It’s been another fairly exciting week here in our training village. For starters my homestay brother just informed me that I would have the honor of naming the new guard dog the family will purchase this Saturday. They are getting a new dog because, unfortunately, their former dog, Arukool (spelled phonetically because I have no idea how it’s actually spelled), was hit and killed by a passing car. I was more upset by this news than any of my family, all of whom simply remarked that he had failed to look both ways before crossing.
The Togolese have a much different view of dogs than Americans do. Although they are the only household animals to whom they give names, they are far from pets. Instead they are thought of more as a necessary nuisance. They are needed to alert the family of intruders in the night, but otherwise, just kind of annoying. As such they treat them pretty poorly, all dogs in Togo have that beaten dog syndrome where they wimper away when you stick out your hand, and even my baby brother will slap the dog when given the chance, although the one dog is big enough to easily topple the little guy (and has when he thought no one was looking).
The fact that no one gives these dogs any love has made it easy for me to trump there effectiveness as guard dogs. Although these dogs are not regarded as pets, I am completely unable to avoid petting any dog within reach. This small gesture of affection has made the dogs very fond of me. So while they will bark there heads off at anyone arriving after 6 pm, I can come in well past 9 (late by Togolese village standards) without them making a sound. They know that if they keep quiet they’ve got a well deserved belly rub coming.
Anyway, my other homestay brother (approximately age 10) is into 80s karate/kung fu movies, and as the dog is suppose to be a ward off intruders and evil doers, I suggested that the new dog be named Jean-Claude Van Dam. He thought this was funny but told me that he thought Bruce Lee could take Van Dam any day. I thought this name might work, until my other brother came in with the suggestion of Chuck Norris who, realistically, could probably take all of them. The thought of a little dog running around in a small village in Africa named Chuck Norris is almost too much for me to handle, so I think we’ve got a winner, but I don’t have to name the dog for a little while, so if anyone’s got any other ideas, I’m open to suggestions.
Turning back a few days, I began this week on a pious note. Sunday morning I went to church with my family. My family invited me over a week ago, telling me that it was a special feastival day celebrating all the staple crops. Thinking, of course, that a feast day implied fun, music, dancing, food, and libations, I gladly accepted, excited to immerse myself in my first Togolese celebration. As it turns out festival, in this case, actually means an 8 hour long mass service.
The first two hours were actually pretty nice. My family belongs to the “Assembly of God” church. I have no idea what that is in the states or if this sect even exists in the states, but services here are pretty entertaining. There is ample music, pushed on by an African drum beat, and plenty of dancing. At least once per service a huge Congo line forms and everyone marches around the church singing and dancing in their Sunday best in the midday heat.
Furthermore, the pastor gives the presentation in Ewe, the local language, but seeing that I was the only white person in the congregation, he welcomed me, guessed that I knew no Ewe (actually I was not paying much attention when he welcomed me and had no idea he had switched over to French, or that he was addressing me personally, until I felt the whole congregations eyes upon me, and quickly smiled and waved hoping their attention would soon shift back to the pastor), and he made sure that I had a personal translator sitting by me translating everything into French.
Having a personal translator was a great opportunity to practice my French comprehension skills. The subject matter was fairly simply, and there are no surprises in the bible. Even if you don’t catch every word, you can pretty much guess what Jesus was trying to say. Furthermore, if I really didn’t get something I could also just ask the translator to explain it. However, after about hour 3, I had even lost interest in this.
It was around the time that the 2nd or 3rd guest speaker was talking (in Ewe and of course my translator had run off somewhere no where to be found), and the small child who had decided to be my friend and sit next to me had fallen asleep on my arm that I decided I had to make some moves. It was already 2:30, and I had been at church since 8 that morning. Furthermore, Sunday is my only day off. It’s my only day to do laundry, write letters practice some French, go for a bike ride, and just generally have some time to myself.
Luckily my ten year old brother had decided he had had enough as well as was ducking out to go back home. I walked back with him, and as soon as I got home, I soaked my blanket in cold water, wrapped myself inside, and napped for the remainder of the afternoon.
When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned from church, and my homestay father had come in from Lomé for his Sunday afternoon visit. However, instead of heading back to Lomé after a few hours visit as he normally does, he ended up staying straight through till Wednesday. He was apparently slightly ill, and came home to rest for a few days before returning to work in Lomé. Up until this point, I had always been slightly apprehensive around my homestay father, he had never been around often enough for me to get to know him very well, and it always seemed as though the rest of the family walked on brass tacks when he was around. As though the household authority had arrived and so everyone was afraid to misstep.
However, after getting to know him for a few days, my view of him has changed much. First of all, when he’s actually living there, the rest of the family seems much more at ease in his presence. He does not seem to rule over them with an iron fist, as I first assumed, he’s even pretty good with the baby. Furthermore, he’s a pretty nice guy. At night he’d turn the radio on to BBC Africa so I could listen to some English radio, although the rest of the family can’t understand a word of it (and actually I’d prefer to listen to the French news to get some practice, but the thought is nice).
One night he watched and laughed as I struggled to eat a bowl of steaming hot pate (west African food staple food made from corn flour) with my bar hands, I told him that the problem was my American hands, but that I would soon have African hands like his (African hands are completely immune to heat, I’ve literally seen my homestay sister stick her hand into a stove of hot coals, pick out the most red hot one in there and walk off with it in her palm). He was extremely amused, and from that point on I knew we were friends.
To some it may seem cruel of him to laugh as I struggled not to burn my hands in the pate. I’ve always thought that Africans’ laughs (both Togolese and Ugandan) are so kind-hearted and benevolent that it would be hard to mistake them for malice (especially since they are almost always followed with a handshake and a congratulation regarding whatever it was that you were trying), but apparently some trainees in the past have also misinterpreted the local’s laughter as malevolent. Therefore, one of our trainers explained us that the Togolese laugh at you when you are in difficult situations not to belittle you, but rather to put you at ease in a situation where you might not be otherwise. Laughter to them is a way of breaking the ice in an otherwise tense situation. I thought this explanation put it very well, and helps to explain why the Togolese laugh all the time. The culture out here seems to encourage laughter and lightheartedness. Any culture that puts such emphasis on jovialness in life I find admirable.
One the school front, it’s been a pretty interesting week as well. Monday for our tech class we went to a local home in the community and made them an “improved cook stove”. This is essentially a clay stove, made in almost the exact same fashion as the traditional wood burning stove, but with a few modifications that make the transfer of heat from the wood to the pot much more efficient. This means quicker cook time (which translates into more time to pursue other activities, in fact the wood burns so slow that people can leave slow cooking meals on the fire all night while they sleep), and less wood burned (which cuts down the families yearly expenses, and helps counter the massive deforestation problem in Togo). Tuesday we constructed a solar dryer, which allows you to dry fruits and vegetables, without exposing the food to harmful pests, or leaching away the nutrients (as happens when simply drying in direct sunlight), we also applied natural pesticides to our garden, to anyone interested, tea made from garlic, tobacco leaves, papaya leaves, or corn stalks all make great natural pesticides. Finally yesterday, we spent the whole afternoon learning how to make various things from soy (which is a valuable source of protein in a country were few people have sufficient access to animal protein). Yesterday afternoon was a rainy day, and probably the first day since we’ve been here that the temperature has dropped down to the low 80s (maybe even the 70s), so it was a great opportunity to get bundled up, and drink some warm soy milk (the first dairy like product we’ve had since arriving in country) around the coal stove. Finally tomorrow we close out the week with our first day of local language class. So from tomorrow on I’ll not only be learning to converse in French, but also Ewe, the language of the south, spoken in my post village. I’ve never tried to learn two languages at once, and frankly I sort of wish I could get this whole French thing down before I started with another one. Anyway, wish me luck!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Post Assignments
These past few days have been very exciting. On Tuesday, we learned where in the country we will be posted for the next two years. The general consensus among the current volunteer with whom we “stagieres” have spoken is that you should not expect to be given your first pick of post assignment, too often there are too many people vying for the same favored posts, plus the administration is more likely to base their decision on where they feel your skill set best matches the needs of the community, rather than on your personal preference. For this reason I was overjoyed to learn that I would be given my first pick of posts.
The village in which I will work is a small community (only 600 people in the whole town), located 7 km from any paved roads. It is in the northern most part of the Togo’s southern most region, maritime. Though it is off the beaten path, which was definitely a desire of mine, it is still only about 60 miles from the nation’s capital city, Lomé. This is nice because it gives me the option of being either as isolated or connected as I choose. The post is also one of the few which offer the luxury of having ones own compound, removed from other families. The description even goes so far as to point out that there is a fence surrounding my building providing “extra privacy”.
As much as I do enjoy the cultural exchange inherent in the home-stay family system, and am currently perfectly content living with my home-stay family here in training, as a living arrangement for the next two years, I am thankful for the privacy.
In the village, my main counterpart (or homologue in PC speak) will be a woman farmer, something of a rarity in Togo, since most activities are family based and since it is traditionally the men who work in the “champ” (or field). The village has requested that the volunteer stationed there helped introduce methods of interdependent agricultural and animal husbandry practices, help with the introduction of new fodder crops, and work towards the integration beneficial trees (such as nitrogen fixing trees) and crops into the agricultural process in order to promote the long term sustainability of the soil. All of which I am incredibly excited about.
One thing which I particularly like is the fact that the village has requested that a volunteer come and provided a list of projects for which they would like help. One of my biggest hesitations about the Peace Corps was that, like so many other international aid projects, its force would be misapplied, ineffective, and ultimately might represent nothing more than a grand monument to the developed north’s fundamental misunderstanding of the south, and the hegemonic attempts of the those of the north to simply impose their values and culture upon less developed nations (come to think about it, this is a rather large apprehension concerning an organization to which I plan to devote two years of my life). This apprehension seems especially relevant considering my position as student fresh out of college, with absolutely no background in agriculture or agronomy (save my summer on the farm in Nebraska), who was chosen to come and promote better agroforestry and food security practices to a population of which 90% are farmers, and who have been practicing agriculture for 100s if not 1000s of years. To think that I’m really qualified to do this is arrogance bordering upon hubris. Yet again and again, our trainers and other volunteers have stressed the fact that in village, you won’t be teaching people how to farm, they will know astronomically more on the subject than you, nor will you be telling them how to farm like an American, or trying to amend what you think they are doing wrong. Instead you are simply there to offer fresh, new ideas, and provide help to people who already know what they are doing. We are told from day one that our biggest asset is not our superior knowledge (which no one would feign believe for even a minute) but rather it is the fact that we are a new face and an outsider, and for that reason will be able to effectively introduce ideas to our communities that someone from within the community may not be able to voice (as one of our trainers put it, the two ways to harbor respect and gain an audience in a village is to be an elder or to be an outsider, and we’ve got the latter going for us).
Furthermore, it is not at all as if we, the Peace Corps, as representatives of the US, are coming into villages and telling them the way we think they should operate, or introducing the new ideas that we think are of value. Instead, the village submits a request to the Peace Corps Togo office, and the villagers themselves agree upon what they think they need and what the Peace Corps can do to benefit them. In terms of cultural and developmental self-determination, this is a much better approach than much of the development community offers. Of course I suppose you could argue that the Peace Corps still has the ultimate say as to which project proposals to honor, and in this way retains the ability to enforce cultural hegemony, but to me this is a slippery slope, the whole premise of development is that aid must be given by developed countries to less developed countries, and at some point the developed countries must decide in which way and to whom aid should be given. To reject any agency on the part of the developed country or its organizations is to refute the possibility of development projects, which on the whole are probably a good thing.
But let’s not get into that. Basically, I’m very pleased with the way the Peace Corps is operating in Togo, I think it has set up a system that makes it easy for the people the PC was set up to assist to determine how they should be assisted.
Another reason today was such a good day is because I was afforded an opportunity to come back and see just how far I’ve come in learning French. Unto this point learning the language has been a source of apprehension for me, as my high school and collegiate record will show that language learning has traditionally served to do nothing for me but bring down my GPA. Furthermore, Peace Corps (quite reasonably) demands that all trainees be at the “intermediate high” level of French speaking before they are sent to post. This means that if, after your language evaluation you did not pass but were close to this level, you are kept back for an extra week of super intense language training. However, if you were not close you were simply sent home. Neither option sounds very appealing to me.
Anyway, today we had an activity called “Cocktail Français”. Essentially it was an informal get together between the language trainers and the trainees. Instead of spending the afternoon memorizing vocabulary, we simply got to talk one on one with several trainers. Walking into the session I was apprehensive as I seriously doubted if I even had 2 ½ hours worth of conversational vocab to work with. Yet two hours in, I sat back for a moment and realized that I was successfully discussing the potential flaws inherent in Nietzsche’s Übermach with one of the trainers, entirely in French. Considering that less than a month ago I could hardly greet my family (it took me until day two to figure out how to formally explain that my French was extremely poor, and by that time I’m pretty sure they had figured it out for themselves). At any rate, though I’m still not anywhere near the level I need to be at in order to pass the exam, I no longer have any doubt that by the end of training I will be; which is an extremely comforting thought.
Suffice it to say that things are beginning to get pretty exciting around here. In just two short weeks I’ll be in my future village for a week doing an in-training visit. This is mostly to get a feel for the place that will be my new home for the next two years, and start to lay the ground work for what potential project’s I may do. Next week, local language training begins (as if learning French wasn’t hard enough), and later this week all of the guys in NRM will be shaving for the first time since we’ve come to village, leaving only our now fully formed mustaches, to prove once and for all which one of us is the manliest volunteer of the bunch. Wish me luck on all counts. Until next time!
The village in which I will work is a small community (only 600 people in the whole town), located 7 km from any paved roads. It is in the northern most part of the Togo’s southern most region, maritime. Though it is off the beaten path, which was definitely a desire of mine, it is still only about 60 miles from the nation’s capital city, Lomé. This is nice because it gives me the option of being either as isolated or connected as I choose. The post is also one of the few which offer the luxury of having ones own compound, removed from other families. The description even goes so far as to point out that there is a fence surrounding my building providing “extra privacy”.
As much as I do enjoy the cultural exchange inherent in the home-stay family system, and am currently perfectly content living with my home-stay family here in training, as a living arrangement for the next two years, I am thankful for the privacy.
In the village, my main counterpart (or homologue in PC speak) will be a woman farmer, something of a rarity in Togo, since most activities are family based and since it is traditionally the men who work in the “champ” (or field). The village has requested that the volunteer stationed there helped introduce methods of interdependent agricultural and animal husbandry practices, help with the introduction of new fodder crops, and work towards the integration beneficial trees (such as nitrogen fixing trees) and crops into the agricultural process in order to promote the long term sustainability of the soil. All of which I am incredibly excited about.
One thing which I particularly like is the fact that the village has requested that a volunteer come and provided a list of projects for which they would like help. One of my biggest hesitations about the Peace Corps was that, like so many other international aid projects, its force would be misapplied, ineffective, and ultimately might represent nothing more than a grand monument to the developed north’s fundamental misunderstanding of the south, and the hegemonic attempts of the those of the north to simply impose their values and culture upon less developed nations (come to think about it, this is a rather large apprehension concerning an organization to which I plan to devote two years of my life). This apprehension seems especially relevant considering my position as student fresh out of college, with absolutely no background in agriculture or agronomy (save my summer on the farm in Nebraska), who was chosen to come and promote better agroforestry and food security practices to a population of which 90% are farmers, and who have been practicing agriculture for 100s if not 1000s of years. To think that I’m really qualified to do this is arrogance bordering upon hubris. Yet again and again, our trainers and other volunteers have stressed the fact that in village, you won’t be teaching people how to farm, they will know astronomically more on the subject than you, nor will you be telling them how to farm like an American, or trying to amend what you think they are doing wrong. Instead you are simply there to offer fresh, new ideas, and provide help to people who already know what they are doing. We are told from day one that our biggest asset is not our superior knowledge (which no one would feign believe for even a minute) but rather it is the fact that we are a new face and an outsider, and for that reason will be able to effectively introduce ideas to our communities that someone from within the community may not be able to voice (as one of our trainers put it, the two ways to harbor respect and gain an audience in a village is to be an elder or to be an outsider, and we’ve got the latter going for us).
Furthermore, it is not at all as if we, the Peace Corps, as representatives of the US, are coming into villages and telling them the way we think they should operate, or introducing the new ideas that we think are of value. Instead, the village submits a request to the Peace Corps Togo office, and the villagers themselves agree upon what they think they need and what the Peace Corps can do to benefit them. In terms of cultural and developmental self-determination, this is a much better approach than much of the development community offers. Of course I suppose you could argue that the Peace Corps still has the ultimate say as to which project proposals to honor, and in this way retains the ability to enforce cultural hegemony, but to me this is a slippery slope, the whole premise of development is that aid must be given by developed countries to less developed countries, and at some point the developed countries must decide in which way and to whom aid should be given. To reject any agency on the part of the developed country or its organizations is to refute the possibility of development projects, which on the whole are probably a good thing.
But let’s not get into that. Basically, I’m very pleased with the way the Peace Corps is operating in Togo, I think it has set up a system that makes it easy for the people the PC was set up to assist to determine how they should be assisted.
Another reason today was such a good day is because I was afforded an opportunity to come back and see just how far I’ve come in learning French. Unto this point learning the language has been a source of apprehension for me, as my high school and collegiate record will show that language learning has traditionally served to do nothing for me but bring down my GPA. Furthermore, Peace Corps (quite reasonably) demands that all trainees be at the “intermediate high” level of French speaking before they are sent to post. This means that if, after your language evaluation you did not pass but were close to this level, you are kept back for an extra week of super intense language training. However, if you were not close you were simply sent home. Neither option sounds very appealing to me.
Anyway, today we had an activity called “Cocktail Français”. Essentially it was an informal get together between the language trainers and the trainees. Instead of spending the afternoon memorizing vocabulary, we simply got to talk one on one with several trainers. Walking into the session I was apprehensive as I seriously doubted if I even had 2 ½ hours worth of conversational vocab to work with. Yet two hours in, I sat back for a moment and realized that I was successfully discussing the potential flaws inherent in Nietzsche’s Übermach with one of the trainers, entirely in French. Considering that less than a month ago I could hardly greet my family (it took me until day two to figure out how to formally explain that my French was extremely poor, and by that time I’m pretty sure they had figured it out for themselves). At any rate, though I’m still not anywhere near the level I need to be at in order to pass the exam, I no longer have any doubt that by the end of training I will be; which is an extremely comforting thought.
Suffice it to say that things are beginning to get pretty exciting around here. In just two short weeks I’ll be in my future village for a week doing an in-training visit. This is mostly to get a feel for the place that will be my new home for the next two years, and start to lay the ground work for what potential project’s I may do. Next week, local language training begins (as if learning French wasn’t hard enough), and later this week all of the guys in NRM will be shaving for the first time since we’ve come to village, leaving only our now fully formed mustaches, to prove once and for all which one of us is the manliest volunteer of the bunch. Wish me luck on all counts. Until next time!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
First Week
After eleven days of going non-stop in Togo, I’ve finally found the time to write my first blog entry. I’ve retired early from an evening with my home-stay family, and am currently tucked beneath a mosquito net, sitting on my bed trying to move as little as possible in order avoid generating any unnecessary heat. Outside, my family is sitting around the dwindling stove, and preparing for bed. My homestay brother is whistling the tune I inadvertently taught him the other day while humming the song that was stuck in my head. Much to my amusement, the song has circulated around my brother’s friends, and now there exists in this small African town a folk rendition of Delta Spirit’s incredibly catchy “Trashcan”. Assuming nothing has changed since I left, the family baby, who as near as I can tell is my homestay nephew, born of my older sister (but African family trees are always pretty hard to discern), is running around pantless clapping while my brother whistles.
But let me rewind to the beginning of this trip. We arrived in Lomé early in the evening after two fairly rigorous days of travel. Although Peace Corps policy mandates that we travel to our destination using a domestic carrier, we were fortunate enough to be going to a place not serviced by any domestic carrier directly and therefore had to take Delta airlines affiliate carrier, Air France. Even when it comes to airline food, the French seem to take their meals pretty seriously and so even though the trip was exhausting, the service was incredible.
When I first stepped off of the plane in Lomé, I was overwhelmed by how instantly familiar everything felt. More than anything, I think it was the smells that gave this impression. Even at the airport, the vague mingling odors of burning charcoal fires, human bodies, and tropic humidity instantly conjured memories of my last time on this continent (although I did think it was curious just how poignantly the charcoal fire smelled, since were we in the middle of the airport tarmac).
I think from this point on, I’ve been amazed more than anything else by how incredibly similar Togo seems to be to Uganda, climatically, organizationally, and culturally. You’d think that two countries on different sides of the largest continent on earth (not to mention a continent on which in any given country there is likely to be over 50 different ethnic groups and accompanying languages) would be noticeably different. Yet the architecture seems the same, the traffic patterns are the same, purchasing cell phone minutes is the same, the rules of social engagement so far seem much the same, the fact that in the cities beer is sold in comically large bottles, and in the country most spirits are moonshined is the same, even the food is basically the same (this is not to say that the Togolese appreciate the same generally bland tastes as Ugandans, but rather that the organization of meals is very similar. More on this later). Of course, this is based on my total of eleven days of experience with this culture, and most of this has been classroom time in which I have been told, rather than seen what Togolese culture is all about. I’m sure, as a student of anthropology, I’ll look back in a few months and laugh at my sweeping comparisons between these cultures. But for the moment, culture adjustment lectures feel a bit like watching a play to which I already know the ending, I can almost mouth what people are going to tell me about social hierarchy, attitudes towards feeding guests, why riding in bush taxi’s (which are the equivalent of matatus in Uganda) is almost never a pleasurable experience etc.
At the airport we were greeted by the in countries PC director, we gathered our bags, and jumped in the Peace Corps private (air conditioned) van. At the guest house, we were greeted with a meal prepared by PC’s private chefs, and a swarm of current volunteers who had left their posts in the bush to come welcome the new trainees (and enjoy a free meal from professional chefs), and who warned us to enjoy the good food while it lasted, since we would be eating nothing but home cooked village food for the next three months of training (and probably nothing more than our own poor renditions of home cooked village food for the two years following that). The volunteers had as many questions for us (especially questions about what they had missed in the states) as we had for them, but it was definitely reassuring to a bunch of jetlagged, doe-eyed, trainees to see how at home they all seemed in this country.
The next couple days were filled with basic orientation information. Here I began to learn about some of the amenities provided by Peace Corps that I had not anticipated. I think I expected the organization of Peace Corps to resemble more SIT’s study abroad program approach in terms of what they give their participants. Whereas with SIT in Uganda the attitude was “find your way to class using local taxi’s, good luck navigating the taxi park”, Peace Corps provides an air conditioned van. SIT sent you out to the bush with the warning that you should be wary of unboiled water, PC gives you a filter and enough bleach to last your full term. Whereas, SIT warned us that we may need to share a room with a homestay sibling, Peace Corps provides volunteers with their own lodging. Of course, this difference ultimately makes sense. SIT’s goal was to expose its students to what life was like in the host country, which meant subscribing to as many local norms as possible. While this is also certainly one of the major goals of Peace Corps, it is ancillary to the primary goal of accomplishing projects which will benefit volunteers’ communities. This means that PC must often find the most effective way to do something, even if that means working outside the boundaries of local norms. Plus, SIT lasted only three and a half months, just enough time to still be at least marginally excited by the idea of living like a local. Conversely, while serving for two years with the Peace Corps, it is at time comforting to know that if you are stationed in the northernmost part of Togo and need to be in the southern coastal capital of Lomé ASAP, a Peace Corps vehicle can have you there in one day, rather than the full two it would take using local transportation (this is of course assuming that all else goes smoothing, no road closures, accidents, or down bridges, all of which occur fairly frequently in Togo).
Although I have stressed how similar Togo feels to Uganda, one major difference I’ve noticed already is the feel of the capital city. Kampala was by no means a modern western style metropolis, and expats from the region will tell you that it hardly registers as a city compared to the “cosmopolitan” Nairobi in neighboring Kenya. However, Kampala certainly felt like something larger than a small town. There were tall buildings, loud noises, some paved roads, constantly jammed with matatus with conductors harassing people through the side window to come take a ride, and diversity such that you would walk by a slum on one block, with buildings whose floor was dirt and whose walls were plastic tarps and by the next see buildings so well designed you would hardly believe you were in Uganda. From what little I’ve seen of Lomé, it by no means had the downtown feeling of Kampala. Most of the roads are dirt, the streets don’t seem too densely crowded, nor are there so many cars you can hardly cross the street, and in looking from the rooftop of our three story guest house you would be hard pressed to find a building much taller. For those reading who have been to/currently reside in Uganda, Lomé to me feels like the equivalent of a town such as Mbarara, only Lome is spread out over a greater distance. Furthermore, according to the volunteers already active in Togo, the region in which we were staying was the nice part of town, where foreign dignitaries generally stay. Strangely enough, though even in the nice parts of Lomé the city is not built up like Uganda, our guest house provided free wifi internet, a service you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in Uganda.
After a few short days of preliminary info sessions in Lomé, we departed for our training sites. As a prospective volunteer you have 3 months of training before you are actually sworn into service. Our group, which had unto this point been composed of almost 40 people, was split into our two project groups, Natural Resource Management (NRM) of which I am a part, and Girls Education and Empowerment (GEE) (The PC has so many abbreviations it still makes my head spin). GEE was sent to the large town of Tsevie, about 40 minutes north of Lomé. Here they enjoy all the amenities of big African towns, including electricity, running water, paved roads, access to internet café, ample street food, and television. Since NRM volunteers are more likely to serve in rural areas, removed from such urban amenities, training is seen as a time to acclimate us to such a lifestyle. We, therefore, were sent to the neighboring village, devoid of any of the above listed amenities save the one paved road on which cement trucks from a nearby factory fly by at all hours of the day…. But we’re not bitter or anything.
Actually, I’ve instantly taken a liking to our village. Once again drawing comparisons between Uganda and Togo, I was instantly reminded of my time back in the villages surrounding Mbale, in Uganda. The feeling is very similar, the community is small, everyone is incredibly friendly, and at any given moment you are likely to find yourself being followed by a hoard of village children (while in Uganda they would follow yelling Muzungu, here they yell Yovo, and have their own suite of rhymes and chants to accompany it). I spent my first night in my village, lying atop my foam mattress (the same kind they had in Uganda) feeling almost as if I had just come home. Perhaps this comes across as an almost clichéd sentiment connoting notions of getting back to ones roots as an agrarian farmer, or living amongst simpler people, which is not at all what I mean to convey, but rather that I felt already used to, and well prepared for whatever was to come in the following weeks. At any rate, although it was admittedly a weird feeling, it was also a comforting one for my first night in a strange place.
More than anything, my first interactions with my homestay family on that first night were awkward. They spoke little English, I spoke no French (at least none that seemed applicable, Rosetta Stone approach to language, though effective, seems to teach you some very unimportant words such as “run” and “fish” before they come around to slightly more important phrases such as “Hello, how are you?”), and so our communication was limited to vague body language, and big smiles when they fed me.
Although I am still light-years away from being conversant in French (actually hopefully only about 3 months away), my interactions with my family have since become much improved. I’ve learned all the necessary phrases in French, and have become proficiently fluent in body language.
My family, typical of an African family, is very large, one week into living here, I’ve not yet at the point where I’m figuring out just how everyone’s related (a point which is confused by the fact that all family members of a particular generation are siblings, and all those older are parents), I’m still just trying to figure out who is family, and who is just visiting. At any rate, I know that the head of the household (6 days of the week anyway, save the one day my homestay father comes back from Lome where he works) is my homestay mother. She is a very nice lady but speaks little French (although admittedly more than I do). Still our relationship is based almost entirely on gestured communication. My twenty-five year old brother, is fluent in French and close to me in age, and so has become the family member to which I’m closest, as well as my liason to the non-French speaking members of the family. Other than that there is my homestay sister who lives there, her husband, who is sometimes around (and who, like my brother, speaks French well enough to try to teach me), two young boys and a young girl, all of whom save the youngest who is just a baby, speak French at a level comparable to mine. They are all incredibly friendly, and laugh patiently as I struggle with my 5 or 6 French phrases to explain everything I’d like to convey to them on a regular basis.
Anyway, that’s been my life so far here in Togo. So far so good, and I’m really looking forward to the work I will be doing here, which hopefully I can get into a little more in depth in my next entry. Until then au revoir!
But let me rewind to the beginning of this trip. We arrived in Lomé early in the evening after two fairly rigorous days of travel. Although Peace Corps policy mandates that we travel to our destination using a domestic carrier, we were fortunate enough to be going to a place not serviced by any domestic carrier directly and therefore had to take Delta airlines affiliate carrier, Air France. Even when it comes to airline food, the French seem to take their meals pretty seriously and so even though the trip was exhausting, the service was incredible.
When I first stepped off of the plane in Lomé, I was overwhelmed by how instantly familiar everything felt. More than anything, I think it was the smells that gave this impression. Even at the airport, the vague mingling odors of burning charcoal fires, human bodies, and tropic humidity instantly conjured memories of my last time on this continent (although I did think it was curious just how poignantly the charcoal fire smelled, since were we in the middle of the airport tarmac).
I think from this point on, I’ve been amazed more than anything else by how incredibly similar Togo seems to be to Uganda, climatically, organizationally, and culturally. You’d think that two countries on different sides of the largest continent on earth (not to mention a continent on which in any given country there is likely to be over 50 different ethnic groups and accompanying languages) would be noticeably different. Yet the architecture seems the same, the traffic patterns are the same, purchasing cell phone minutes is the same, the rules of social engagement so far seem much the same, the fact that in the cities beer is sold in comically large bottles, and in the country most spirits are moonshined is the same, even the food is basically the same (this is not to say that the Togolese appreciate the same generally bland tastes as Ugandans, but rather that the organization of meals is very similar. More on this later). Of course, this is based on my total of eleven days of experience with this culture, and most of this has been classroom time in which I have been told, rather than seen what Togolese culture is all about. I’m sure, as a student of anthropology, I’ll look back in a few months and laugh at my sweeping comparisons between these cultures. But for the moment, culture adjustment lectures feel a bit like watching a play to which I already know the ending, I can almost mouth what people are going to tell me about social hierarchy, attitudes towards feeding guests, why riding in bush taxi’s (which are the equivalent of matatus in Uganda) is almost never a pleasurable experience etc.
At the airport we were greeted by the in countries PC director, we gathered our bags, and jumped in the Peace Corps private (air conditioned) van. At the guest house, we were greeted with a meal prepared by PC’s private chefs, and a swarm of current volunteers who had left their posts in the bush to come welcome the new trainees (and enjoy a free meal from professional chefs), and who warned us to enjoy the good food while it lasted, since we would be eating nothing but home cooked village food for the next three months of training (and probably nothing more than our own poor renditions of home cooked village food for the two years following that). The volunteers had as many questions for us (especially questions about what they had missed in the states) as we had for them, but it was definitely reassuring to a bunch of jetlagged, doe-eyed, trainees to see how at home they all seemed in this country.
The next couple days were filled with basic orientation information. Here I began to learn about some of the amenities provided by Peace Corps that I had not anticipated. I think I expected the organization of Peace Corps to resemble more SIT’s study abroad program approach in terms of what they give their participants. Whereas with SIT in Uganda the attitude was “find your way to class using local taxi’s, good luck navigating the taxi park”, Peace Corps provides an air conditioned van. SIT sent you out to the bush with the warning that you should be wary of unboiled water, PC gives you a filter and enough bleach to last your full term. Whereas, SIT warned us that we may need to share a room with a homestay sibling, Peace Corps provides volunteers with their own lodging. Of course, this difference ultimately makes sense. SIT’s goal was to expose its students to what life was like in the host country, which meant subscribing to as many local norms as possible. While this is also certainly one of the major goals of Peace Corps, it is ancillary to the primary goal of accomplishing projects which will benefit volunteers’ communities. This means that PC must often find the most effective way to do something, even if that means working outside the boundaries of local norms. Plus, SIT lasted only three and a half months, just enough time to still be at least marginally excited by the idea of living like a local. Conversely, while serving for two years with the Peace Corps, it is at time comforting to know that if you are stationed in the northernmost part of Togo and need to be in the southern coastal capital of Lomé ASAP, a Peace Corps vehicle can have you there in one day, rather than the full two it would take using local transportation (this is of course assuming that all else goes smoothing, no road closures, accidents, or down bridges, all of which occur fairly frequently in Togo).
Although I have stressed how similar Togo feels to Uganda, one major difference I’ve noticed already is the feel of the capital city. Kampala was by no means a modern western style metropolis, and expats from the region will tell you that it hardly registers as a city compared to the “cosmopolitan” Nairobi in neighboring Kenya. However, Kampala certainly felt like something larger than a small town. There were tall buildings, loud noises, some paved roads, constantly jammed with matatus with conductors harassing people through the side window to come take a ride, and diversity such that you would walk by a slum on one block, with buildings whose floor was dirt and whose walls were plastic tarps and by the next see buildings so well designed you would hardly believe you were in Uganda. From what little I’ve seen of Lomé, it by no means had the downtown feeling of Kampala. Most of the roads are dirt, the streets don’t seem too densely crowded, nor are there so many cars you can hardly cross the street, and in looking from the rooftop of our three story guest house you would be hard pressed to find a building much taller. For those reading who have been to/currently reside in Uganda, Lomé to me feels like the equivalent of a town such as Mbarara, only Lome is spread out over a greater distance. Furthermore, according to the volunteers already active in Togo, the region in which we were staying was the nice part of town, where foreign dignitaries generally stay. Strangely enough, though even in the nice parts of Lomé the city is not built up like Uganda, our guest house provided free wifi internet, a service you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in Uganda.
After a few short days of preliminary info sessions in Lomé, we departed for our training sites. As a prospective volunteer you have 3 months of training before you are actually sworn into service. Our group, which had unto this point been composed of almost 40 people, was split into our two project groups, Natural Resource Management (NRM) of which I am a part, and Girls Education and Empowerment (GEE) (The PC has so many abbreviations it still makes my head spin). GEE was sent to the large town of Tsevie, about 40 minutes north of Lomé. Here they enjoy all the amenities of big African towns, including electricity, running water, paved roads, access to internet café, ample street food, and television. Since NRM volunteers are more likely to serve in rural areas, removed from such urban amenities, training is seen as a time to acclimate us to such a lifestyle. We, therefore, were sent to the neighboring village, devoid of any of the above listed amenities save the one paved road on which cement trucks from a nearby factory fly by at all hours of the day…. But we’re not bitter or anything.
Actually, I’ve instantly taken a liking to our village. Once again drawing comparisons between Uganda and Togo, I was instantly reminded of my time back in the villages surrounding Mbale, in Uganda. The feeling is very similar, the community is small, everyone is incredibly friendly, and at any given moment you are likely to find yourself being followed by a hoard of village children (while in Uganda they would follow yelling Muzungu, here they yell Yovo, and have their own suite of rhymes and chants to accompany it). I spent my first night in my village, lying atop my foam mattress (the same kind they had in Uganda) feeling almost as if I had just come home. Perhaps this comes across as an almost clichéd sentiment connoting notions of getting back to ones roots as an agrarian farmer, or living amongst simpler people, which is not at all what I mean to convey, but rather that I felt already used to, and well prepared for whatever was to come in the following weeks. At any rate, although it was admittedly a weird feeling, it was also a comforting one for my first night in a strange place.
More than anything, my first interactions with my homestay family on that first night were awkward. They spoke little English, I spoke no French (at least none that seemed applicable, Rosetta Stone approach to language, though effective, seems to teach you some very unimportant words such as “run” and “fish” before they come around to slightly more important phrases such as “Hello, how are you?”), and so our communication was limited to vague body language, and big smiles when they fed me.
Although I am still light-years away from being conversant in French (actually hopefully only about 3 months away), my interactions with my family have since become much improved. I’ve learned all the necessary phrases in French, and have become proficiently fluent in body language.
My family, typical of an African family, is very large, one week into living here, I’ve not yet at the point where I’m figuring out just how everyone’s related (a point which is confused by the fact that all family members of a particular generation are siblings, and all those older are parents), I’m still just trying to figure out who is family, and who is just visiting. At any rate, I know that the head of the household (6 days of the week anyway, save the one day my homestay father comes back from Lome where he works) is my homestay mother. She is a very nice lady but speaks little French (although admittedly more than I do). Still our relationship is based almost entirely on gestured communication. My twenty-five year old brother, is fluent in French and close to me in age, and so has become the family member to which I’m closest, as well as my liason to the non-French speaking members of the family. Other than that there is my homestay sister who lives there, her husband, who is sometimes around (and who, like my brother, speaks French well enough to try to teach me), two young boys and a young girl, all of whom save the youngest who is just a baby, speak French at a level comparable to mine. They are all incredibly friendly, and laugh patiently as I struggle with my 5 or 6 French phrases to explain everything I’d like to convey to them on a regular basis.
Anyway, that’s been my life so far here in Togo. So far so good, and I’m really looking forward to the work I will be doing here, which hopefully I can get into a little more in depth in my next entry. Until then au revoir!
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