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!