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!