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.
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 2nd 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.
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.
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