3 Champs

A path through the champ

'Champ' in French means 'field.' When the Togolese use the word champ, they are talking about the strips of land where they grow food. The Maritime region of Togo where I live is just heading into the midst of the rainy season, and I often find the road into town much less crowded than before because most of the village is out working the earth. Some of their champs line the road. Others are far, far away. The high population density in my area means that any space that is not taken up by living or business becomes a champ. For miles around, the vast majority of the once-upon-a-time brush is divided up into squares and cultivated.


I have been working with friends in the champ to better understand the lives of the farmers I hope to help. While my background and experience are far different, my hope is that scraping at dirt with a hoe under the hot sun will give me insights into how to better promote development initiatives that fit into the Togolese lifestyle. It also gets me out of the house, is good exercise, and builds character.

The champs of 3 friends in particular have stood out to me:

Champ 1:

A short woman with a wide smile lives in a mud house on the other side of the paved road from me. One day I offered to go out to work in the champ with her, expecting to go off somewhere into the African brush. Instead, we went to a field right beside the paved road between our houses. This champ is wedged between the wall of a family compound and the potholed road that cargo trucks take to and from the cement factory further north. On the far side, pieces of cinder block are mixed into the soil with the corn and cassava. Next to the road, the crops grow slightly better because of all the trash thrown from bush taxi windows into the champ.

I woke up with the sun and headed over to her house. She laughed when I took the basin off her head and put it on mine to carry it to the champ. We walked together back towards my house and then took the slight detour off the path into the rows of crops. Land in my area is measured in 'lots' and hectares – four lots make up a hectare. Laborers are paid by the number of lines of crops they tend to, and they are paid more for longer lines.

In addition to corn and cassava, the woman also planted peanuts in this field. Unfortunately, there is a weed that looks very similar to a small peanut plant. To a villager, the difference is black and white. To me, it was like close shades of gray. I began to start down my first row when the woman cried 'Azi!' at me, meaning peanut in the local Ewe dialect. I realized that in my enthusiasm I had chopped off several peanut plants. I resolved to pay more attention but as the day wore on and I began to sweat more, I decapitated more peanut plants. She set me eventually to the task of hoeing the rows with no peanuts and I was much happier.

I began to notice after observing the woman the tricks she used to spot peanuts. Seeds were planted at approximately equal distances from each other so that the position of one could be used to determine the approximate distance of another when moving up a row. Next, after she had estimated where the next plant would be she pulled up the biggest weeds first until she spotted the peanut plant. Even then many of the plants were still tiny, and her long experience growing peanuts made them stand out much more to her. I had never even seen a peanut plant before I came to Togo.

The sun climbed high in the sky. I was sweating on the short walk to get to the champ, and by 10 in the morning the peanuts were hard to spot through the dried sweat fogging my glasses. Despite my putting many peanuts to rest, my friend showed up afterward at my door with bowls of corn paste and sauce which I ate under the mango tree while she joked with my host mother.

Champ 2:

Yawovi is one of my best friends in village. I have worked alongside him in the champ through all parts of the growing season: scraping off the field before the rains come, poking holes and planting seeds in them, weeding around plants with a hoe as they grow bigger, harvesting fruit, and finally conserving or selling them. Yawovi's champ is further off the paved road than the previous champ, a five minute walk along a path away from village. The path winds between many other fields that all seem the same. However, on closer look it is obvious that every farmer is in a different stage of work. We are now in the month of May and while some fields have corn almost ready to harvest in others it is just sprouting. Some farmers have planted different combinations of corn, cassava, and / or peanuts in the field. Some fields contain only rows of crops, while others are punctuated by palm and coconut trees.

Yawovi has an incurable wound of gout on his foot which makes the champ work tough. Like other men, he usually has a few shots of sodabi, the local palm liquor, to get him fired up before we go out to work in the field. The land he works lies next to a giant baobab tree. He has his own champ, but the land he works is rented. Renting land is a normal practice throughout my village. While systems of land tenure with champs being passed down through generations do exist, family land has been divided up so many times between many sons and daughters that they can not grow enough to support themselves and their growing numbers of kids. This means that the poorest farmers grow crops on rented land. Profits for subsistence farmers are tiny, and paying rent puts more of a burden on villagers like my friend Yawovi.

In addition, renting land also takes away any individual incentive to improve soil quality. Agroforestry, cover cropping, and other field management techniques take more than a season to yield benefits, so if a person is only renting a lot for this year they want to get as much out of it as possible before paying up. Luckily, there is a technique that makes crops shoot up magically toward the sky and bear bigger fruit: chemical fertilizer. To apply chemical fertilizer, farmers poke a small hole next to the base of the plant, pour in a capful of fertilizer, and close it up. Corn right now is huge in fields where the farmers were able to afford and apply 'l'engrais chimique,' but in the other fields the corn looks wilted, waiting for its lifeline. But chemical fertilizer degrades the soil. Cultivating a champ year after year saps nutrients out of the soil so that it eventually becomes impossible to grow anything without the fertilizer.

After working and sweating with Yawovi, I try to imagine the time of his great grand parents. He has told me that there was a time when crops planted in the soil would produce decent harvests without any other assistance than the constant work of the farmer. When farmers had enough land that they could leave part of it fallow. But with the exploding population and the increased pressure to produce food that time is far passed.

Champ 3:

On a Saturday a couple weeks ago I biked the 12 kilometers out to another friend's champ to work. His champ, also rented, is out towards a village northeast of mine called Atitogon. As I pedaled behind his oldest son in the cool early morning, the path got rougher and bumpier and the weeds crept closer to the bike tires. We arrived, set our bikes under a mango tree, and I watched as he threw up rocks into the tree to make riper mangoes rain down. When his father arrived we walked over to the rows and got to working.

In Champ 1, I could hear music blaring out from shop speakers as I tried to make peace with the peanuts. Out in a champ this far in the brush, the only sound was the wind in my ears. We worked until noon without hardly stopping. I felt like a clown trying to scrape the weeds around the barely discernible corn plants on the ground, many of which had not yet even sprouted. After a couple hours my back was burning and I had likely made a massacre of more corn plants than paying me for the rows I had done would ever be worth.

I finally arched my back and looked up to see that my friend's son had made it through two rows to my one. He made weeding look like an art, smoothly guiding the hoe around even the seeds that had not sprouted yet and shifting the cassava branches between the rows from side to side. Looking at him, I saw that he would alternately put his elbow on his knee to release the strain on his back. Positioned thus he would reach across the other side of the row with the hoe and effectively extend his reach to scrape more area. Years of practice had also given him the feel to scrape only the top of the soil to avoid uprooting the deeper planted corn seeds and conserve energy. On top of this, he was ripped and strong like all the other teenagers in the area.



In this last champ, the land is still fertile enough and far away from extensive human disturbance to produce with out fertilizer. But my friend is still going to put some in the soil this year to make the plants grow even better. He reasons that rain this year has been unpredictable. While farmers can not tell when water will fall from the sky, they can rely on the surety that the white powder mix of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that comes in a giant white sack with a scientific label will make their crops grow better. For the moment.

A Change of Perspective

Imagine that you are the first Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) to arrive in a rural community in West Africa 50 years ago. The village where you are posted has never experienced any outside efforts at development work. During your first few months you conduct an assessment to help the community identify felt needs. You are then ready to help them conduct their first project to address the most important need identified. What guidelines would you use to help the community design this first development project?

This is a version of the question I posed to volunteers to begin my presentation at the recent All Volunteer Conference (AllVol) in Senegal. During my past two years of service, I have turned over and over again in my mind the Peace Corps' definition of development as 'a process, not a project' and the role of the volunteer 'to help people help themselves.' How might I help design projects to better help community members create a process for development? How might I better help them to help themselves?

After the past 50 years of outside efforts at development work, a general perception of development as a project, not a process, is present among community members in my village. This perception of development as a project, something 'given to' or 'done for' community members, has been a major obstacle for me in my efforts to help community members help themselves. My primary goal during my third year of service is to explore possibilities for changing this perception.

However, the way I have been exploring these possibilities has not been productive. I have spent a long time thinking, reading, and writing about development in order to create guidelines which I feel should be used to help communities design projects and then communicated these guidelines to the rest of the Peace Corps community. But the dialogue I hoped to spark and the changes I hoped would result never came. Why? The answer might be best portrayed through the evolution of the recent presentation I made at AllVol.

Making the presentation at AllVol

I come from a scientific background through which I learned to make an argument and back it up with evidence and examples. A year into my service, I wrote an article for an in-country PCV publication titled 'Making Projects that are Sustainable and Reach the Poor.' In the article, I stated the guidelines I feel should be used in designing development projects, presented supporting evidence, and cited examples from how I was applying them to Moringa promotion in my village (please refer to previous blog posts or look online for more information on Moringa). The first version of the presentation I created for AllVol followed this same pattern of telling my guidelines, proving them, and citing examples.

I was given the opportunity to practice the presentation with PC Togo staff before leaving for Senegal, and it was apparent from the start that my presentation did not have its intended effect. Excited to finally be speaking in front of a group after practicing with the powerpoint presentation on my laptop, I found the faces of audience members as blank and unresponsive as my computer screen. Rather than create dialogue about how we might better encourage the perception of development as a process, not a product, and better help people to help themselves, my presentation left the audience unresponsive and distant. I began to realize with the feedback from staff that the topic is better approached through discussion rather than presentation. Instead of telling my guidelines, it would be better to help others develop their own and discuss them together.

I went back to the drawing board before flying to Senegal to make the presentation more engaging. Instead of telling the audience my guidelines, I would ask them to make their own list and compare with a partner. I would then help audience members create a list as a group and facilitate a discussion of which guidelines we do well and which we might improve. At the end, I would make connections between the guidelines on the group list and my work promoting Moringa in village. The presentation turned into a discussion where I spoke less than the PCVs who attended.

I presented 3 times at AllVol. During each presentation, the audience came up with a different list and had different views of what we do well / what we might improve. It was interesting to note that there were several guidelines that appeared on each group's list:

• Before beginning a project, PCVs should help community members discover and assess the needs which they feel are most important (aka 'felt needs').
• PCVs should understand the culture and conduct projects in a culturally-appropriate manner.
• Projects should use local, pre-existing resources and structures in the community.
• PCVs should play the role of facilitator or witness, training trainers so that when the PCV leaves the knowledge will continue to spread through the community.

I might draw the following connections between the above guidelines and Moringa promotion in my village:

Community members in my village feel that there is a need to improve health, but there is not a consensus on how to accomplish this. Discovering and assessing the needs for a village of 20,000 people would also be very difficult. I have therefore taken a different approach to addressing this need. The photo above shows a Moringa tree that was planted a decade ago as a branch. This one branch has in time produced many branches. My hope is that Moringa can be promoted in a similar way: villagers will begin to consume Moringa leaf powder, realize the health benefits, and then their neighbors will notice these benefits and also begin using Moringa. While only a few people may plant Moringa and consume Moringa powder at first, with time many more might pick it up. Village saving and loan groups and pig raising are two development projects that I have seen spread across my community in this way.

Moringa branches integrated into a live fence. Live fencing is an already existing cultural practice in my community – villagers build live fences for privacy, shade, and animal pens. Planting Moringa branches is also preferable to planting seedlings because there are roving goats which will eat the seedlings close to the ground, whereas the animals are unable to eat the leaves of planted branches which sprout higher up. An enclosure must be built to protect seedlings, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Children like to amuse themselves with branches planted in the open by rocking them back and forth. This is very fun but kills the tree, and planting the branches in a fence resolves this issue.

Moringa leaves being dried on a mesh, called an 'agbadze,' used to break clumps of ground up cassava into powder to transform into cassava flour. Moringa leaves must be dried in the shade in order to conserve vitamins which would be killed by sunlight. Villagers often try to dry them on the floor in a room of their house. However, due to a lack of air movement inside the room the leaves take a long time to dry and they require frequent turning to prevent molding. The poorest villagers also only have two rooms in their houses, and drying Moringa leaves in one room takes up valuable space. The 'agbadze' is a local, pre-existing resource which helps to resolve these issues. Leaves can be placed on the mesh, covered with another mesh, and put in the shade under a tree or straw payote where there is lots of air movement so that the leaves dry faster.

A woman who sells sniffing tobacco sitting next to Moringa leaf powder she made. The process for making sniffing tobacco is very similar to making Moringa powder – dry leaves, grind them into a powder, and then filter the powder through a sieve to make it fine. By focusing on teaching women who make snuff tobacco to make Moringa powder, a new technology can be fit into a pre-existing aspect of the local culture.

A fat baby, fat because her mother eats lots of Moringa leaf sauce and powder. Other villagers have begun to notice this and asked how the baby got this fat. In this way the baby's mother has become a trainer, explaining the benefits of Moringa to other villagers.

The discussion that produced the above guidelines did not follow the Socratic Method. It is not possible to ask questions to guide audience members to an answer because in creating guidelines for development there is no answer – only better ways of doing things. Creating guidelines and proving their importance will not result in dialogue on or changes in response to the perception of development as a project, but consideration and discussion of the development process might.

I learned much more from this discussion than I would have if I had stuck with the first version of the presentation. First, PCVs must have time to settle into their village, integrate into the local culture, get used to the food, learn the language, perform a needs assessment, and do a hundred other things before they are ready to even begin that first project. Criticism of a specific project makes PCVs unresponsive, distant, and defensive because they have spent all this time on these initial tasks in preparation to conduct the project. Asking them to further consider the values of the Peace Corps in the context of their work might be much more productive than stating my guidelines and showing how they might be applied to their situation.

Next, outside development efforts often have goals other than 'helping people to help themselves.' Diplomacy, for example, is often a priority for projects begun through U.S., European, or East Asian development organizations in West Africa. Development projects can improve relations between countries with potential benefits for other sectors such as trade. Volunteers also have goals other than teaching a community the development process. Many hope to gain experience with project planning, creating and managing a budget, and monitoring and evaluation, skills needed to conduct a funded development project which will be useful in life following Peace Corps.

Lastly, I came to realize that while the guidelines individual PCVs might use in designing development projects are different, our intentions are the same: to help people. The difference is the process we would go through to accomplish this. Giving things to or doing things for a community through development projects is seen as necessary by some PCVs if we are to improve the lives of villagers. And no matter how much I have worked to create guidelines for development projects, this other viewpoint has equal importance.

PCVs in the audience during a presentation

Now imagine that you are a PCV arriving in that same rural community 50 years in the future. The community now has another half century of experience with development projects. Do the villagers perceive development as a project or a process? Are they looking to have things 'given to' them or 'done for' them, or are they eager to see how you can help them help themselves? Or is it somewhere in between?

The Long Run - Staying a Third Year

A child’s health card

 

Many Fridays I go help fill out health cards at the local hospital for children brought by their mothers to get weighed and vaccinated. The inside panel of these cards has a graph for tracking the weight of a child to make sure they are growing properly. Under the graph are pictures depicting the child’s state of growth: during the first year a child begins to sit up and crawl, at 2 years the child is walking, and at 3 they are talking.

 

My baby sister trying to use the grinding block

Here she is trying to wash laundry

By the time I finish my time in Togo the children who were born when I arrived will be speaking Ewe, probably better than me. I have chosen to stay on for a third year as a volunteer in this country. While there are many personal and professional reasons for this decision, the main reason is that the work I am doing and the people I am working with make me happy.

An empty church in Bologna

A bustling piazza in Milan

My last year of university I travelled throughout Italy and Europe – Liguria, Germany, Florence, Bressanone, Sicily, Barcelona and the list goes on. A friend came to visit me for a last final journey across the continent. We spent a week in Paris then took a train to Amsterdam. During the trip he noted how important it was for me to see the sights – cathedrals, museums, cafes. For him it was the relationships that were most important – who we met and the experiences we shared together. Now I have come around to his point of view to value people over places. Here in Anfoin I have found happiness in the villagers I live with and in the many moment we have passed and will pass together.


I have changed a lot since I came over:

0 months - At a medical session my first day in Togo. I spent the first 3-4 months getting used to the food and battling a wide array of stomach problems

4 months - My first time in Atakpame on a hill overlooking the city. The metal roofs are all rusted and from a distance the place could be a town nestled in the Appenine mountains. I am wearing my favorite pants made from pagne (African fabric) which have since died from being ripped and sewn up too many times.

7 months - Hanging out with elephants at Mole National Park during a trip through northern Ghana

 8 months - Under a waterfall next to the caves in Nano near Dapaong in Togo’s Savannah Region

9 months - Coming back from a Moringa training

13 months – Working as a volunteer trainer

15 months – Hanging out with a friend in village

18 months – Out on Lake Zowla with fishermen from the nearby village of Boko

21 months – At the recent swearing-in ceremony for the 2^nd group of new volunteers I’ve seen come in.

In photos, people often notice how over time my hair has become longer and more disorderly. I recently cut it, much to the relief of everyone who works with me in a professional capacity. My body has also changed since I arrived – I’m about 10 pounds lighter, I have a few more scars (lesson learned – do not slide tackle playing soccer on a rocky field), and wearing flip flops every day in the sun has given me enticing tan lines on my feet. I also like to think I’ve changed inside – become more patient, developed the ability to face difficult situations with a positive attitude, etc. But these changes have been so gradual and the times have changed the places and people around me too, so it’s hard to say.

The spot I reserve on my shelf for things that make me happy.

At times a year feels like an eternity, at others it feels like a drop in the bucket that is the long run of my life. The year I have ahead of me at times feels like a hallway of opportunity. Other times I see it as I saw the first two years while I was reading by candlelight in a house devoid of furniture those first few months in village – a looming black cloud. Visions of the ‘accomplishments’ I’ve had a part in making over the past two years seem to be offering themselves up more and more often for nostalgic contemplation:

The nearby town of Ganabe when I visited in October 2010. The village had a Peace Corps volunteer who left 6 months before I arrived in Anfoin. A flood had destroyed all the mud structures on lower ground when I visited my first week au village.

Ganabe at the end of my first dry season after all the water dried up. A few months ago the previous volunteer came back to visit and all that was left standing of his old house was the latrine.

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Standing in my garden a month after arriving in Anfoin. I did the double-dig and made a real attempt to water my pitiful plants through the dry season before someone stole my tomatoes. Thankfully the basil grew like mad and I figured out how to best do a garden – grow veggies that other people won’t recognize. Finally I just did a tree nursery for a cooperative I was working with of which most of the trees got left in place. One of them has grown to as big around as my head and has begun giving seeds.

Members of the same cooperative staring on confusedly as I explain the process for making compost. The farmers in my community already recycle every scrap of organic material they have, and in my eager Togo budding volunteer youthfulness I had not yet realized that. I might have done better if I had instead explained the difference between inorganic material like plastic bags and organic stuff like a banana peel. Here people just throw it all into the field.

Two months later, teaching the same cooperative how to make an improved cook stove. In my opinion, villagers in Anfoin wouldn’t use improved cook stoves because (1) they take up more space than other cookstoves, (2) the family uses the light given off by the stove to do other work, and (3) significant air movement is necessary to get oxygen to the fire, and if that doesn’t happen the stove doesn’t cook fast enough. A chicken later laid eggs in the stove pictured, and as of yet it’s offspring are doing swell.

My friend Ezekiel and I after I organized a garden training involving the same cooperative. The members don’t garden because the water level in the well is 20 meters below the surface. Pulling water up that well then dragging it over to the garden is hard work.

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Helping some distant neighbors build my friend’s mother a new clay house 2 months into my service.

Helping some closer neighbors build a clay house for a friend a few months ago. I never did get any better at doing it, but my mistakes all made the guys doing real work much happier.

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Kids in the car last year on the way back from Camp Espoir 2011, a week long summer camp for children infected or affected by HIV. I worked as a counselor

Kids and Togolese counselors from my dorm this year. For Camp Espoir 2012 I began work several months beforehand as a regional counselor, and I have the dream of moving Camp Espoir to the Maritime region next year and taking steps to make the camp more sustainable.

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The chief of Ganabe walking through a field planted with agroforestry trees. The volunteer in Ganabe before I arrived worked often in this garden.

The road leading north from my house towards Tabligbo as seen from the top of the village telephone antenna. The landscape in the region changes every year as the population goes up along with the area of land under cultivation.

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Planting a Moringa tree after doing a training on Moringa for a children’s club at an AIDS NGO last year.

Cutting the same Moringa tree to harvest the leaves during a Moringa training for a group of adults at the NGO this year.

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Participants from a rural community Moringa training I did with a Community Health Agent my first year of service. They are proudly demonstrating the tree nurseries done with the 10 seeds I gave each person.

The same villagers carrying branches after cutting the Moringa trees for the second time back in February.

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With the two professors at the local high school I worked with to start a Healthy Life Skills club. This is at the beginning of the school year.

Together with all the students who participated in the club during the last week of school. We will be continuing the club this upcoming school year.

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The remnants of traditional enclosures for agoutis that my homologue / host  father used to use.

The walls of the enclosures scattered to make the foundation for a future terrace.

After we finished the foundation to build modern enclosures for the agoutis. My homologue contributed the land and surrounding wall to the community for the project.

The completed enclosures. My official counterpart contributed the land and surrounding wall for the project.

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A participant of our first training on how to raise agoutis in a photo taken right after we sent in the application. This middle school student began building his enclosures immediately when he found out about the project. Unfortunately it was another year before we received approval and were actually ready to begin the trainings / animal bank.

The same kid standing last month standing next to his completed enclosures. He has now completed the training and the other requirements, and I predict that within the week he will be loaned agoutis through our animal bank. Go him!

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The people I work with have also changed and grown since the start of my service. Take my friend Monsieur Francis:

This is Francis when I first met him. He is a wood carver in the nearby village of Adokowoe whose principal source of income is making custom fettish statues. An accident in Lagos took away the use of his left arm, but he still seems to get twice as much accomplished as a lot of other villagers.

Francis working with his daughter to make Moringa leaf powder. At the start of this year he worked with me to do a Moringa training split into several meetings for the women in his rural community. I helped him last month to find Moringa cuttings which he planted all around a new payote he built, and he used leaves from the cut branches to make powder which his daughter sold out.

Francis working with another participant during the ‘pratique’ portion of the first agouti training, of which he is also a participant. He has almost completed enclosures and will be receiving agoutis soon.

By throwing himself into my two primary projects in village, moringa and agoutis, Francis has shown his motivation and determination to improve the quality of life for him and his family. Every time I go to his house, he insists on giving me oranges, coconuts, etc. Living on a shoe string is not easy, and adopting this attitude at the same time is awesome.

Hanging out with friends at a park in Bologna.

So there is this new sea change in my conscious away from a concentration on places and towards a focus on people. There are new relationships I’ve built along with knowledge and beliefs. And there is above all the ‘experience,’ this day-to-day living and interaction that has caused the above.

Two of my best friends in Togo, also volunteers, in one of their houses soon after we first arrived at post. My friend’s house, like mine, was almost devoid of furniture and anything to make it feel like a home. These two friends have since finished their service and returned to the U.S., while I rest here.

This next year for me will mean more sweaty trips up and down the hill leading into village. It will mean eating more corn paste with slimy ademe fish sauce. It will mean being laughed at in the face for the millionth time after trying to greet someone in local language. It will mean living through another dry and another rainy season, dealing with the heat and the harmattan and the monsoon rains. It will mean being shoved into more crammed bush taxis crashing along bumpy roads. It will mean more days full of free time that I need to figure out how to fill with work.

The desk where I spend most of the evening working.

But it will also mean seeing Francis finish his enclosures and start raising his own agoutis. It will mean seeing the Moringa trees get bigger and the villagers harvest more and more leaves. It will mean going more places, building more houses, working more in the field, going to more funerals / parties, and more exciting bike rides.

The view out my window at my host family’s house during pre-service training.

The view out my back door in Anfoin. You can see the sky through the filament and metal grillage and the palm thatching.

I still go to work at the local hospital most Fridays – filling out health cards, saluering all the new mothers in local language, saying ‘sronyo ofoa?’ (my wife, how are you?) to baby girls while the women laugh and try to seem interested when I talk about Moringa. Their babies are getting older, and so am I.

The view off my terrace I get to look at for another year. One of the great things about Africa – the sunset is always beautiful.