Camp ESPOIR

After a couple weeks of struggling to teach english at the lycee, I decided that working with children during my service was not for me. That was until last week, when I went to Camp ESPOIR and had one of the best times of my life singing, dancing, and playing with a bunch of kiddos. Espoir in French means 'hope', and the goal of the camp was to give kids living with or affected by AIDS an awesome week to jump, run around, and basically have a really good time. And maybe learn something...

The kids from my building, Les Montagnes!!!

Camp ESPOIR is a collaboration between Peace Corps Volunteers and Togolese NGOs. The week's activities include a bonfire (strange when people here cook with fires, but hey its fun), carnival (simple low tech games with prizes), info sessions (sex ed, self confidence, activity generating activities, stuff like that), and more. It takes place at our training center where kids are grouped by age and put into different buildings themed with different environments (Arctic, Caves, Praries). I went with the younger boys, ages 12-13, and we were the mountains. In French 'LES MONTAGNES'. The entire week wherever we paraded to on the grounds I would constantly cry 'les montagnes!' and all the kiddos would yell 'OHHHHHH.'

Firing up some popcorn.

Eating said popcorn.

We also made some caramel popcorn after talking about feasibility studies and Income Generating Activities, accompanied by a camp 'marche' market where the kids packaged and sold what they had made, in our case popcorn. The 2 hour marche was full of kids screaming and chanting their product and creatively parading it around on their heads to sell to others. Many sellers in West Africa carry their product, whether it be soja or soap or shoes, around on their heads while screaming the name, so this was pretty typical.

 I presented a session on children's rights (droits de l'enfant). Some of the sessions were dull and I could see the kids looking around, so I tried to make mine as exciting as possible by having sketches where every camper was involved, using very few words and posters, and putting each right (education, vie, alimentation) into song form so the kids would remember them. I discovered that I am very good at being enthusiastic but very bad at generating discussion, so hopefully that will improve next year.

My kiddos trying to lift me to the sky!

The entire week was a truly amazing experience. I got to know the 8 boys in my dorm so well. We would walk to dinner or to the different activities all holding hands and singing, and they always sat around me at all the meetings. I didn't know the exact story of the lives of each kiddo outside of camp, but I knew that this might be the best week of their lives, so I did my best to make that happen.

Some campers on the ride back to Aneho.

The ride back was sad and fun at the same time. Kids are such great teachers, and heading back from Lome to Aneho I was in a taxi with a group of girls and a Togolese staff. The girls laughed and taught be songs in Ewe and I taught them Italian. I found out that they had learned Italian at camp the year before. It was so awesome seeing these kids smiling and having a good time! It's experiences like this that just make me love my service and make me feel like I'm doing something useful to help the world. It reminds me of that age old saying, 'People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.'

On getting older…

Time moves differently in my village. There are still seconds, minutes, and hours, but along with the expected changes in climate, culture, and living conditions I have noticed that the days have begun to disappear. I’ll wake up to my homologue’s wife singing while she prepares fried bon bons over the wood fire in the early morning, and when I’ve turned around night has fallen and my eyes are already closing in front of a book in the flickering fluorescent light. What happened in between opening and shutting my eyes seems to swirl up and disappear like dust on a dry dirt road.
We, the volunteers of Peace Corps Togo, are getting ready to welcome some bright new faces to our midst. While I was initially isolated in my village tucked into the southeast corner of the country, I will be getting two new neighbors, one within biking distance in a nearby village and another right on the coast in a beach town, strategically positioned so that I can easily stop by and grab a beer beside the lapping waves on future trips to Lome. Three weeks ago the other Maritime volunteers and I welcomed the newbies into our midst in proper form: by killing and roasting 3 chickens, teaching them to use a coupe coupe, and introducing them to the fabulous local beverage sodabi at the end of their post visit week. Today these current trainees will become true volunteers, a process I went through 8 months ago.

The bright shining faces of my new neighboring volunteers

 having lunch chez  moi

My new neighbors are going to be working with community health and small enterprise development. I’m hoping that our respective talent sets can merge in order to teach the importance of Moringa to the whole of our villages. A couple days ago I did a training in the market so the women who sell me tomatoes, onions, and fish could learn the health benefits of this tree for them and their children, and I was happy to have a woman who owns a store in town partner up with me to teach them in local language. She had been at the training I did at the Catholic Church, and I let her take the pedestal and do all the talking while I just waved moringa branches around. Watching her give the down low instead of me made me feel like I was doing something right going about teaching this. If I can teach about Moringa its no big deal, but if I can teach others to teach others and keep that process going I just might change the minds of everyone in my village. We shall see. I feel at the same time that I have been doing this moringa project for forever, but at the same time progress is made with every passing day.

Several companies have been moving into my village to encourage stores to sell their products and post their names all over the place. The best example is MOOV, a west African cell phone company. They have hired a guy dressed all in MOOV brand gear who drives around on a very nice MOOV branded moto to get people to sell credit and sell phones for the company. Seems like his whole being, existence, and identity at the moment lies with their products. When I arrived, there were hardly any posters outside stores advertising MOOV credit or special offers or credit. But now they are everywhere, and people seem to go about with this attitude of this is how it has always been. The same thing is happening with cigarettes: the FINE cigarette brand has begun an extensive promotion campaign, with several employees driving around in a shiny brand new ford pickup with the FINE logo on the side getting everyone from up scale boutique owners to marche mammas to sell death sticks. To go along with this, I have noticed more of my neighbors beginning to light up recently. I’m not so shocked about the health (there seems to be plenty of bugs and diseases in this country more harmful to health than cigarettes), but I am amazed that some Africans would pay out of their poor pockets to buy these things. Every time I go into Lome I pass by an enormous new bank built by the giant EcoBank company, and this along with the appearance of new products gives me strange vibes about development in sub-Saharan Africa. Some people further up the socio economic ladder will be able to buy these products and sport them around village, others at the bottom will only be able to watch on as they walk to and from their fields, witnessing development passing them by.

Chillaxin with nearby French and Togolese volunteers

Along with the arrival of new Peace Corps volunteers, I have friends from both Peace Corps and other European organizations who will be leaving soon. Today I am getting lunch with a German volunteer who arrived the same month I did and is going back to his home country next week. Several French volunteers in a village near Anfoin are getting ready to finish up their work on a community library and head back north (not to Savanes, but to France). Seems like the majority of volunteers are here for shorter term projects while few are willing to spend a ‘long’ two years of their lives working on development on this continent. I’ve noticed that volunteers who are here for shorter spans of time tend to be more positive, more outgoing and spontaneous when hanging out with other Africans, where as I tend to be more patient and more withdrawn as I have the same conversation I’ve had a million times before. Also, other volunteers are not ‘alone’ in their villages: they have other volunteers beside them to share the experience with. But Peace Corps volunteers are often the only foreigners in their communities and it can be difficult to relate.

Speaking of the passage of time, I shaved for the first time in 2 months last night and was amazed at how much my hair had grown without me even registering. At post I have a small mirror that I rarely look into, but even with this small reflection I could tell that my face was starting to get kind of raggedy. The hair on top of my head continues to grow and resembles more and more an out of control brush fire. At the start of my service I decided to shave my head and let my hair grow the whole two years as a symbol of my service, but in the Bogardus family our hair tends to not cooperate and attempts all means possible to take off in random directions, so that may be getting cut soon too. It is long, loooong, longer than I remember it ever being.

I’m looking forward to this month. My schedule is packed with stuff: a camp called ESPOIR for children with aids, a vacation tour to northern Ghana, a Take our Daughters to Work training in Tsevie. Things are picking up and moving along, hopefully for the better. A rolling stone gathers no moss, but my hair is growing all the time.

Moringa: Arbre de Vie

I have two main projects going on in village. The first, creating a training center for raising agoutis, will hopefully be funded in the next few months by a program at the US Embassy and is causing me lots of head ache and frustration. The second project is composed of small trainings on cultivating and using the tree moringa oleifera, whose leaves are packed with vitamins and are in my opinion the cheapest, simplest, easiest solution to problems with malnutrition racking sub-Saharan Africa.

This second project seems to be going much better than the first. To start off with, the only two inputs that are needed are a moringa seeds. I have been doing small trainings in the groups of clay houses between my house and a community partner who already has moringa growing. Whereas with my garden training I asked people to come all the way to my house and failed, I am now going myself into groups of houses and getting a much larger turnout. Going to meetings that have already been set up, whether with groupements or at schools and churches, or stepping outside the door is much easier for villagers than taking their time, leaving their children, and coming all the way across Anfoin to my door.

Each small training has been very successful and rewarding for me. To start them off, I meet with the ‘togbui,’ or leader/head of the group of houses. We decide on a time that would be good for the women and men to talk about moringa, and here I really stress that it is the women who need to participate because it is the women who do the cooking and will be putting the moringa leaves in the sauce. I give him moringa seeds, ten for each woman coming to the training, so he can soak them overnight before the meeting. Also I leave it to the group of houses to find sachets for making a tree nursery.

People happily holding future moringa trees

When the day of the training arrives, I show up on time even though the meeting usually doesn’t start for another half hour. This time is not wasted though because I have time to greet the men and say ‘Okay, I said there needed to be women at this training, so where are they? Go get them.’ Each training is part lecture, talking about the benefits of moringa specifically for children and pregnant women, and part hands-on filling up sachets with dirt and making a small nursery of 10 seedlings to give to each woman present. If possible I ask a woman who has previously attended a training and seems motivated to come and assist me, and I leave it as much up to her as possible to teach the other villagers what moringa can do for their health and then how to plant it.

Who knew the leaves of this one plant were sooo awesome?
 

The benefits of moringa are endless. Different parts of the tree, from the flowers to the roots, help cure a myriad of diseases. The leaves are full of Vitamin A, B, C, and on down the alphabet, as well as calcium, potassium, iron, and even protein like one finds in meat and fish (super expensive for villagers). They can be either put in the sauce fresh or can be dried in the shade and ground into a powder for later use (say towards the end of the dry season when there aren’t many veggies available). People have found that the tree improves vision like carrots, builds strong bones, and leads to the growth of healthy, alert children.

Essentially, a natural resource management volunteer like myself could go on for hours about how awesome this plant is. But all this information does not help villagers and often serves only as a barrier to getting people to use it. Ever go to sleep during a long lecture where the same things seem to get repeated over and over? Happens a lot easier for Africans tired after working in the field or watching kids all day. So, it is better to have a simple phrase, like ‘Put moringa leaves in sauce for good health,’ and leave it at that. Or better yet, look the women in the eyes and tell them about how often women who eat moringa throughout their pregnancy had the baby with hardly any problems, recovered faster, and had healthier babies because there was moringa in the breast milk. Their eyes light up and they get interested, especially if it is another woman from the group of huts next to them saying this. I also talk directly to the women and look them in the eyes as much as possible. Gender equity doesn’t mean anything if all you do is say ‘les femmes d’abord’ (the women first) and then give all your attention to the men the whole time.

Filling sachets with dirt

 

So, lecture part finished. Next we move on to filling sachets with dirt, poking holes in the bottom so they don’t flood with water, and putting the seeds in at the depth to the second knuckle of a finger. I do this second because if you try doing this beforehand, everyone just stares at whoever is doing work and no one listens to the person talking about moringa. After each woman has been given 10 sachets with seedlings to take back to her hut, I ask them questions to make them plan for the future. So, what are you going to do to take care of these trees? Where are you going to plant them? How are you going to protect them from the goats? Hopefully they put the trees right next to the kitchen to make it easier to use leaves in the sauce. In asking these questions, the women make their own plan for their tree nurseries, which they are much more likely to carry out than if I told them how to do it.

Each nursery of 10 trees is a small responsibility, but it is still a responsibility. There are only a few trees for every household, and their realizing the benefits of the tree is entirely up to that household. It also helps that her next door neighbors are doing the same thing, and they talk about it. I have given information and helped them start, and continuing is entirely up to them.

Women celebrating their moringa tree seedlings

I have used several guiding principles in promoting moringa in my community. First of all, I have started slow and small. When I first came to Anfoin, there was a surge of interest where everyone wanted to learn everything I had to teach (mostly to make me happy in the hopes that I would bring in money in the future), and then it subsided. If I start slow and small a project is much more likely to last. Another principle I have is to involve community members as much as possible as teachers. When a woman from a nearby house can teach everything about moringa that I can, I leave her the word and let her do it. Lastly, I address a felt need. I ask the villagers how often their kids got sick since the last rainy season, and they say a lot. I say well, if want them to be healthier, do this simple, easy, cheap thing that will help take care of this problem.

The agouti project has gotten me frustrated. We are going to be building more enclosures, buying agoutis, starting to train people how to raise them, etc. But I feel like the vision I have of the project in my mind is very different from the groupement’s. In the application we talked a lot about an agouti bank and helping participants start raising agoutis, but in reality the groupement members seem to think that all the agoutis will belong to them. (sidenote: the project was just too cool to pass up, I would love to go home and say I did nothing for two years except help people raise bush rats, would be awesome)With moringa, I let the community make its own plan, its own vision, and that is why it is working. Funded projects create a lot of headache, and while I love the US Embassy’s project application because it forces applicants to plan their project very well and actually significantly help the community before it will get accepted, the moringa seems like it will have the greatest total impact in the future. I’m hoping I can teach it to enough people and get them started planting it next to their kitchens that it will become the norm, villagers will start telling other villagers about it, and I will leave my quartier in Anfoin a little greener than when I found it.

Rant on Development

Improving agriculture in developing countries is the dream of many college environmental majors. In films and newspapers we get glimpses of villagers struggling to pull a living out of the impoverished land while supporting an ever-growing family. We want very badly to help get the poor out of their situation and see that basic human rights are provided to the point where kids can get a reasonable amount of schooling, gender equity begins to take hold, and people aren’t hungry.


But it’s tough, at least in my village. Many years of well-meaning aid in the past have given peasants an idea that there is no way to improve their lives without money and resources coming in from foreign donors. Hands shoot out when handouts come in that might feed people today but leave them tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday. The same might happen when information is given in a technical training: people are well cared for and well fed during the classes, but after the training they continue supporting the status-quo.

Right now I am reading the book Two Ears of Corn by Robert Bunch, the president of World Neighbors. In this compendium of decades worth of learning experiences in the field of agricultural development, he gives guiding principles for determining what technology should be proposed for a given area, how to go about teaching it, and eventually how to remove the assisting organization from the picture entirely so that the project is carried on my villagers. This book should be essential reading for the aforementioned environmental majors. Paternalism, or providing services or money to people who have the potential to provide it for themselves, is one of the first subjects discussed. When aid organizations do this it gives people the mindset that nothing will improve if money doesn’t majestically fall out of the sky into their hands. The next time they want to push a project forward they will first look for that aid and, if the organization has moved on, simply abandon that course of action.

Africa is scattered with rusting tractors, empty warehouses, and experimental fields overgrown with weeds. These are the physical manifestations of a flawed approach to teaching new agriculture techniques. They are symbols of this giving mentality, this idea that I know what these people need so I will give it to them and then leave with that warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach and not look back while the equipment breaks down and the farmers I spent time teaching go back to planting only corn and manioc, their soil dying under their feet.

In the States I rarely got asked for money. Here it happens every day, with kids and adults, who tell me that I have to give them 200 francs to buy beans while the bean lady who I thought was my good friend listens passively to see if I really will give that money out. When it comes to doing financed projects in village, people have the idea that I will do all the application and planning, oversee the project, and then the benefits will come back to them.

I want to give the money. I don’t want people to be hungry like this when I am fed, when I am not doing back breaking work every day. But this is not the way to go. This is not going to help vastly improve the lives of lots of people in the long term. So what will? Agriculture is the central activity of the majority of people in Togo, and real improvements in agriculture take place when farmers teach them to other farmers. And how does one get this process started?

Clearly defining the problem is the first step. The agricultural improvement needs to directly confront felt needs: people need to know that there is a problem and want to carry out a solution aiming to fix it. Also, it is impossible for an organization to come in already knowing what a village needs, do an activity like teach condom use and how to prevent HIV/AIDS, and then expect the people to use that knowledge after the aid moves on. Simply telling villagers to change their habits, like was tried with hand washing in the recent polio vaccination campaign I helped out with, will change nothing. If the problem is poor soil quality and a volunteer charges into a mass of huts telling people that agroforestry is definitely the solution and then leaves before the first growing season is even over, the project will bottom out. Similar attempts by aid organizations often involve a lot of work and actually harm development in a small village: the next time a volunteer attempts to introduce a new agriculture technique the people will have less faith because it didn’t work the first time.

So know the problem, and know the people, before even starting. That takes months. MONTHS. When Roland Bunch talks about agricultural improvement, the programs are on the span of 5-10 years, difficult for me to fathom when I will be a Peace Corps volunteer for 2 years which sometimes feels like a very long time.

The next step is to introduce the correct agricultural technology. This needs to:

• Fit in to what the villagers are doing already: The new technology needs to fit into the agricultural calendar. If it requires that people work a lot when they are already super busy busting their butts in the field, it won’t fly.

• Be simple: if a technology is too complex, it will be impossible for villagers to teach it to other villagers. If it takes too long to teach villagers will lose interest, and if it involves complex materials not already in the community then the project will not be sustainable.

• Farmers must be able to experiment with the technology on a small scale before applying it to their whole field. The farm is their livelihood, and villagers are not able to take chances with a work that their lives and bellies depend on.

• Have early, significant benefits. If there are not results that show up within one season then villagers will lose faith and enthusiasm. They will go back to what they were doing before.

The list goes on. With my recent garden training, I tried to organize for villagers to come and learn many new techniques for planting crops that don’t exist chez moi. I wanted to get people to stop their daily activities, sacrifice their time so I could bombard them with technical information, then leave them to put it into practice. The training took me several months to organize and in hindsight seems like a massive failure. But I learned some of the most important lessons that I wish someone had told me before I started.

First of all, don’t try to introduce a lot of new crops at one time to a community. Work with crops that already exist. Gardens require constant maintenance and do really well in the wet season when local grasses and herbs are already plentiful. Having vegetables right next to the house to put in the sauce and help kids get the vitamins they need makes a lot of sense, but when a woman has to pull water up a long well in the morning and evening to water her garden on top of carrying her kids, making corn paste for dinner, washing clothes… just no. My community didn’t need to be taught how to garden, and I wasted many months figuring that out.

Also, it is much better for volunteers to go to meetings that are already set up than to try and create their own. For my past trainings I have tried to get many people to converge on one place of my deciding when what I really need to do is go towards the people. Talking to people at a groupement meeting, a class at school, or speaking at mass at the church are much more effective and involve much less time than trying to organize a training. Recently I did a training on how to do a feasibility study and make liquid soap with a groupement near the college in Anfoin, and it was more effective than the garden training I spent months prepping for. Also with training, people often have to be fed and lodged, but when one person goes toward a group instead of asking the group to come to the person’s doorstep a training is much more effective.

One central idea of Bunch’s book is that it is much better to teach one thing to many people than a lot of things to one group. When I first got to Anfoin, my groupement wanted me to go through and put all of the techniques I learned during training on the table. So I taught them how to do improved cook stoves, double dig garden beds, and the benefits of agroforestry. At the moment not one of them has put any of this into practice, and if they have it is to keep me happy and not to actually improve their own lives. What I would really like to do with my service is find one technology that my community could really use, teach it to a lot of people, and have it become the HABIT of people to use it. There must be a critical mass where over a certain threshold everyone will begin to put a technology into practice and those who don’t will be considered strange.

The best thing I have found thus far to improve agriculture is a plant called Mucuna. It is a green fertilizer, kind of like a creeping vine, that fixes nitrogen in the soil and crowds out some of the especially annoying weeds. Farmers can plant it towards the end of the wet season when corn is already high enough that the mucuna won’t crawl up it. During the dry season it continues growing for a while and then dies, making weeding the field a lot easier and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. Farmers can see whether it has had an effect or not when they go to plant at the beginning of the next wet season, it is easily planted between growing corn in the middle of a pause in the agricultural cycle, farmers can experiment with it on a small scale, and it is simple and easy to teach to others. This is the best solution I have seen so far to begin addressing the dying soil in my region.

Several other organizations in my village have taught villagers how to correctly use chemical fertilizers. You make a small hole in the ground next to the corn plant, put a small amount of fertilizer in, and cover it up (NOTHING like I envisioned chemical fertilizers being when I first got here). This sounds like a great start to help villagers have faith in a program. I’m hoping I can jump on board and help them with this next step, mucuna, giving a few seeds to a lot of people to put on one portion of their land to see if it continues this process.

I’ve also been investing a lot of time recently helping my homologue get together a project dealing with agoutis (bush rats). Our goal is to create a center to train college students to raise agoutis as an AGR. We will be: (1) Building a lot of new enclosures for the animals, (2) giving trainings on how to raise the animals, (3) creating an animal bank (along with a project for the groupement) to help students begin to raise the animals, and (4) helping them to find a market to sell them when they are ready. At first I was incredibly adverse to financed projects, but this was just too cool to pass up. We are writing the application to send to the American embassy and I have found that, unlike labor in the field, I am actually very good when it comes to writing applications and planning projects. More about this to come.

Before coming to Togo, I thought learning experiences were a one-time deal: something bad happens, I get hurt and learn from it. Now they are drawn out over months and that can be hard to take. But my approach to my service is changing, for the better. Instead of running around on a hamster wheel for this period of my life, I feel like if I put some of these new ideas into practice I just might get somewhere.

The Rains Roll In

(written 4 May 2011)

Since several people have been asking lately, I’m going to start off this blog post with a list of things I would like to get in care packages. Many of these things, which make me ecstatically happy and give a pleasurable reason for my existence, are not available in Togo (except, of course, in the care packages of other volunteers heh heh). Here we go:

-Oreos –Of all sizes and flavors. At the marche in Anfoin I can easily find these Parle-G biscuit cracker cookies that come from China, margarine from Thailand and sugar which when mixed with vanilla make fantastic icing, and make what I like to call ‘en brousse’ oreos. The real thing is better…

- M + Ms – Not to be found even in Lome. Once again all shapes and flavors would be awesome. Recently received some mint m+ms that were exquisite.

- Granola Bars – The kind that aren’t good for you, with chocolate chips and gooey goodness, etc.

- Crystal Light – Those little packets of mix that can make lemonade, orangeade, etc.

- Army rations – These are so delicious! How did I ever think they weren’t that great! I just tear open the packages of food and cute little packets and mix them all together and peacefully consume the goodness.

- Love – Not sure how you can get this into a packet and preserve it very well to ship over cuz it would probably melt, but I’ll ask for some anyway ;)



My life has picked up a little bit since my last blog post. I went to another training in Pagala up in the Centrale region near Atakpame. We talked about how to plan projects and how to make them succeed. I figured out why my garden training didn’t work: in order for a project to fly, the group or community has to do two things:

1) Realize and acknowledge that there is a problem.

2) Have the desire (motivation, enthusiasm, whatever) to solve the problem.

The project is the course of action meant to address that specific problem: malnutrition, soil depletion, bad sanitation practices, lack of income generating activities, no water, etc. I came to Anfoin super gung hoe to do gardens because we spent so much time growing green stuff during training. But I didn’t take the time to realize what the real problems were in my community or help the people spell out the problems and decide on a solution. Heck my arms hurt after hauling one bucket up my looong well, how could I expect people to want to start a garden at their house when they would have to do that time after time to water it?

Needless to say, my garden is beginning to look less pathetic since the rainy season began. I’ve got more cucumber than any person could want for, but there is a tomoto thief who has been stealing my baby grape tomatoes. I don’t really understand because usually when people ask to try a vegetable from my garden I give them some. My friend Ezekiel (my garden is in his compound because in mine there are bush rats running around that would replace the tomoto thief) seems more angry about it than I am. Crop theft is pretty common here: some people will spend the whole rainy season raising a field of yams and then arrive at the end to harvest them and find that someone has come in the night to gank them all.

While the garden training bore resemblance to a broken airplane’s downward spiral, I have a few other projects that are beginning to take flight on wings full of air. The nitrogen-fixing-tree nursery I began back in February is full of young trees that are ready to plant now that the rains have returned. These past couple days I’ve helped my groupement in our communal field planting corn, and when it begins to sprout we are going to plant lots of trees in between the rows of crops. Also, each groupement member is planning on taking trees from the nursery and planting them in their personal fields. Guess I must have done an alright job convincing them that soil degradation is a big problem and agroforestry is the best solution for us.

Another budding project is a training for my community (the Koutigbe quarter of Anfoin) on Moringa. Moringa is a tree whose leaves have vitamins A (good vision), B, and C (dodge sicknesses), calcium (those bones), iron (good for blood), and even protein which people normally get very little of since eggs and meat and fish are so expensive. This is the simplest, easiest, and least expensive way I’ve heard of to help an agricultural community confront problems with malnutrition. I’m working with a really great guy Louis who raises chickens and who already has the tree growing at his place. He’s also already made powder with the leaves and puts it every night in the sauce, so he has experience with the tree which is much more important than anything I could every teach about the tree.

As opposed to the garden training where I did all the planning and preparation alone, now I have a nice and motivated community member working with me on this moringa training. I was planning on scheduling it on a Saturday (like my garden training) but Louis reminded me that Saturday is market day in Anfoin. So we rescheduled to Sunday from 10-12 (after mass at the church) and planned to do the formation in a peyote next to Louis’ house. The way I’m finding participants is also different. There are these clusters of clay huts between where I live and Louis’ house. I’m going to each of these clusters in the evening, trying to arrange to meet with and talk to everyone who lives in the huts, and have them choose one woman (cuz they do the cooking and would be the ones to use the trees) to come to the meeting, learn about Moringa, and take some seeds home to plant them. That way everyone is interested but I’m not just arriving to a group of people I don’t know, talking, and giving them something before disappearing.

(That DOESN’T work by the way. I recently helped with a polio vaccination campaign and walked all over Koutigbe giving the liquid-drop vaccination to kiddos and at the same time tried to help the Community Health worker explain to people that they need to start washing their hands correctly before meals and after they go to the bathroom. Think they’re going to do that after we just talk at them? They need to be guided to realize that diseases are a problem and often come from bad sanitation, they need to want to change their habits so that their children will get sick less and be able to go to school, and then after being demonstrated how to wash their hands, washing their own hands, and then having them get their children in a line and having the parent teach their kiddos to wash their hands and doing it day after day after day… whew, I’ll stop there.)

So one person will represent each group. I couldn’t handle everyone in the community coming, and this way the community is responsible for reminding the participants about the training and then asking them what they learned when they return. At the training I will teach about Moringa, Louis will translate for me into Ewe and also talk about his experience with Moringa, and then we will go to his neighbor’s house and help him to start the tree nursery. While I spent 3 months planning the garden training, I’m only throwing in 2 weeks on this one. And it looks like it might do a lot more because these people are really the poorest of the poor. Each family has basically an army of kids who flock to me like flies when I walk into the middle of their cluster, and lots of them look like they could use moringa powder.

Lastly, I’m gearing to go back to Pagala to help out with a camp this month. It is to teach Togolese students about life skills like AIDS, family planning, much of which I know very little about but will be learning a lot. Pagala is awesome because there is Wagash, or goat cheese, and tons of great big trees that I rarely see in this country.

I’m still here, now poking holes to plant corn instead of digging uselessly in the dirt, which is nice. Finally the rainy season started and has made my job a lot easier. Guess I’ll go plant some trees now.

The Next Big Thing

5 April 2011


I geared up for about 2 months for the garden training I hosted in Anfoin last weekend. In preparation, I created a program with exact times when activities were supposed to start and end, invited community members, groupements, and students to participate, and made arrangements to lodge other Peace Corps volunteers in my family compound.

My program was very nicely laid out and detailed on paper: the training would take place over a weekend while students were on break so they would have time to come. On Friday other volunteers would arrive, we would organize lodging arrangements, and I would cook dinner. Saturday early morning groupement/community members would arrive to practice sustainable agriculture techniques in our model garden and when it got hot the volunteers gave presentations about gardening under our frantically constructed apatam (made from wood beams and palm branches, to create a shady place). In the afternoon, the students would arrive and we would do the same deal.

Apatam built for the training

When I invited people to come, I wrote down information about who they were, what they did, where they lived. Most came from my quarter of Anfoin, which was great because if they wanted help after starting the garden I could go and assist them. I stopped by to talk to them the week before to remind them about the training.

As for lodging arrangements, I thought that my homologue would be cleaning out several rooms in the compound to put volunteers in, find mats/mosquito nets, and clean the rooms very well.

As can be expected, nothing went according to plan, but it was great fun. I had a good time cooking for the 5 volunteers who I hosted in my two tiny concrete rooms and sleeping on mats on my concrete terrace (very glad it didn’t rain). We didn’t really organize presentations, which didn’t really matter since the next day the first participants arrived about two and a half hours after the training ‘began’. Not that I was on time with breakfast either: I began to make honey/brown sugar/cinnamon buttered toast around start time for the training. By this time my house looked like a danger zone: I had filled up water jugs for my guests to sit on since I haven’t yet gotten furniture, we put a lot of random stuff on the floor after finding no space on the countertop, and we spent lots of time huddled in a semi circle around my fan as it slowly rotated and a slight breeze (strength varying with the electrical current) flowed from it.

Volunteers HAPPILY cooking breakfast

I had been planning to work in the garden during the early morning when it was cool and then hang out under the apatam when it got hot. However, we began in the garden around 9:30 when the sun was beginning to really bare down. My friend Ezekiel and one of my neighbors sweated profusely while doing most of the work digging two beds. I did my best to look useful waving a shovel around; the others observed from the shade. After double digging in the hard soil (I thought it would have rained by this time making this part easier, but ironically it rained the day AFTER the training), another volunteer did an excellent job explaining companion planting and bed mapping, and we planted green bean and pepper seeds together. I had asked one of our groupement members to bring baby tomato, gumbo, and pepper plants from his plant nursery beside the river (talked to him 3 times in the month preceding the training) but he alas did not show.

Afterwards we moved to benches under the apatam, but at that point I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be around other people, couldn’t try and stand up and give a presentation, couldn’t keep trying to act like I had a positive attitude about the training when inside I wasn’t feelin it. So I slowly went to my room, slowly pulled some water up the well, filled up a bucket and took a long luxurious bucket shower. I’ve come to realize that when I need time for myself, I just need to go ahead and take it. As a volunteer, if I need to reset or get away from whatever is happening these days I just do it and don’t worry. So I left my homologue to talk about agoutis while I took a half hour to shower off and get my mind back on track. Don’t get me wrong, I can get real enthusiastic about gardening and talk for hours about building a live fence or companion planting, but when I need space, when I feel myself slipping, I’ve learned to just get away and take a break instead of fighting it. So that’s what I did, and when I came back to the training, walked slowly across the mud floored compound strewn with broken concrete blocks, palm fronds, chicken poop, rotting mangos, and water basins, I felt much much better.

The rest of the training went. For lunch I walked the volunteers down to my bean lady; she was thrilled to see so many foreigners coming to lunch. We got some drinks under the mango trees at the Auberge Californie and then walked back in the heat of the day to meet up with another volunteer and take a long repos under the apatam. In the afternoon, the first and only student that came to the training showed up about an hour late, so we all decided to skip the training and go to see our groupement member by the river who has a lot of fish ponds. The one student that did come is an incredibly motivated person in his last year at the lycee, and as I walked with him and the other volunteers into town we talked about plans for starting gardens and building improved cook stoves in the longer ‘summer’ break.

The volunteers were pretty impressed with the fish ponds, and afterwards we walked to the opposite bank of the river where my friend has an auberge and mini-zoo with crocodiles. The place is pretty schwanky, and we took pictures and tried to get the crocodiles to make some motion before motoing back to my place. The night was spent merry making on the terrace accompanied by a dinner of pancakes and carrots with local peanut butter.

Looking back on it, I can’t really say how I thought the garden training would go. I’m just glad it went. This was the first big thing that I have tried to do with my service, and it was a great learning experience. I feel like if I had a budget for the next one, if I was able to rent fancy plastic chairs, make nice invitations and photocopy garden materials, create a nicely laid out notebook to mark down participants in, buy each person a pen and notebook for notes, install a big water tank and pump to easily water the garden, more people would come. But with this training I found out that the most motivated people came, and I made it obvious that if they want to work with me in the future I will be available for them.



In other news, the tree nursery in our groupement garden is growing, and since it rained like crazy the night before last (making a deafening sound, the huge droplets falling on my tiled roof) I believe we will be planting the trees soon in one of our groupement member’s fields. I also have some mahogany plants I’ve been raising and am hoping to have kids at the college plant them in conjunction with a lesson on the importance of trees for the soil.

I’ve begun teaching English at the lycee, and I led my first class yesterday. Only about 50 students showed up because of the rain, but normally I’ll be teaching closer to 70 or 80. For the first lesson I wanted to help the students figure out why they wanted to learn English and how they could better learn the language. For me, when I was studying Italian, it was real important for me to keep in mind that eventually I would be able to read Dante’s Commedia in his own language. Responses from the students were pretty predictable: they wanted to learn English to make more money in the future, to travel to an English-speaking country and find a good job there, to communicate with an international language, etc. But with the activity I tried to help them realize why I would like to teach them English: using their ability to speak and write this language they will be better enabled to help their communities in the future. They will be able to bring resources and work with people in the future that before would not have been possible. I felt like I made a good fight against the dominant escapist mentality, and the class seemed helpful for all involved. I encouraged them for the next time to think of more specific tasks they wanted to use English for in the future like reading a certain book, writing a scientific paper on a certain subject, or talking with a famous person.

Talking in front of so many kids at first was difficult. It was hard for me to get out of bed, my feet felt like lead walking over to the lycee, and I felt real edgy waiting for the class to begin. But next time it will be better. I have to speak very loud to maintain attention and reach all the students, and an hour of that made my voice hoarse. After I teach I feel useful, and when it seems like these days there is no set schedule for anything I do teaching gives me a more solid base to be here. Maybe it will help me to connect more with the lycee students and start more environmental projects there in the future.

Next month I’m going to be helping with a national WHO vaccination campaign against polio for kiddos. Here in village there are many disabled people who get around on hand-powered tricycles. One English professor at the lycee can not get around without crutches. Despite this, I feel like a lot of Togolese seem incredibly fit and healthy. They seem to have either gotten really good at tolerating injuries or have learned to avoid dangerous situations. When I walk through a crowded market place or see my friends doing back breaking work in the field, I am always surprised at their ability to make it through seemingly unscathed.


Just recently got an amazing package full of specialty Italian food from a good friend in the States along with lots of other letters. I read the letters and the food descriptions and looked up the places the pasta, sauces, and biscotti came from on the map. Thank you all for all that. I’ll put up another blog post when another big thing comes along.

Baby Steps

Check out pictures at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2586782&id=2737002&l=0d9a632b48

My baby sister is beginning to learn how to do chores around the house. Taking example from her mother and older sisters, she absentmindedly moves the dust around the courtyard with a straw broom, swishes water around with clothes in a basin without cleaning them, and puts a big pot on the stove with dirt and rocks in it to see if it will transform itself into pate. In doing all this, she is incredibly cute and runs off giggling whenever she sees me looking.

When I got here four months ago, she wasn’t doing any of this. She was hardly able to speak a few words in the local language. Now she can hold a basic conversation and is beginning to take a role in the household. She still has a far way to go and some growing up to do, but don’t we all?

This is the way I feel about my service thus far. At first, I couldn’t do anything. Now I can sort of communicate and move things, mainly myself, around. Other things include dirt and people. A lot of this movement though seems misdirected, like I’m pointing the dirt or the people in the wrong direction. Other times it seems like I’m throwing in the wrong combination of ingredients and expecting something entirely different to come out. For example, this afternoon we had a groupement meeting and I decided with the president of the groupement and another member to put on an improved cook stove demonstration. Some of the women got into it right away when I stepped to the side and told them to mix some mud and straw together, put these rocks there, pile the clay up like this. Some just lounged on the grass, wondering what their crazy new volunteer was doing when just before we had been talking about buying another collective field, much more important.

I am also inspired by the fact that there is actually something green in my garden now. Before it was just brown, a very homogenous and not inspiring color. When people come to look at it and see brown they are like ‘you fail’ and walk away. Now though I have some pretty sweet tomato plants to show them and I can point at the basil and tell them how if it grows with the tomatos they both taste better. Oh, Italy, a little piece of you sticks with me though I move closer to the equator. Not only did the tomato seeds I bought here sprout well, but the ping pong ball tomatos that I brought from my mom’s garden in the US are coming up pretty strong. Hopefully when they start producing veggies I can give seeds to the groupement members to plant in their gardens. That and eat copious quantities of them like popcorn.

I feel like these little tomatoes might also do good in the marche here. When I walk over to step into that throng on Saturday mornings, I am always surprised… to see that everyone sells basically the same stuff. There is always a long line of ladies selling just tomatoes that are all the same, another long line of ladies selling just peppers, a long line of vendors with hand me down clothes that I can’t tell apart. Seems like there is just about as much variety in vendors as there is international diversity in my village… The other day I went to the market with a friend in Tabligbo looking for ingredients to make smoothies (yes, you heard me right, smoothies, he found strawberries in Lome and we chopped in a pineapple and four bananas and two things of sugery fan milk glace, then we blended it in his blender, whaaaa) and there was a lady in the market selling home made ice cream! Only one! And it seemed to me like she was making a killing, selling each cone for about 100 francs (20 cents).

When I go to my market I look for original people to tell the volunteers with Small Enterprise Development about, but they are really hard to find. Luckily, when I least expect it I also just happen upon cool stuff. The other day I went to saluer the owner of an auberge (motel-like lodging) who lives in his establishment next to the river that flows through Anfoin. After talking to him for more than two hours, I was astounded how many projects he had going and how cool they were! For starters, he has three fish ponds where he practices pisciculture. He uses the fish to feed to his crocodiles, which have big teeth and are way awesome to see after looking at goats and chickens for months. He also raises ducks and is planning to add agoutis and rabbits to the list. There is a great view of the river from the patio of his auberge, he has all kinds of cool nitrogen fixing trees growing, and he has begun a huge garden where he is growing watermelons (which I have yet to see elsewhere in Togo) and eggplants. We had a fantastic conversation over a beer, and I explained companion planting to him and all my ideas for setting up our model garden and model field. If I was coming to Togo, this is exactly where I would want to stay and what I would want to see.
He also offered to let me stay for free whenever I like, so if I ever need a break from my screaming sisters for the evening (all as cute as they are painstakingly annoying), I can jet down there and we can hang out. He has this cool idea to grow veggies in the river on a floating platform made of bamboo. He can wedge baskets full of sand and soil into the float with the bottom part in the water, and the soil will suck water up into the basket so that he never has to water the plants. Awesome!!! Wish he already had this thing so I could take a picture.

Watering a garden (I do it every morning and evening) is definitely the most difficult part of keeping one up. It’s great to say I want to do raised beds, garden planting, all that jazz. But when I have to pull the water up a well, put it in buckets, and walk it to my garden, it is nothing like having a hose. In fact, my pectoral muscles have been sore for like the last month trying to get those bad-a tomatoes going. Hopefully when the rainy season starts my garden will take off some more, and it will feel less like I am just moving soil around.

Thanks to all the people who wrote to me, acknowledging my existence even though it seems so faible at the moment. I haven’t been out of village in a while, so tomorrow I’m heading a little north to help a friend start his garden. Maybe I’ll have some knowledge to impart. Maybe not. But good times will be had by all.