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'.