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.)