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!