The Cauldron Maker

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!

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

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

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

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!

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!

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

So above is my most recent attempt at putting up pictures. It’s quite the process trying to load pictures through the connection here but I thought it would be worth the effort to give everyone at least a snapshot of things from time to time. Eventually I will be putting up photos of my new 'milieu'.