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.

The experience...

I’ve added more pictures to my last album, check them out at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2577099&id=2737002&l=8b65af2465
I’ve just passed the 3 month mark of my Peace Corps service in luxury and style. By luxury I mean I slept on a mattress (not my hard lit picot) for the first time in a month, and by style I mean that I have clothes to wear (fortunately you can still tell that the shirt I’m wearing is supposed to be white, kind of have to squint though). I miss you all and I have been responding nostalgically to your letters, but in reality I feel good.
Up till now life in village has been going pretty ‘doucement.’ I’ve been playing around with the groupement garden and my garden, taking different routes to get to the market so I can meet people, and casually gazing into the distance, uncomprehendingly, while the locals talk the local language, usually 2 or 3 hours a day. The last week however I left Anfoin to go to a village in the Centrale region. This was the first time I have left maritime in my 5 months in Africa, and it was a bit of a shock to see mountains rising in the distance. When I got to Pagala our training center, pretty much like a summer camp, was in the middle of an awesome forest and bordered on two sides by a stream and a river. Forests don’t really exist chez moi in Anfoin, unless you consider a grid of eucalyptus trees a forest.
I spent a week in this forest with the other volunteers of Natural Resource Management. We learned how to build salt licks, make container gardens, easily kill bugs with locally available materials, build basket fences to protect trees, and a million other things. We were also fed very well and, after a couple months eating pate or fufu and cooking for myself all the time, I ate each meal like I would never get an opportunity to eat again. For some reason I had lost a bit of weight: I came in weighing 175 pounds but in Pagala I found that I weighted 160. No idea why I lost the weight because I feel like I eat food like a black hole consumes matter. By the end of this training I was back up to 165, and I’m hoping to continue that trend by getting some ingredients here in Lome to ‘spice’ up my kitchen.
I feel very inspired now to go back to village and get a lot of the cool stuff I learned during training started. For example, I am going to be making container gardens to hang on my terrace when I get back home. To make a container garden, you need a sac, some rocks, a tube thing, and good soil. You scrunch up the sack and put the tube in straight up, then fill the tube with rocks. Pack soil around the sides of the tube and then slide the tube up and repeat the process. By the end you have a sack full of soil with a tunnel of rocks going through the middle. Then you plant plants on the top, poke holes in the side and put plants in the holes, and then hang it up. When you water the sac, the water seeps very easily to all parts of the sac through the rocks and it produces like crazy. I can get all this stuff in village, and it gets rid of the hardest part of gardening here: watering. Soon my terrace will be overflowing with passion fruit, grape tomatoes, and tiny peppers… if all goes well.
There are a million techniques like this that I want to teach to the people in my village. However, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months wondering how to do this, and I feel like I found out from the other volunteers and from the trainers the best way: do strange stuff outside and get people who look on in fascination to talk and ask questions. For example, I want to start a tree nursery when I get back to grow Mahogany, some nitrogen fixing plants, and Moringa (a tree that could potentially solve malnutrition due to the vitamins in its leaves). To do this, I need to take a sac and walk around the community picking up these empty water sachets that are everywhere here. People will stare at me, and when they do that I can go up to them and explain what I’m doing and why. Most people here think that trees provide wood, fruit, and shade. The benefits for them stop there. They haven’t been told the importance of trees in the environment: preventing erosion, encouraging water to soak into the ground, bringing nutrients from deep in the earth to the surface where plants can ‘enjoy’ them, and making people happier.
If I can get myself up to do stuff like this I will have a successful service. If I can get people talking, then get them acting, I will have done my job here.
I also had a lot of fun at training in Pagala, swapping stories with other volunteers, throwing Frisbee, playing basketball and pingpong, and participating in other recreational activities I hadn’t experienced in forever. I met a new species of red ants which thought of my legs as a giant meaty chicken wing, danced in the first rains sweeping the dry season away, and had a long argument with a friend about whether unicorns (my school mascot, superior) or griffons (animals confused about what they should be) are better after some (cold!) beers and sodabi at the local ‘buvette.’ I felt at ease for the first time in a while, not pressed in by the stresses of changing cultures or being stared at all the time.
But tomorrow I’m headed back to village, excited and motivated. I’m going to be starting an environmental and English club at the high school, organizing an event for the beginning of April to teach people in my community about gardening, and planning a trip north in March to see how the different projects change as the environment changes and write an article about it in our newspaper. And I have to keep telling myself this WILL HAPPEN!
I just have to believe in the experience. Then the experience will happen.

Success? What’s that?

Check out pics from my first months at post at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2577099&id=2737002&l=8b65af2465

Gardens are a central part of the Peace Corps experience. When I think of a volunteer in the depths of a foreign country working hard in the process of development, I imagine them with a straw hat on bending down and working in the field, demonstrating sustainable agriculture techniques to the population.

Well, I do have a hat. It isn’t made of straw and it has ‘Friday Harbor’ written on it. The hat is pretty dirty now from getting dropped on the ground or concrete floor too many times, but it does the job. As for the garden, well, let’s just say it’s coming along. After almost three months at post I don’t even have a solid fence yet. I tried starting a nursery for tomatoes, peppers, and basil (oh man I would totally make pesto), but the chickens tended to devastate it every day because there was no fence. I’ve refused to plant anything until the fence for the garden is finished.

Thing is, I could easily go into town and find the materials and finish the fence myself. I could get branches chop them up with a machete, dig post holes, and have it all done in one day. But the garden is not going to be my garden: it is my groupement’s garden. It will be a model garden to demonstrate biointensive sustainable agriculture techniques to the community, and it is a good idea and has been approved by the groupement members (or those that come to the meetings at least). Problem is, if I did everything myself it would not be the groupement’s garden. It would be my garden. Our ultimate goal is for the members of the groupement to have small family gardens at their houses (or huts) in order to improve nutrition and health and save money for the families, which they can use to send their kids to school.

I like to think about what I can do. Here in the dry season, and generally in Africa, people like to think about what they can’t do. The general opinion with my prescence here is: we don’t have the money to do this project, so give us money and we will do it. And I say, no, I’m not giving you money, I already am giving two years of my life, left my home in the United States, and spent a lot of time learning French before coming here to help you.

So what can I do?

I can begin to get seeds. When I eat oranges or peppers these days, I save the seeds and dry them out so I can use them in a nursery in the future. The other day I visited a Catholic infirmary in the nearby town of Afiata. Other than speaking Italian with the nuns there (oh the language of Dante, their words flowed over me like a waterfall, so beautiful) I told them about our garden. Then I helped them in their garden and they gave me a ton of seeds my groupement can use and told me I could have a sac of dirt with ‘enzymes’ which will help naturally fertilize the garden the next time I came to visit.

I can talk to people. The hometown of one of my friends in agriculture is close to Anfoin, so I invited him to come meet with my groupement and give us some advice. Apart from considering that he arrived 3 hours late that Sunday (his family sent his sick sister to a voodoo doctor instead of a real doctor in Aneho, so he had to clear that up), he gave some valuable advice about getting the fence done and preparing the garden for planting. After talking with my friend Ezekiel, I’ve decided to start a garden that will be my own personal garden in his family compound (where all the chickens have been turned into sauce) so that I can test out some of these gardening techniques before trying to teach them to people in our model garden.

Every time a person sees my garden or sees me trying to water the pitiful live fencing that will become a strong fence… in 5 years… they talk to me. We talk about the compost (or rather, the 3 current piles, each an improvement on the last but still lacking in compostable vigor), we talk about the nursery or lack there-of, we curse the chickens and their small but hungry chicks. And we talk about the dry season, the harmattan, how it is especially strong this year, and what the garden might look like a month from now (still the same? More weeds?). These conversations are the real reason I have the garden, not to actually grow anything or make a compost myself, but to have people think or reconsider the way agriculture is done in this region, to consider the importance of having a garden close to the house, for the family.

Several groupement members have already begun gardens at their houses (or huts). Not all of them have a well or steady supply of water, but the ones who do are trying. I feel like as an American, I’m pretty used to getting things done and being proactive. With applications and assignments in college, I never waited till the last minute to get started and couldn’t stop thinking about them till they were done. Learning patience for me is hard, not just with projects but with people and with the new life I lead.

I think about the garden because it is strategically located right outside my family compound, so I see it every time I step outside our sandy courtyard. But there are a ton of other good things that have gone on in the past few months apart from the miniscule progress made with this plot o’ land. For starters, I’ve built a lot of relationships and gotten to know a lot of people. From the Catholique nuns in Afiata to my next door neighbors, from random people in bush taxis to teachers at the local elementary school, I’ve talked with a lot of people. And while I still constantly stick out as a foreigner and white person, I’ve realized I can use that to my advantage to tell people why I’m here and explain what my groupement is doing. Being called names and taunted every time I go the marche still hurts, but I’ve gotten good at ignoring the people I don’t care about, responding in a loud obnoxious voice when people saluer me in loud obnoxious voices, and recognizing who are my friends and being nice to them.

I’ve made a general rule for myself that whenever I take off my moto helmet, whenever I start a new conversation, whenever I meet someone for the first time, I smile. Sometimes it is real hard, and most times the smile is fake, but it makes the situations so much better. If I get angry and show I’m angry, I’ve lost, but if I can be composed instead and smile nicely and nod when people try to ruffle my feathers, life is a lot better.

Every day here I am going to see my garden (now in my mind what my dad would call a ‘learning experience’). Every day I will get called ‘Yovo’ and be taunted for being here and trying to help. But I will also see the smiling, patient faces of my groupement members who try to talk with me in Ewe. I will see my homologue who has made it his goal to make sure I am happy and who wakes up every morning to work as a volunteer teacher in the school he started. I will look at the pictures of my friends and family on my wall and be inspired to keep on keepin’ on.

Home

With the dry seasonal winds of harmattan beginning to flow south over Togo from the Sahara desert, the pictures that I taped to a board above my desk are beginning to dry out and curl back. There are photos of my trip to the island of Stromboli where I saw a volcano shoot fire into the night air, of my kitchen table loaded with empty plates and wine bottles after an epic dinner on my fourth floor apartment in Bologna, of my arms outstretched gliding on a boat under a bridge in Seattle. If I had less time to think, I might not see any meaning in the glimpses into my past losing their grip and floating down to the floor, but as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the first stages of service I have more than enough time to think, and what I think is this: one chapter in my life’s book is folding shut like the photos while another is beginning.


Togo is beginning to feel more like home. I’ve made it halfway through my first 3 months now and things are starting to feel pretty good. I still miss my family and friends (that means you!) back home, but I am beginning to find some new family and friends here. For example, my friend Ezekiel is 24 and in the ‘premier’ grade at the local lycee, or high school. Last month I went to visit his village and got fed fufu (severely beaten manioc, pretty mushy stuff), visited his chef, and met his family (which is basically the entire village). Before eating the fufu I saw them pick up a chicken from the hard dirt floor of their courtyard and carry it behind the house. Later, I was informed that the chicken we were eating in the sauce was the chicken I had seen previously turned ex-chicken. The Ben that I was at the beginning of my stay here would have been a tad uneasy, but now I have become comfortable with the way animals are raised and consumed as well as other facts of life in this country.

I am still very excited about the work I will be doing over the next two years. I have been assigned to work with a groupement, or group of community members with a common interest, called ‘Union Fait la Force’. The name comes from the fact that apart it is more difficult for people to solve their problems, but together with their forces combined they can do things that were not possible before. When I see the women and men at our meetings on Wednesdays, I look at their determined faces and am inspired by their motivation and determination to work on our projects.

Last month I did an activity with the groupement to find out what our projects are and which are most important. I used the results of the activity to create a website (which is all in French but there are pictures, you can find it at sites.google.com/site/gapu2f) and to figure out how to present our groupement and explain it in the future. The goal of the groupement is to improve the lives of its members, which more concretely means 5 things: we want the women (several of whom go to Lome now to look for work and money) to be able to stay at the house with their kids, we want the members and their families to be able to eat well 3 meals a day with fruits and veggies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we want the members to be able to pay for sicknesses, send their children to school until they graduate high school, and build houses out of concrete rather than clay. The common work of the women in the groupement is the transformation of manioc, or cassava, into manioc flour, called ‘gari’. The most important project of the groupement which will help us achieve the goals mentioned above involves taking out a microfinance loan to get a collective moulin (grinds manioc into powder) for the groupement. Much of my service will devoted to creating a center for the production of gari where we will house the moulin and other related tools. Other projects that I am starting with my groupement include a model farm and a model garden, which I am working to plan during the dry season and start when the rains bless us again.

That’s work. Outside of work, I am improving my skills at drinking the local strong drink offered to me every time I visit someone, called ‘sodabi.’ I am gradually turning my two concrete rooms into a home by adding things like spices to cook food, posters on the wall (much harder to mount with the crappy paint they use here) and more rows of books. While I am still at a loss when anyone tries to speak the local language, I am studying it every night and taking lessons twice a week so that maybe in the future I won’t imagine a lot of question marks coming out of someone’s mouth whenever they speak it. And this Saturday, if all goes well, I will even have electricity so I can do stuff on my computer for our groupement and play the loads of music I brought on my external hard drive!

Its getting better all the time. When I first got to Togo I freaked out about transportation, and the first time I took a bush taxi from Anfoin back to training in Gbatope I thought all my money was going to get stolen and I was going to end up a burning wreck on the side of the road. But now it is normal for me to shove into a five-seater car (if you can call it a car, more like a scarred chunk of metal that was left over after they got done filming combat scenes in the first Terminator) with six other people. I even have nice conversations if they speak French, all while the rusted car with a cracked windshield bangs it’s way over the potholes. As for food, I am gradually adding stuff to my kitchen, and tonight I am planning to cook humus with home made tortilla chips. Ambitious, right? We’ll see how it turns out… So far I’ve been able to make pancakes on my tiny gas stove and even pasta with sauce (I have olive oil now, don’t you know it, and olives, oh my goodness they are soo good) that resembles what I ate in Italy. I still eat a lot of pate and fufu, or corn and manioc paste respectively, but even those are beginning to taste delicious if not nutritious.

Last weekend I went to visit another volunteer in a village near Tabligbo as part of our Natural Resources Management ‘shadowing’ (ohhhh scary) to see what she has started in the year since she arrived. She took me to a sodabi party WAAAAY out in the brush, like many many miles from a paved road, and under a straw thatched roof I drank honey and ginger sodabi while talking with the guy who makes it and his several apprentices. Afterwards we took a walk through this diverse forest full of huge trees, very hard to find one of those in Togo, and the sodabi manufacturer explained that the forest is under 10 feet of water during the rainy season. It was crazy to walk through a place with so much organic material and diversity when all I see most of the time are corn and manioc in straight lines. Being slightly tipsy, we decided it would be a good idea to start climbing trees. I stopped after getting about 15 meters in the air, wanting to not get fatally wounded and end up ending my service that way and all, but one of the apprentices climbed to the top of the tree, walked along a branch like it was nothing, jumped to another tree and clambered down! I keep on trying to get a grip on people’s value of life here, but I don’t seem to be getting any closer.

Harmattan also means lots of dust, dust which tried to clog my nose as I biked to Aneho today. My knee seems to be doing better; perhaps the absence of cold all the time is good for it. In Aneho I spoke with some workers for a government agency that deals in agriculture called ICAT and found out that there are some other groupements who have already got collective moulins. Then I went to the bank and managed to take out money in small bills that I can actually use in village rather than large bills that people just kind of look at me funny when I show and wonder why I ever came to market. I checked out the main strip in Aneho, looked inside a hotel on the beach called L’Oasis, and then biked back with the Harmattan winds howling in my ear. I had beans and sauce with gari on the side of the road when I got back to Anfoin, bought some bananas a woman was carrying on her head, and headed home. The Corps gave me this sweet bike, but it is getting pretty choked with dust and I need to clean it soon. While I was in Aneho I found out where villagers can get tested for AIDS for free, and tomorrow I am helping a woman whose husband helped the president of my groupement start a school go to Aneho to get tested. Her husband died last year, she doesn’t know why, and she has 6 kids.

One conversation I have continuously here goes like this: Are you married? No? Do you want to get married? No?!? Why? You have to! How many kids will you have? No kids?!? But you have to have kids, at least four of them! What if something happens to them? After the Togolese and I go through this, I usually ask people how many brothers and sisters they have and how many died. Many of them say 7 or 8 brothers and sisters (per wife, polygamy is a reality here) and that none of them died. Children are like insurance for the parents and help in the house and fields, but you can’t feed and clothe 6 kids well when you barely have the means to do it for 2! I feel like having lots of kids made sense back in the days when infant mortality was high, and that family is a very very important part of African culture, but it seems like kids could go a lot further along the path if they didn’t have so many siblings. Then again, I have only been here 5 months while Africans were born and raised here, so my opinion and experience are both incredibly limited.

There seem to be a lot of questions that I get all the time: Do you like Obama? Are you French? You eat pate?!? I also still get yelled at, jeered at, whenever I go into town. Yesterday I went to a neighboring village to help build a house. As I was sticking my hands in the pile of clay to plop another glob to build up the wall of the house along with the rest of the community, an adult in nice looking pagne, his hands clean and sunglasses shiny, stood taking a picture of me with his cell phone without asking, without anything, like I was just here to amuse him. Stuff like this happens continually. Some people here just give me no respect no matter what I do. But the good stuff makes up for the bad, and life continues.

Hope all is well in the States. I don’t understand the French accent on the BBC, which comes in staticky anyway, and my most recent magazine is Newsweek from before my plane landed in Lome. Needless to say, I’m a tad out of touch with what’s happening in my home country, but I hope you all are doing well. You are missed across the ocean. Happy New Year, Bonne Annee!

Settling In

Hey all, so I’m back in Lome on a quest to create a website for my groupement and get my laptop fixed. Thus far, I have in a way failed to do both those things but hey, that is Togo. The website (google the words ‘GAP Union Fait la Force’ if you want to check it out) has been difficult to organize even with the ‘faster’ connection at the Peace Corps office. My laptop, which managed to break the first week I got here after I bought a new external hard drive and new battery, has now been cleaned up and scoured by the owner of a sketchy looking photocopy booth on the side of a dirt road here in the Kodjavakope quarter of the city. He basically took it all apart, removed all the dirt and hairs (remember when I had long hair?), and called his friend to find out that we wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the random part needed to fix the computer. Sigh… Now the thing works, thanks to his cleaning and tightening of bolts, but I have to be very, very gentle with it. That should get interesting when I climb in the back of a bush taxi to head back to Anfoin this afternoon.
Life is beginning to take on a little more normalcy for me in my village. I’m getting used to not having some of the pleasures of life in the states. No electricity means no lighting and no fridge, which means I either need to get creative at preserving food or lower my quality standards and risk contracting one of the many diseases mentioned in our Safety and Health In Togo book (can you see the acronym…). Friday night getting into the hotel in Lome, which costs only 5000 CFA or $10, I imagined when I stepped under the rusted showerhead to wash all the dirt and grime off that it was a tropical waterfall, kind of like when I try to imagine that I am being buffeted by waves off the shore of the Outer Banks when in reality I am getting bounced around by a bush taxi. However, doing without makes things better when I actually get ahold of them.

I’ve developed a routine for the mornings now. I get up at 5:30AM with the sunrise and take my daily constitutional in the latrine. I bought a toilet seat to set up on the concrete blocks to make the experience less painful, and I have a bag of wood ash from our fire to pour down the hole and cut down on the smell. Afterwards I make my way in my flipflops (we call them tapettes because of the tchwack noise they make when they hit your foot) back to my room while my homologue’s children sweep our dirt courtyard and stare at me like I’m from another planet. I then grab my pagne (the name of cloth here) and my bucket. From our deep well I pull up water filling the bucket and head for the shower. When I first got here I bleached the shower to try and kill the bacteria that grow on the floor, but there is still an interesting looking green algae that manages to survive my continuous antiseptic attacks. The first ladle of cold water wakes me up pretty well, and if the first one doesn’t do the job the second follows close on its heels like an electric shock. I scrub myself with a rough sponge to wipe off the grime from the day before and then hang the pagne on the line to dry. I found that I attract more bugs if I take a shower in the late evening.

I take off to go running after my shower because I’ve found that if I can heat up my body and sweat immediately after cleaning myself my dry skin problems go away! In fact, I haven’t had any problems with my dry skin since I’ve arrived in Togo because the heat kind of assures that I sweat continuously.

During my runs, which at the moment are enormously entertaining for all the people in my village because exercise by a white person is just hilarious, I try to run by the houses of members of our groupement and by the local lycee so I can say hello to the students. When I begin working in the schools, hopefully at the beginning of next semester, I’m going to start at the lycee because the students there have already mastered French. In the elementary schools the local language is a lot more effective. There is a dirt track next to the lycee and I do a few laps before turning around. Some days on my runs I’ll take off on random unexplored dirt roads and surprise people in small villages who have not yet found out that a Yovo (local name for a foreigner) has moved in nearby. I found this great hat to wear at the marche that somehow made it’s way there from the Hard Rock Café in Dubai. On the back it says ‘Love all, Serve all’ which I think is a pretty peaceful slogan.

I’m finally beginning to run again after recovering from my knee injury. The flat dirt paths that wind through the manioc and corn fields and mud hut villages in Maritime are great for this. I’m beginning to consider going to Ghana for the marathon next year if this keeps up. It’s fun to run when everyone say hello to you and there are chickens and goats always scurrying across the paths.

When I get home I usually wipe all the sweat off, hang more clothes on the line to dry (the heat of the sun really helps to get the odor out), and go on my bike into town to buy food for the day. I get bread from a lady behind the thatched wooden shelter where guys with motos hang out waiting to ride people to nearby villages. The word for bread in Mina is ‘kpono’ and I eat it pretty much every morning for breakfast along with citronella tea and hot chocolate. I also eat tons of fruit: papaya, oranges, pineapples, bananas, and the list goes on. However, the other day I bought a couple of apples and they were real expensive because no apples are grown locally. A lot of my fruit is going to eventually come from the trees near our house and from my garden, but that’s a while in coming. I also buy hot peppers, tomatoes, spices, and other things from the ‘marche mommas’ sitting under umbrellas with the vegetables in piles in front of them on little round wooden tables.

After I get done with that I bike back to the house for breakfast and I have time to work in the garden or do something else productive. My homologue, who is my connection to the community and who I live right next to, goes on weekdays to the mud walled school he helped to create over the course of the last 10 years in a nearby village. They are now in the process of finding funding to construct a real building for the school. I’ve been welcomed by the directors at every school I’ve gone to so far except his, where the director insists that I need official papers even to introduce myself to the students or sit in on classes. This is pretty frustrating because I’ve been there twice now and want to get to better understand how teachers teach in this country, but I will get these papers and everything will smooth over.

During the middle of the day, from about 11AM till 3PM, everyone lies on straw mats in the shade and tries not to move in order to escape the heat. Right now we are just beginning the dry season (la saison seche) which people also refer to as the dead season (la saison morte) because it is hard to do anything. Without rain and water cultivating crops is very difficult. For the garden we are going to do only 2 sunken beds for the dry season because to water them I will have to pull water up the same long well I get my shower water from. I’m beginning to get more used to the heat, but I still sometimes have trouble sleeping at night and am always, always drinking water.

We also have started a compost beside the garden, and whenever anyone will listen I explain the structure of compost and its benefits to soil and crops. People in my town spend a large portion of their income buying chemical fertilizer for their fields, and if I could help them find a way to not buy so much they would have more money to spend on things like sending their kids to school. When we finish the fence for the garden, I am planning to start growing basil and tomatoes in one bed (oh Italy) and peppers and onions in the second one. We’ll see how it goes since I have never had my own garden and have thus far little experience with agriculture in general (except for the end part, eating).

Other than that, I study the local language by candle light at night, sleep at night under my mosquito net on a hard cot called a ‘lit picot,’ and am trying to cook more things other than just spaghetti or rice and red sauce for every meal. I have been talking with one of our trainers from my formation in Gbatope about a big reforestation project for the region, and I am pretty excited about starting on that. Every day the women from the groupement pass by on their way to or from town, take whatever they are carrying down from their heads, and say ‘woezoo’ to me, which means welcome. Their smiling faces give me hope for my service and for the future.

Gback in Gbatopé

So I made two presentations this week, one teaching people Italian and another detailing a huge reforestation project that one of our trainers wants to start in my region. I also took a French test and wrote a short speech in Mina that I will be giving at our swearing in ceremony in less than a week when I become a volunteer! My host parents have bought me a sweet outfit made from African cloth called pagne and I plan to sport it at the ceremony and during the dancing that will follow.

Things are awesome in Togo. I play all kinds of made up games with my awesome 2 year old host brother Godwin who takes a shower in a bucket. There isnt a lot of rain these days so I have been taking showers with about half the water I was at the beginning. It is super hot at night and I cant get to sleep cause I sweat so much under my mosquito net but I think I will begin sleeping on the floor with the spiders and cockroaches to at least cool off. We have no electricity in gbatope, so we are going to light some candles or lanterns tonight and sing songs or play musical chairs or something.

PLEASE send me mail! My address is on my blog. Even if it is just a postcard with 'Ben, I know you exist' I will super appreciate it and respond to you immediately. Please! Miss you all, hope all is well overseas.

Ciao a tutti! Sto per devenire volontario fra meno d'una settimana! Fa troppo caldo qui e é difficile per me a dormire la notte. Questa settimana ho fatto una presentazione sulla lingua italiana per i miei amici e insegnanti! Loro sono molto interessato ma io sto dimenticando la lingua. Per favore, mi scrivete qualche lettera. Il mio indirizzo é sul mio blog. Ciao!

The Trainee

Bonjour tout le monde! I am entering the 8th week of training here in Togo and I'm beginning to feel a little more prepared for the next two years. Yesterday we learned how to make improved cook stoves out of clay, sand, and dried grass followed by a session on the ethnodiversity of Togo. There are over 50 main ethnic groups in this tiny country and hundreds of subethnicities. The main ethnic group at my post in Anfoin is Mina, and the language is very close to Ewe but just different enough to make things frustrating. Since I am leaving soon, I treated my host family in Gbatope to breakfast yesterday: french toast, which was still incredibly easy even though I cooked it over a wood fire in a mud hut. My little 2 year old host brother Godwin ate it up real fast and gave some to his friend, but when I tried to give some to his friend he got scared of me and ran away. Its so easy to scare kids here not trying because many of them have never seen a white person before.

I am looking forward to our swearing in ceremony and to becoming a real volunteer. I have so many plans for projects to help with or start at my post: permagarden and composting, a tree nursery to begin a regional reforestation project, doing agroforestry in the field that my groupment has recently acquired, helping to install a well in a nearby town where the water is 54 meters underground, and souping up my two small rooms with a lippico and a gas stove. Let's hope this all happens! I'm really looking forward to cooking for myself with vegetables I grow, but it's hard to do as one person with a wood stove. Tonight I am going to be spending some quality time with the other volunteers before preparing for a presentation on compost next week. Pretty much everything is in French now, and I feel like I've made some progress in these weeks on talking faster. My grammar could still use some polishing and my American/African accent is not too romantic, but I'm working on it. Write me! I miss you all a lot!

Amici, adesso ho passato otto settimane in Togo! Sto per finire la formazione fra 2 settimane e apre saro' volentario davvero! Maintenant mi sto divertendo molto con gli altri volentieri, e questa sera guarderemo un video insieme a Tsevie dove c'è l'electricità. Africa è tres differente, ma mi sto abituando un po. Tutte le macchine sono in mal condizione, e come in Italia la gente va spesso in moto (ma le moto sono anche in mal condizione). In Italia abbiamo l'olio d'olivo, ma ici usiamo piu spesso l'olio di palma e l'olio d'olivo è troppo costoso a comprare. Non ho ancora cucinato per se stesso ma quando comincio il mio servizio à Anfoin, la mia posta futura, spero di cucinare molto e di avere un giardino con le tomate e il basilico! Oh pesto, oh pizza, oh lasagna! Ricodatevi i giorni quando ho cucinato gli gnocchi per tutti voi! Non piu :( Ma ici il cibo è anche buono ma solo differente. Mon indirizzo è scritto sul mio blog: per favore mi scrivete delle lettere e io faro una risposta perchè vorrei continuare di praticare l'italiano. Mi manca la lingua di Dante! Alla prossima!