Daily Life

Now that I’ve been in village for over a month life here is beginning to take on some sort of normalcy. Every morning I wake up around 6. I’ve been trying for about a month to wake up at 5 to get that early morning run in, not so much to get it in before the heat of the day sets in but more to get it over with before there are a bunch of people outside, and I’m obliged to stop and greet everyone along the road, effectively cancelling out the benefit of the workout. I have yet to meet with success on my endeavors for the 5 o’clock get up, and I’m beginning to think I should just take the full eight hours of sleep a night, and be proud that I manage to routinely wake up at 6.
After getting up, I begin the day by watering my garden. If there is water left over from the night before, this is a fairly easy task, but normally this consist of walking the 200 or so yards to my pump with two 25 liter plastic cans originally meant as restaurant sized cooking oil containers. The water pump is analogous to the water-cooler in American offices, except that with the exception of me, it is almost exclusively the domain of women and children. This would be a very social part of the morning except that women and children are people in my village least likely to know any French. I take the opportunity to practice my greetings in Ewe. Greeting in Ewe culture is extremely important. As my Ewe language teacher put it during stage, if you are walking down a path and fail to greet someone, even a total stranger, coming the other way, then further down the road you are attacked by bandits, the stranger will remember your rudeness, and look the other way as the bandits rob you. If conversely you greet them they will come running to your aid no matter much personal danger it puts them in. In my own experience, I’ve not found any example so extreme, but I have realized the importance of formal greetings. Before you can have any serious conversation, you must the person you are talking to. Going back to the bandit example, you could never run up to someone on the path and just scream, “Please help me I’ve just been attacked by bandits”, you would first need to greet them, and then continue your panic stricken plea for help.
The greeting varies considerably given the situation, but a general greeting goes as follows:
“Good morning sir”
“Good morning, how is the family?
“The family is fine”
“How are the kids”
“The kids are fine” (this you say regardless of whether or not you have any kids, presumably they are referring to potential children, on the assumption that one day you will have kids and at that point you will have appreciated being ask how they were)
Then follows a line that has no direct translation into English (or French for that matter), but is essentially referring to the last time you saw someone. Thus if it is the morning, you would:
“I saw you yesterday”
“Yes I saw you yesterday”
If it is afternoon and you saw them that morning, you would change yesterday to this morning etc. This sounds kind of silly, but like I said that isn’t really a direct translation, I’ve also heard it translated, “Did you finish the work I saw you doing yesterday/this morning/the other day”. Regardless it’s a greeting that makes sense within the Ewe cultural context, but not so much in English. Essentially it is just a way of showing that your taking an interest in the other person’s life.
While this extended greeting may raise Romantic notions of a slower paced culture, in which people still have the time for each other, and are willing to stop and talk to people in a meaningful way, I’ve found that much like our greetings in America, greetings here are superficial formalities. Regardless of how your kids are (or whether or not you even have kids) you respond that they are fine; regardless of whether or not you finished yesterdays work you say you have. If you want to complain about your work or your kids, you wait till after the greeting, in which you’ve said they are fine in order to expound on exactly why they aren’t fine. Furthermore, people breeze over the greetings. Much to my dismay a normal greeting as described above only takes about 3 seconds, this is an impossible short time for me, as I stumble just to make the syllables come out of my mouth with any semblance of how they are supposed to sound. I suppose its nice that the culture at least nods to the importance of an in depth interest in the lives of others (even total strangers) before embarking on a conversation, but much as you would automatically say “well” when someone says “how’s it going” these greetings are just as formulaic as ours.
Taking the full cans of water back, I’ve found, is a good work out in lieu of my hypothetical 5 o’clock runs. The garden is coming along very well much to my relief. The plot of land I took was more gravel and sand than anything resembling soil, which made me nervous that my person garden would be a total failure, causing the villagers to lose confidence in my ability to help them embark on new agricultural endeavors, which directly affect their livelihood. Thankfully it’s apparently true what they say, with the right soil preparation you can turn a parking lot into a blooming bountiful vegetable garden.
After watering the garden, I normally go outside where the ladies by the road sell food. In the morning they sell boule for 25CFA a bowl (or 5 cents USD), which is essentially porridge. Boule can be made from a variety of cereals, but the kind sold by the road is either corn boule, or sorghum boule. Personally I prefer the sorghum boule. It has a certain spice to it that just vaguely registers as a burning in the back of your throat. It’s this red and goes down smooth. Corn boule is also good, but for some reason it’s lumpy, it is blander flavored than the sorghum variety, and since there isn’t sufficient protein in corn alone, in order to get a nutritious meal, you’ve got to buy some peanuts to throw in there as well (which will cost you another 5 cents). Hanging around the vendors is another chance for early morning socialization. Villagers stop buy to grab some breakfast and kill some time before heading off to work in the field, school has not started yet, so all the students hang around waiting for the morning bell (which is actually not a bell at all but rather an elaborate drum beat played on native animal skin drums, it’s way coolers, but it upsets me to think that that sweet sound must give some students the instinctive recoil of disappointment that the morning bell used to give me in high school).
I’ve struck up a friendship with one of the ladies who sell food (she normally sells little “gateaus” as she calls them, as well as bowls of beans sprinkled with cassava flour and pepper. The mixure is addictingly delicious. She is the one vendor who speaks French, and so she always helps me communicate with the other vendors. Furthermore, she loves to talk about the village and has helped me to get an understanding of who to talk to for certain things, as well as more simply just how village life works. She also offers a unique perspective, since she is not a native to the village, she can look at it with slightly more unbiased eyes. She actually comes from Burkina Faso, but moved hear with her husband.
On top of all that, she is often generous with gifts of free food. This started, I believe, when she asked me to bring her back some bread one day from market. I didn’t know then that everyone asks you this when your going to market (especially if you are perceived as a rich Yovo), if fact any time you go anywhere upon your return someone (anyone really) is bound to ask you “Where’s my gift”. I’ve found the best response is to joke back “Its where you left my gift from the other day when you went to town” or something along those lines. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling necessarily obliged to buy her bread, but I also did not yet know that this was a common semi-joke of a request that should probably be ignored, unless you want to personally provide a constant supply of bread for the entire village, and so I brought her back some bread. She was dumbfounded. “You know that was a joke, right?” was her first response. Nonetheless she gratefully accepted, and ever since they has been general about the occasional free bowl, which is nice, considering its sometime hard to find change so small, especially considering the bank will often issue withdrawls in 10,000 CFA notes. Short of large purchases like a stove or a bed, this denomination is about as useful in village (and even in the marchés) as monopoly money. Nothing is that expensive, and no one has the change.
At first I was weary of accepting gifts from people here, as its painfully obvious that, if anything, I’m the one in the position to give gifts. The 50 CFA a bowl of beans will bring her is a significant percentage of total profit for a food vendor, to me, it is 10 cents. However, I then remembered a book I read in one of my Anthropology classes. It was an ethnography of the Kabye people (who live just north of the Ewe people among whom I live here in Togo). In Kabye culture, the more gifts you give to someone the more power you have over them, as they must then at least marginally be in your service until they have repaid you with a bigger and better gift. If I remember correctly the author actually gives the example of the food vendor lady who has barely any money whatsoever, but because she gives food gifts to the chief (the richest and most powerful man in her village) can coerces (for lack of a less forceful word) him into doing her favours, he is in her power. In the importance people place on gifts here, it would seem attitudes of the Ewe are remarkably similar (what’s more this vendor is not an Ewe, and comes from up north). Though I was at first slightly reluctant to become entangled in this system of indebtedness, I suppose it’s inevitable, and so in exchange for the occasional bowl of beans, every now an then I make sure to bring her back some fruit, or bread or something from the marché. Most lately, I’ve built her an improved cook stove, which through better conservation of heat, cooks more quickly and uses less wood. Since she is cooking beans all day, I hope it will be a huge relief on her need to search for firewood.
In a much more obviously pronounced example of this inaction. I’ve become indebted with gifts from a lady who sells Tsuke at my marché. She actually is Kabye, come down from the north. As Tsuke is the traditional beer of the Kabye, she makes it better than anyone I’ve met down here. Every time I go pay her a visit she gives me a free calabash of Tsuke. Last week, I drank three calabashes, each one costs 50cfa. When I went to pay, she simply said, “Next week, bring me a surprise gift, and we’ll call it even. I figure something in the range of 500cfa or about 1 dollar will keep me out of debt for a while. But what a great system, and she uses it pretty masterfully. According to the author of the book I mentioned, to the Kabye (and it seems to the Ewe among whom I live as well), life is very much defined by the interconnected system of social relations that are reinforced by the obligations bestowed by gift giving. It’s kind of a cool way to think about life. Defining the individual as simply a point in an complex web of interdependence runs counter to the strongly held notion of American independence (the whole self-reliance thing). But I think that the interconnected web model is a much more accurate description of life. Self-reliance is a myth, I’m reminded of an essay by some economist I learned about back in high school, in which the author asserts that no one in the world knows how to make a pencil. He justifies his argument by saying that without the lumber industry, the pencil maker would have no wood, without the graffite mines there would be no lead, without copper mines no metal to connect the eraser, and without chemist making synthetic rubber, no eraser either. Thus, from start to finish (and not even counting the industries of transportation of these raw materials, or the industries that make the machines that bring these materials together in the form of a pencil) it takes many completely unrelated industries to make a pencil and thus no one person in the world can make a pencil. It is precisely the specialization skilled labour which has, if anything, increased our dependence upon other people. I would argue that the monied economy, through commodity fetishism, has created the illusion of self-reliance.
Here, in an economy much less reliant on money, but instead on gift exchange, the web of interconnectedness that binds people together is much more apparent, and I think it’s a very cool way to look at life.
So all these digressions have taken me to the limit of my battery life, though I’ve not managed to talk about the voodoo ceremony I promised from last time, nor about my Christmas, or my New Years celebration in village. On top of all that I’ve only managed to get through breakfast of my daily routine in this post. All the same, battery life dwindles and I should probably go out and see what my village is up to on this Sunday morning. The voodoo, New Years, and the remaining 90% of my daily life will all come next time.