Goin' the distance!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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!

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

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!

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!

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!