Improving agriculture in developing countries is the dream of many college environmental majors. In films and newspapers we get glimpses of villagers struggling to pull a living out of the impoverished land while supporting an ever-growing family. We want very badly to help get the poor out of their situation and see that basic human rights are provided to the point where kids can get a reasonable amount of schooling, gender equity begins to take hold, and people aren’t hungry.
But it’s tough, at least in my village. Many years of well-meaning aid in the past have given peasants an idea that there is no way to improve their lives without money and resources coming in from foreign donors. Hands shoot out when handouts come in that might feed people today but leave them tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday. The same might happen when information is given in a technical training: people are well cared for and well fed during the classes, but after the training they continue supporting the status-quo.
Right now I am reading the book Two Ears of Corn by Robert Bunch, the president of World Neighbors. In this compendium of decades worth of learning experiences in the field of agricultural development, he gives guiding principles for determining what technology should be proposed for a given area, how to go about teaching it, and eventually how to remove the assisting organization from the picture entirely so that the project is carried on my villagers. This book should be essential reading for the aforementioned environmental majors. Paternalism, or providing services or money to people who have the potential to provide it for themselves, is one of the first subjects discussed. When aid organizations do this it gives people the mindset that nothing will improve if money doesn’t majestically fall out of the sky into their hands. The next time they want to push a project forward they will first look for that aid and, if the organization has moved on, simply abandon that course of action.
Africa is scattered with rusting tractors, empty warehouses, and experimental fields overgrown with weeds. These are the physical manifestations of a flawed approach to teaching new agriculture techniques. They are symbols of this giving mentality, this idea that I know what these people need so I will give it to them and then leave with that warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach and not look back while the equipment breaks down and the farmers I spent time teaching go back to planting only corn and manioc, their soil dying under their feet.
In the States I rarely got asked for money. Here it happens every day, with kids and adults, who tell me that I have to give them 200 francs to buy beans while the bean lady who I thought was my good friend listens passively to see if I really will give that money out. When it comes to doing financed projects in village, people have the idea that I will do all the application and planning, oversee the project, and then the benefits will come back to them.
I want to give the money. I don’t want people to be hungry like this when I am fed, when I am not doing back breaking work every day. But this is not the way to go. This is not going to help vastly improve the lives of lots of people in the long term. So what will? Agriculture is the central activity of the majority of people in Togo, and real improvements in agriculture take place when farmers teach them to other farmers. And how does one get this process started?
Clearly defining the problem is the first step. The agricultural improvement needs to directly confront felt needs: people need to know that there is a problem and want to carry out a solution aiming to fix it. Also, it is impossible for an organization to come in already knowing what a village needs, do an activity like teach condom use and how to prevent HIV/AIDS, and then expect the people to use that knowledge after the aid moves on. Simply telling villagers to change their habits, like was tried with hand washing in the recent polio vaccination campaign I helped out with, will change nothing. If the problem is poor soil quality and a volunteer charges into a mass of huts telling people that agroforestry is definitely the solution and then leaves before the first growing season is even over, the project will bottom out. Similar attempts by aid organizations often involve a lot of work and actually harm development in a small village: the next time a volunteer attempts to introduce a new agriculture technique the people will have less faith because it didn’t work the first time.
So know the problem, and know the people, before even starting. That takes months. MONTHS. When Roland Bunch talks about agricultural improvement, the programs are on the span of 5-10 years, difficult for me to fathom when I will be a Peace Corps volunteer for 2 years which sometimes feels like a very long time.
The next step is to introduce the correct agricultural technology. This needs to:
• Fit in to what the villagers are doing already: The new technology needs to fit into the agricultural calendar. If it requires that people work a lot when they are already super busy busting their butts in the field, it won’t fly.
• Be simple: if a technology is too complex, it will be impossible for villagers to teach it to other villagers. If it takes too long to teach villagers will lose interest, and if it involves complex materials not already in the community then the project will not be sustainable.
• Farmers must be able to experiment with the technology on a small scale before applying it to their whole field. The farm is their livelihood, and villagers are not able to take chances with a work that their lives and bellies depend on.
• Have early, significant benefits. If there are not results that show up within one season then villagers will lose faith and enthusiasm. They will go back to what they were doing before.
The list goes on. With my recent garden training, I tried to organize for villagers to come and learn many new techniques for planting crops that don’t exist chez moi. I wanted to get people to stop their daily activities, sacrifice their time so I could bombard them with technical information, then leave them to put it into practice. The training took me several months to organize and in hindsight seems like a massive failure. But I learned some of the most important lessons that I wish someone had told me before I started.
First of all, don’t try to introduce a lot of new crops at one time to a community. Work with crops that already exist. Gardens require constant maintenance and do really well in the wet season when local grasses and herbs are already plentiful. Having vegetables right next to the house to put in the sauce and help kids get the vitamins they need makes a lot of sense, but when a woman has to pull water up a long well in the morning and evening to water her garden on top of carrying her kids, making corn paste for dinner, washing clothes… just no. My community didn’t need to be taught how to garden, and I wasted many months figuring that out.
Also, it is much better for volunteers to go to meetings that are already set up than to try and create their own. For my past trainings I have tried to get many people to converge on one place of my deciding when what I really need to do is go towards the people. Talking to people at a groupement meeting, a class at school, or speaking at mass at the church are much more effective and involve much less time than trying to organize a training. Recently I did a training on how to do a feasibility study and make liquid soap with a groupement near the college in Anfoin, and it was more effective than the garden training I spent months prepping for. Also with training, people often have to be fed and lodged, but when one person goes toward a group instead of asking the group to come to the person’s doorstep a training is much more effective.
One central idea of Bunch’s book is that it is much better to teach one thing to many people than a lot of things to one group. When I first got to Anfoin, my groupement wanted me to go through and put all of the techniques I learned during training on the table. So I taught them how to do improved cook stoves, double dig garden beds, and the benefits of agroforestry. At the moment not one of them has put any of this into practice, and if they have it is to keep me happy and not to actually improve their own lives. What I would really like to do with my service is find one technology that my community could really use, teach it to a lot of people, and have it become the HABIT of people to use it. There must be a critical mass where over a certain threshold everyone will begin to put a technology into practice and those who don’t will be considered strange.
The best thing I have found thus far to improve agriculture is a plant called Mucuna. It is a green fertilizer, kind of like a creeping vine, that fixes nitrogen in the soil and crowds out some of the especially annoying weeds. Farmers can plant it towards the end of the wet season when corn is already high enough that the mucuna won’t crawl up it. During the dry season it continues growing for a while and then dies, making weeding the field a lot easier and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. Farmers can see whether it has had an effect or not when they go to plant at the beginning of the next wet season, it is easily planted between growing corn in the middle of a pause in the agricultural cycle, farmers can experiment with it on a small scale, and it is simple and easy to teach to others. This is the best solution I have seen so far to begin addressing the dying soil in my region.
Several other organizations in my village have taught villagers how to correctly use chemical fertilizers. You make a small hole in the ground next to the corn plant, put a small amount of fertilizer in, and cover it up (NOTHING like I envisioned chemical fertilizers being when I first got here). This sounds like a great start to help villagers have faith in a program. I’m hoping I can jump on board and help them with this next step, mucuna, giving a few seeds to a lot of people to put on one portion of their land to see if it continues this process.
I’ve also been investing a lot of time recently helping my homologue get together a project dealing with agoutis (bush rats). Our goal is to create a center to train college students to raise agoutis as an AGR. We will be: (1) Building a lot of new enclosures for the animals, (2) giving trainings on how to raise the animals, (3) creating an animal bank (along with a project for the groupement) to help students begin to raise the animals, and (4) helping them to find a market to sell them when they are ready. At first I was incredibly adverse to financed projects, but this was just too cool to pass up. We are writing the application to send to the American embassy and I have found that, unlike labor in the field, I am actually very good when it comes to writing applications and planning projects. More about this to come.
Before coming to Togo, I thought learning experiences were a one-time deal: something bad happens, I get hurt and learn from it. Now they are drawn out over months and that can be hard to take. But my approach to my service is changing, for the better. Instead of running around on a hamster wheel for this period of my life, I feel like if I put some of these new ideas into practice I just might get somewhere.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Rains Roll In
(written 4 May 2011)
Since several people have been asking lately, I’m going to start off this blog post with a list of things I would like to get in care packages. Many of these things, which make me ecstatically happy and give a pleasurable reason for my existence, are not available in Togo (except, of course, in the care packages of other volunteers heh heh). Here we go:
-Oreos –Of all sizes and flavors. At the marche in Anfoin I can easily find these Parle-G biscuit cracker cookies that come from China, margarine from Thailand and sugar which when mixed with vanilla make fantastic icing, and make what I like to call ‘en brousse’ oreos. The real thing is better…
- M + Ms – Not to be found even in Lome. Once again all shapes and flavors would be awesome. Recently received some mint m+ms that were exquisite.
- Granola Bars – The kind that aren’t good for you, with chocolate chips and gooey goodness, etc.
- Crystal Light – Those little packets of mix that can make lemonade, orangeade, etc.
- Army rations – These are so delicious! How did I ever think they weren’t that great! I just tear open the packages of food and cute little packets and mix them all together and peacefully consume the goodness.
- Love – Not sure how you can get this into a packet and preserve it very well to ship over cuz it would probably melt, but I’ll ask for some anyway ;)
My life has picked up a little bit since my last blog post. I went to another training in Pagala up in the Centrale region near Atakpame. We talked about how to plan projects and how to make them succeed. I figured out why my garden training didn’t work: in order for a project to fly, the group or community has to do two things:
1) Realize and acknowledge that there is a problem.
2) Have the desire (motivation, enthusiasm, whatever) to solve the problem.
The project is the course of action meant to address that specific problem: malnutrition, soil depletion, bad sanitation practices, lack of income generating activities, no water, etc. I came to Anfoin super gung hoe to do gardens because we spent so much time growing green stuff during training. But I didn’t take the time to realize what the real problems were in my community or help the people spell out the problems and decide on a solution. Heck my arms hurt after hauling one bucket up my looong well, how could I expect people to want to start a garden at their house when they would have to do that time after time to water it?
Needless to say, my garden is beginning to look less pathetic since the rainy season began. I’ve got more cucumber than any person could want for, but there is a tomoto thief who has been stealing my baby grape tomatoes. I don’t really understand because usually when people ask to try a vegetable from my garden I give them some. My friend Ezekiel (my garden is in his compound because in mine there are bush rats running around that would replace the tomoto thief) seems more angry about it than I am. Crop theft is pretty common here: some people will spend the whole rainy season raising a field of yams and then arrive at the end to harvest them and find that someone has come in the night to gank them all.
While the garden training bore resemblance to a broken airplane’s downward spiral, I have a few other projects that are beginning to take flight on wings full of air. The nitrogen-fixing-tree nursery I began back in February is full of young trees that are ready to plant now that the rains have returned. These past couple days I’ve helped my groupement in our communal field planting corn, and when it begins to sprout we are going to plant lots of trees in between the rows of crops. Also, each groupement member is planning on taking trees from the nursery and planting them in their personal fields. Guess I must have done an alright job convincing them that soil degradation is a big problem and agroforestry is the best solution for us.
Another budding project is a training for my community (the Koutigbe quarter of Anfoin) on Moringa. Moringa is a tree whose leaves have vitamins A (good vision), B, and C (dodge sicknesses), calcium (those bones), iron (good for blood), and even protein which people normally get very little of since eggs and meat and fish are so expensive. This is the simplest, easiest, and least expensive way I’ve heard of to help an agricultural community confront problems with malnutrition. I’m working with a really great guy Louis who raises chickens and who already has the tree growing at his place. He’s also already made powder with the leaves and puts it every night in the sauce, so he has experience with the tree which is much more important than anything I could every teach about the tree.
As opposed to the garden training where I did all the planning and preparation alone, now I have a nice and motivated community member working with me on this moringa training. I was planning on scheduling it on a Saturday (like my garden training) but Louis reminded me that Saturday is market day in Anfoin. So we rescheduled to Sunday from 10-12 (after mass at the church) and planned to do the formation in a peyote next to Louis’ house. The way I’m finding participants is also different. There are these clusters of clay huts between where I live and Louis’ house. I’m going to each of these clusters in the evening, trying to arrange to meet with and talk to everyone who lives in the huts, and have them choose one woman (cuz they do the cooking and would be the ones to use the trees) to come to the meeting, learn about Moringa, and take some seeds home to plant them. That way everyone is interested but I’m not just arriving to a group of people I don’t know, talking, and giving them something before disappearing.
(That DOESN’T work by the way. I recently helped with a polio vaccination campaign and walked all over Koutigbe giving the liquid-drop vaccination to kiddos and at the same time tried to help the Community Health worker explain to people that they need to start washing their hands correctly before meals and after they go to the bathroom. Think they’re going to do that after we just talk at them? They need to be guided to realize that diseases are a problem and often come from bad sanitation, they need to want to change their habits so that their children will get sick less and be able to go to school, and then after being demonstrated how to wash their hands, washing their own hands, and then having them get their children in a line and having the parent teach their kiddos to wash their hands and doing it day after day after day… whew, I’ll stop there.)
So one person will represent each group. I couldn’t handle everyone in the community coming, and this way the community is responsible for reminding the participants about the training and then asking them what they learned when they return. At the training I will teach about Moringa, Louis will translate for me into Ewe and also talk about his experience with Moringa, and then we will go to his neighbor’s house and help him to start the tree nursery. While I spent 3 months planning the garden training, I’m only throwing in 2 weeks on this one. And it looks like it might do a lot more because these people are really the poorest of the poor. Each family has basically an army of kids who flock to me like flies when I walk into the middle of their cluster, and lots of them look like they could use moringa powder.
Lastly, I’m gearing to go back to Pagala to help out with a camp this month. It is to teach Togolese students about life skills like AIDS, family planning, much of which I know very little about but will be learning a lot. Pagala is awesome because there is Wagash, or goat cheese, and tons of great big trees that I rarely see in this country.
I’m still here, now poking holes to plant corn instead of digging uselessly in the dirt, which is nice. Finally the rainy season started and has made my job a lot easier. Guess I’ll go plant some trees now.
Since several people have been asking lately, I’m going to start off this blog post with a list of things I would like to get in care packages. Many of these things, which make me ecstatically happy and give a pleasurable reason for my existence, are not available in Togo (except, of course, in the care packages of other volunteers heh heh). Here we go:
-Oreos –Of all sizes and flavors. At the marche in Anfoin I can easily find these Parle-G biscuit cracker cookies that come from China, margarine from Thailand and sugar which when mixed with vanilla make fantastic icing, and make what I like to call ‘en brousse’ oreos. The real thing is better…
- M + Ms – Not to be found even in Lome. Once again all shapes and flavors would be awesome. Recently received some mint m+ms that were exquisite.
- Granola Bars – The kind that aren’t good for you, with chocolate chips and gooey goodness, etc.
- Crystal Light – Those little packets of mix that can make lemonade, orangeade, etc.
- Army rations – These are so delicious! How did I ever think they weren’t that great! I just tear open the packages of food and cute little packets and mix them all together and peacefully consume the goodness.
- Love – Not sure how you can get this into a packet and preserve it very well to ship over cuz it would probably melt, but I’ll ask for some anyway ;)
My life has picked up a little bit since my last blog post. I went to another training in Pagala up in the Centrale region near Atakpame. We talked about how to plan projects and how to make them succeed. I figured out why my garden training didn’t work: in order for a project to fly, the group or community has to do two things:
1) Realize and acknowledge that there is a problem.
2) Have the desire (motivation, enthusiasm, whatever) to solve the problem.
The project is the course of action meant to address that specific problem: malnutrition, soil depletion, bad sanitation practices, lack of income generating activities, no water, etc. I came to Anfoin super gung hoe to do gardens because we spent so much time growing green stuff during training. But I didn’t take the time to realize what the real problems were in my community or help the people spell out the problems and decide on a solution. Heck my arms hurt after hauling one bucket up my looong well, how could I expect people to want to start a garden at their house when they would have to do that time after time to water it?
Needless to say, my garden is beginning to look less pathetic since the rainy season began. I’ve got more cucumber than any person could want for, but there is a tomoto thief who has been stealing my baby grape tomatoes. I don’t really understand because usually when people ask to try a vegetable from my garden I give them some. My friend Ezekiel (my garden is in his compound because in mine there are bush rats running around that would replace the tomoto thief) seems more angry about it than I am. Crop theft is pretty common here: some people will spend the whole rainy season raising a field of yams and then arrive at the end to harvest them and find that someone has come in the night to gank them all.
While the garden training bore resemblance to a broken airplane’s downward spiral, I have a few other projects that are beginning to take flight on wings full of air. The nitrogen-fixing-tree nursery I began back in February is full of young trees that are ready to plant now that the rains have returned. These past couple days I’ve helped my groupement in our communal field planting corn, and when it begins to sprout we are going to plant lots of trees in between the rows of crops. Also, each groupement member is planning on taking trees from the nursery and planting them in their personal fields. Guess I must have done an alright job convincing them that soil degradation is a big problem and agroforestry is the best solution for us.
Another budding project is a training for my community (the Koutigbe quarter of Anfoin) on Moringa. Moringa is a tree whose leaves have vitamins A (good vision), B, and C (dodge sicknesses), calcium (those bones), iron (good for blood), and even protein which people normally get very little of since eggs and meat and fish are so expensive. This is the simplest, easiest, and least expensive way I’ve heard of to help an agricultural community confront problems with malnutrition. I’m working with a really great guy Louis who raises chickens and who already has the tree growing at his place. He’s also already made powder with the leaves and puts it every night in the sauce, so he has experience with the tree which is much more important than anything I could every teach about the tree.
As opposed to the garden training where I did all the planning and preparation alone, now I have a nice and motivated community member working with me on this moringa training. I was planning on scheduling it on a Saturday (like my garden training) but Louis reminded me that Saturday is market day in Anfoin. So we rescheduled to Sunday from 10-12 (after mass at the church) and planned to do the formation in a peyote next to Louis’ house. The way I’m finding participants is also different. There are these clusters of clay huts between where I live and Louis’ house. I’m going to each of these clusters in the evening, trying to arrange to meet with and talk to everyone who lives in the huts, and have them choose one woman (cuz they do the cooking and would be the ones to use the trees) to come to the meeting, learn about Moringa, and take some seeds home to plant them. That way everyone is interested but I’m not just arriving to a group of people I don’t know, talking, and giving them something before disappearing.
(That DOESN’T work by the way. I recently helped with a polio vaccination campaign and walked all over Koutigbe giving the liquid-drop vaccination to kiddos and at the same time tried to help the Community Health worker explain to people that they need to start washing their hands correctly before meals and after they go to the bathroom. Think they’re going to do that after we just talk at them? They need to be guided to realize that diseases are a problem and often come from bad sanitation, they need to want to change their habits so that their children will get sick less and be able to go to school, and then after being demonstrated how to wash their hands, washing their own hands, and then having them get their children in a line and having the parent teach their kiddos to wash their hands and doing it day after day after day… whew, I’ll stop there.)
So one person will represent each group. I couldn’t handle everyone in the community coming, and this way the community is responsible for reminding the participants about the training and then asking them what they learned when they return. At the training I will teach about Moringa, Louis will translate for me into Ewe and also talk about his experience with Moringa, and then we will go to his neighbor’s house and help him to start the tree nursery. While I spent 3 months planning the garden training, I’m only throwing in 2 weeks on this one. And it looks like it might do a lot more because these people are really the poorest of the poor. Each family has basically an army of kids who flock to me like flies when I walk into the middle of their cluster, and lots of them look like they could use moringa powder.
Lastly, I’m gearing to go back to Pagala to help out with a camp this month. It is to teach Togolese students about life skills like AIDS, family planning, much of which I know very little about but will be learning a lot. Pagala is awesome because there is Wagash, or goat cheese, and tons of great big trees that I rarely see in this country.
I’m still here, now poking holes to plant corn instead of digging uselessly in the dirt, which is nice. Finally the rainy season started and has made my job a lot easier. Guess I’ll go plant some trees now.
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Next Big Thing
5 April 2011
I geared up for about 2 months for the garden training I hosted in Anfoin last weekend. In preparation, I created a program with exact times when activities were supposed to start and end, invited community members, groupements, and students to participate, and made arrangements to lodge other Peace Corps volunteers in my family compound.
My program was very nicely laid out and detailed on paper: the training would take place over a weekend while students were on break so they would have time to come. On Friday other volunteers would arrive, we would organize lodging arrangements, and I would cook dinner. Saturday early morning groupement/community members would arrive to practice sustainable agriculture techniques in our model garden and when it got hot the volunteers gave presentations about gardening under our frantically constructed apatam (made from wood beams and palm branches, to create a shady place). In the afternoon, the students would arrive and we would do the same deal.
When I invited people to come, I wrote down information about who they were, what they did, where they lived. Most came from my quarter of Anfoin, which was great because if they wanted help after starting the garden I could go and assist them. I stopped by to talk to them the week before to remind them about the training.
As for lodging arrangements, I thought that my homologue would be cleaning out several rooms in the compound to put volunteers in, find mats/mosquito nets, and clean the rooms very well.
As can be expected, nothing went according to plan, but it was great fun. I had a good time cooking for the 5 volunteers who I hosted in my two tiny concrete rooms and sleeping on mats on my concrete terrace (very glad it didn’t rain). We didn’t really organize presentations, which didn’t really matter since the next day the first participants arrived about two and a half hours after the training ‘began’. Not that I was on time with breakfast either: I began to make honey/brown sugar/cinnamon buttered toast around start time for the training. By this time my house looked like a danger zone: I had filled up water jugs for my guests to sit on since I haven’t yet gotten furniture, we put a lot of random stuff on the floor after finding no space on the countertop, and we spent lots of time huddled in a semi circle around my fan as it slowly rotated and a slight breeze (strength varying with the electrical current) flowed from it.
I had been planning to work in the garden during the early morning when it was cool and then hang out under the apatam when it got hot. However, we began in the garden around 9:30 when the sun was beginning to really bare down. My friend Ezekiel and one of my neighbors sweated profusely while doing most of the work digging two beds. I did my best to look useful waving a shovel around; the others observed from the shade. After double digging in the hard soil (I thought it would have rained by this time making this part easier, but ironically it rained the day AFTER the training), another volunteer did an excellent job explaining companion planting and bed mapping, and we planted green bean and pepper seeds together. I had asked one of our groupement members to bring baby tomato, gumbo, and pepper plants from his plant nursery beside the river (talked to him 3 times in the month preceding the training) but he alas did not show.
Afterwards we moved to benches under the apatam, but at that point I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be around other people, couldn’t try and stand up and give a presentation, couldn’t keep trying to act like I had a positive attitude about the training when inside I wasn’t feelin it. So I slowly went to my room, slowly pulled some water up the well, filled up a bucket and took a long luxurious bucket shower. I’ve come to realize that when I need time for myself, I just need to go ahead and take it. As a volunteer, if I need to reset or get away from whatever is happening these days I just do it and don’t worry. So I left my homologue to talk about agoutis while I took a half hour to shower off and get my mind back on track. Don’t get me wrong, I can get real enthusiastic about gardening and talk for hours about building a live fence or companion planting, but when I need space, when I feel myself slipping, I’ve learned to just get away and take a break instead of fighting it. So that’s what I did, and when I came back to the training, walked slowly across the mud floored compound strewn with broken concrete blocks, palm fronds, chicken poop, rotting mangos, and water basins, I felt much much better.
The rest of the training went. For lunch I walked the volunteers down to my bean lady; she was thrilled to see so many foreigners coming to lunch. We got some drinks under the mango trees at the Auberge Californie and then walked back in the heat of the day to meet up with another volunteer and take a long repos under the apatam. In the afternoon, the first and only student that came to the training showed up about an hour late, so we all decided to skip the training and go to see our groupement member by the river who has a lot of fish ponds. The one student that did come is an incredibly motivated person in his last year at the lycee, and as I walked with him and the other volunteers into town we talked about plans for starting gardens and building improved cook stoves in the longer ‘summer’ break.
The volunteers were pretty impressed with the fish ponds, and afterwards we walked to the opposite bank of the river where my friend has an auberge and mini-zoo with crocodiles. The place is pretty schwanky, and we took pictures and tried to get the crocodiles to make some motion before motoing back to my place. The night was spent merry making on the terrace accompanied by a dinner of pancakes and carrots with local peanut butter.
Looking back on it, I can’t really say how I thought the garden training would go. I’m just glad it went. This was the first big thing that I have tried to do with my service, and it was a great learning experience. I feel like if I had a budget for the next one, if I was able to rent fancy plastic chairs, make nice invitations and photocopy garden materials, create a nicely laid out notebook to mark down participants in, buy each person a pen and notebook for notes, install a big water tank and pump to easily water the garden, more people would come. But with this training I found out that the most motivated people came, and I made it obvious that if they want to work with me in the future I will be available for them.
In other news, the tree nursery in our groupement garden is growing, and since it rained like crazy the night before last (making a deafening sound, the huge droplets falling on my tiled roof) I believe we will be planting the trees soon in one of our groupement member’s fields. I also have some mahogany plants I’ve been raising and am hoping to have kids at the college plant them in conjunction with a lesson on the importance of trees for the soil.
I’ve begun teaching English at the lycee, and I led my first class yesterday. Only about 50 students showed up because of the rain, but normally I’ll be teaching closer to 70 or 80. For the first lesson I wanted to help the students figure out why they wanted to learn English and how they could better learn the language. For me, when I was studying Italian, it was real important for me to keep in mind that eventually I would be able to read Dante’s Commedia in his own language. Responses from the students were pretty predictable: they wanted to learn English to make more money in the future, to travel to an English-speaking country and find a good job there, to communicate with an international language, etc. But with the activity I tried to help them realize why I would like to teach them English: using their ability to speak and write this language they will be better enabled to help their communities in the future. They will be able to bring resources and work with people in the future that before would not have been possible. I felt like I made a good fight against the dominant escapist mentality, and the class seemed helpful for all involved. I encouraged them for the next time to think of more specific tasks they wanted to use English for in the future like reading a certain book, writing a scientific paper on a certain subject, or talking with a famous person.
Talking in front of so many kids at first was difficult. It was hard for me to get out of bed, my feet felt like lead walking over to the lycee, and I felt real edgy waiting for the class to begin. But next time it will be better. I have to speak very loud to maintain attention and reach all the students, and an hour of that made my voice hoarse. After I teach I feel useful, and when it seems like these days there is no set schedule for anything I do teaching gives me a more solid base to be here. Maybe it will help me to connect more with the lycee students and start more environmental projects there in the future.
Next month I’m going to be helping with a national WHO vaccination campaign against polio for kiddos. Here in village there are many disabled people who get around on hand-powered tricycles. One English professor at the lycee can not get around without crutches. Despite this, I feel like a lot of Togolese seem incredibly fit and healthy. They seem to have either gotten really good at tolerating injuries or have learned to avoid dangerous situations. When I walk through a crowded market place or see my friends doing back breaking work in the field, I am always surprised at their ability to make it through seemingly unscathed.
Just recently got an amazing package full of specialty Italian food from a good friend in the States along with lots of other letters. I read the letters and the food descriptions and looked up the places the pasta, sauces, and biscotti came from on the map. Thank you all for all that. I’ll put up another blog post when another big thing comes along.
I geared up for about 2 months for the garden training I hosted in Anfoin last weekend. In preparation, I created a program with exact times when activities were supposed to start and end, invited community members, groupements, and students to participate, and made arrangements to lodge other Peace Corps volunteers in my family compound.
My program was very nicely laid out and detailed on paper: the training would take place over a weekend while students were on break so they would have time to come. On Friday other volunteers would arrive, we would organize lodging arrangements, and I would cook dinner. Saturday early morning groupement/community members would arrive to practice sustainable agriculture techniques in our model garden and when it got hot the volunteers gave presentations about gardening under our frantically constructed apatam (made from wood beams and palm branches, to create a shady place). In the afternoon, the students would arrive and we would do the same deal.
Apatam built for the training
When I invited people to come, I wrote down information about who they were, what they did, where they lived. Most came from my quarter of Anfoin, which was great because if they wanted help after starting the garden I could go and assist them. I stopped by to talk to them the week before to remind them about the training.
As for lodging arrangements, I thought that my homologue would be cleaning out several rooms in the compound to put volunteers in, find mats/mosquito nets, and clean the rooms very well.
As can be expected, nothing went according to plan, but it was great fun. I had a good time cooking for the 5 volunteers who I hosted in my two tiny concrete rooms and sleeping on mats on my concrete terrace (very glad it didn’t rain). We didn’t really organize presentations, which didn’t really matter since the next day the first participants arrived about two and a half hours after the training ‘began’. Not that I was on time with breakfast either: I began to make honey/brown sugar/cinnamon buttered toast around start time for the training. By this time my house looked like a danger zone: I had filled up water jugs for my guests to sit on since I haven’t yet gotten furniture, we put a lot of random stuff on the floor after finding no space on the countertop, and we spent lots of time huddled in a semi circle around my fan as it slowly rotated and a slight breeze (strength varying with the electrical current) flowed from it.
Volunteers HAPPILY cooking breakfast
I had been planning to work in the garden during the early morning when it was cool and then hang out under the apatam when it got hot. However, we began in the garden around 9:30 when the sun was beginning to really bare down. My friend Ezekiel and one of my neighbors sweated profusely while doing most of the work digging two beds. I did my best to look useful waving a shovel around; the others observed from the shade. After double digging in the hard soil (I thought it would have rained by this time making this part easier, but ironically it rained the day AFTER the training), another volunteer did an excellent job explaining companion planting and bed mapping, and we planted green bean and pepper seeds together. I had asked one of our groupement members to bring baby tomato, gumbo, and pepper plants from his plant nursery beside the river (talked to him 3 times in the month preceding the training) but he alas did not show.
Afterwards we moved to benches under the apatam, but at that point I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be around other people, couldn’t try and stand up and give a presentation, couldn’t keep trying to act like I had a positive attitude about the training when inside I wasn’t feelin it. So I slowly went to my room, slowly pulled some water up the well, filled up a bucket and took a long luxurious bucket shower. I’ve come to realize that when I need time for myself, I just need to go ahead and take it. As a volunteer, if I need to reset or get away from whatever is happening these days I just do it and don’t worry. So I left my homologue to talk about agoutis while I took a half hour to shower off and get my mind back on track. Don’t get me wrong, I can get real enthusiastic about gardening and talk for hours about building a live fence or companion planting, but when I need space, when I feel myself slipping, I’ve learned to just get away and take a break instead of fighting it. So that’s what I did, and when I came back to the training, walked slowly across the mud floored compound strewn with broken concrete blocks, palm fronds, chicken poop, rotting mangos, and water basins, I felt much much better.
The rest of the training went. For lunch I walked the volunteers down to my bean lady; she was thrilled to see so many foreigners coming to lunch. We got some drinks under the mango trees at the Auberge Californie and then walked back in the heat of the day to meet up with another volunteer and take a long repos under the apatam. In the afternoon, the first and only student that came to the training showed up about an hour late, so we all decided to skip the training and go to see our groupement member by the river who has a lot of fish ponds. The one student that did come is an incredibly motivated person in his last year at the lycee, and as I walked with him and the other volunteers into town we talked about plans for starting gardens and building improved cook stoves in the longer ‘summer’ break.
The volunteers were pretty impressed with the fish ponds, and afterwards we walked to the opposite bank of the river where my friend has an auberge and mini-zoo with crocodiles. The place is pretty schwanky, and we took pictures and tried to get the crocodiles to make some motion before motoing back to my place. The night was spent merry making on the terrace accompanied by a dinner of pancakes and carrots with local peanut butter.
Looking back on it, I can’t really say how I thought the garden training would go. I’m just glad it went. This was the first big thing that I have tried to do with my service, and it was a great learning experience. I feel like if I had a budget for the next one, if I was able to rent fancy plastic chairs, make nice invitations and photocopy garden materials, create a nicely laid out notebook to mark down participants in, buy each person a pen and notebook for notes, install a big water tank and pump to easily water the garden, more people would come. But with this training I found out that the most motivated people came, and I made it obvious that if they want to work with me in the future I will be available for them.
In other news, the tree nursery in our groupement garden is growing, and since it rained like crazy the night before last (making a deafening sound, the huge droplets falling on my tiled roof) I believe we will be planting the trees soon in one of our groupement member’s fields. I also have some mahogany plants I’ve been raising and am hoping to have kids at the college plant them in conjunction with a lesson on the importance of trees for the soil.
I’ve begun teaching English at the lycee, and I led my first class yesterday. Only about 50 students showed up because of the rain, but normally I’ll be teaching closer to 70 or 80. For the first lesson I wanted to help the students figure out why they wanted to learn English and how they could better learn the language. For me, when I was studying Italian, it was real important for me to keep in mind that eventually I would be able to read Dante’s Commedia in his own language. Responses from the students were pretty predictable: they wanted to learn English to make more money in the future, to travel to an English-speaking country and find a good job there, to communicate with an international language, etc. But with the activity I tried to help them realize why I would like to teach them English: using their ability to speak and write this language they will be better enabled to help their communities in the future. They will be able to bring resources and work with people in the future that before would not have been possible. I felt like I made a good fight against the dominant escapist mentality, and the class seemed helpful for all involved. I encouraged them for the next time to think of more specific tasks they wanted to use English for in the future like reading a certain book, writing a scientific paper on a certain subject, or talking with a famous person.
Talking in front of so many kids at first was difficult. It was hard for me to get out of bed, my feet felt like lead walking over to the lycee, and I felt real edgy waiting for the class to begin. But next time it will be better. I have to speak very loud to maintain attention and reach all the students, and an hour of that made my voice hoarse. After I teach I feel useful, and when it seems like these days there is no set schedule for anything I do teaching gives me a more solid base to be here. Maybe it will help me to connect more with the lycee students and start more environmental projects there in the future.
Next month I’m going to be helping with a national WHO vaccination campaign against polio for kiddos. Here in village there are many disabled people who get around on hand-powered tricycles. One English professor at the lycee can not get around without crutches. Despite this, I feel like a lot of Togolese seem incredibly fit and healthy. They seem to have either gotten really good at tolerating injuries or have learned to avoid dangerous situations. When I walk through a crowded market place or see my friends doing back breaking work in the field, I am always surprised at their ability to make it through seemingly unscathed.
Just recently got an amazing package full of specialty Italian food from a good friend in the States along with lots of other letters. I read the letters and the food descriptions and looked up the places the pasta, sauces, and biscotti came from on the map. Thank you all for all that. I’ll put up another blog post when another big thing comes along.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Baby Steps
Check out pictures at:
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.
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.
Monday, February 14, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Success? What’s that?
Check out pics from my first months at post at:
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
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!
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!
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