game. I can even find youngsters peddling frozen yogurt and juice in coolers from Dapaong! No there’s no ice cream truck music, but they do have a little horn to let me know where they’re at!

Nonetheless, the market can’t be considered fully animated until the market trucks clunk in with the material goods and the traders selling them. In essence, it’s a traveling market. The trucks and the traders they carry serve different villages on different days. Of course, every Tuesday and Friday these guys save the day for us and anywhere between 10 and 11 am I can count on hearing or seeing the old clunkers rumble into village brimming with goods. The merchandise piles high inside and the passengers perch themselves along the edges, swaying in unison with each bump that the old truck begrudgingly takes. The other day I caught one of the trucks coming in and posted the picture here for you!

Most of the goods they unload in village are clothes of some sort. New clothes, all sorts of pagne (the cloth used by tailors and seamstresses to hand make clothes) and plenty of second hand clothing shipped in from the western world are included. This by the way is one of my favorite aspects of the market. It reminds me of shopping at the Salvation Army, where I can find all sorts of treasures and at the very least see clothes that remind me of home, since much of it does indeed come from the U.S. I do some of my best shopping there, getting t-shirts at 10 cents a pop. The top picture is of one of the market trucks packing up to leave in the evening while the market center is still, more or less, in full bustle.

But there’s so much to the market that this one blog wouldn’t do it justice! I want to spend the next couple of blogs trying to bring part of this experience to you. So hang on, give me a few weeks to get some more pictures and I’ll be back with a couple more entries to give you the best digital tour I can!

Workin’ with the youth

2011-03-06T19:40:00.004Z

Life seems to be speeding up for me here by the day! I’m 2/3 of the way home for my service and I don’t see things slowing down for what’s left (well hot season may have a word to say about that). Talking to other volunteers, it sounds like the sensation is par for the course, but as time’s gone on and I’ve integrated in the area and gained contacts I’ve picked up more and more activities to keep me busy. Among some of the work I’ve been picking up, has been more frequent work with youth, especially the high schoolers in my village.

In general, the people I’m working with in village are of an older generation. Generally, they’re all farmers, usually upwards of 30 years old, lots of them over 50 in the case of my association. In this context, I do think I’ve been a part of some really positive things in the past year, but the importance of involving youth in activities is huge and has become much clearer to me over the course of my time here. In all areas that Peace Corps volunteers are trying to contribute to in Togo (agriculture, health, business and girls education), we’re up against some very engrained practices that can be very hard to change, especially in the older generations. Negative trends were adopted over years and years and solutions to these things don’t lie in the immediate future, but rather in the decades ahead. A country’s youth is a country’s future and their ideas and aspirations will eventually decide the character of Togo in the years to come. Fortunately, we have a chance to engage some of these kids in their formative years to work for a brighter future.

Last year, I mentioned that one of the ways volunteers engage kids is through camps. In Peace Corps Togo, we run two major camps called Camp UNITE (for motivated students and apprentices) and Camp Espoir (for kids infected or affected by AIDS). The goals of the camps are very similar. Basically, we try to give kids basic direction on a variety of key life issues such as HIV/AIDS, self-confidence, girls’ education, time management, small business and child trafficking. This means taking time to introduce these issues to kids in a fun and positive environment. As an extension of Camp Espoir, volunteers in the Savannah region are now organizing a monthly Club Espoir, similarly directed at kids in/af-fected by AIDS. Half of our goal is to just have fun with the kids to keep up morale despite their situation. But it also gives us a chance to broach other important subjects with them as well. For example, yesterday we held our first club meeting and we discussed the importance of gender equity (check out the second picture).

Work I’m leading with youth recently has all been through our village high school, although none of it has actually been based on agriculture. As is common among volunteers, I dabble in other areas of work outside the realm of my agriculture or “natural resource management” assignment. For a while I’d been sitting in on English classes, offering my insight when useful. My relationship with the teacher there has led to two clubs. Related to English, we just started up a pen pal program between 4th graders in a Maine School and the top English students in the high school. Despite the age mismatch, it seems like the best way to put kids in both countries in touch with each other’s lives and culture. It offers the chance for the cultural exchange that Peace Corps emphasizes. We just got a batch of letters from two classes two weeks ago (and for sure we had some fun explaining certain things 4th graders in the U.S. might talk about, like pets, Pokémon, video games, pets or snow!). Now, my kids are working on their responses. Hopefully, before the school years both at home and here in Togo finish, we can do a couple rounds of exchange.

The other club, which has been going since November, is for the girls of my high school. Like most other schools in the region, girls are severely underrepresented. For those girls who are in school, they can benefit from any kind of encouragement to keep them in the classroom. Having more and more successful and educated women only strengthens the chances of the next generations and hence why girls’ education is something we volunteers try to stress no matter what our assignment. Lately, I’ve been teaming up with a nearby volunteer whose assignment actually is girls’ education, to hold monthly meetings where we read articles, talk about them and play a game or two. In the first picture, we’re animating a little game after one of our sessions. (By the way, March 8 is international women’s day!)

The clubs and camps are my attempts to branch out and have some “secondary activities”. Hopefully, it gives you an idea for some of the stuff I’ve been trying to get involved with here, apart from the other agricultural/natural resource management oriented stuff.

I hope everyone’s spirits are high back home! I’m always looking forward to hearing from you all! Talk to you soon!

Bonne Année!

2011-01-11T15:39:00.004Z

Although it’s hard to compete with the excitement and anticipation of my recent trip to France/Switzerland, when I was planning it I was very keen on finishing in time to be back in village for New Years. Last year I celebrated New Years in a friend’s village and I could tell how it had disappointed them. They build up to this party for quite a while and is, I’d say, their biggest “fête”, even more so than “Premiere Mai” which I wrote about months back. People make sure to prepare enough to party well, and since we’re coming relatively fresh off of the harvest, a lot of people are as well off now as they will be for the rest of the year since they’ve been able to sell their surplus. That means that they have some money to spend for now. Yes, money is precious, but to differing degrees everyone sets something aside so they can treat themselves to a good celebration. Regardless, I was really looking forward to being in village for this and made sure not to miss it.

As opposed to New Years back home, the New Years party takes place during the first day of January and not New Year’s eve. For the first time in my life I actually didn’t stay awake for stroke of midnight. If I had I would have been alone, because it’s simply not the thing to do here. They would rather be in bed at a good hour to wake up real early the next day to start preparing the day’s feast. The same goes for the kids, who want to be the first ones running from house to house screaming “Bonne Année, Bonne Année”. It’s like the Togolese version of Trick-or-Treat except on New Years. The tradition is that everyone has candy on hand to pass out to kids (like my friend Jean is doing in the picture), especially the ones that parade by to say “Happy New Year!” Kids and adults alike continued the hearty “Bonne Année” cheers all day and throughout the rest of the week.

Once again the party revolved around food and drink. The measure of how well you partied is all in the caliber of the food. Just like parties for us can be marked by dining at a fine restaurant, extravagance is the goal of a good party. In the village this means novelties like rice, spaghetti, canned tomato paste for sauce, meat and bottled beer. In our family we killed a goat and a rabbit to go with our main plates of mixed rice and spaghetti and then capped off the night at the village bar where everyone managed to get some beer for themselves. But nobody eats just one plate of food, in fact your bound to eat several plates. The tradition is to prepare not only food for yourself, but enough to send food over to neighboring family and close friends. Thus, if you are at the house all day any number of people may send dishes of food over to you as well. Plus, if you intend to visit anyone’s house on that day to give Bonne Année wishes, expect to be invited to eat even more food. In my case, I way over ate on New Years, to the point of being uncomfortable. It’s was all great, but my stomach wasn’t pleased with me by the end of the night. Felt a lot like Thanksgiving in that respect, and similarly, it was hard to regret.

France and Switzerland with the fam for Christmas!

2011-01-11T14:26:00.006Z

Hello everybody! How has the holiday season been treating you! Thanks to everyone that sent me Christmas notes (Shannon & Craig, Steve, Betty & Earl, Uncle Bob, Mary & Chris, Tim & Samantha)! They’re appreciated so much, and I was ecstatic to find each one! I’ve put myself on a guilt trip because I haven’t posted anything in a while! I’m overdue, but I’ll try to make up for it by filling you in on what I’ve been up to!

It’d been so long looking forward to these past travels! So long that I could barely believe it was happening when it finally was time. But sure enough, as always time flies and after 15 months in Africa I got the great chance to leave the continent and vacation some in Europe. Since the little brother Kyle (he’s now 21 folks so buy him a beer!) was wrapping up his study abroad in Rouen, France, I set that as my first destination. Some long travel, but more or less things went according to plan, which for sure is more than my parents and Kelly can say about there travels. In sum, I bussed to Ouagadogou, Burkina Faso where I caught a 4 am flight, which had stops in Niger and Morocco on the way to Paris. And, BOOM, just like that, I found myself back in the “developed world”. And for all the anticipation, I strangely felt in stride. Granted my perspective had greatly changed, altering the light in which I now saw my surroundings, but I also felt a normalness of things that was nice to have back.

After arriving in Paris and having a brief money crisis (turns out African money, specifically CFA, is not a highly sought after thing in France, so thanks Uncle Chris, your birthday money from last year, being US currency, got me out of a pinch) I caught a train straight to Rouen to meet Kyle, which is up in the Normandy region. What a relief it was to finally see in person another member of my family! We spent 4 nights there before heading back out on the trains, this time catching the high speed TGV train, express to the French Alps and a mountain village called St. Gervais. There I had another travel adventure, as we were forced to hike 45 minutes up the side of a mountain to get to our apartment! We had gotten in so late on a Sunday that all the taxis had already called it quits. Normally, my folks and Kelly would have been there already to pick us up, but they had a travel fiasco of their own to cope with. So with baggage in hand we had to buck up and call on our own Mainah’ salt to drag ourselves up to our beds!

The next day a Swiss friend from my time in Quebec came in to catch up, another great chance! And the day after that my parents and Kelly finally made it in! At that we hunkered down for the Christmas week. It was a great chance to relax and just appreciate the familiar feeling of taking it easy in the presence of family.
Beyond that, some of the best parts were skating, skiing and, most importantly, I enjoyed the food! Good, western food has been a craving I've been fighting for a year and I took advantage of it all in France. Bystanders may have taken me to be a glutton, but during my time there I was not going to be ashamed for how much I ate. Delicious!

The trip wrapped up with a jaunt into Switzerland to visit some family friends. While mom, dad and Kelly were flying out from Switzerland, Kyle and I still had to make it back to Paris for our flights home. With that, I reluctantly but necessarily said the goodbyes and hopped a last train back to Paris for a quick afternoon of sightseeing (it was something that needed to be done!) before my flight the next day. Of all the things I saw in that half day I will say that the Eiffel tower was the most spectacular! It was amazing to gaze up at all lit up in the night, and there was an equally incredible view from half way up (we walked the stairs!). Nonetheless, the general feel and mood of Paris had a certain coldness that didn’t make me sad to be leaving. In fact, it made me even more excited and ready to head back to Togo in time for their New Years celebrations!

The Cauldron Maker

2010-11-26T09:28:00.003Z

Today I’ll tell you guys a bit about a recent little project I’ve been doing in village. Being as the last couple of months have been the harvest, people’s lives have been swamped with the endless associated chores, such as the ones I explained in the last blog. Among these chores is the very tedious process of deseeding ears of maize. Unlike us back home who eat our corn fresh off the cob or canned, most of the maize people here produce is dried and stored. If you’re in a hurry, you take your ears (shucked) and leave them in the sun for a couple days until their dry. Then you chuck ‘em all in your storage room or grainery if you have one. However, at some point all those dry kernels need to get stripped off the cob before they can either be sold by the bowl full, or ground down to make the flour that makes their staple meal, “la pate”.

And this my friends, is another massively tedious process. There are two approaches. First option any guess? Yes, once again, like the rice, beat the cobs with a stick and in a long, sweaty flurry of flying kernels (we did it just the other day at our house). The second option is a little less aggressive and often quite social. People will spend hours sitting around a basin breaking the individual kernels off the cob with their thumbs (yes x-box gamers, you too just may have an adaptable skill for agriculture!). It’s even a bit of a social chore, since people are rarely left to do it on their own. If you stop by a family compound where someone’s working on this job, the common courtesy is to join in on the work and whatever conversation ensues. But as a rookie to the task I still wouldn’t call it a picnic. I joined in not long ago for a solid hour and left with cramped and blistered thumbs. And I’m not the only one who would complain about this job, many would agree that it’s quite a pain. Mais sinon, on va faire comment?

One of the ideas that I have been given as an “extension agent” (my technical title as a volunteer) by my boss, is to propagate and share a metal tool that can strip corn cobs with much more efficiency. The tool, which resembles an oversized and hollow Reeses cup, open on both ends and lined with thin ribs on the inside, was something I could busy myself with trying to replicate in village. You use it by inserting the ear of corn and rotating the cob and the tool in opposite directions, allowing the ribs to grip the kernels and rip them off in a hurry. And it really wasn’t too hard replicate, being as my boss had already provided me with a model. It also gave me an excuse to meet and learn the trade of the man known as “le marmitier”, or (drum roll please….) the cauldron-maker.

As it turns out, the grand majority of pots and cauldrons that are found here, aren’t the ones turned out in factories in Lomé or abroad. Rather, most are made locally out of all manner of aluminum scrap, ranging from coke cans to other broken pots to the more often relied upon car parts. So despite the lack of recycle bins in Togo, aluminum adds itself to the long list of things that Togolese and Africans alike recycle to a substantial degree. In fact, although Coke cans don’t leave the store requiring a deposit, once empty they can be found in a collection of aluminum that fetches about a dollar per kilo.

With that mess of useless looking metal the marmitier makes his trade. It allows him and his handful of apprentices to go work. Even in village, this aluminum (even including exhausted engine blocks!) is melted down in a cast iron pot, (for whatever reason aluminum melts much quicker than iron). The pot sits on scorching charcoal which is kept unusually hot by an underground ventilation system, powered by a hand crank, which is manned by one of the apprentices. The aluminum heats and heats until a runny liquid is created. All the impurities of the scrap, including dirt or un-melted metal float on top and are easily sifted off the top, usually with long iron prongs and a sardine can (which too, won’t melt with the aluminum). Then the metal is ready to be poured.

While two apprentices are charged with the job of melting the aluminum (and sometimes all four if it involves melting an engine block…no small task but then again no more complicated than heat and a sledge hammer), the marmitier and an apprentice or two set to work making their molds. Were any of you reading ever big into making sand castles? If you were, I got your African job already figured out. Now it’s a little complicated to explain in words, but their molds are made of nothing more than tightly packed sand, since it can hold together when liquid aluminum is poured on it, yet once the aluminum sets it falls away without any pains. To make the sand molds, they have split cauldrons serving as positive models to help them. They start by crafting the inner negative mold, which will lie upside-down and fixed to the ground. Off to the side they craft the outer negative mold in a series of boxes to be placed around the first mold (being careful to create a conduit in the sand where the bottom of the cauldron will be for the metal to pass through). Then the outer mold is carefully assembled around the inner mold to finish the prep.

If you’re trying to imagine it, you’d now be looking at what appeared to be only a box packed with sand and a small hole on top. In reality, that hole is the entrance into the mold. If the molds are properly positioned, the conduit leads the liquid metal into the space in between the two negative molds of sand when poured. Now cross your fingers and hope the sand stuck and that the molds were well meshed. After no more than 5-10 seconds you can start to break away the sand, because the metal will have set, although it’ll be hot for minutes (the hardened kids still like to try and hot potatoe it, showing off by seeing whose hands can stand the heat the longest). They’re pretty good at what they do, but they’re still forced to redo many a pot for having gotten a bad set (FYI, in the picture they’re actually pouring a cauldron top and not a cauldron itself, sorry if it makes it more confusing!).

So to come back to the maize theme, by adapting the techniques he uses in his shop, my marmitier is slowly taking on the side trade as “maker of the thing that deseeds maize”. He’s already made a handful of sales with me at his side for 300 fCFA (~60 cents), like we’re doing in the picture on market day, and hopefully with time, he’ll get more and more requests to make this tool, which can deseed corn cobs about 5 times as fast as by hand. For now, he gets the pride of introducing a new tool to his community and I walk away with a free apprenticeship in cauldron making. Haha, and so goes my humble life as a Peace Corps volunteer!

Happy Thanksgiving!

La Récolte!

2010-11-02T12:09:00.001Z

In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, right now we’re in the thick of the harvest, even starting to wind down a bit. At this point pretty much all of the harvest is either out of the ground or off the stalk, excepting only the six month millet, which still has a bit to go. But let’s be honest, a harvest is hard work, and I’ve been getting a taste of it.

The other day I went out and pulled up peanuts for about an hour. I left exhausted and my brother and his second wife just smiled in appreciation of my effort, even though they themselves weren’t yet ready to call it quits, and had been out there for hours before I even showed up. I think they were just happy and proud that I came out to see their harvest, which I was impressed by.

It’s fun to get the first hand experience of seeing the cultivation and harvest. I think it’s important to gain an appreciation for where our food comes from. Before Africa I couldn’t have even have told you how a peanut grows because it usually just came straight from a tin can. In case you didn’t know, each peanut that we eat hides in a shell that comes out of the ground on ends of the roots of the plant. When you yank up a peanut plant you’ll find about a dozen root ends that have peanuts attached to them. Amazing, we eat peanuts all the time and yet how many of us know how it grows and the process involved in growing them! And just like the luck involved with the germination of peanuts and all the other crops (which I briefly mentioned months back) it takes a little luck to come up with a good harvest. The maturity and harvest of peanuts needs to be timed up with relatively dry conditions so the peanuts don’t rot or sprout in the ground before you get them up.

But despite the fatigue of the peanut harvest, I’ve found myself better suited to lend a hand with the rice harvest. As it turns out, beating rice is a decent substitute to batting practice! And lately, my family compound has been filled with rice needing a good beating! Yes, there’s been maize, beans, sorghum, peanuts and millet coming through, but it seems like I’ve seen more rice than anything! Maybe it’s just because it takes so much work!

Rice here appears to be one of the crops that is mainly tended to by women for whatever reason. While men occupy themselves with other cultures, the women seem to dominate the rice fields (one day I tried to weed rice for about 10 minutes and not only was I very inefficient, everyone laughed in part I think because of how out of place I looked as a man). And so my mom and all my sisters have their own harvests of rice to take care of. They come back from the fields navigating donkey wagons full of bails of rice; long stems of rice which tassel at the tips where the individual grains of rice are, all bundled together with cord. To start, the rice grains are protected by a hard shell that they break off with a pestle and mortar and then winnow off after. But before you can do that, you have to take all the rice grains (still encased in their shells) off of the long stems. And this is where batting practice and wood chopping experience comes in handy, because you have to beat the rice stems with a palm branch until all the grains fall off (just like my brother’s first wife is doing in the picture). Considering some of my baseball withdrawals since being here, I kind of enjoy the occasion to beat some rice, especially if it’s in the cool air of the evening (however, they’ll be at it all day…I’ve been getting woken up at five to the sound of the thwacking, and they’ll pick away at it all day).

Finally, I get a chance to put a picture up of my mysterious dog! He had a field day playing in the leftover rice stems, where I caught him hanging out before dinner the other day. So for all of you curious about Boots, here ya go

Travelin’ Man

2010-10-16T15:01:00.005Z

I know this is just about the longest stretch I’ve gone without posting something, so I’m sorry about that! But, that’s mostly thanks to some recent travel I did at the end of September into Burkina Faso and Senegal that kind of took me out of my normal routine. Now I’m back and can to tell you a bit about it!

The travel started off with a week stay in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, where I took part in a conference on food security. In short, an organization based out of Ft. Myers, FL, called ECHO (echonet.org), organized a West African networking conference for workers associated with food security to get together and exchange ideas concerning the problem of food security (unfortunately, while other continents increase food security bit by bit, Africa struggles more than any other. That is to say, Africa isn’t experiencing the gradual improvements in food security that the rest of the world is). The occasion for such a conference was certainly called for and I left feeling very positive about what took place. By getting together with other people in the region working on the same issues we were able to share a lot of important information that normally isn’t well vulgarized in this corner of the world. I definitely came away with some great ideas and made some important contacts.

Beyond the conference, however, I got the chance to check out Ouagadougou and all the goodies that it has to offer! I was itching to have my first trip out of country since arriving in Togo and that start in Ouaga kicked things off well. Like Togo, I found the people to be welcoming, especially after presenting myself as a Peace Corps volunteer (people are almost always excited about Peace Corps if they’ve heard about it, and a lot of people have). The majority ethnicity in Burkina is the Mossi people, who speak a language called More (pronounced more-ray), and is actually an ethnicity I encounter often in Togo. My village and Dapaong both have a strong populations of Mossi, so it was a nice occasion to get to know a little about their homeland. In fact, my best friend in village is Mossi and so is my village family name (although my mom is Moba). Thus, I got to use some More salutations I’ve picked up over the course of my year here and that helped me get a few extra smiles out of people. While there, some of the highlights were an “artisanal village” selling all kinds of African artwork, a very nicely organized market, a bowling alley, an American country club with a pool and a gym (I had a bench press and baseball on the tv, who’d of thought!) and darn good food. Among other things, I binged on dates, brochettes (street meat) and hamburgers! Yes, hamburgers people, they are not to be taken for granted!

After a week in Ouaga, we caught a flight out to Dakar, Senegal, where the real vacation set in and I started to feel like a tourist again. After getting in (the flight was about 2.5 hrs) we shot straight up to the brink of the Mauritania border and the city of St. Louis, the former capital of Senegal and French West Africa. After a pretty uncomfortable and drawn out bus ride we made it in and checked into a very nice hostel on the main island (the first picture is taken from the hostel’s roof terrace at sun down, looking across the slice of the Senegal river that separates the island and the sand bar that protects it from the ocean, called the “langue de barbarie”). The town definitely had a nice colonial-type feel to it, which has evolved to accommodate a regular influx of tourists. Thanks to it being the end of their rainy season (meaning humid heat pushing 100 mid-day and mosquitoes at night), the number of ex-pats on the island was down from normal, giving us some nice space to roam and extra leverage to barter with the many artists lining the streets. Overall, I’d call it a very nice tourist destination for someone wanting to check-out Senegal, especially if you’re looking for a place with some Western comforts.

But if you might one day go to Senegal and want a tip, get the pen out for the next one. After St. Louis, we a caught a night bus back towards Dakar and on to a beach town called Toubab Dialaw. This was paradise! A little harder to find and less developed for tourists perhaps, but it’s one of those places you can get real comfortable in. Check out the second picture from our hotel, you can get a glimpse of the view. Just a few steps from my hotel room door I could soak in the smell and sight of the ocean in full that I’ve lacked in my landlocked part of Togo. I especially enjoyed swimming in the fairly calm, and temperate ocean water (as opposed to Maine’s ice water) and beach restaurants that gave me my fill of seafood.

After Toubab, we headed back to Dakar to wind things down. One night out downtown, a day trip out to Gorée Island and an ice cream and pizza binge later we hopped back on our plane and called it a trip.

After getting the time away I definitely needed, I’m now back in Togo ready to go. And although we’ve had a couple scorchers here lately topping 100, Harmattan is soon to come and I couldn’t be more happy about it! It’s my closest equivalent to fall back home and if you know me well you know it’s my favorite time.

Well, Saturday afternoon in Dapaong, means it’s market it day. We’ll see what goodies I can find, or as the Moba would say “daa bic”. Haha, this means “the market’s child”, to imply metaphorically whether or not the market gave birth to good stuff for the town today or not! I’ll let ya know!

Saving the Charlatan’s Trees

2010-08-30T15:44:00.005Z

In country we publish a paper that we call "Farm to Market". In it, volunteers share their experiences in the agricultural domain to help facilitate cooperation and communication amongst ourselves, which is sometimes tough being posted all over the country. The following is what I wrote for the next edition and I figured I would share with people at home...

Ever wanted an excuse to chat with a charlatan or a marabou (a charlatan with a muslim twist)? Well I got it for ya. Start a botanical tree garden!

Deforestation in Togo is at its most severe in the Savannah region. But for an area that is famous for lacking trees, there is any amazing abundance of tree diversity. While the association I work with (Shade is Good) normally grows a variety of exotic trees in their nurseries (your average list of quick growing nitrogen fixers), they came to the realization that there is still a very real demand for native trees. And most of it is rooted in traditional medicine!

There’s no doubt modern medicine is replacing the work of charlatans, marabous or the family vieux (in moba the word we use is "chambah", but it all refers to a respected elder), but the reality is, traditional remedies are still highly sought. Oftentimes, these remedies are age old recipes made from the bark, roots, fruits and leaves of many different tree species. In fact, part of the reason the rare trees are disappearing isn’t just arbitrary cutting for firewood. Lots of the trees that are left are dying because people are constantly digging up their roots and scarring their bark to treat assorted ailments or work certain gris-gris (what you may consider voodoo or animism). Really, once it dawns on them, people are excited by the idea of being able to plant these trees in their own yard. Believe it, the demand is there! The question is, how do you go about meeting it?

Shade is Good, is responding in a unique way. They are in the process of creating a botanical garden made up of the region’s rarest trees, shrubs and vines. In one hectare they hope to gradually amass a dictionary of living trees and cultivate nurseries full of their saplings to make available to the community and generations to come. Although they’ve already succeeded in trials of at least 18 local species, the process will be ongoing and has required a lot of homework.

This is how we’ve gone about it so far:

1) We needed a list of the trees we wanted to focus on. Thus, we asked our native tree experts, Dr’s Charlatan, Vieux and Marabou! Just like that we got a list of the rarest and most highly sought after trees around. You’d be amazed by the size of the list you can generate from only a handful of local wise men. Be forewarned though, French and English with be of little use. This is local language time!
2) Once we knew the trees that were going to be our priority, we sought out the nearest known adult tree of each species. Finding and noting the location of existing trees is essential. With this information you can go out and scientifically identify your tree (try Arbres, Arbustres et Lianes du Sahel by Michael Arbonnier, he has versions in French and English) and more importantly find your seed source.
3) While finding our adult trees, we took pictures and sometimes samples of the fruits, leaves and bark of the trees, since these offer the most defining features of a tree that can help with identification (In my experience, the fruits have been the giveaways for ID. Leaves are second best and only sometimes do you need the bark/core color). Then if possible, we harvested the seeds to try in our nurseries. If mature seeds weren’t available, we determined (often by asking the nearest local) the month when we could come back to get them. Also, keep an eye out for species that are done by boture!
4) We identified as many trees as possible. By getting a scientific name, we open ourselves up to inter-regional or international cooperation. This could help us bring in certain species whose seeds are already too hard to find locally and in addition, it could help us attract visitors from afar to one day come visit us in hopes of finding a specific tree.
5) What seeds we did find, we distributed among our men, asking them to try growing them in their garden. This is how we came to get our current stock of 18 species.
6) Having gathered information on the harvest periods for each tree, we plugged the data into a calendar to further organize the search. Using this calendar of seed harvests, we send people out on a monthly basis to find certain seeds for trials. This way, we are able to try out all the species we want (not just the ones that give seeds in dry season for example) and with time, hopefully continue to add to our botanical garden!

So, if you want a dry season hobby (the best time for a tree nursery!) or just an excuse to probe the local charlatan, think about starting a botanical garden in your village!

Chez le Mécanicien

2010-08-08T16:59:00.003Z

Hey all!

Let’s take a trip to the mechanic’s today, village style!

So I’ve already mentioned that in village, if you have a mode of transportation, most often it’s either your feet or a bike. And despite road conditions, we’re not talking about mountain bikes. We’re talking about single gear, often old, often twisted and often Chinese city bikes. The kinds with thin tires and no tread, a platform over the back tire (the bed) for your bigger loads and sometimes even a basket in front, convenient for transporting chickens or “la sauce” (as a side note, I always get a kick out of the fact that in general people refer to any kind of green vegetable as being “the sauce”!) . These are bikes abused to no end on all kinds of roads and paths leading into the Savannah bush villages. The elaborate network of dirt roads/paths are rocky, sandy, eroded and, right now, sometimes water logged. But the bikes manage to pull through it all more often than not. But what happens when the bikes finally do break down?

Usually, a trip to the mechanic's means you’ve exhausted all of your MacGyver-esque techniques. Most people are their own mechanic, but sometimes they just don’t have the tools or the broken part to do the trick. But believe me, if they can jerry rig it to avoid a fee, they will! I think the niftiest piece of work I’ve seen yet was how we once repaired a flat tire of someone while on the path. We had no patches to work with, but what we did have was a long rubber “caoutchouc”, our bungee cord, standard on all bikes. It’s what we use to strap things to our bikes. Without them we wouldn’t be able to manage to carry so much on our bikes, like 50 kilo sacks of fertilizer or bed frames! I’m amazed by how much a bike can carry if you really want it to! Anyway, after locating the hole by rotating the tube through a bucket of water, they pinched the spot of the whole, making a bit of an earflap, and then tied it off tightly with a thin strip of this caoutchouc. They pumped it up and it was ready to go. Sure it was an awkward looking thing that patched inner tube, but sure enough it took us all the way back to village and to the above pictured mechanic shop.

Now yes, there is a motorcycle mechanic in village for those who do have the chance to own a moto. But for the large majority who move around on bikes, this and one other stall next door suffice as our auto body shops. And just like our frustrations with mechanic shops at home with our cars, people here are subject to similar pains with their bikes. I’ll hear people moan about the money they have to spend or the wait they have to endure to get their bikes back on the trail and I can’t help but chuckle and think of how in a way, it’s just like home. Haha!

For those pictured here, fortunately it’s still early on market day and things haven’t yet filled up. But believe me, by noon that same day the lot will be chock full of upturned bikes waiting to be tended too. In that case, take a seat at a tchakba stand, grab a calabash and “patientez un peu pour le mécanicien”.

How about a little tourism!

2010-07-18T09:43:00.004Z

This Friday I took the occasion to partake in some Togo tourism. Some locals may see me and assume all along that I’m a tourist, but in reality and especially at this point (10 months in), I hardly feel like one. This Friday I took time out with a handful of other vols and ventured to one of the more well known tourism sites in Togo. By tourism site I don’t mean that it’s swarming with visiting Europeans and equipped with a gift shop, but the place does draw some attention and usually gets mentioned in traveler’s books, such as the ones written by Lonely Planet.

So on Friday, with the help of a nearby volunteer and his counterpart, we made the hike that heads up the side of one of Savanes’ plateaus to a century old cliffside fort, about 40 kms south of Dapaong. And we picked a great day for it! With an overcast sky, the weather stayed fresh all morning and although the rain threatened, it didn’t actually fall until the afternoon. With the heat at bay and a slight breeze it was gorgeous!

In southern parts of the region of Savanes (when the savannah starts) there are various plateaus that stretch north before they suddenly drop off into lower, rolling savannah. One of my favorite parts of the drive north to Dapaong is when the national route comes down off one of these plateaus and splits its two peninsulas. At this point you can look both left and right at two giant plateau tips pointing us north. Even the bike ride from my village (further north) to Dapaong leaves me at one point with a great view of a mighty plateau off in the distance to the south. Friday, we drove up to the edge of one of these plateaus and made the hike up the steep slope to the top. Although it was quick, it was very pleasant trouncing along the rocky but well forested trail.

Once on top we soaked in the refreshing breeze on our way to the house of the village chief, in order to pay the 2 000 CFA fee required for visiting the cliffs. For a bit we walked along the recently paved but not very often used road (established in the hopes of attracting more visitors) that leads right up to the site of the cliff fort, which sits on a northern face of the plateau. On the edge there’s a German built ladder fastened to the vertical edge that descends straight down onto a ledge that is the site of a former Moba fort. Once on the ledge you can walk along this perch where the remains of the fort rest. Naturally a cave jutting into the face of the plateau, Moba had built a fort in and around the hollow with chambers, storage rooms and pots all made of clay. Where the cave juts in we could crawl in to explore and at one point we even wriggled through a pitch dark passage that came out to where I’m pictured sitting in the picture. It was really a pretty wild experience to find this hidden treasure and get a glimpse into a bit of local history. We walked the ledge, along which the mini village stretched, snapping photos until we got to where we could no longer continue and found a small waterfall trickling down the face. It really was awe-inspiring to imagine that some of the ancestors of the Moba had lived here only a hundred years ago.

The fort had been occupied in the 19th century, while Togo was still under German influence. In the midst of conflict surrounding colonial and tribal issues, certain Moba had turned the cliff cave into a safe haven from their tribal rival, the Chokossi. It has now been years since any Moba lived there, but the marvel of the site is certainly still alive!

World Cup, Live in Dapaong!

2010-06-27T11:42:00.003Z

Well I guess I’m pulling for Ghana in the World Cup now. Bummer of a loss, if not a little heartbreaking! Not going to lie, having been away from competitive sports for almost a year now, I got into the game last night. I had the occasion to be in Dapaong and was able to sit down for the game in Bar El Dorado, downtown. With the picture, hopefully you now have an idea for what a sports bar in Togo looks like. A small TV hooked up to a satellite for a room full of people holding their oversized beers, trying to follow Ghana as far into the World Cup as their last remaining African team will take them.

Watching on with 5 other Americans, I think I can fairly safely say that we were the only ones in the room pulling for the U.S. Not to say that people don’t like the U.S. here, because that is not the case (as an American I have always felt well received here in Togo). However, African pride for this World Cup (and any World Cup I think, though especially this one, being in South Africa) is very strong! And it’s interesting, because it’s almost like people don’t care which country it is that succeeds in the World Cup, just so long as it’s African. One might think that because Ghana is next door to Togo that of course people would be pulling for their neighbor on the world stage (here in the Dapaong area Ghana is roughly 20 km away and Ghanaians are frequently encountered, even in my village). But, I feel like people would have rooted almost just as passionately against the U.S. (or whoever) whether it was Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire or South Africa playing because they represent “l’Africain”.

In fact, I fairly often feel that people here identify themselves as African, before Togolese, Ghanaian or whatever nationality. I finally really understood this last night when the guy I was sitting next to explained to me why “Les Etats-Unis doivent partir”. In his mind, he was down to his last African team left in the cup out of 5. It was Africa’s last chance for an African team to win the World Cup. As of last night, the Americas still had 4 teams playing (Argentina, U.S, Mexico and Brazil?). He was assuming that my being American meant that I had 4 teams left to root for. “Ça reste 4 équipes pour l’Amérique, or l’Afrique n’a que Ghana! Ghana doit gagner !” Thus for the U.S. to eliminate the last African team would be selfish when I could still root for Brazil, Argentina or Mexico if we lost! Of course, I did my best to explain that our sense of pride rests with the U.S. and that I didn’t really care about the other teams, but regardless, that conversation helped shine some light onto my understanding of the African identity as a continent and what that means to people here.

Needless to say, people were ecstatic when Ghana scored in overtime. They might have celebrated a little more than usual considering that 6 defeated Americans were in the same room, but I think the joy was pretty widespread regardless of our presence. I’m sure the reaction was the same in village, where people are surprisingly well tuned in. A couple people have been running generators and a dish to watch in on the games, and a good amount of others lounge around boutiques or family concessions listening to the matches on their short-wave radios. Anyway, not sure I have a choice now. They still have to be a long shot, but what the heck, I’ll root for Ghana.

Allons-y, au champ!

2010-06-13T09:17:00.006Z

If you ever start to dislike rain, move to the African Savannah for hot season and I guarantee you’ll have a newfound appreciation for that rain that often dismays and depresses us back home! Despite the harsh storm that I wrote about in the last blog, each time it rains I breathe a sigh of relief in appreciation for the rains that might have otherwise discouraged me at home in the U.S. I now associate a whole list of positive things to rain. With it comes the occasion to bring out pants I’d put away since Harmattan, sound nights of sleep in the cool weather, a green landscape, chirping birds, croaking frogs, a flowing river, less heat rash and maybe most importantly, the new wave of work that can now be undertaken in the fields.

As I’ve mentioned before, almost everybody in village goes "aux champs" to cultivate one crop or another during rainy season. Even village elites such as doctors, chiefs or teachers tend to have their own fields. What are the main crops in the Savanes region of Togo? Maize and millet trumps all, as that takes up the majority of peoples’ fields. Often, legumes such as soy beans or peanuts are intercropped to get more yield from their land (this a good habit of theirs! Any time you can mix in a leguminous plant species, which usually means some sort of a bean or certain trees, with a crop such as millet or maize you create a bit of a symbiotic relationship. This is thanks to differences in root depths and the fact that legumes tend to fix nitrogen, which improves soil quality). Some more secondary crops include cassava, rice, cotton, okra, yams, green beans and watermelons.

As I write, the millet and maize crops are already starting to grow. And despite a quick scare, the peanuts shouldn’t be far behind the maize and millet in germinating. There was a quick moment of doubt when the rain failed to cooperate for a week. Because people rely solely on rainfall to water their crops people have to be smart about when they plant. The rainy season is relatively short, thus they can’t wait too long before putting their seeds in the ground or else the crops won’t have time to fully develop. On the other hand, if they plant their seeds too early and a two week rain drought hits, the seeds will rot in the ground before they have a chance to properly germinate. I shared some uneasiness with my mom before we got a last minute rain that should save our peanut crop. After two big rains in back to back weeks, she gambled that it was time to plant the peanuts. She planted all of them and with peanuts going for 1,250 CFA/bowl (~$2.50), it would be an expensive loss if she gambled wrong. Fortunately, she and many others in village sighed in relief when the next rain made a last minutes appearance.

So if you were to visit northern Togo right now you’d see a landscape neatly tilled in uncountable rows. As you can hopefully make out in the picture, most people till the land with a plow pulled by either cattle or donkeys, in this case cattle. Otherwise, it's going to be all by hand using hoes. They till it as a means to loosen the soil and organize the field. Then they plant it by walking amongst the rows with long sticks, poking holes, dropping seeds in the holes and then lightly covering them with soil. It’s a satisfying thing to see as the formerly barren fields are transformed into organized rows of green. It’s kind of like a freshly cut lawn. However, you have to be careful how you till your fields depending on the layout of the land. One of the things I’ve been trying to work with people on lately has been the use of contour lines in sloping fields. One of the problems with tilling a sloping landscape is that it can exacerbate erosion problems if the lines are improperly positioned. Unfortunately, people often till their lines down slope, allowing water to pick up speed and rush down the sloped fields. This can ruin crops, sweep away precious fertilizer and significantly hamper water penetration into the soil (affecting soil humidity and water table levels).

Thus, I’ve been trying to get people to warm up to the idea of tilling their lines more attentively, paying attention to the contour of their land. This means constructing barriers and tilling in a way that disrupts water flow down slope, instead of intensifying it. It means being able to identify, on a hill, lines that go across the hill at a consistent elevation. If the rows of crops respect these lines and intermittent barriers of notable strength (such as strong grasses, trees, stones and ditches) are constructed while respecting these lines, hill-side farming can be very successful. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a risky business.

So if you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to that’s been it for the past week. Hopefully, if we can get a couple demonstration fields going this year, I can get some more people interested in the practice next year and start to reverse a trend. We'll see!

Other than that, two weeks ago I went down country to work as a counselor for a summer camp we call Camp UNITE. It’s basically a countrywide summer camp for Togolese students and apprentices to bring together the ethnically diverse Togolese and talk to them about important, but often misunderstood youth topics. As I understand it there’s a website for it that you can check out if you’re curious at .

Enjoy the start of summer back home and take a swim or at least go to the beach for me if you can! And go team USA!

Like the kids in my village say, “Bye bye”!

A Moba Storm

2010-05-17T16:32:00.005Z

I can’t help but fill you guys in on one of the more eventful experiences I’ve had yet in village. Not a feel good thing, but Mother Nature has a way of leaving us in awe sometimes. That’s how I felt when I walked outside of my house near midnight last Friday after a violent storm had swept through.

As of yet, we have yet to fully pull out of the hot season. The hottest days are still as hot as they were a month ago, but now we can realistically hope for a rain at any moment. Nonetheless, the rain has been stalling for us and leaving us hot and ever hopeful for it’s eminent relief (with the late rains comes as well an unusual delay in the start of field work). Lately, I’ve been teased by a couple spotty rains and nearby storms that light up the sky each night off in the distance. Although I’m usually not touched by much more than a night breeze, it’s been refreshing and taunting at the same time to stand outside of the compound at night, taking in the breeze and watching a storm off in the distance flash regularly, lighting up the massive clouds that threaten but rarely materialize over us.

So, last Friday when the gods were out playing again I thought they were just toying with us. But not much long after I asked my brother “est-ce que finallement il va pleuvoir, ou bien les dieux vont nous tricher encore?” the storm made it clear that this time it was here with a quick rush of dust that filled my eyes and stuck to my skin. I quickly gathered up everything that was outside, and sealed myself into my house. And then it hit!

Understand that I still don’t have a concept of what a normal rain is so I didnt know if this one was out of the ordinary. But my suspicions raised when I was hearing massive popping sounds on my roof. Water started dripping on me where I was sitting and when I went into my bedroom I could feel water falling on me like a drizzle. I’m still pretty sure that my roof had held up fine, but the wind must have been blowing the rain across and under the tin so that it came into my room and filtered through the plafond. Yet, just to be safe, I took everything out of that room into the other, closed the door and tried to fall asleep on the floor.

Afterwards when I went back in I found a couple of centimeters of standing water in the one room and later a good inch standing in my kitchen. Nothing too bad, but the shocker was when I walked out into the concession and saw what’s in the first picture I posted! The wind had taken the roof off of the house that’s home to my sisters and all their grains and deposited it onto my straw fence and canapy! Fortunately nobody was hurt (This was the case for the whole village. Since it was at night everyone was able to take cover well.), but a chunk of the stored food was ruined with most of our thatch structures (my garden and house fences, the chicken hut and the payote).

The reaction was mixed. I actually thought of past experiences like Hurricane Bob or Ice Storm ’98 in Maine. Though the force of these disasters were no doubt stronger than what we experienced the other day, the relative impact it had in a village where many structures are make shift or aging I thought was comparable. Everyone should bounce back but I bet it will stick in their memories well. The destruction shouldn’t have been laughable given the real life consequences of it (for people who generally have little backup money saved, losing a roof or a chunk of your stored grains is heartfelt), but somehow people were laughing afterwards and have already started moving on from it. I credit the laughing to a combination of awe and disbelief that can sometimes prevent one from getting too upset. That’s how it was. We couldn’t believe what mother nature had just did, and we couldn’t help but laugh a little in between the remarks of “woah-woah-woahhh” that conveyed our disbelief. There were vieux’s (our volunteer creole coming out here…I mean the village elders) who swore that they had never seen anything quite like that (although several of them remarked that while winds of similar strength may have come through before, the destruction was something else. We couldn’t help but speculate about the effect of deforestation, since trees help a lot as wind breaks in these instances).

In the end many homes lost roofs or at least a couple pieces of tin or thatch. Several of our wisest trees had been uprooted and deposed along the roads. Others were just snapped in half or lost branches (which, by the way, were already being cut up for firewood by 7 am the next morning). Also notably, the market took a hard hit (makes sense since the huts that make up the market are made out of buried branches as posts and straw thatch as roofs). That’s what the second picture is of (to the right is a group of locals drinking tchakba as they gossip about the storm, soaking in the events before they set about rebuilding).

But like I said, I still haven’t heard of anyone being seriously hurt and that’s the good thing! Thankfully it was just property damage and with time it’ll become another story to reflect on in the years to come. For now, people will go about repairing what they can before the rain starts to come more frequently and we can pick up the hoes and try and catch up with the field work that has already fully engulfed the southern 4/5ths of Togo.

La fete de premier mai

2010-05-09T16:57:00.003Z

Tun-po man!? Such is the afternoon salutation in Moba meaning roughly “does your work go well?” And with that, happy Mother’s Day!

So even though Mother’s Day isn’t a celebration practiced here, today I’ll give a glimpse of one fete (party) that we actually just celebrated here in Togo on May 1st. Premiere Mai is easily one of the two biggest national celebrations in the country. The other grande fete celebrated here is New Year’s. So beyond the irregular scattering of extravagant funerals, other traditional regional celebrations and bonne année, premiere Mai is a holiday that all Togolese put their sights on. Just like us back home, people bank on having certain regular holidays built into their schedules to look forward too throughout the year. Regardless of who you are and what kind of a living you’re able to make, most everyone manages to keep enough saved up in their pockets so they can make chockbah (millet beer), pool enough money to blast music all day long and afford to eat meat in a dish of macaroni and rice (two of the more pricey starches found here). It’s a funny way of saying it, but in truth people seem to judge how well you celebrate as a function of how well you eat. So on the day of any fete at least a couple people usually ask me “et tu as tué quoi pour la fete?”

For the case of premiere Mai, the occasion celebrates work. So you might equate it to Labor Day for us. Although almost everyone in village works the land, most people have some sort of a profession or craft that they do on the side for supplementary income. That trade may not suffice for a living, hence the need to cultivate, but it at least serves as a point of pride for many people. I recall my brother (a welder by trade) explaining to me the importance of his work and the great pride he took in showing me his certificate of apprenticeship. I remember him saying with great conviction « Si tu n’as pas un travail, les gens vont te dire
Thus, in honor of the various professions that the Togolese undertake, every May 1st everyone celebrates, usually with his or her fellow tradesmen. So respectively the woodworkers, the tree planters, the local beer makers, the soccer team, the local associations and so on get together and celebrate whatever work they identify with. In my village and elsewhere, the celebration kicks off with a defile (parade) in which all the registered groups line up, in some sort of a common uniform and march from the CEG (which is like a high school) into town and settle where the chief and other community notables are waiting to receive them. The picture I’ve got here is of the tail half of the parade as they head up the road away from the CEG and into the village center. Of course, I walked with my association of tree planters who you can see in the foreground, sporting nice blue and white polo shirts ordered from Lomé. Once the march ends the groups settle into their respective corners and rejoice over food, drink and loud music. Needless to say, I enjoyed the festivities and was even spoiled by an afternoon shower (oddly enough certain people had promised me that May 1st it would rain. I didn’t believe them since based on experience, I’ve found it’s best to take most such assertions with a grain of salt, but of course these people where not gripped by the same surprise that I had when it started to rain and I was obliged to jog back to my house to protect my solar chargers which had been bathing in the sun.)

Mange!

2010-04-15T15:58:00.005Z

How’s it goin’ everybody? It’s gotta be about spring time there right? I’ve gotten some letters and emails lately that have been fun to read. I appreciated them all!

Just got back from a quick trip down to Lomé. First trip back down to the coast since I swore in. I guess it’s about four months into service now for me, which in a way is tough to believe. That means it’s been over half a year living out of the States and away from home! Wow!

It was a fairly smooth trip considering how much one normally dreads the voyage down country. Each way we were able to make it between Dapaong and Lomé in under 12 hours (good time believe it or not). While in the past volunteers have generally relied on bush taxis to make the trip down we now have the advantage of what we call “the post bus”. It’s amazing, basically a charter bus labeled the “Golden Dragon” that runs up and down the country daily carrying the post and dozens of passengers with it. Honestly it’s a little bit of a bizarre experience, cruising past the underdeveloped Togolese countryside in the giant air conditioned bus. The loud horn blairs constantly like a semi-truck horn, warning goats, pigs, steer, sheep, loaded bush taxis, over charged semi trucks and cyclists of it’s presence as it attempts the impossible task of running a prompt bus schedule in an otherwise clock-impaired country. It almost made me feel like I was at home and like the world outside wasn’t real. While I was buckled in and enjoying the AC I almost thought for a second that sights such as a full grown cow strapped on a motorcycle with a flatboard, a goat tied by his neck but otherwise left to stand on top of a moving bush taxi or a taxi apprentice mounting the roof of a moving taxi to check the baggage on top were somehow odd. But those thoughts didn’t last long. At this point we just laugh when we see these things and don’t really consider them as being all that bizarre. Good ‘ole Togo, it’s a different world. It makes me think that when I do come home I’m likely to have a pretty off center understanding of what is normal. Try not to make fun of me for it when that moment comes!

Thought I’d talk some more about food this time. I know I’ve talked some about the staple foods here, but I don’t think I described them well enough for people to really visualize it well. This time I tried to add some pictures for you. A lot of life here revolves around food. Most of the daily activities go into its production. As people work the land with their hands they eat amazingly large quantities of these staple foods as their bodies fuel up in search of relatively scarce nutrients. I sometimes joke that people eat pate and fufu just so they have something to put in the belly here, because other than that the unfortunate truth is that the food really isn’t very nourishing. Nonetheless, it can be made very tasty with the right sauce and a Maggi cube.

In my part of the country the most common food is what we call “la pâte” (ou bien en Moba on dit “saab”). It’s derived from Maiz and normally processed in a moulin. This is the [second] picture that hopefully uploaded well. It’s a machine that takes any food that needs processing and turns it into either a paste or flour so that it’s edible. Many things are put through these engine powered machines. You find them even in the smaller villages. In an otherwise traditional village you’ll see one hut, usually in the marché, that has an exhaust pipe coming out of the roof puffing black smoke as it chugs along grinding whatever food. That food can be anything from millet to make the flour for their beer, to peanuts to make peanut butter or peanut oil, to soja to make the flour that makes tofu or to maiz to make the flour that makes pâte. In the case of maiz, from the flour you then labor over a cauldron of hot water, mixing the flour in with a wooden spatula. Tough work but a piece of cake for the women who prepare it here. They’ll work the mass till they have the texture they want, constantly using their bare hands to whisk stray pâte off the brim of the scalding cauldron. Finally they dip a bowl into the cauldron and pull out the steaming mass and leave it to cool and solidify. They eat it hot and if I’m eating with them I usually have to take it slower that them, trying not to show them that my fingers can’t withstand the heat of the pâte like them. Like most other foods, pâte is a finger food. Grab a hunk from the mold, dip it in the sauce and devour it!

The [first] picture is us making fufu in my family compound. For us, fufu is more of a novelty since the yams that make it are expensive here. However, at this point I’m just as fond of it as my family, so as a treat I usually bring back four or five yams whenever I’m far enough south to find a good deal. It’s enough to make a family feast and simple enough to make. You only have to peal, cut and boil the yams before you put them in the mortar and pound them with a pestle, at times adding water and turning the developing mass with your hands almost like a wet pizza dough. To make it faster, people will take two pestles and alternate strokes, like my two sisters are doing in the picture here. This too is a finger food that is dipped in any variety of sauces.

Just as a side note, I found out after I took this picture that we aren’t supposed to pound fufu at night since it can upset certain spirits. The fear is that if a bad spirit hears this he may poison the food, but if it’s only a good spirit it’s okay. So by exposing yourself to the spirits at night like that you take a risk! It’s true that most people here now have taken on the religions that we can identify with in the States, being Christianity/Catholicism and Islam. My family for example is Muslim. Nonetheless, almost everyone, including my family, retains some level of animist belief (or at least fear of the “grisgris”/sorcery of animism). Although we did break from tradition to pound the fufu after dark in this case, don’t worry for me. My brother sacrificed a chicken just for good measure!

mango city

2010-03-20T12:52:00.003Z

Hey everyone, how’s home? Winter starting to wind down or is it being stubborn as usual? From my end it’s amazing to think that snow and ice covers the landscape at home. Here and there I’ve been showing people pictures of snow and ice in an attempt to get their sympathy as I do my best against the midday sun which struggles to penetrate the shade of whatever tree I’m taking refuge under.

I heard there’s been some rain back home of late. I feel obliged to mention that it poured at my house the other day! That was pretty wild. Before it came I could hear a bit of a rushing sound, maybe like if you heard a river off in the distance. Normally I would associate that with a downpour next door about to come my way, like sometimes happens when a storm comes through back home. I should have trusted the instinct but nonetheless I refused it given the notion that it was hot/dry season and that it’s not supposed to rain. But it poured in sheets for about a half an hour! Cooled things right off (and at least now I know where the leaks are in my house). Makes me that much more excited about rainy season!

But until the rain comes more regularly shade is my best friend. The association I work with a lot here calls themselves “Songou-Man” (Shade is Good). Truth! The thought of living here without the shade of certain trees isn’t an appealing one. Honestly, I can manage to stay feeling fairly fresh if I don’t venture far from my go-to trees. I’ve staked out one good spot in particular where a couple of old trees still stand thanks to the presence of the large boulder they’re wedged around. I can set up my old hammock just right between them for a solid nap and light reading if I need an escape. However, I have to say that the best shade trees are mango trees, one of the few trees that are widely planted and protected by everyone for obvious reasons.

Right now I’m reaping multiple benefits of mango trees. Mangos are coming out in quantity and variety! I shamelessly take advantage as I indulge myself in them. I feel like a kid when I finish and stand up with mango juice all over my hands and face and realize my teeth are lodged full of stringy mango grains.

There are many varieties of mangos, but only one of them really seams to root well in the soil here. It’s a succulent variety, but small and grainy. To add to the variety of the mango crop people often practice grafting. It’s a technique where you create a sort of mango “hybrid” (you can do something similar with oranges too). How does it work?

Pick out your mango tree that does the best in the local climate and plant it. Once the tree has at least 6 months of age go find your mate. Hunt out another mango tree (this can even be another grafted tree that is already mature) and cut off the tip of one of its branches. Slice off all the leaves and then sheer off the skin of one side of stem. Pick a spot on your young mango and sheer off an equal sized strip of skin and then kiss the two together. Wrap it in plastic, wait for it to bud, open up the budded part and then let it grow. This way your mango trees will start producing fruit at a younger age and will give you mangos that are, as my Moba mom would say in her broken French, “gros-gros…et doux”!.

I’ve recently started walking the river bed on occasion as a way to get out and about. Now completely dry it makes a pleasant walk and leads me out into the bush a bit were I can find the appeal of a forest relatively undisturbed. A combination of coolness afforded by the shade, sounds of birds playing and the sights of the native trees lures me there.

However, thanks to the presence of dry season my walk there inevitably leads me across groups of people like the ones in the picture I posted here. For those who aren’t fortunate enough to have a well that doesn’t dry up, finding water right now is tough and for some, means routine trips to the "marigot". Fortunately for us my family does have a well right outside our compound. It’s deeper than it was three months ago, but there’s still water there (one of our ducks can attest to that as he fell in searching for water…we cleaned him a week later). Our problem is that our rope often breaks, sending our bucket careening into the depths until we able to fish it out or buy a new one a couple days later. In this case my sisters may be forced in the meantime to venture into the marigot for water like the folks in this picture.

One of my friends in village claims that the river didn’t used to dry up. But as the years went on people started farming on the land right on the river’s edge. When the solid vegetation was uprooted nothing was left to hold it together when the rushing water of rainy season came. This swept away the banks making the riverbed, (formerly narrow and rocky as my friend claims) wide and sandy. So instead of standing water being left in the river all year round (at least a little bit anyway), what water is left in dry season rests under the sand of the riverbed (this is their "marigot").

So if you don’t have a well you grab a bunch of containers, a hoe/shovel, a couple of calabashes and your donkey if you have one and head out to a spot like this. Start digging until you hit water, dig some more (a little bit past the “water table”), clean out the dirty water you just created and then wait for it to fill up with relatively clean water. Now scoop out your water with a calabash and lug it back home, which for some can be rather far. It’s rough work and they know it, but at least while I’m around they keep a good spirit up in spite of it. I feel fortunate for my well!

Good luck with the winter doldrums back home! All my best!

Sweatin' a bit

2010-02-25T16:38:00.002Z

Phew, the heat is really starting to kick in! Not sure whether or not my watch’s thermometer is trustworthy or not, but if it is the temperatures have been getting as high as 105 F in the early afternoon. The harmattan winds are still lingering but they’re sporadic and hot instead of constant and cool. On my bike ride today I was once again confronted by the now moderate winds and I’ve even seen a handful of strong funnel clouds sweeping by at times. Just the other day one came by my house without any warning. While it had been perfectly calm minutes before the cloud swept right through my terrace in a quick flurry and sent two loose papers flying high into the air and carried out of site in seconds by the unusually warm gusts of the cloud. I didn’t even bother looking for the papers because they were long gone.

As I understand it, things will only continue to heat up during the next month. The heat peaks here in mid-March as the sun chases the harmattan winds away until next November. For now I have to set my sights on the promise of the spring rains, which will come around the end of April and signal the end of the heat. Nonetheless, although I may take back this statement in a couple weeks, I will say that the heat is not as intolerable as I once imagined . It’s amazing how one’s body can adapt to such a change in climate. I am sure that 5 months ago I would be near miserable in the midday heat with no air-conditioning. I’m finding that the key is to leave all of the physical work one may do to the morning and evenings and then find a book or some friends, some shade and plenty of water while you wait out the high sun. Nobody knows this better than my dog who generally sleeps during the day but is spunky as ever in the morning and evenings.

From a couple of letters that I’ve received from home it seams that people are pretty curious about some of the work I’m involved in here. It’s tough to wrap everything up all at once, but I’ll try and dip into it a bit here.

As a general rule, each volunteer that is sent out by the Peace Corps results from a specific demand of a community. In my case, it was an association of gardeners who work on reforestation who wanted the help of a volunteer. So, if I was going to try and sum up neat and simple my work here you might say that I’m in the business of reforestation since my priorities at this point rest with the association (whose name, if translated from Moba, means “the shade is good”). As of now the brunt of my work is with them. When I was doing all my biking in the first weeks at post it was to help with the construction of fences for 4 separate hectares of land they reforested and now needed to protect from grazing animals. Now we’re switching our focus on planning for formations on reforestation in neighboring villages and planning for a botanical garden they hope start while I’m here. The idea is to set up a botanical garden (I might say botanical garden/forest) that has a collection of all of the region’s disappearing tree species. But more about that as it develops!

Beyond the association, I also have a responsibility to my village community as well and thus try and respond to other issues with any ideas I may have so long as the interest is sincere and somewhat widespread. As a modest example, yesterday I led a composting session.

Folks in my village, and most of Togo for that matter, face the ever compounding problem of soil degradation. Most people harvest the same fields every year. When they harvest the crop and then burn everything else in brush fires, each year the soil is left a little worse than it was before. The common solution is nothing more than the application of chemical fertilizers. These are expensive for them, have uncertain health effects and do little to restore soil quality. Composting is a modest way to improve their soil and thus their crops, with no inputs beyond labor and recycled farm matter. A handful of farmers in my village had heard about composting and wanted to learn more. So yesterday morning we got a group of about 11 men and 5 women together to demonstrate a compost construction. Again, just a modest gathering, but hopefully something that will spark community interest in compost as a way of improving their crops, reducing waste, improving the struggling soil and ending brush fires.

On that note I tried taking some photos of a brush fire (unfortunately, they didn’t come out too well so I apologize for that! They burn at night making them hard to photograph but you can get a sense for how they light up the sky and cover huge areas) that was lit a couple days ago to give people some incite into the commonly talked about issue. Back home we are usually at least able to till crop residues back into the soil in preparing our gardens or fields. But when hoes and dabas (large hoes) are the only tools generally available for such a job, one can understand why tilling might not be appealing! Compost itself is fairly labor intensive on the large scale and so even if the technique is known or heard of, it may not be applied when one has the option to clear his field quickly with fire. So, the fairly common solution to the unsightly and impeding crop residues is burning.

Legitimately, the practice might not be so bad if there was more planning involved. Although burning does result in a loss of soil nutrients, ashes can add something back to the soil if they’re reabsorbed. In fact, the law does allow brush fires between November and December. This is when things can be burned with little chance of unwanted spread and leaves some time for vegetation to reestablish before the dry season. However, when brush fires are lit in the middle of February (like the one in my backyard the other day) they get out of control easily and any nutrients that might have been left in the ash are swept away with the breeze before the soil can take them up again in time for the next crop.

Fortunately, it does seem that general consensus is heading in disfavor of brush fires. Nonetheless, old habits die hard and the impact is still quite visible both by the bright burning night fires and the charred landscape that’s left the next day as well. Hopefully, little by little, simple alternatives such as composting can be popularized here to help things out.

Anyway, I went off more than usual but I hope it was interesting. I’ll get back on when I can!

Bonne Journée!

Chez-moi

2010-01-28T11:05:00.003Z

So I wanted to take this blog as a chance to describe in some more detail the area that I’m living in. Hopefully the picture I’m going to try and post with this comes out, but that’s always a toss-up whether the upload will work or not. I know I’ve tried to describe some the rolling landscape, harmattan and the trees in the past, but it can never take the place of a decent photo.

Anyway, I took this picture on just about the windiest day we’ve had yet, about a week ago. It felt like a storm was coming through, except all day long and without a trace of rain. Generally, the winds stop during the night. They’ll start to pick up around 9 in the morning (so get your sweeping done early!) and peak around noon. However, they won’t fully stop until the sun starts to set. It can make for a real difficult time biking! I’ve left for work in neighboring villages in the morning and made it with no problem, but had to come back through the wind later in the day. It can make a normal ride seem like a stretch in the Tour de France! Hopefully you can kind of see how the wind is kicking up dust in the background. Fortunately, the winds have since died down some from when I took the picture. I’m told that the coldest weather is now behind us, although the winds could continue until late February when the breeze dies and la chaleur (the hotness) begins.

But this picture also gives you a snapshot of my house. I actually live in what we would call a “compound” here. Most families live in these kind of circular and compartmentalized concessions that have separate little houses/rooms that are built into the wall. There’s usually some kind of gate or door that opens into the compound where the family shares a space you might compare to a crude courtyard. Guard dogs are generally the extent of security for the actual compound interior and then it’s the individual rooms that often have locks on them. In the case of our compound we have a mango tree growing in the middle, popping out from a hole they made in the cement floor. Looking around we have about ten separate rooms, ranging from where the donkeys and goats sleep, the chicken coup, two or three kitchen rooms and then the bedrooms.

For me I have a section blocked off for myself. My portion of the compound consists of a kitchen room, my “house” (two small rooms), my shower and my latrine. I fenced off this area with straw fencing that I had made in village, just to give myself some privacy when I need it. There’s also a section that is shaded with a bit of an outdoor roof. In the picture you can see from the outside the two rooms that make up my house, which are on the right side of the compound.

Little by little it’s starting to feel like home. The difference maker is that I’ve finally starting getting some furniture and wall decorations (besides spiders and geckos) to fill the empty space. With the temperatures relatively cool it’s turning into a cozy little space. However, I think mosquitoes may become an issue as they’ve started showing up in numbers in my kitchen and latrine!

I’m working on putting together a little garden/tree nursery on the opposite side of the compound, close to the well. We’re also shaping up our “peyote” (not sure how to say it in English but it’s like a shaded terrace made from branches and hay, equipped with log benches) outside of the compound where we can greet people under some shade (hard to see in the picture but it’s just to the right of the tree to the left of the compound).

You can’t see it the picture but there is a riverbed in the kind of valley I live near. Right now it’s just about dried up except for a few spots where people go to find water or do their laundry. The other thing that’s worth mentioning, but which may be tough to make out, is the trees that line some of the roads here. In the background you might be able to make out the dirt road that heads up the hill and into a stand of giant trees. One of the neat things about biking the roads here is that a lot of the roads are lined with these huge trees. In French they are known as Kapokier trees, but they were actually planted by the Germans along their roads in the early 20th century when Togo was still a German colony. Although the villagers don’t like the trees because they don’t go well with their millett crops, I appreciate riding into my village center being greeted by the shade of these neat trees.

My house itself is only a five minute walk from the village center where I can get most of my needs (relative to the picture, my village is behind where I stood as I took the photo). There’s a couple of schools, a couple churches, numerous boutiques, a number of street vendors, a handful of buvettes and then the market (which is generally empty except for Tuesday and Friday when the market comes to town). It’s actually a sizeable little village. From there the city is roughly 15k away if I have any more specific needs (such as internet to post this blog!).

So if you were interested I hope that helps out with your vision of my new surroundings. It’s difficult to describe it all, but like I said, it is turning into home for me.

As always I hope everyone is doing well, or as the Moba would say “Lafié” (meaning health). A plus!