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!