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!

The Cauldron Maker

Today I’ll tell you guys a bit about a recent little project I’ve been doing in village. Being as the last couple of months have been the harvest, people’s lives have been swamped with the endless associated chores, such as the ones I explained in the last blog. Among these chores is the very tedious process of deseeding ears of maize. Unlike us back home who eat our corn fresh off the cob or canned, most of the maize people here produce is dried and stored. If you’re in a hurry, you take your ears (shucked) and leave them in the sun for a couple days until their dry. Then you chuck ‘em all in your storage room or grainery if you have one. However, at some point all those dry kernels need to get stripped off the cob before they can either be sold by the bowl full, or ground down to make the flour that makes their staple meal, “la pate”.

And this my friends, is another massively tedious process. There are two approaches. First option any guess? Yes, once again, like the rice, beat the cobs with a stick and in a long, sweaty flurry of flying kernels (we did it just the other day at our house). The second option is a little less aggressive and often quite social. People will spend hours sitting around a basin breaking the individual kernels off the cob with their thumbs (yes x-box gamers, you too just may have an adaptable skill for agriculture!). It’s even a bit of a social chore, since people are rarely left to do it on their own. If you stop by a family compound where someone’s working on this job, the common courtesy is to join in on the work and whatever conversation ensues. But as a rookie to the task I still wouldn’t call it a picnic. I joined in not long ago for a solid hour and left with cramped and blistered thumbs. And I’m not the only one who would complain about this job, many would agree that it’s quite a pain. Mais sinon, on va faire comment?

One of the ideas that I have been given as an “extension agent” (my technical title as a volunteer) by my boss, is to propagate and share a metal tool that can strip corn cobs with much more efficiency. The tool, which resembles an oversized and hollow Reeses cup, open on both ends and lined with thin ribs on the inside, was something I could busy myself with trying to replicate in village. You use it by inserting the ear of corn and rotating the cob and the tool in opposite directions, allowing the ribs to grip the kernels and rip them off in a hurry. And it really wasn’t too hard replicate, being as my boss had already provided me with a model. It also gave me an excuse to meet and learn the trade of the man known as “le marmitier”, or (drum roll please….) the cauldron-maker.

As it turns out, the grand majority of pots and cauldrons that are found here, aren’t the ones turned out in factories in Lomé or abroad. Rather, most are made locally out of all manner of aluminum scrap, ranging from coke cans to other broken pots to the more often relied upon car parts. So despite the lack of recycle bins in Togo, aluminum adds itself to the long list of things that Togolese and Africans alike recycle to a substantial degree. In fact, although Coke cans don’t leave the store requiring a deposit, once empty they can be found in a collection of aluminum that fetches about a dollar per kilo.

With that mess of useless looking metal the marmitier makes his trade. It allows him and his handful of apprentices to go work. Even in village, this aluminum (even including exhausted engine blocks!) is melted down in a cast iron pot, (for whatever reason aluminum melts much quicker than iron). The pot sits on scorching charcoal which is kept unusually hot by an underground ventilation system, powered by a hand crank, which is manned by one of the apprentices. The aluminum heats and heats until a runny liquid is created. All the impurities of the scrap, including dirt or un-melted metal float on top and are easily sifted off the top, usually with long iron prongs and a sardine can (which too, won’t melt with the aluminum). Then the metal is ready to be poured.

While two apprentices are charged with the job of melting the aluminum (and sometimes all four if it involves melting an engine block…no small task but then again no more complicated than heat and a sledge hammer), the marmitier and an apprentice or two set to work making their molds. Were any of you reading ever big into making sand castles? If you were, I got your African job already figured out. Now it’s a little complicated to explain in words, but their molds are made of nothing more than tightly packed sand, since it can hold together when liquid aluminum is poured on it, yet once the aluminum sets it falls away without any pains. To make the sand molds, they have split cauldrons serving as positive models to help them. They start by crafting the inner negative mold, which will lie upside-down and fixed to the ground. Off to the side they craft the outer negative mold in a series of boxes to be placed around the first mold (being careful to create a conduit in the sand where the bottom of the cauldron will be for the metal to pass through). Then the outer mold is carefully assembled around the inner mold to finish the prep.

If you’re trying to imagine it, you’d now be looking at what appeared to be only a box packed with sand and a small hole on top. In reality, that hole is the entrance into the mold. If the molds are properly positioned, the conduit leads the liquid metal into the space in between the two negative molds of sand when poured. Now cross your fingers and hope the sand stuck and that the molds were well meshed. After no more than 5-10 seconds you can start to break away the sand, because the metal will have set, although it’ll be hot for minutes (the hardened kids still like to try and hot potatoe it, showing off by seeing whose hands can stand the heat the longest). They’re pretty good at what they do, but they’re still forced to redo many a pot for having gotten a bad set (FYI, in the picture they’re actually pouring a cauldron top and not a cauldron itself, sorry if it makes it more confusing!).

So to come back to the maize theme, by adapting the techniques he uses in his shop, my marmitier is slowly taking on the side trade as “maker of the thing that deseeds maize”. He’s already made a handful of sales with me at his side for 300 fCFA (~60 cents), like we’re doing in the picture on market day, and hopefully with time, he’ll get more and more requests to make this tool, which can deseed corn cobs about 5 times as fast as by hand. For now, he gets the pride of introducing a new tool to his community and I walk away with a free apprenticeship in cauldron making. Haha, and so goes my humble life as a Peace Corps volunteer!

Happy Thanksgiving!