Monday, December 14, 2009

The Big City, The Little Town, and a Funeral

When I had last written, my stage had just returned from our fieldtrip to the north of Togo. The next few weeks have been without contest the busiest we’ve had since I’ve been in Togo, therefore, my apologies for not being more religious with the updates. Now I’m sitting along in my little two room house (three if you count the hut outside), alone, no longer a stagiere, but a full fledged volunteer, with nothing but time on my hands. The irony is that now that I finally have the time to make some thorough entries into this blog, I am much further away from any source of electric power. At best I will be able to charge my computer once a week a the internet café in my market town, giving me significantly less computer time than I would like to write this blog. At any rate, I will do my best in the next hour or so of battery time to update this blog as much as possible to the present date.
After having returned from our fieldtrip, we had only a week of stage left and the threat of the test loomed large over everything we did. We have often compared our Peace Corps training to a Survivor-esque reality TV show. Peace Corps takes a bunch of strangers, puts them all in a small African village, and gives them series of tasks to complete (teach a middle school class, lead a community meeting on reforestation initiatives, build a solar dryer, raise a successful vegetable garden) in a language they don’t understand (French and a bit of Eve). The only things missing are the cameras and the confession booth. Going along with this analogy our language assessment would be our final, deciding task. Of course our million dollar prize is two years of monetarily uncompensated service in an even more remote African village, but it still certainly felt like a culminating event. If you don’t pass the language exam, you are kept in Lomé for an extra week and given intensive, one on one language tutoring. All things considered this is not such an awful alternative. But you have to keep in mind that your remaining in Lomé is cutting into the language teacher’s vacation time, so they are already a little upset with you, all your friend have already left the city, so you don’t really have anything to do when your not in class, and furthermore, they are all off, already volunteers, having adventures and getting acclimated to their new village while your stuck, still a trainee, in Lomé.
Fortunately, everyone from the NRM stage passed the language exam. After the exam we all packed up our bags and left for Lomé. This was an interested experience, as we stayed in the same hotel, Mamy’s, were we had all gotten to know each other three months ago. This time, we were all actually friends, and we weren’t completely dependant upon volunteers who had already been in country for over a year to walk us through every situation. It felt to me like it had been years since we left Mamy’s back in September.
Mamy’s is an interesting hotel (or I suppose more properly speaking a guest house as I feel that name places an establishment somewhere between a hotel and a hostile, which is exactly where Mamy’s lies). The place is Peace Corps official lodging quarters in Lomé. The guest house is run by none other than Mamy, who is an old east Asian woman, who spends most of the day napping, or sitting in her chair watching the world go by. Though I had little contact with Mamy during our first stay here, as I knew no French and so effectively couldn’t communicate, this time I learned that Mamy is a very nice lady, who seems to have a pretty good sense of humor (although French with an Asian accent is almost harder to understand than French with a French accent (French with an African accent, for whatever reason, is way easier to understand)). The building is set up sort of like a three story house, with a dinning room on the first floor, a living room on the second, and an open rooftop on the third. Many rooms feel pretty makeshift; mine was simply a corner of the living room that had been sections off by walls made of plywood. Each room at Mamy’s has a girls name printed on it, instead of a number. Though I’ve not heard any authoritative reports on this, the going story is that Mamy’s used to be a brothel, Mamy herself the mistress of the house, and so each room used to belong to the girl for whom the room is named. That’s the word among volunteers anyway.
Our time in Lomé was probably the most rushed and stressful time since I’ve been here. All of us were pretty much running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to say our goodbyes to everyone (those going up north have a 8-12 hour drive to come visit those in the south, and the two generally have no real excuse to make that trip), preparing to be publically sworn in as volunteers, grabbing everything we might need at post from the zoo of the Lomé market (mattress, bedsheets, gas stoves, etc), and trying to sneak in a good meal or two before we headed out the bush (Lomé is one of maybe two places in the whole country where you can find good, well prepared, international cusine). All this, we did with the two Peace Corps vehicles assigned to service over 30 of us.
The actual swear in went fairly smoothly. We gathered at the ambassadors house, all dressed in pangya (colorfully patterned fabrice from West Africa, think that generic bright clothing you occasionally see African heads of state wearing), before television cameras, Togolese government officials, and our homestay families (who the Peace Corps generously reimbursed for their travel expenses to come see us). As part of the ceremony, we all marched up individually and delivered a brief speech in the local language of the community in which we will be working. I hope it at least sounded good, as our speeches were mostly just phonetic mimicking, I’m really only about 60% sure of what I even said. After much pomp and circumstance (indeed swear in felt more like a graduation than anything), we were sworn in officially as volunteers (I am now officially working in the service of the US government). Then followed a brief cocktail party, after which we promptly returned to the mayhem of scrambling around Lomé in search of good food, and supplies for post.
We arrived in Lomé Wednesday afternoon, by Saturday morning we were departing for post. For the second time that week, we scrambled together all of our belonging (this time, after of two and a half day shopping spree in Lomé, we had significantly more belongings), and loaded them into the vans that were to take us to our villages. This like everything else we did in Lomé, was rushed and helter skelter. As a result, we realized only once we were unloading my bags in my village, that all the luggage of one of the other volunteers in my van had been placed on the wrong bus. I’ve since talked to him, and he apparently managed to track the things down, although he declined to comment on where or how he found them. It is my guess that they were loaded up on someone else’s van heading to the far north, (he along with everyone else in my van was located in the southern most two regions of Togo, plateau and maritime).
So, within hours, I was removed from the hectic bustle of Lomé to the quiet rural village where I am now residing. Truthfully it was quite a relief, and though I didn’t manage to find everything I had intended in the Lomé market, I was happy enough just to get out of there. Those who read my blog from Uganda will remember descriptions of “Old Taxi Park”, the Lomé market is the closest thing I’ve found in Togo to Uganda’s taxi park. However, I maintain that, though stressful, Lomé’s market is still significantly more orderly and less stress inducing that Uganda’s taxi park. At least here there is, generally, room to move and there is not the ever present threat of being squished between two taxi’s sitting dangerously close together.
As a side note, I believe I had commented early on about how much less developed Togo’s capital city, Lomé, seemed than that of Uganda’s Kampala. I now think that this judgement was premature, as I had only been exposed to a quiet and relatively small neighborhood in Lomé, the kind of which were also present in Kampala. Lomé is every bit as developed and modernized as Kampala. It has high rise buildings, paved roads, and truthfully the traffic is infinitely better in Lomé, the hour and a half delays on a five mile ride that were endemic to Kampala seem unlikely to happen, ever, in Lomé.
Anyway, in village I was greeted kindly by everyone, even the little girl who was apparently under the impression that I would bring her a bike upon my return, and was slightly disappointed to see that among my many household amenities acquired in Lomé, her bike was not among them. Don’t ask me where she got this impression, I haven’t the slightest idea. Life in village has been slow, but also pretty exciting. I’ve managed to keep busy by preparing a kitchen garden for myself (a considerable task considering the soil in which I’ve had to work is rock hard clay covered, literally with an inch of unmixed cement).
I’ve also been frequenting market days of nearby towns in search of some of the things I was unable to locate in Lomé (silverware, pots and pans, benches tables etc). To clarify, major towns in a region generally have a section of town marked off as market grounds. Generally once or twice a week, everyone comes into town from the neighboring villages to buy and sell everything from houseware and food, to livestock and fetch items. The markets are open air, and prices are always negociable. This is a blessing and a curse, if you are good at haggling you can generally get items relatively cheaply, but if you are a Yovo, who everyone assumes is both rich and naïve, vendors will always try to rip you off. I find that when I have a mind to, I can get what I want at low prices (sometimes even lower than what the Togolese would consider a good price), but also that I’m easily tired by these markets, and towards the end of the day I’ll end up paying too much simply because I’m too tired to negotiate. It is definitely not your one stop shop, grab and go, Walmart experience. Everything you’d like, from a tomato, to a shovel requires at least a five minute conversation (often with a vendor who’s high pressure approach would put any used car salesmen in the states to shame), in which you employ all your stubbornness, charm, and grit to get what you want at the price you want to pay. Although it is an exhausting experience, I try to look at the market as a challenge, a good chance to practice my French, and an opportunity to make friends (once you establish good relations with a “marché mama”, they will give you good prices more easily, and occasionally offer small gifts in appreciation for loyal patronage). Generally speaking, I like market days.
This past Thursday I was given my first sampling of Togolese cultural processions. My next door neighbor (and landlord’s) brother had died. Although the brother lived in Lomé, he was to be brought back to his hometown for burial. I expressed my condolences, and went upon my way. When I went over to greet my neighbor Friday morning, he was sitting under the makeshift shade covering that had been constructed in his courtyard with other family members, drinking sodabe, a moonshined alcohol made from distilled palm wine, which is itself a fermented beverage made from the sap of felled palmtrees. Palm wine smells like vomit, but tastes like pixie sticks, sodabe smells like firewater, and tastes like firewater (depending on what it was cooked on, occasionally there is the slight hint of mesquite BBQ flavoring). Mind you I came to greet him at approximately 8 o’clock in the morning. By that night, the village had doubled in population, there were large shade coverings set up everywhere, and this little village, removed from even running water, had bright lights, thumping bass speakers, and catered food. The party went all night (which is rough when you are their next door neighbor trying to get a little sleep) and well into the next day. I gather this is the African equivalent of a wake, but with louder music and generally more celebration. Interestingly, although they managed to rent out a large sound system, they didn’t have much music, so by around hour 18 of the same CD playing on repeat I could actually repeat all the words to the songs in a language I didn’t know (the Togolese, apparently, have an indefatigable love of music).
Since I had never even met the deceased, and because I didn’t want to take away from the solemnity of the proceedings by drawing all of the newly arrived guests attention to the fact that there was a Yovo living in this village, at one point I stepped out once in the morning to go grab some breakfast from some ladies who sell food by the road, and was instantly demanded money from… I can handle that in the market, or a big town where I’m just another Yovo, but in my own village it was too much, this person wasn’t a beggar, but simply a guest at the funeral who thought because I was white that I would give him money. Furthermore, he didn’t ask, but rather phrased it as “Il faut donner moi mil franc” roughly translated as you must give me 1000CFA. I simply ignored the guy as he yelled after me, as any attempt to express my anger in French would have likely fallen flat. By Sunday, however, as the festivities were still going strong, although many people had already parted, and the village once again resembled its original population, it became apparent that I was more than welcome at these ceremonies. By this time the thumping bass speakers had been replaced by tribal drums and traditional dances. The locals erupted with laughter as I was brought to the center of the ceremony to try to mimic the local dances. I was met with comments ranging from “where did you learn to dance like an African” to “you have tried…” meaning thanks for coming out, but for your own dignity’s sake, don’t try that again. Therefore, I have no idea how well I can actually do the tribal dances here.
As far as funerals go, the Togolese seem to have a pretty good idea as to how to go about it. Funerals are a very important part of the culture, when someone dies, if you are even loosely connected with them, you are obligated to go to at least part of the funeral. Inasmuch as the funerals are much more for the living than for the dead, the Togolese definitely take the right approach. There is very little official mourning of the dead, instead, the whole ceremony seems to be one big party, lasting several days, with all of your family and friends around you. At all times someone is walking around with a shot glass and a bottle of sodabe, for those who want it, and generally it seems as though the deceased is celebrated rather than mourned at these events. Even this morning, four days after the funeral process began I sat in on a dance ceremony. Sodabe was passed around and the women were dancing to what seemed like a strange rendition of music chairs. They would dance until the music stopped, at which point everyone would look for the butt of another woman to smack, and they would all erupt in laughter.
This is not to say that everyone is jovial at such events. Naturally people are sad for the loss of their loved ones. Even this morning I saw some sitting in the back, wiping tears from their eyes. But the ceremonialized emphasis seems to focus on celebrating with the living, and appreciating all being together, rather than lamenting the loss of the loved one.
That said, these funerals are often looked upon from the outside as backwards, dated, and wasteful traditions. Perhaps there is some truth to this, small villagers who live in clay houses, subsisting their own agricultural output probably can’t afford to rend an electric generator and cater a meal for everyone they know each time someone dies. However, all the same, the ideas behind the celebration it seems to me are valuable and worthy of note.
That’s all for now as my battery is dwindling. My experience at a voodoo ceremony to bring rain next rainy season will have to wait until next time. Until then!