La Récolte!

In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, right now we’re in the thick of the harvest, even starting to wind down a bit. At this point pretty much all of the harvest is either out of the ground or off the stalk, excepting only the six month millet, which still has a bit to go. But let’s be honest, a harvest is hard work, and I’ve been getting a taste of it.

The other day I went out and pulled up peanuts for about an hour. I left exhausted and my brother and his second wife just smiled in appreciation of my effort, even though they themselves weren’t yet ready to call it quits, and had been out there for hours before I even showed up. I think they were just happy and proud that I came out to see their harvest, which I was impressed by.

It’s fun to get the first hand experience of seeing the cultivation and harvest. I think it’s important to gain an appreciation for where our food comes from. Before Africa I couldn’t have even have told you how a peanut grows because it usually just came straight from a tin can. In case you didn’t know, each peanut that we eat hides in a shell that comes out of the ground on ends of the roots of the plant. When you yank up a peanut plant you’ll find about a dozen root ends that have peanuts attached to them. Amazing, we eat peanuts all the time and yet how many of us know how it grows and the process involved in growing them! And just like the luck involved with the germination of peanuts and all the other crops (which I briefly mentioned months back) it takes a little luck to come up with a good harvest. The maturity and harvest of peanuts needs to be timed up with relatively dry conditions so the peanuts don’t rot or sprout in the ground before you get them up.

But despite the fatigue of the peanut harvest, I’ve found myself better suited to lend a hand with the rice harvest. As it turns out, beating rice is a decent substitute to batting practice! And lately, my family compound has been filled with rice needing a good beating! Yes, there’s been maize, beans, sorghum, peanuts and millet coming through, but it seems like I’ve seen more rice than anything! Maybe it’s just because it takes so much work!

Rice here appears to be one of the crops that is mainly tended to by women for whatever reason. While men occupy themselves with other cultures, the women seem to dominate the rice fields (one day I tried to weed rice for about 10 minutes and not only was I very inefficient, everyone laughed in part I think because of how out of place I looked as a man). And so my mom and all my sisters have their own harvests of rice to take care of. They come back from the fields navigating donkey wagons full of bails of rice; long stems of rice which tassel at the tips where the individual grains of rice are, all bundled together with cord. To start, the rice grains are protected by a hard shell that they break off with a pestle and mortar and then winnow off after. But before you can do that, you have to take all the rice grains (still encased in their shells) off of the long stems. And this is where batting practice and wood chopping experience comes in handy, because you have to beat the rice stems with a palm branch until all the grains fall off (just like my brother’s first wife is doing in the picture). Considering some of my baseball withdrawals since being here, I kind of enjoy the occasion to beat some rice, especially if it’s in the cool air of the evening (however, they’ll be at it all day…I’ve been getting woken up at five to the sound of the thwacking, and they’ll pick away at it all day).

Finally, I get a chance to put a picture up of my mysterious dog! He had a field day playing in the leftover rice stems, where I caught him hanging out before dinner the other day. So for all of you curious about Boots, here ya go

Travelin’ Man

I know this is just about the longest stretch I’ve gone without posting something, so I’m sorry about that! But, that’s mostly thanks to some recent travel I did at the end of September into Burkina Faso and Senegal that kind of took me out of my normal routine. Now I’m back and can to tell you a bit about it!

The travel started off with a week stay in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, where I took part in a conference on food security. In short, an organization based out of Ft. Myers, FL, called ECHO (echonet.org), organized a West African networking conference for workers associated with food security to get together and exchange ideas concerning the problem of food security (unfortunately, while other continents increase food security bit by bit, Africa struggles more than any other. That is to say, Africa isn’t experiencing the gradual improvements in food security that the rest of the world is). The occasion for such a conference was certainly called for and I left feeling very positive about what took place. By getting together with other people in the region working on the same issues we were able to share a lot of important information that normally isn’t well vulgarized in this corner of the world. I definitely came away with some great ideas and made some important contacts.

Beyond the conference, however, I got the chance to check out Ouagadougou and all the goodies that it has to offer! I was itching to have my first trip out of country since arriving in Togo and that start in Ouaga kicked things off well. Like Togo, I found the people to be welcoming, especially after presenting myself as a Peace Corps volunteer (people are almost always excited about Peace Corps if they’ve heard about it, and a lot of people have). The majority ethnicity in Burkina is the Mossi people, who speak a language called More (pronounced more-ray), and is actually an ethnicity I encounter often in Togo. My village and Dapaong both have a strong populations of Mossi, so it was a nice occasion to get to know a little about their homeland. In fact, my best friend in village is Mossi and so is my village family name (although my mom is Moba). Thus, I got to use some More salutations I’ve picked up over the course of my year here and that helped me get a few extra smiles out of people. While there, some of the highlights were an “artisanal village” selling all kinds of African artwork, a very nicely organized market, a bowling alley, an American country club with a pool and a gym (I had a bench press and baseball on the tv, who’d of thought!) and darn good food. Among other things, I binged on dates, brochettes (street meat) and hamburgers! Yes, hamburgers people, they are not to be taken for granted!

After a week in Ouaga, we caught a flight out to Dakar, Senegal, where the real vacation set in and I started to feel like a tourist again. After getting in (the flight was about 2.5 hrs) we shot straight up to the brink of the Mauritania border and the city of St. Louis, the former capital of Senegal and French West Africa. After a pretty uncomfortable and drawn out bus ride we made it in and checked into a very nice hostel on the main island (the first picture is taken from the hostel’s roof terrace at sun down, looking across the slice of the Senegal river that separates the island and the sand bar that protects it from the ocean, called the “langue de barbarie”). The town definitely had a nice colonial-type feel to it, which has evolved to accommodate a regular influx of tourists. Thanks to it being the end of their rainy season (meaning humid heat pushing 100 mid-day and mosquitoes at night), the number of ex-pats on the island was down from normal, giving us some nice space to roam and extra leverage to barter with the many artists lining the streets. Overall, I’d call it a very nice tourist destination for someone wanting to check-out Senegal, especially if you’re looking for a place with some Western comforts.

But if you might one day go to Senegal and want a tip, get the pen out for the next one. After St. Louis, we a caught a night bus back towards Dakar and on to a beach town called Toubab Dialaw. This was paradise! A little harder to find and less developed for tourists perhaps, but it’s one of those places you can get real comfortable in. Check out the second picture from our hotel, you can get a glimpse of the view. Just a few steps from my hotel room door I could soak in the smell and sight of the ocean in full that I’ve lacked in my landlocked part of Togo. I especially enjoyed swimming in the fairly calm, and temperate ocean water (as opposed to Maine’s ice water) and beach restaurants that gave me my fill of seafood.

After Toubab, we headed back to Dakar to wind things down. One night out downtown, a day trip out to Gorée Island and an ice cream and pizza binge later we hopped back on our plane and called it a trip.

After getting the time away I definitely needed, I’m now back in Togo ready to go. And although we’ve had a couple scorchers here lately topping 100, Harmattan is soon to come and I couldn’t be more happy about it! It’s my closest equivalent to fall back home and if you know me well you know it’s my favorite time.

Well, Saturday afternoon in Dapaong, means it’s market it day. We’ll see what goodies I can find, or as the Moba would say “daa bic”. Haha, this means “the market’s child”, to imply metaphorically whether or not the market gave birth to good stuff for the town today or not! I’ll let ya know!

Saving the Charlatan’s Trees

In country we publish a paper that we call "Farm to Market". In it, volunteers share their experiences in the agricultural domain to help facilitate cooperation and communication amongst ourselves, which is sometimes tough being posted all over the country. The following is what I wrote for the next edition and I figured I would share with people at home...



Ever wanted an excuse to chat with a charlatan or a marabou (a charlatan with a muslim twist)? Well I got it for ya. Start a botanical tree garden!

Deforestation in Togo is at its most severe in the Savannah region. But for an area that is famous for lacking trees, there is any amazing abundance of tree diversity. While the association I work with (Shade is Good) normally grows a variety of exotic trees in their nurseries (your average list of quick growing nitrogen fixers), they came to the realization that there is still a very real demand for native trees. And most of it is rooted in traditional medicine!

There’s no doubt modern medicine is replacing the work of charlatans, marabous or the family vieux (in moba the word we use is "chambah", but it all refers to a respected elder), but the reality is, traditional remedies are still highly sought. Oftentimes, these remedies are age old recipes made from the bark, roots, fruits and leaves of many different tree species. In fact, part of the reason the rare trees are disappearing isn’t just arbitrary cutting for firewood. Lots of the trees that are left are dying because people are constantly digging up their roots and scarring their bark to treat assorted ailments or work certain gris-gris (what you may consider voodoo or animism). Really, once it dawns on them, people are excited by the idea of being able to plant these trees in their own yard. Believe it, the demand is there! The question is, how do you go about meeting it?

Shade is Good, is responding in a unique way. They are in the process of creating a botanical garden made up of the region’s rarest trees, shrubs and vines. In one hectare they hope to gradually amass a dictionary of living trees and cultivate nurseries full of their saplings to make available to the community and generations to come. Although they’ve already succeeded in trials of at least 18 local species, the process will be ongoing and has required a lot of homework.

This is how we’ve gone about it so far:

1) We needed a list of the trees we wanted to focus on. Thus, we asked our native tree experts, Dr’s Charlatan, Vieux and Marabou! Just like that we got a list of the rarest and most highly sought after trees around. You’d be amazed by the size of the list you can generate from only a handful of local wise men. Be forewarned though, French and English with be of little use. This is local language time!
2) Once we knew the trees that were going to be our priority, we sought out the nearest known adult tree of each species. Finding and noting the location of existing trees is essential. With this information you can go out and scientifically identify your tree (try Arbres, Arbustres et Lianes du Sahel by Michael Arbonnier, he has versions in French and English) and more importantly find your seed source.
3) While finding our adult trees, we took pictures and sometimes samples of the fruits, leaves and bark of the trees, since these offer the most defining features of a tree that can help with identification (In my experience, the fruits have been the giveaways for ID. Leaves are second best and only sometimes do you need the bark/core color). Then if possible, we harvested the seeds to try in our nurseries. If mature seeds weren’t available, we determined (often by asking the nearest local) the month when we could come back to get them. Also, keep an eye out for species that are done by boture!
4) We identified as many trees as possible. By getting a scientific name, we open ourselves up to inter-regional or international cooperation. This could help us bring in certain species whose seeds are already too hard to find locally and in addition, it could help us attract visitors from afar to one day come visit us in hopes of finding a specific tree.
5) What seeds we did find, we distributed among our men, asking them to try growing them in their garden. This is how we came to get our current stock of 18 species.
6) Having gathered information on the harvest periods for each tree, we plugged the data into a calendar to further organize the search. Using this calendar of seed harvests, we send people out on a monthly basis to find certain seeds for trials. This way, we are able to try out all the species we want (not just the ones that give seeds in dry season for example) and with time, hopefully continue to add to our botanical garden!

So, if you want a dry season hobby (the best time for a tree nursery!) or just an excuse to probe the local charlatan, think about starting a botanical garden in your village!

Chez le Mécanicien

Hey all!

Let’s take a trip to the mechanic’s today, village style!

So I’ve already mentioned that in village, if you have a mode of transportation, most often it’s either your feet or a bike. And despite road conditions, we’re not talking about mountain bikes. We’re talking about single gear, often old, often twisted and often Chinese city bikes. The kinds with thin tires and no tread, a platform over the back tire (the bed) for your bigger loads and sometimes even a basket in front, convenient for transporting chickens or “la sauce” (as a side note, I always get a kick out of the fact that in general people refer to any kind of green vegetable as being “the sauce”!) . These are bikes abused to no end on all kinds of roads and paths leading into the Savannah bush villages. The elaborate network of dirt roads/paths are rocky, sandy, eroded and, right now, sometimes water logged. But the bikes manage to pull through it all more often than not. But what happens when the bikes finally do break down?

Usually, a trip to the mechanic's means you’ve exhausted all of your MacGyver-esque techniques. Most people are their own mechanic, but sometimes they just don’t have the tools or the broken part to do the trick. But believe me, if they can jerry rig it to avoid a fee, they will! I think the niftiest piece of work I’ve seen yet was how we once repaired a flat tire of someone while on the path. We had no patches to work with, but what we did have was a long rubber “caoutchouc”, our bungee cord, standard on all bikes. It’s what we use to strap things to our bikes. Without them we wouldn’t be able to manage to carry so much on our bikes, like 50 kilo sacks of fertilizer or bed frames! I’m amazed by how much a bike can carry if you really want it to! Anyway, after locating the hole by rotating the tube through a bucket of water, they pinched the spot of the whole, making a bit of an earflap, and then tied it off tightly with a thin strip of this caoutchouc. They pumped it up and it was ready to go. Sure it was an awkward looking thing that patched inner tube, but sure enough it took us all the way back to village and to the above pictured mechanic shop.

Now yes, there is a motorcycle mechanic in village for those who do have the chance to own a moto. But for the large majority who move around on bikes, this and one other stall next door suffice as our auto body shops. And just like our frustrations with mechanic shops at home with our cars, people here are subject to similar pains with their bikes. I’ll hear people moan about the money they have to spend or the wait they have to endure to get their bikes back on the trail and I can’t help but chuckle and think of how in a way, it’s just like home. Haha!

For those pictured here, fortunately it’s still early on market day and things haven’t yet filled up. But believe me, by noon that same day the lot will be chock full of upturned bikes waiting to be tended too. In that case, take a seat at a tchakba stand, grab a calabash and “patientez un peu pour le mécanicien”.

How about a little tourism!

This Friday I took the occasion to partake in some Togo tourism. Some locals may see me and assume all along that I’m a tourist, but in reality and especially at this point (10 months in), I hardly feel like one. This Friday I took time out with a handful of other vols and ventured to one of the more well known tourism sites in Togo. By tourism site I don’t mean that it’s swarming with visiting Europeans and equipped with a gift shop, but the place does draw some attention and usually gets mentioned in traveler’s books, such as the ones written by Lonely Planet.

So on Friday, with the help of a nearby volunteer and his counterpart, we made the hike that heads up the side of one of Savanes’ plateaus to a century old cliffside fort, about 40 kms south of Dapaong. And we picked a great day for it! With an overcast sky, the weather stayed fresh all morning and although the rain threatened, it didn’t actually fall until the afternoon. With the heat at bay and a slight breeze it was gorgeous!

In southern parts of the region of Savanes (when the savannah starts) there are various plateaus that stretch north before they suddenly drop off into lower, rolling savannah. One of my favorite parts of the drive north to Dapaong is when the national route comes down off one of these plateaus and splits its two peninsulas. At this point you can look both left and right at two giant plateau tips pointing us north. Even the bike ride from my village (further north) to Dapaong leaves me at one point with a great view of a mighty plateau off in the distance to the south. Friday, we drove up to the edge of one of these plateaus and made the hike up the steep slope to the top. Although it was quick, it was very pleasant trouncing along the rocky but well forested trail.

Once on top we soaked in the refreshing breeze on our way to the house of the village chief, in order to pay the 2 000 CFA fee required for visiting the cliffs. For a bit we walked along the recently paved but not very often used road (established in the hopes of attracting more visitors) that leads right up to the site of the cliff fort, which sits on a northern face of the plateau. On the edge there’s a German built ladder fastened to the vertical edge that descends straight down onto a ledge that is the site of a former Moba fort. Once on the ledge you can walk along this perch where the remains of the fort rest. Naturally a cave jutting into the face of the plateau, Moba had built a fort in and around the hollow with chambers, storage rooms and pots all made of clay. Where the cave juts in we could crawl in to explore and at one point we even wriggled through a pitch dark passage that came out to where I’m pictured sitting in the picture. It was really a pretty wild experience to find this hidden treasure and get a glimpse into a bit of local history. We walked the ledge, along which the mini village stretched, snapping photos until we got to where we could no longer continue and found a small waterfall trickling down the face. It really was awe-inspiring to imagine that some of the ancestors of the Moba had lived here only a hundred years ago.

The fort had been occupied in the 19th century, while Togo was still under German influence. In the midst of conflict surrounding colonial and tribal issues, certain Moba had turned the cliff cave into a safe haven from their tribal rival, the Chokossi. It has now been years since any Moba lived there, but the marvel of the site is certainly still alive!