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.

House Building

House building in village is an art. Each poor villager is an artist, their creativity hidden by an education based on rote memorization and their talent clouded by the social drive towards consensus. When my neighbors come together to build a new house, they are sculptors, engineers, and architects working within the strict limits and with the secret benefits of nature.

Yawovi and friends

A few weeks ago I accepted my friend Monsieur Yawovi’s invitation to help his neighbor build a new house. Waking up before the sun to a cloudy monsoon sky, I made my way over to chez him.

The poorer villagers in Anfoin build their houses and compound walls out of what they call ‘clay.’ However, the material used is not really clay but a natural mixture of sand, clay, and other elements found below the top layer of soil. This mixture becomes almost rock solid when it dries, and walls are built by mixing the clay with water until a certain consistency is achieved and adding to them level by level. While it may seem primitive, well-built walls can withstand the stresses of the rainy and dry seasons for a decade or more in decent condition. Houses are built during the monsoon because the moisture in the air and cloudy conditions help keep the pile of building clay moist and because villagers have more free time while beans are growing (which require relatively little weeding).

Following my arrival chez Yawovi, we began by throwing palm branches shading a mound of clay to the side and scooping out a portion of the mound over the ground with hoes. Our workspace had been wet previous to my arrival to keep the clay from sticking to the hard-packed earth underneath. After splashing more water onto this clay, I helped to mix the water with the clay using a stair-master dance: pushing one foot into the clay (at an angle to make it go deeper and mix better), then doing the same with the other while pulling the first foot from the muck. Eventually the mixture reached was at the right level of muckiness to use on the house.

Rolling out clay balls…

… to be carried on over

Yawovi’s neighbors gradually came out of their clay houses to help. They usually began by watching me - commenting on my strength (‘Il est fort!’) and the difficulty of the work (‘Le travail, c’est dur!’). Afterwards we moved to the next step – crafting balls of the mixture and carrying them over to the house. Rolling these balls is not an easy task. It requires a feeling for where to apply pressure and how to use one’s bodyweight and the weight of the ball to help with sculpting. The key is a solid center – by driving their fingers straight into the muck, kneading a smaller solid ball, and then smacking more clay on the sides the workers shaped the mud into manageable volleyball-sized hunks. My arms were exhausted after trying to do one, and it fell apart in my hands while the men working beside me churned out ball after ball no problem.

Thus, the majority of my time was spent doing the easier task of carrying balls over to the house to be added to the wall. This did required skill in how to position my hands to maximize the area of my grip and minimize the point pressure exerted on the clay ball. One of my good friends, a fat jolly guy who speaks no French, delighted in making giant balls and then hefting them into my arms to watch me struggle. A mound containing the proper mixture of mud and water had also been placed in the center of each room of the house to roll balls. This allowed more neighbors to work at one time and sped up the building process.

Balancing on the wall

A neighbor throws a clay ball up to Yawovi

Yawovi adds a hunk of clay to the house

After being carried over, balls were hoisted or thrown up to men standing on the walls and added to the new level. I handed up the balls at first, but began to go with the flow and throw them up as I got the hang of things. Watching my friends climb up a sketchy ladder made from tree branches and balance on a wall while hefting heavy balls of mud made me feel sketchy. But they smiled and laughed and sang as the wall slowly grew. This part of the building reminded me of my ceramics class in high school. The men standing on the wall would pat down new clay with the pads of their fingers then run their hands up the side grabbing at irregularities and setting them straight. This is meant to minimize the air bubbles trapped in the clay, which can cause giant cracks when the wall dries in the sun (just as when clay dries in a kiln).

Smoothing off the edges

The new level was finally completed smoothed over using a machete. This smooting made the new level straight and true to guide and support the building of the next one. Unfortunately, the guy assigned this task was the last one to sit down and eat the pate and ademe sauce provided to the workers by the wife of the new home’s family. I preceded this breakfast with several shots of that great source of village spirits we call ‘sodabi’ (distilled palm liquor), and I ate a mountain of pate before laying back on a mat in complete satisfaction.

But the work was not yet over. For each house, four or five layers about half a meter in height are necessary. The first is a wider base, wide because it will support the rest of the layers and because rain splashing down from the roof gradually erodes the clay close to the ground. Each consecutive layer is different – space must be left for doors and windows, and each higher layer requires more hefting to put in place. The house I helped to build had three rooms in a straight line: the first on the left would become a cooking space and a ‘douche’ would be put up where the inhabitants could take that infamous bucket shower, the second would be a front room with doors opening to the front and to the other two rooms, and the last room would become a bedroom. Windows for each room were placed on the side facing away from the main path. The windows and doors were later covered with several branches upon which was stacked more mud to create the frames. After each new level, the mud must be left several days to dry. Wood stakes are shoved into the top and the new level is covered with palm branches to keep rain from washing the work away.

In front of the house

A ceiling and a roof are the final steps. As I walked by the house on a later day, some of my friends were shaping giant logs cut lengthwise from coconut trees into ceiling supports. They showed me how the wood from the base of the tree is stronger than that at the top because it has to support more weight. With that idea in mind, this part of the tree is used to create supports which run lengthwise along a house, while the weaker wood from the top of the coconut tree is used for cross supports resting on the stronger beams. More mud is piled on these supports to create a drop ceiling which helps keep the house cool through the hot season. A frame is then created, often using bamboo, on which the villagers pile straw in an overlapping manner to make rain water slide off the sides. A poorly built roof will last a couple years, but a well-built one can stand for up to five.

Time to eat pate

The changes taking place in house building mirror the changes taking place in Togolese society. As villagers in Anfoin move up in the world, they are beginning to build houses out of cinder block and cover them with metal sheeting. A mason, specialized in the creation of blocks and application of cement, must be hired to do the work that was once taken on by the entire community. This does away with the moments shared while working, the songs sung, and the pate shared by workers afterwards. Cement and metal sheeting come from outside the village (cement from a giant factory in Tabligbo, sheet metal from I don’t know where). And the kicker: these modern houses often lack the cooling effect of the thick clay walls, drop ceiling, and straw roofs found in mud houses, making them unbearable when the November hot season rolls around. This society is marked by a greater push towards individualism and a greater reliance on foreign materials. While much of my efforts are directed at ‘developing’ this country, I am coming to realize how the value of existing local knowledge.



La Peche

Looking at Lake Zowla from afar is like looking into an impressionist landscape – curving canals bordered by purple flowers are separated by islands of tall grasses swaying in the breeze. Fishermen navigate the canals like gondoliers in Venice, standing at the far end of small wooden canoes and deftly guiding them with bamboo poles. Swallows, red bishops, and other birds add flushes of color to a sea of green as they take off from thickets into the salty air blowing from the coast.


When the sky is Carolina blue and the clouds lazily roll their outlines over the open side of the lake, the beauty is breath-taking. The day I met with a group of men from the nearby village of Boko to go fishing, however, was gray, overcast, and chilly: monsoon weather. A young professor from the Anfoin high school, Monsieur Ago, decided to study fishing during the long rainy season vacation asked me to assist him with conducting a survey and gathering information. After reviewing the survey and inputting data, we decided to meet with an unofficial fishing cooperative in Boko to get an on-the-ground perspective.

The end of the canal we followed – the sides are lined with adako while the middle is clogged

with ‘kavi,’ a free-floating plant whose sharp leaves cut skin

Moments after being introduced at that first meeting, the leader of the cooperative solemnly told me about the gravest problem plaguing the local fishermen’s trade – ‘les herbes,’ a word that includes both weeds and grasses. Specifically, he was referring to the plant locals call ‘adako.’ Adako is a tall grass that stretches roots deep into the lakebed and grows even in areas where water is over head high. Adako grows quickly, but its’ inter-locking crescent-shaped stalks are weak, spongy, and full of water. While women in Boko dry these grasses and tie them into mats to sell at the market in Anfoin, they pose some serious problems for fishermen. First off, they take up space that could be occupied by fish and decrease the area of the lake accessible by boat. In terms of lake ecology, these grasses prevent sunlight from reaching the water’s surface. This decreases phytoplankton growth, which in turn harms the zooplankton that the fish depend on for food. In the end, this means a smaller harvest for fishermen.

In the next breath, the coop leader described the history of failed attempts to eradicate ‘les herbes.’ At some point in the past, the World Bank opted to finance the removal of the grasses by having a giant machine come in and uproot them all. I was told that funding to pay for the project was sent first to the head of the district, who proceeded to ‘boof’ (embezzle) the money so that it never took off. In the fading evening light of our first meeting, this man told me that the fishers were tired of foreigners coming in, asking questions, and leaving without anything ever getting done. Was I going to help them or not? Not expecting any of this, having come on an invitation from M. Ago, I felt more pressure and pairs of eyes on me than usual. So I replied that I would listen to what they had to say and think about it.

Boko is about 2 kilometers from Anfoin on the road west towards Vogan. The road plunges downhill through the village and then runs over a bridge and across a marshland before climbing another hill. Fresh water flowing under the bridge feeds Lake Zowla to the south, which is in turn connected to the Lake Togo system and to the ocean. When the co-op members were children, they would take off from this bridge with their fathers to fish on open water. The day I went, the bridge was surrounded by a sea of grass and we had to take motorcycles 4 kilometers further downstream to find a lifting point.

Eventually we plunged out of the brush and into a coco tree bordered clearing near the lake. M. AGO and I stripped down to our skivvies, left our clothes and shoes with a farmer, and followed the young man guiding us towards the water. We walked downhill past an enclosure housing emaciated village cows, then through a field studded with cow pies. I was a bit bothered by this as we waded through muck and then waist-high water further downhill, but my environmental conscience was somewhat appeased afterwards when I learned that animal waste is one of the most important additions to ponds when fish-farming because it encourages phytoplankton growth.

Fishermen steering their pirogues

We slogged across a field of short, thick ‘djesikovi’ grass before we reached a canal that the young man had built for his ‘pirogue.’ (small wooden canoe, called ‘aklo’ in Ewe) There are two different kinds of pirogue used by these fishermen: one made from wooden planks bent to create curved sides and another formed from a carved out tree trunk. Men use long bamboo poles to steer them: they plant the poles at an angle into the water, shove behind them overhand until finally pushing off the end with their palm, and then use the steeper angle and a twisting motion to free the pole from the mud. With the same hand they slide the pole up, swing it over the surface, and repeat. Always pushing off on the same side, they appear to maneuver the boat effortlessly through narrow canals. Often two men can stand in and steer one pirogue, an amazing act of balance and coordination. Shallow depths make it possible to navigate the whole lake with these poles.

M. Ago holds a tofla flower

M. Ago and I struggled into the pirogue at the end of the canal. We pushed out through clusters of beautiful free-floating ‘tofla’ flowers into the canal and headed away from the open lake towards the marshland. Opportunities for fishing vary widely from rainy (March - September) to dry (October – February) season. At the moment, strong monsoon winds create currents over the open section of the lake, both of which make it difficult to balance on a pirogue. Weather is most conducive to fishing in September, when the open lake will be full of fishermen. The lake level begins decreases steadily during the dry season as less freshwater comes flooding in from tributaries. This decreases the surface area of the lake, concentrating the fish into a smaller space and making for an easier catch. Further on in the dry season, the cool harmattan winds blowing south off the Sahara make going out on the lake a chilly experience. Standing up wet in a cool breeze is a sure way to get the ‘palu’ (fever). The connections with Lake Togo also play a part – in the rainy season the abundance of fresh water decreases overall salinity in the lake, but as the floods depart brackish water begins to make its way more often to the lower reaches of the tributaries.

Net strung on a stick

We wound through the channels and joined up with two other pirogues steered by men from the co-op. At a clearing in the grasses we all stopped and I watched as each team laid out their nets. The man in front slowly guided the pirogue while the one in back reeled the net off a stick. There are two words in Ewe for fisherman: ‘todzito’ (‘eto’ = river, ‘dzi’ = on, and ‘-to’ = one who) and ‘topodela’ (‘-la’ = one who and ‘pode’ can be roughly translated as the sound a stick makes when it thwacks the water). With the net in place along a border of the clearing, the men began heartily striking at the surface of the water and then the side of the pirogue to drive the fish out of hiding and towards the net. After doing a thorough job of it, they passed back by to string the net back onto the stick and pick out the fish. They let out a whoop of joy every time they found a big one. Our fishing was further complicated by the clear water, which enabled the fish to see the net and react before it could entrap them, but by the end of the day we had nabbed almost 40 fish!

The vast majority of the fish we caught were tilapia. While my papers on fish raising in rural communities focus completely on tilapia because of their wide dietary preferences, quick growth, and resistance to changing environmental conditions, they are not among the principal fish species listed in my 30-year-old atlas. They escaped into the waterways, likely from flooded fish-culture ponds, and either or were seasonally abundant at the time we fished. Apart from fish, the fishermen also catch and consume turtles (‘eklo’), alligators, alligator eggs, and crabs (‘aglo’), all of which I hope to try before the end of my service.

A fisherman holding a recently caught eklo

Crab caught in a trap made from a tin can, rubber band, and nail

This time of high water is also when fish reproduce. After the females grow and lay thousands of eggs, the males stay behind to guard them until they hatch. Thus, because the females are more mobile and likely to take off out of hiding they dominated our catch.

One of the common quarrels between fishermen is over what size net to use. The two main types contain lines spaced with one- or two-fingered holes. The one-finger size traps juvenile fish while the two-finger allows them to pass through. Leaving the small fish behind is important to maintain stock in the lake, but that might be a difficult choice to make for a poor village fisherman. Fishing is best at the start of the dry season. As the months go on and harmattan rolls in, the catch brought home each day goes down. If the fingerlings are caught there are less fish to grow and reproduce before the next harvest. I don’t think the concepts of mass balance or tragedy of the commons really sunk in with the fishermen, who simply noted that ‘there are thousands of fish!’

Fisherman picking fish from a net

Heading back, a high school student almost capsized his pirogue while enthusiastically leaping into the water to prove to me he could swim. This is one skill, in addition to superb balance and coordination, separating fishermen from all the other Togolese. Farmers rarely go near the river, and swimming is impossible on the beach because of strong currents. After handing my shirt to M. Ago and jumping in myself, I found that after clumsily trying to steer a pirogue and staring jealously as the men skillfully wound in nets this was one thing I could do better than them! They stayed on the surface with awkward doggy-paddle strokes that made them look like dying turtles, more used to swimming with a calabash tucked under them for buoyancy. I thoroughly explained and demonstrated free style and breast stroke before letting my feet sink into the muck and watching them thrash about.

Fisherwoman laying traps

After climbing back into the pirogue and casting the nets one last time, we wound our way back to the canal we started from. We passed a group of fisherwomen on the way back fully immersed in water and wading into the reeds. They wedged traps in between clumps of adako and tofla plants, then waded to the other side of the clearing and made a horrible ruckus to scare fish out of hiding and towards the traps. Each trap is made of wire-mesh shaped into cylinders with an inward facing conical entrance for the fish. I shouted ‘miadogo’ (we shall meet) to the women from the pirogue before we docked the boat and slogged back up to the motorbike.

I took a bucket shower back in the village and spent the rest of the afternoon talking with the fishermen in the shade of a palm-thatch apatam. We ate a delicious ‘cataplasm’ (cassava flour mixed with sauce composed primarily of animal juices) made from the tilapia we caught and took a lengthy siesta before attending another meeting of the co-op that evening.

Tilapia, pre-cataplasm

Tilapia, post-cataplasm

Rejoicing before eating some fresh fish, SO much tastier than dried or smoked fish

These fishermen seem dead set on remedying the invasion of adako by direct means. Along with the ever popular World Bank project, we discussed a few other solutions for destroying the grasses. ICAT, the national institute for agricultural advising, has suggested that the villagers should organize to cut the grasses themselves with machetes. On the level of community-organized grassroots projects I wholly support this, except that doing it all by hand would be a massively difficult task for villagers whose lives are already difficult enough. Another proposal was to kill the grasses with insecticide, with likely negative consequences on the fish and the food chain. I even saw some scorched islands along the canals where villagers had lit fires to try to burn the grasses down.

Looking back on my experience studying river restoration, the root cause of problems at a specific reach in a river is often found further upstream. The past 30 years have seen a large increase in demographic pressure in the Maritime region, which in 1980 was already the most population dense area of Togo. Land use has undergone dramatic changes: along with a greater expanse of land being cultivated, farmers are increasingly using chemical fertilizers to sustain harvests on already degraded land. Run off carries eroded soils and the waste of urban areas (see previous blog post on trash) downhill and down river. My theory is that the explosion of grasses in the last few decades is encouraged by nutrients and pollutants flushed down a degraded water shed, and that physically removing all of the grasses will never permanently solve the problem. Members of the co-op promised that they will be able to perform maintenance after the grasses have been cut back, but if the same water keeps running into the lake I doubt this will be possible. Out on the lake I tried to pull up a few adako plants on my own. The blades came out easily, but the roots broke off in the mud promising to re-sprout later.

Back at my village market, it is easy to tell which fish are local and which are imported. Women selling piles of dried tilapia and small sardines from Lake Zowla sit next to large smoked fish imported from neighboring countries. These large fish are frozen and brought across the border on a semi or on a ship through the port. A woman next to the market thaws and smokes these fish on a giant stove to preserve them, then sells them to other women who sell them from dirty tables and basket tops at the market. In 1978, Togo was already importing twice as much fish as it produced (30,000 tonnes compared with 15,000), and this has likely increased due to advances in technology and transportation. Fish is the major source of protein for people in my village, but the future of these animals and the culture built around harvesting them remains uncertain.

I’ve begun constructing a seasonal calendar with the co-op in Boko to help them get a better idea of when might be the best times to launch campaigns against ‘les herbes.’ Come September, I’m hoping to go out on the open lake and really learn how to steer a pirogue. While I may not hold the key to solving their problem, I learned a lot out on the lake and I’m glad I made the plunge.



Building Walls… and Breaking Them Down

When I do physical labor I become the village television. People just stop whatever they are doing to come over and see the show. Oh look, there’s Kossi working in the field. Let’s stare at him. There he is pulling up water. Let’s watch. Hey, there he is sweating and biking up the hill. How interesting.


Straining yourself and being the object of everyone else’s attention at the same time can be difficult, but eventually you get used to it. Today as it was getting hot I returned to my house, put on some dirty clothes, and went to help a friend build an enclosure for pigs. Villagers in Anfoin raise many types of animals. Most roam free: goats, chickens, dogs. But some, like pigs, they keep in pens. They build these pens the same way they build walls for their houses: mixing red clayish dirt with water and building it into a wall to to dry in the sun. Today we worked on the first part, rounding up a bunch of clay and mixing it with water to prepare to build walls for the pen.

As we used the hoes to scrape clay and a girl carried basin after basin of water over on her head to add to the mixture, passers-by just sat and watched. This job was not easy: the wet earth was heavy to get at with the hoe and to mix it we sloshed our feet up and down like going through a long swamp. My friend described the work as ‘decourageant,’ discouraging. However, I found that I was learning a lot: the consistency of mixture that was good for building a wall, how to get clay ready before the girl came to pour it on, etc.

I also noticed the amazement of some of the villagers that I was actually doing work. Unlike some Peace Corps Volunteers’ villages, most of the Togolese in Anfoin have seen foreigners before. But they have only seen them taking pictures at the market, driving quickly through town in nice white air-conditioned NGO vehicles, or together with other foreigners at a missionary compound. They have not seen them working.

Last weekend, I was helping Francis, a wood carver in a nearby village, build another pig pen but in a different way. Instead of building a clay wall for the enclosure, he was constructing a living fence using bamboo and a local tree called ‘Izopt’ with the occasional Moringa cutting. ‘Izopt’ cuttings will sprout when planted, like Moringa, and can be planted very close together to form a thick fence. When I went to visit Francis last Saturday, he was building this and I had nothing else to do so I helped him. Francis’ left arm got mangled in an accident, so he can only use his right for everything. He decided we were finished for the day, and his son chopped up coconuts for us to eat and I biked home.

I came back the next day to help Francis continue. By this time, my hands (which had gotten soft from preparing presentations for trainings, articles for magazines, etc.) had some nice cuts and blisters going on. We worked for a while and then put down the work to go over and watch an old man cut the throat of a goat and a chicken and douse the local fettish in blood to honor ancestors. Then we worked for a while more, and when it got too hot I took a shower and got ready to bike home.

Before I could take off, Francis invited me to go somewhere. It could have been a funeral or giant gathering or tiny meeting, but I had nothing on the program so I agreed. We biked to a local ‘villageois’ buvette where there was a beer poster hanging outside and a dangling cord bringing electricity to the fridge from the main line. It was here that Francis told me how honored he was that I had returned to help even with all of the cuts on my hands. Francis is dirt poor, but he bought us lunch and tried to buy us both beers (an incredible luxury that the poorest villagers may taste once a year) before I said I would be getting those (I let him get the third one to share).

The walls and fences I help to build are made of clay and branches. But I like to think that at the same time I’m helping my neighbors become more open-minded, breaking down that idea that foreigners just don’t do this kind of thing. I get tired a lot faster than them, but I will still pick up a hoe and give it a shot.

 

My friend Francis chillin' on a mat

How to Inspire Creativity

Teachers and students the first day of the lycée’s Cultural Week

The most important lesson that I have learned during my service is that it is much more difficult to encourage others to have ideas than to have them yourself. Take, for example, my work with students from the local lycée (high school). Towards the end of last year, I helped the philosophy teacher Madame KPOGO begin a Healthy Life Skills Club as part of a region-wide project to prevent teen pregnancy. The club has only met twice, but after getting wind of our existence the organizing committee for Cultural Week decided to give it a spot on the program. The first spot. The afternoon before we were to go on stage, I arrived at the school to find Madame KPOGO a bit flustered and trying to help selected students from the club prepare for the next day.

The students, Madame KPOGO, and I set up in a classroom on the far end of campus where we had a great view of the hordes of students helping set up for Cultural Week to distract us. Gender equity had already been designated as the theme of the presentation, and Madame KPOGO had decided that the students would perform a skit and then she would give a speech about how girls can do the same jobs boys can. With this as a base, I began guiding the students in planning the skit by asking the first and most important question:

‘So, what would you all like to do?’

Florent, the teacher in the skit, addresses the students

Silence. And more silence. The students were seated the same way that they would be while listening to a teacher in the classroom: in hard wooden desks directly facing the blackboard. Most of them already had their notebooks open ready to write. In the Togolese school system, the large class sizes mean that lecture is the chosen teaching method. Group work or participative activities are difficult to manage with so many students. The concrete walls and tin roof of the school building bounce noise back, making it easier for a lot of students to hear one teacher but chaos if all the students are talking at once.

I sighed. ‘Okay, so where might this skit take place?’

After some more silence, Madame KPOGO finally urged the students on:

‘Does it take place at school? At the house? Both?’

To which the students replied: ‘Yes, yes, both!’

I have noticed this same trend with any group I work with: if the participants hear teachers or project leaders propose ideas, they immediately and enthusiastically approve. Hierarchy plays into this, where participants seek to please those ‘above’ them in order to have their continued support. This makes facilitating (encouraging the members of a group to express and discuss their own ideas) much more difficult than leading (expressing ideas and telling the group how they will be carried out), especially coming from a first-world university background where ideas and creativity are encouraged.

A few months after starting my service this past year, I helped a local cooperative with a project to create a training center for raising bush rats. I was very eager to apply my skills and at the same time incredibly bored, a lethal combination. So following a Project Design and Management workshop with my homologue, the president of the cooperative and a long time bush rat raiser, I decided to help redo the application they had submitted to the U.S. Embassy last year for funding. I did not hold back in throwing out ideas for every step of project design: creating a map to help the mason determine the construction materials needed to build enclosures, strongly advising my homologue how he should train people in bush rat raising, giving the idea for an animal bank and how it should be managed, etc. etc. etc.

I didn’t stop to think how I might encourage community partners to take greater control of the project. Now that the project has been approved, I’m trying my best to involve members of the cooperative and the greater community more in the decision-making process long after it has begun.

Back at school, the students had managed to decide that the skit would involve a teacher, mother, and several students. I realized that many seemed to be looking around lazily while we had only a little time to plan, so I ordered them all up on their feet to switch places with me and stand in front where they would be giving the presentation.

‘So, what will these characters DO in the skit?’

The play developed gradually into a five scenes, employing the travail manuel (manual work) required of lycée students to demonstrate the importance of gender equity. During the two hours that we spent planning, one student in particular, Helene, was very vocal and full of ideas. At camp we called this kind of participant a supercroc. They dominate the conversation and make it difficult to encourage other participants to contribute. The situation is delicate: these kids are awesome because of their enthusiasm, but they make it more difficult for the others to get a word in edgewise. While planning the skit, I had to constantly emphasize the need for each student to take part in the sketch. The supercrocs are the project leaders of the future, and when we do our next sketch I hope step aside and allow Helene to take the leading role as director. This would mean the other students would do all the acting, but she would be central role to the planning process.

Helene plays the role of the mother in the skit

The meeting began with me giving questions to a silent crowd and ended with the crowd eagerly discussing and rehearsing the scenes. I could feel my presence begin to diminish throughout the hours we spent together, and it felt good. Often the school system is based on rote memorization: rules of grammar and mathematics, knowledge of facts presented in a book, and copying the teacher’s notes from blackboard to notebook to mind. There are very few situations that allow students to let their creative side come out. By the end I was only intervening occasionally to ask students to SPEAK LOUDER and clearer, point out ways that more hesitant students could participate, and direct actors to act off-dialogue. We felt ready to present the following day.

Memevi, the daughter in the skit, stands up to the teacher

The presentation was amazing. The students were pumped up by crowd support and easily overcame their stage fright to put on an entertaining and informative performance. They forgot some things (such as explaining roles and scene changes to the audience) and added others (hilarious jabs at teachers), but it was a great success. Afterwards, Madame KPOGO gave a fantastic speech about the importance of gender equity for our society and of students taking the lead in changing gender roles of girls and boys in the household. Monsieur DABLA, the second teacher assisting with the Healthy Life Skills Club, guided the Q & A that followed.

Madame KPOGO tells it how it is

Monsieur DABLA takes the stage

In the larger picture of development, I agree with the author Roland Bunch of my favorite book Two Ears of Corn when he notes that “the ‘how it is done’ matters more than the ‘what is accomplished.’” The process by which a project is done is much more important than the end result because if villagers have the capacity to conduct the development process on their own, they will be able to continue in the future when outside assistance stops. They realize the independence, self-respect, and satisfaction of designing a project, managing, and reaping the benefits. However, if development programs focus instead products, such as creating a center for raising bush rats or training a certain number of people, the process of development will leave with the program personnel. The case of a skit at school, while involving only a few boys and girls in a couple of days and no funding, is a microcosm of this larger issue: much more important than the skit was the students, the community, doing it all themselves.



Trash

Community trash pile in Aneho.

As a faithful hippee, I have always tried to avoid using plastic bags at the supermarket. I bring my backpack to carry food, and upon returning to the house I reuse the bags I was given. Since coming to Togo I have accumulated many more plastic bags. Here they are referred to as ‘sachets,’ and they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. When I’m at the market vendors seem to automatically put everything I buy into a sachet before they sell it to me. Along with sachets, a whole heap of trash gets thrown out in the path, road, or field every day. Family and community trash piles continue to grow, causing health and sanitation problems and thwarting efforts at village beautification. The answer seems to be teaching villagers the consequences of littering and using incentives to encourage good behavior, but this may be a while in coming.

Further back in Togo’s history, everything used was biodegradable. Banana peels, palm branches, straw, and calabashes all came from the earth and would return if cast away. Then in the 20th century this changed. Industry began to make goods out of inorganic plastic, metal, and glass, and globalization brought many packaged foreign products in through the port in Lome to be sold in villages. Before throwing trash in a pit or to the side of the road was no problem, but now much of what is thrown out sits there or is ripped by time into smaller and smaller pieces. And it doesn’t go away.

So what do people throw out? Baterries, bottles, broken household goods, metal tomato paste and soft drink cans, and the ever popular sachets. Packaged ice cream made by the company Fanmilk is sold by villagers carting a cooler around on the back of a bike, and the colorful wrapping adds a bit of joy when cast into the eyesore that is a trash heap. Sachets seem to make up the bulk of the problem. They are given out with fruits, vegetables, and anything else bought at the market. Villagers also put beans and rice in black sachets, porridge in smaller, clear sachets, and other foods like a ‘to go’ order. After the food is eaten the sachet is dirty and gets thrown away. Women selling bread, dried banana chips, cooked eggs, and other treats reach in through the windows of bush taxis to sell to travelers, and the plastic sachets the food is wrapped with get cast along the side of the road. Even water, called Pure Water, is sold in sturdy clear sachets that villagers drink by biting a corner and sucking it out.

 The banana pit where my host family throws its trash.

 

Many families have a pit beside the house where they plant banana trees. Into this pit the family throws all the household’s garbage, and while the organic refuse fertilizes the soil and encourage bananas to grow the rest just sits there. Fields used for growing corn and cassava, especially those closer to urban areas, have more trash sitting on the surface or worked into the soil every day. I am not sure what effect this trash has on the bananas, corn, or cassava, or what long-term health difficulties await the Togolese due to ingestion of heavy metals and manufactured chemicals through their food, but I’m guessing not good.

Plastic sachets sold to vendors at the market in Anfoin.

Trash problems are highlighted in areas with high population pressure. Larger villages like Anfoin have a market which once a week is crowded with women selling food and men selling animals, and there are often vast trash piles which line the boundaries. Streams hold a particular place in my heart do to all my years doing field work for river research in North Carolina. I thought I had worked in some pretty gross streams, streams with low water quality or degraded geomorphology due to urbanization of the watershed. Here the urban streams are choked with trash, and I have seen meter-deep gutters in Lome filled to the brim. If I had an instrument to measure water quality, I’m not sure the readings would even be on the scale. There is a detour right after Aneho along the beach road that I take to get to Lome. It follows the beach, and all along the way people have used the shoreline as a dump for garbage. There is one big walled area on which it is written to jeter les ordures ici (throw trash here). It filled up a long time ago.

So what might be the solution to this rubbish problem? Projects have been conducted in the past to create trash collection programs in the larger cities with varying success, and two of the candidates for mayor in Anfoin have discussed creating such a program with me. My opinion is that this will address a cause and not the problem itself. To resolve this issue, we need to look at the source of the problem: the use of sachets. The Togolese need to decrease the amount of trash created before dealing with the trash that is already there. This starts with finding incentives for vendors to not give out sachets and for buyers to not take sachets. Vendors have to pay for sachets they give and surrounding trash can greatly hurt the presentation of whatever they are trying to sell. They might give an incentive for buyers to bring their own sacks, or they might wrap vegetables in giant teak tree leaves as has been done in the past. Some women selling sweet rolls and fried goods on the street give out smaller purchases on brown wrapping paper, and they could set an example for others. Villagers should be taught the difference between inorganic and organic materials and then begin separating them before throwing the organic stuff on their fields. A behavior change project, encouraging this with a few villagers and then following up to make sure the practice is continued, could help with the solution. Since many of the products that come from outside Togo come in packaging, villagers could buy local to avoid adding to the heap.

 Trash blows across a soccer field in Vogan.



In terms of getting rid of existing trash, burning is currently the popular choice. I have often walked through clouds of smoke where people are burning piles of plastic sachets, and this isn’t good for the lungs or for our already stressed atmosphere. One of the candidates for mayor has proposed a business-friendly solution: turn the trash into building blocks. He has read of a company in Nigeria that pays for plastic sachets, grinds them into powder, then mixes them with cement and water to make road bricks. Pure Water sachets are also great for doing tree nurseries (Natural Resource Management woot!). But in the end, much of the trash will probably need to be carted far away, dumped, and buried.

I’m still doing not much but talk about Moringa, but I may help plan and organize projects in the future to begin breaking down this wall of rubbish. By starting at the sources and encouraging behavior change, I have hope that we can fight the trash monster.

Voodoo Part One

Peace Corps volunteers aim to better facilitate development work by integrating into the culture of their host countries. While spending Christmas in the States, I realized that despite being able to answer the many questions my friends and family had for me I still had yet to fully understand one very important part of the local culture: voodoo. This religion influences social interactions and work life, and knowing more about it may lead to understanding why villagers adopt or do not adopt certain behaviors. Also, voodoo is very interesting to me because it is completely different from any other belief system I’ve seen before coming to Togo. So, I’ve began to ask questions.

Tenants to voodoo believe that there exist many other-world beings, among them spirits, ancestors, and gods. Spirits are global and can be found everywhere. There are good spirits, and there are bad spirits. Ancestors are more localized to a village and include great-grand parents who have died but whose spirits continue to exert an influence on daily events. Lastly, there are gods for many natural elements such as water and air as well as for animals like scorpions.

Each villager who practices voodoo has their own personal legba. A legba is a small mud statue with oval mouth and eye holes. Occasionally cowry shells, which were used as currency in Togo in the times before money, are used for the eyes. The statue has a small indentation in the top which is filled with earth. Adherents use this indentation to make offering to their legba, such as sodabi, animal blood, or corn flour mixed with water, which is absorbed into the indentation and strengthens the protective powers of the legba. Chicken and goat blood can be given to the legba, but not pig blood (which is reserved for voodoo sorcerers). These statues are often found in a line outside family houses and compounds, with a larger legba for the father and smaller ones for the mother and each of the children. They always face outward and they stop evil spirits or kill people invaded by them before the spirits can enter the home.

Monsieur Yawovi standing beside the Appelli that guards his house

Compounds and groups of houses are also protected by appelli, which sit within the walls of the compound and face the house. Their structure is similar to the legba, but they are bigger and have an iron ‘pivot’ planted in the ground in front that helps them protect a family. There are at least 8 other types of statues which serve various purposes in my community, and statues probably vary from village to village along with changes in local beliefs.

Various types of fetishes sold at the market in Vogan: skulls of local reptiles and canines, horsehair brooms that are waved about during dances, and the preserved remains of (hopefully not too endangered) birds.

These legba and appelli statues are different from fetishes, which are objects enabling spirits to help the owner of the fetish. Fetishes include a variety of objects, from goat horns and dead birds to objects piled into bottles and snake skins stretched out on boards. Small wooden statues are used to represent the ancestors in ceremonies, and villagers will make offerings to the fetishes and ancestors just as with the legba. Occasionally they may even put a cigarette in the ancestor’s mouth to smoke! The wooden statues are meant to symbolize the continued presence of an ancestor in the world, and women who have lost a child after having twins will have a statue made to replace it and protect the remaining child.

Wood carver in the nearby village of Adokowoe beside ancestor statues

Each cluster of houses has its own shrine where villagers perform ceremonies and hold fetes. The shrines vary widely in structure, but they are usually the size of a small room with a door in the middle of one side. On each side of the door is a cement ledge for seating. There are two rectangular holes on each side of the door. Next to these holes, offerings are hung to please the gods: the bones and meat of animals, crops such as corn, cassava, peanuts, and beans from the recent harvest, etc. The front of shrines is always painted white.

Shrines can be covered by a tree planted in their centers or by metal / palm thatch roofing. Within the interior, there is a second cement ledge holding back a mound of earth. Cola nuts from previous ceremonies cover the ledge, and various iron tools are planted in the ground in front of it. Cola nuts are considered the food of the devil, and villagers eat them throughout the fetes. The devil leaves the tools behind after he visits. I got very confused trying to find out whether the devil was a good or evil deity. I was told that these tools protect a villager and that when a mean person tries to attack them these tools will make the attacker fall to the ground so they can’t get up and the villager can escape. There also exists an overseeing ‘God,’ different from those designated for natural elements and animals, and I’m not sure whether he is considered good or bad either.

A small voodoo shrine next to the local azeto’s house

Villagers who have sickness in the family can come pray to deities at the shrine to make them better. There are also certain days of the week when people are not allowed to enter the shrine. While visiting a friend in a nearby village, he enthusiastically showed me the local shrine and then, eyes downcast, told me to come back the next day because entrance isn’t permitted on Mondays.

Voodoo fetes go all night, driven by the energizing power of cola nuts and sodabi. People dance, sing, and drink, sometimes for days on end. These ceremonies are often held at the end of the harvest in October and November, before the start of the dry season when villagers are most wealthy. At one that I attended last year, half the village gathered under a Neem tree near the center of town. They formed a circle around a group of priestesses dancing in a line around the tree, and men sat grouped on benches to one side fervently playing drums. The priestesses formed a double line, with the oldest coming first and the youngest, the children, in the back. When each pair arrived in front of the drums, they would do our local ‘chicken’ dance and then continue circling around. Each woman was painted with red powder and they had long cowry shell necklaces hanging across their bodies. Every once in a while, these priestesses would walk off followed by other villagers playing instruments to do a tour of the village. This fete went on for three days, nonstop.

Each fete is presided over by an azeto, aze meaning ‘magic’ and to meaning ‘one who.’ He is a sorcerer who has magical powers, among them the power to change people into animals. The azeto also presides over funerals, sells fetishes, and gives horoscope readings. For my next blog post I am going to interview the local voodoo sorcerer to delve deeper into this very important aspect of Ewe culture.