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!

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!