Wednesday, December 28, 2011

jumping sacred crocodiles and other pics



the architecture is a little different



a portrait of the artist as a young man



burkina



these are ubiquitous. and usually share the roads with massive lorries going 110kph . . .



sacred crocodile says "hi!"



another sacred crocodile munches on a less-sacred chicken



I felt like a meal. Seriously



a jumping sacred crocodile!

happy christmas

Happy Christmas from Togo

I found out on the 23rd that one of my best friends had to leave Togo for medical reasons. If you read this Sangbo, take care. We miss you.

I spent Christmas munching on Cipro and being curled up on a cot in between running to the toilet. Luckily I was in Bassar, at Jacqui’s house. She has a flush toilet. I was feeling a little better by the time they made Christmas dinner, so I ate a little. And then barfed all over the bathroom. Ho ho ho.

Early this morning the wind started gusting. Doors and shutters were banging for a couple hours. The wind died down by daybreak—such as daybreak was anyway. I woke up this morning and visibility was about 5 kilometers.

The weather was interesting coming back from Burkina a couple weeks ago. Visibility was about 2k, if that. It was like a thick white fog covering everything. Except that the air was hot and dusty. The wind picks up sand from the deserts north of here and blankets the landscape in a cloud of dust mingled with ash from the thousands of bush fires that are constantly burning this time of year.

Bush fires are interesting. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been sitting somewhere and seen random bits of ash floating down out a clear sky. I see pillars of brown smoke smudging the sky on any given day. At night, distant fires light up sections of the sky with a brooding orange glow like the crevasse of some deep inferno. The one of the mountains around Bassar was burning on the night of Christmas Eve. Rings of fire circled around a couple of the peaks for about 6 hours; it looked like a volcano gazing out of the darkness.

Cat Update for Karen: Nighan is good. She jumps up on the counter, although not as much since one night when she jumped up and straddled my lit candle . . . She and Nigarmi growl at each other on sight. Mullet is terrified of her. Nighan bats at him when he looks at her so he hides under the bed. The kittens, Stubbs and McFats, bounce around oblivious to all the cat drama around them.

My garden was spewing out all manner of green things 2 months ago. I couldn’t even walk in it without tripping over vines. Now it looks like a desert wasteland. Seriously. Dust devils starve in it. Goats, however, apparently do not.

The bad thing about internet is that you can look and see that 2 of your favorite bands have released new albums that you cannot listen to . . . .

Ouga from our hotel



D at the cafe



Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Ouga

Ouga is the first city I've been in since I arrived in Africa that actually feels like a city. There are digital billboards flashing the virtues of 150 years of Coca-Cola. There are on-ramps and overpasses. Granted, most of these run onto roads that dwindle to 2 lanes outside of the city, but still.

Lome is a city of 2.5 million or so. It has big buildings and nice stuff, but its still fairly poor. Ouga on the other hand has an actual downtown and a lot more money. I walked around a new Jaguar S-type this morning on the way to this cafe. There is a lot more wealth in Ouga, but that makes the poverty that much more obvious.

There are billboards here that advertise desktop and Toshiba laptop computers. One can buy all kinds of ornamental paving stones along the roads. At night, there are lines of sidewalk vendors grilling piles of chicken over charcoal. There are stop lights that people obey-- big ones for cars and small ones for motos. The bigger roads even have separate moto lanes for the hordes of scooters in the city.

This morning I was standing on the balcony of our budget hotel that's in the city center. I watched a gang of 5-6 homeless boys huff glue out of empty water sachets. When not high to the point of oblivion, these boys beg with empty tomato tins. Yesterday D and I watched a 3-way fight between a cord wielding corner vendor and 2 gangs kids from our balcony. The kids were arguing over something and the vendor was whipping the lot of them to run them off the corner. Its a sight we hadn't seen in Togo.

Being white here brings a different type of notoriety than in Togo. There, I am more of an oddity first and a source of money second. Here, I am someone who might buy whatever it is you are selling if you push it in my face and follow me long enough. And there are a Lot more people here selling stuff.

This only happens in the city center though. Out in the "suburbs" where Kadar's family lives the streets are dirt and rocks and people are more interested in staring at white people rather than hassling them.

Monday, December 5, 2011

the view from a cafe in Ougadougou

ok, so its an expat cafe but i like it cause it has free, and fast, wifi and because street vendors aren't allowed to come up on the veranda and shove stuff in my face.

Danielle just successfully ordered a Bloody Mary. I love it here.

I hate visas and borders. Crossing a border is one of the most stressful things I can think of. When I was in Lome a couple weeks ago, I went to the passport place to buy Burkina visas. In Lome they are 35 mille as opposed to 90 mille on the border-- so I heard. Anyway, I get to the place, and the guy is like "c'est fini." He told me to come back in a week. I said I couldn't do it, and he was like, "buy a visa at the border. 25 mille." Right.

I left Kouka on thursday with Kader. We met up with D in Kabou, spent the night in Kara, and then left early friday for Burkina. We got to Cinkasse, on the border, at about 1300. Kadar is friends with the one of the customs officials there who was going to get us across. then we found out that visas at the border cost 94 mille a person. After much deliberation we decided to head back which sucked cause one of the reasons we were going up to Burkina, besides for a vacation, was because Kadar was going to visit family. We were walking back to the station when we found a little bank. D was able to withdraw enough cash on her card to cover our visas. So about 1800 we got into Burkina.

We spent the night in Cinkasse, then took a bush taxi to Ouga. The taxi had a functioning speedometer. The driver kept it pegged at 100-110kph. That's the fastest I've gone in Africa. That says something about the condition of burkinabe bush taxis and roads . . .

Ouga is pretty cool. Its more developed then lome and it seems like everyone has a scooter. There are a lot more foreigners here too. D and I walked around a supermarket yesterday just to remember what it was like. I saw a yellow Lamborghini and got soft serve ice cream.

I am more tired of traveling now than I am when I last posted. 7 hours from Kara to Cinkasse, then another 5 up to Ouga the next day. Stuffed in a van with 20 other people. The car up to Ouga had a moto on top of it. This is not unusual. However, the genius owner didn't shut off the fuel line before he had his moto mounted, so gas ran all over the roof of the car. I've scrubbed my backpack 3 times and still cant get the smell out. Oh well. that's what cologne is for.

Otherwise, i love vacation.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Quick hits

I've spent the better part of the past 3 days on the back of a moto. We visited 16 pumps in the Dankpen prefecture in order to get estimates for the cost of replacing them. I estimate that was about 200 miles or so. I think we were on maybe 3 actual roads the whole time. My body hurts.

I've reached another point in my Peace Corps service. I've taken to buying "biscuits" for meals. These are like little graham crackers that most little stores sell. Nigarmi likes them too. I am teaching him to beg for them.

Speaking of Nigarmi, my house is like the Kitty Cold War right now. I am taking care of Karen's cat, Ninga, and her two kittens. Ninga and company live in my bedroom, and Nigarmi lives in the other room. Nigarmi hisses at the kittens whenever they come out to play with him, then goes and hides.

Next time you find yourself moaning about the condition of life in the US, go wash a week's worth of your laundry by hand.

It's been deliciously cold in the mornings. Especially at Bryanna's house cause she lives down in a little valley. I found myself shivering even. it was a strange sensation.

hi Karen, how's Thailand?

My travel clothes were so dirty after this last pump tour that it took N'Tido a half hour to get my shirt close to its original color. I was scrubbing on it for about 15 minutes while my Petit sat and laughed at me. Then N'tido came over and was like "can you do that?" I said "of course" and she was like "uh huh ok" then she came back over and was like "il faut donne moi ca." Laundry fail.

This is the time of year when farmers burn their fields. And everything else. Huge swathes of countryside burn. I passed 2 brush fires on the way to Kabou yesterday. Little pieces of burned grass floating down out of a clear sky all the time. Bits of charcoal leaves make their way into my house. I find mysterious black streaks on my hands, then realize that its just ash from something.

So I got a bag of beef jerky in the mail the other day (I give up, send it to me!). I shared some with my host family. It got a great "what the hell is this?" reaction. but it got me thinking. In Togolese cuisine, most meals come with a bit of meat, if one is lucky, or has the money. There is like a bite of chicken, or goat, or whatever, on top of whatever you get- like rice, or pate, or fufu. This usually represents one's protein intake for the day. Anyway, I was standing there holding this bag of jerky in my hand, and I realized that the pieces I'd passed out were about as much meat as my host family got at a meal. Then I realized that I was snacking on more meat than most togolese eat over the course of like a week. Think about it.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

partial post

The sky is a clear blue bowl that you look at through the haze of a smoky dive bar. The wind picked up. Finally. It kicks the heat around and beats it down to size through the compounds and under the shade. A lot of the trees are shedding. Teak leaves crumple and turn into brown sandpaper sheets. Neem leaves cascade into yellow showers that swirl in the gusts. Mango trees say "f*** you" to it all as they get ready to bloom-- their leaves staying a stubborn deep green. Bayobobs suddenly look like naked giants bearing pendulous green fruits. The landscape suddenly develops features close up but devolves into a brown blur in the distance as the grass and undergrowth dies. Vistas open up along the roads where there used to be green and brown tunnels. The dust takes on a life of its own; its this red-brown demon that works its way into the core of your life on the road. When you get home, its the grey gremlin that greets you at the door. Cotton fields vomit white and sorgham stalks bend low. Togolese wake up and wear long sleeves in the mornings. Its harmattan.

At least in the north. I just got back from Lome where I went to the swear-in festivities for the 2011 NRM/GEE stage and said goodbye to a lot of the Volunteers that they are replacing, like Karen. Before that, I went up to Dapaong to attend my stage's 1 year party. Only about half of us made it up there, but it was still a lot of fun. The northern most region of the country is beautiful. It was the first time I'd been up there.

It was a bittersweet week. Seeing people and meeting new Volunteers is always exciting, but its sad to see people leave, especially the ones who have formed an integral part of the first year of service. Chez Karen/Manoba is now chez Bryanna. Suddenly, if I have a question about something, there is no 'older' Volunteer to ask-- instead there are 'younger' Volunteers who might expect me to have all the answers. A paradigm switch in a week.

It was a fun week, but I am glad to be home. I like Lome-- I ate expensive (and delicious) seafood twice, Indian and pizza once each. I got a mint milkshake! And I enjoyed air conditioning at the Peace Bureau. But I hate the humidity and the dirt-- most of the streets are sand, so walking anywhere can be a hassle-- and dealing with expensive taxi drivers, etc. I was really glad to wake up on the bush taxi ride north and see the green of the south turning brown.

I just spent 2 days on motos touring the Bassar prefecture. We are starting a big pump replacement project that will, hopefully, replace 20 or so broken pumps in west Kara. More details to come on that.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

things

the other day i reached a new high, or low depending on your perspective, in my PC service. I didn't have any vash qui ri (a cheese-ish substance) or tabasco sauce-- the combination tastes sort of like how I image chedder cheese-- so i made myself a mayonnaise and chili sauce sandwich. It was edible.

i reached another point yesterday. i was in Dapaong, in northern togo, for a Volunteer get-together. I traveled from there to Kara. The next day from Kara to Bassar, then, yesterday, from Bassar to Lome. Through this i wore the same clothes, because traveling is really dusty this time of year. I could barely make myself touch my shirt long enough this morning to stuff it in the deepest recesses of my backpack.

togo.peacecorps.gov is our new website! actually its been around for awhile but i just found out about the address. you can read the publication that I help edit- Farm to Market, and find out all kinds of other fun stuff about life in Togo on it.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Night in Village

Nighttime in Nampoch is one of my favorite times. Unless I am mad because my laptop battery is dead or that I have to hold a flashlight to read a book or do crosswords. The past couple of nights have been a full, or nearly full, moon. There is usually enough light to see by, to cast shadows, but not enough to see if the thing moving in the weeds is a rope around a goats neck or a snake. A goat with an especially long rope once about gave me a heart attack.
Moon shadows are interesting. They outline everything in stark black. They wash out color and reduce the world to shades of gray, which might be more accurate anyway. Moonbeams reflect off dusty tin roofs and give thatch a silver shimmer.

The moonlight washes out most of the stars, but when there is no moon, the universe is laid out like a map in front of your face. I see stars and other stuff that I never knew you could see, like the International Space Station. One night I watched that soar over my head in a perfectly straight line. The other night I saw an ugly shooting star that burned up in two thick contrails, sort of like what I would imagine comes out of a dragon's snout, only in reverse.

Sometimes I sit out under the magic reseau mango tree and listen. I hear the distant thuds of girls pounding yams or maybe pepper in big wooden pestle as they make supper. There is always at least one dog yapping somewhere, and the sound of distant poultry in distress. Perceived or real, it all sounds the same. Children bawl. Last night I heard one kid off in the brush who screamed with all the rage in the world. There is the staticy hum of radio broadcasts from neighboring houses, or from my own. Music and world news 6 miles in the countryside. It is life in an audio clip.

hi stephen

Last monday, I had a goodbye party for Karen in Nampoch. Abby, Jen, Brandon, and Dani came. All my friends from village where there too. It was a lot of fun. We did a fetish ceremony to protect us against snakebite, and to ask for good luck for Karen. Then we went back to my house to hang out. Karen brought her guitar, so we sang songs while she played it. "One tin soldier," "Wagon Wheel," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Circle Game," "Hallelujah," that one song that goes "the lion sleeps tonight" in french, etc. We were surrounded by Togolese. Eventually we sang our respective national anthems. Later on, we ate a big dinner. Then someone brought a boom box and a stack of cassettes and we had an impromptu dance party. There must have been 60 kids in my compound, plus a lot of other people. We danced until midnight. It was amazing. It was one of the best nights I've had here. I like parties that take on a life of their own.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

happy tous saint day

its been awhile since i've updated my blog. i haven't felt like writing.

i am sitting on karen's porch. she is playing guitar and singing. Jen is reading a Joe Abercrombie novel. i am blogging.

i just got a togocell USB modem that makes this possible. it is really cool cause it connects over the cellular network. too bad i dont any togocell reseau in village. or electricity.

karen made some kind of soup today with butternut squash and carrots from my garden. it was delicious. i think it was like cream of butternut squash soup or something like that.

i also ate iguana, or some other comparable large lizard today. it tasted like a cross between pork and chicken. togolese love it.

i woke up one morning last week and staggered out of my my bedroom in my usual morning fog. i had to dance around the pieces of a bat that nigarmi left in the middle of my floor. he looked at me and went "meow."

the next morning i got outside before i saw anything weird. then it was little David beating a knife blade against a metal basin and cooing. until he saw me and started screaming.

Last week was post visit week. this is when new trainees leave training, or stage, and go spend a week at their new posts. This was kind of a bittersweet week. it's always really fun, if somewhat nerve wracking, to meet new people. but this means that karen has about 3 weeks before she leaves. Her replacement seems pretty cool. we had a post-visit party on friday night for the new people in west Kara. then, on saturday, we had a big party in Kara for all the new people in our region. it was a fun weekend.

Saturday was also really cool because the Guerin-Kouka girls football team went to play the Kara girls football team. Karen and i went to watch the match before the post-visit party. Kouka tied Kara 1-1! Kara scored in the first half, then Kouka scored the equalizer on what was easily the prettiest goal i've seen in girls football here. Kouka's goalie had several spectacular saves too.
It was really awesome because Kouka is out in the sticks of west Kara; they were easily the underdogs. The fact that they could come in and tie Kara is pretty cool and goes a long way to promoting girls football in the region.

it was cool enough that i forgave Kouka for beating Nampoch 1-0 on Wednesday in their warm-up match.

the weather here is changing. i noticed it when i got back up from Atakpame a couple weeks ago. the rains have stopped for the most part, to the detriment of my garden. there is a haze in the sky during the day now; everything looks dustier. it gets cold(er) at nights. the plants have that spicy smell they get when they are about done growing. everything is dustier now that the rains have stopped. harmattan is coming . . . and then hot season.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Peanuts!

I think I have eaten my body weight in peanuts over the past 2 days. People have been harvesting them for the past 6 weeks or so and I have recently gotten into eating them. There are two ways of preparing them-- steaming/boiling them in the shell or roasting them in the shell. there is no salting. People come over to my house with a pocket or shirt full of peanuts and we hang out and eat them.

Togolese have this really smooth crack, split, pop-into-the-mouth routine. i still have to use 2 hands and miss my face more often than not.

Its grilled corn season too. You take an ear of young corn and stick it in the fire until the kernals are nicely toasted, or charcoal, then eat it. so good. white and yellow corn are equally good.

I read about the concept of "slow time" in some magazine a couple days ago. I think that its a good way to characterize life here. People spend hours a day sitting under a neem or mango tree shelling peanuts and talking for example. You have time to notice and observe stuff too. I spend a lot of time on my porch doing crosswords and watching the world go back. This is especially good for thunderstorm watching. Think about spending 2 hours sitting on your porch with someone and doing nothing. its a really weird concept for americans. our self-worth is tied up in being "busy." granted, its really frustrating here when this different concept of time gets applied to things like, say, scheduled meetins, but thats just part of it.

i don't mind goats. but like 15 of them like to sleep on my porch at night. this makes going to the latrine at 2 am somewhat challenging sometimes. that and they knock my stuff over and it wakes me up. yet life goes on.

Monday, September 19, 2011

A typical Peace Corps day

Friday, September 16th, 2010, I left for Philadelphia and pre-departure staging. Friday, September 16th, 2011 was a typical Peace Corps day.

A couple of months ago me and Jen, my neighbor, re-started the Committee Against Forced Marriage, an initiative that some people in the Nampoch canton had started several years ago. As our first official event, Jen and I decided to put on a girls football match, after which the Committee members would address the audience about the problem of forced marriage.

So, a couple of weeks ago, when I got back from MSC and Bassar, Jack, one of the Committee members and an immediate neighbor came to me and was like "the football field is over-grown, we should do it at the primary school where the ground is clearer." I was like "um, the middle school ground is like 1/3 the size of a football pitch, no." Unfortunately, my mental state then sucked, and I didn't do anything about it.

Long story short, last monday, I got on the ball and bought some herbicide and got the coach to go spray the terrain (football pitch in french). I wasn't very optimistic that this would kill the weeds in time, but I thought it would help.

On Wednesday, I went to see the chief to tell him about the match and to get him to tell some kids to go "mow" the terrain, i.e. cut the grass with machetes. An hour with a lawnmower would have made my life so much easier.

Friday rolled around. The terrain was still overgrown, albeit slightly brown. I got up early, tracked down the coach, and we went to see the chief again. He called the guy he'd told to cut the terrain, and the guy was like "everyone is off trading labor in the fields today." I was bummed. Then the coach and I spent the next hour wandering through Nampoch rounding up people to help cut the field. Most of them were friends of mine so it wasn't hard. I was relieved and went back to my house to coordinate food efforts. The Committee was suppose to supply the food, I was organizing the the game, and Jen was bringing her team from her village- Manga.

Back at the house, the Committee members brought a lot of new yams for fufu, and got stuff to make sauce, but they didn't have the money to buy chickens for the sauce. I delegated people to go buy chickens, then decided to go check on the field status. As I biked by the middle school, i saw people out on the parade ground putting up goal posts. I swore.

The coach was like "the weeds in the terrain are too tough to cut with machetes, so we'll lay out a smaller terrainhere, and it'll be great." The terrain they were laying out was about half the size of a normal sized terrain and included 4 mango trees. A flag pole was directly behind one goal.

I had an internal freak-out, then helped them set up the field. And got sunburned. Seriously, you haven't really mowed weeds until you've used a machete.

As the afternoon progressed, the terrain got set up and laid out. I biked back home and coordinated the acquisition of tchakpa. Jen texted me to say that the van that came to pick them up was going to be late on account of friday prayers. The ref did show up on time. Karen had arranged his services, but he forgot his watch and didn't look too thrilled about the small field.

I tracked the coach down again and pressed him to find jerseys for the Manga team because they didnt have their own. He told someone to go collect jerseys from the cartier players.

The match was suppose to start at 3 pm. Which is about when the Manga team arrived. After Jen and I got them squared away, we discovered that the Committee didn't really have a plan for addressing the population. I found myself coordinating that and planning the match (2 30minute halves, 8 players on a side) with the ref at the same time. The President of the Committee talked to the players awhile, and Jack did too. Then we finally got the match started an hour later. In retrospect, that was actually decent timing.

I had to walk around the terrain during the match to keep from fidgeting. I was a nervous wreck. I was afraid that a failed match would both look bad for the Forced Marriage Committee and also dampen my efforts to engender a girls' football culture in the area. I was really happy, and a bit surprised, to see people get as into the girls' match as they would have a guys' match. There were a lot of people screaming at the ref, at the teams, and at each other like any good football game. When Nampoch scored, the crowd went wild. I think I remember picking someone up. It might have been my host dad.

Nampoch won, 1-0. The first goal scored by the Nampoch girls' football team.

Afterwards, I was even more surprised when a sketch group composed of a bunch of my friends put on a professional sketch about forced marriage. It was a big hit. It was all in Konkumba so I didn't get the jokes, but by that point I didn't care.

We took the Manga team, the theater group, and the Committee back to my house for supper under storm clouds. The Manga people left right before the storm hit. Jen told me later that they floated home.

The match, overall, was a great success. People have been asking me when we're going to go play in Manga. Yesterday, in the Kouka marche, a couple of my (guy) friends from Nampoch started trash talking with a couple girls from the Kouka team about who would win the next game. Friday, however, was an emotional roller coaster. I went between "oh crap, everything is screwed" to "oh wow, I cant believe this is going to work" hourly. I was pleasantly surprised when cool stuff happened without me having to coordinate it. I learned a lot about my community (one of my best friends in village is an actor, who knew?). I had to remind myself throughout the day that everything was going to work out even as it looked like it was falling apart. So yeah, over all, a typical Peace Corps day.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

More snakes and chinese flashlights

I promise that after this I will stop talking about snakes. But I'm freaked out now. So last monday, when I was biking into Kouka, I saw a big one crossing the road ahead of me. When I got back home that night, Kodjo came over and we eventually started talking about snakes. I described this snake that Alisha and I saw when we were biking back from Kante last month. Kodjo was like "yeah, that was a spitting cobra" (awhile ago he told me that those are good eating). So after that, he told me that the chief's daughter got bit one night last week but that Kodjo's father-in-law, who is a local fetisher, was able to save her using traditional methods. It was about this point that I realized that he was making a distinction between snakes ("serpents" in french) and vipers (same). When I asked him about vipers, one of which bit the chief's daughter, he was like "oh il y a beacoup ici." Crap.

My parents called me right after that talk and I sat out under the magic reseau tree and shined my flashlight in the bushes the whole time I was talking to them.

Speaking of flashlights, that was probably the 5th flashlight I've had since I've gotten here. They are cheap. I can get one for about 600 CFA. They are LED and put out a lot of light, even with the cheap Chinese batteries here (C- batteries shouldn't be squishy. enough said). However, they have to be handled doucement. The little metal plate that the battery touches under the bulb is really flimsy. If it is bent at all, your flashlight turns itself off all the time. I spent a month beating my first flashlight against things to make it work until i figured out what the problem was. Now, if I am feeling ambitious, i pry out the little metal plate and bend to back into shape. If I'm not, I give it to N'tilabi after I send him to go buy me a new one. He likes tinkering with them.

I had a really weird moment in Kouka last Sunday. I stopped at this boutique to buy phone credit. While I was negotiating with the shop owner in French, a guy asked me "are you the guy who speaks Arabic" in Arabic. I found myself holding a conversation in Arabic while getting my phone credit recharged in French. I had a huge headache afterward and found myself mixing up languages for the rest of the day.

Kouka on marche day is kind of crazy. The main road through town is laterite, ie packed red dirt (the nearest paved road is about 25 miles away). Trucks roar through town along with overloaded bush taxis (vans) and a sprinkling of cinq-places. Zeds dart through this dust storm, dodging vehicles and each other. A few lonely bikers are usually included in the mix, as well as the odd pedestrian and random livestock. Last Sunday I was headed into town on the back of a zed. there were two trucks coming toward us, side by side, as a car passed them on the "shoulder". We got around them, and another zed, by going through ditch.

Monday, September 12, 2011

stuff I forgot to add

Before I started this post, I had to squash a mosquito

Saturday, N'tilabi and Adjay, my host brothers, went hunting in the teak woods with slingshots. They killed some big bats which they cooked up that night. My friend Djabob was over hanging out with me, and he insisted that I try it.

It didn't taste like chicken. Maybe like a chicken heart. I think I ate a whole bat.

The other day I was laying in my house during repo when a thunderstorm blew up. I ran outside to rescue my solar charger, then I helped a neighbor girl sweep up piles of peanuts that were drying in the courtyard. in the pouring rain. it was kind of fun, although she was freaking out.

A big snake crossed the road today as I was biking into Kouka

Below is my mamba

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Stuff

This has probably been the weirdest, and by far the most difficult, past 10 days of my service in Togo.

Contributing factors to the weirdness- we have internet (sort of) in Guerin-Kouka now! I am sitting in my friend Karen's house typing this. Her homologue is the head of a local NGO that recently got some internet 'keys' that we can use. I think the official name for them is USB modem. We can (sometimes) connect to the cellular network. . . right now it isnt working. Oh well.

Last week all four stages (sectors) from 2010, this includes mine, had their Mid-Service Conference at the PC center in Pagala. Since the CHAP/SED stage swore in 3 months before ours did, it was their actual mid-service, whereas for us in NRM/GEE it was more like our 10 month service, but oh well. The conference was 2.5 really busy/hectic days. We had stuff scheduled all day, plus all the other committee meetings and collaborating that PCVs do when we find ourselves around each other. It was really good to see everyone again, as well as to meet new people from the other sectors. There was a bit of wrenching personal trauma at the end of MSC, but oh well.

After MSC, I went, with a bunch of other Volunteers, up to Bassar for the Yam Fete. This corresponds, roughly, the beginning of the yam harvest in Kara. Yams are one of the staple foods in northern Togo. In Nampoch, people were anxious for them to mature because corn stocks were nearly depleted and the prices were going up in the marches. Anyway, the Yam Fete was fun, except for the personal problems and the fact that Bassar's football team beat Guerin-Kouka's.

Friday was the Yam Fete in Nampoch. Karen, Jen, and Abby all came out for it. Here, it has more of a religious overtone; its regarded as more of an animist/fetish holiday because people make a lot of sacrifices for security, good harvest, health, etc. And they dance a lot too.

The highlight of the party was yesterday. I was picking stuff for people in my garden, then Karen, Abby, and Jen, went over to eat at Kodjo's house. I stayed behind to fill up my water filter and stuff then joined them. In the 15-20 minutes before we got back, a meter-long green mamba crawled up the rear wall of my house and hung out on the wall by my water jar/garden gate. By the time we got back, someone was carting its writhing remains off on the end of a stick. The Togolese response to any kind of snake is to beat it with a big stick until it stops moving. In this case, I fully endorse that action. I will post pictures sometime.

The weather is changing again. Now, the days are hot, the nights are cold(er), and there are thunderstorms almost every day. I like having to sleep under a sheet for once.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Herbs! and pictures

So after like a month, my basil AND my cilantro both sprouted. Well, i have like 20 basil plants now and 3 cilantro, but its still a big deal for me. I miss cilantro.

The flip side to this is that I'd already planted stuff over both of them. This is why I'm doing "bio-intensive" gardening.

i cant think of anything to write at the moment, so have some pictures

the dog that ate my sandal? he disappeared. its very sad. I liked him a lot. Richard, his part-owner and my friend/zed driver, was really upset about it.

I biked over to Atalote in about 3.5 hours. This includes waiting for a ferry man at the river. Just getting to the river was a pain; the paths leading to and from it are apparently intermittent streams. I was biking upstream in the mud.

check out Alisha's blog at alishawilliams.com

The other week, a pig got sick, so my host dad got some guys to butcher it. Sick animals dont last long--the idea is to butcher them before they lose anymore weight. Anyway, so several days after that, my host dad was sitting with a friend one evening eating pig. I walked by and he offered me a piece. "its one of my favorite parts" he told me. It wasn't the liver. Wrong shape, and, after I nibble it a bit, wrong texture. I eventually realized I was eating the lung. Yummy.



N'Tido, my oldest host sister, and David



A inter-cartier football game at Nampoch



My host mom planting corn with David.



Alisha during an NRM field trip



East Kara countryside



N'Tilibi, my first host brother and main 'helper'



Smoke coming out of the roof of a cooking room on a rainy morning



Adja, my second host brother.



My garden. The fence is corn/millet stalks. The bed in the background is corn/green beans. The beds in the middle, starting on the left are nursery, tomato/onion/other stuff, and watermelon/squash etc. front beds are sweet potatoes/tomatoes, and tomatoes/other stuff. i planted a lot of tomatoes. Mostly on purpose.





Blue Vinyl Brown

This dog that lives at Karen’s house gnawed off the buckle on one of my Chacos. This is dire. I’m not kidding.

During the past week the weather has been overcast and rainy. This is awesome, although not for my garden. Sunshine, as well as water, is apparently necessary for plant life. Right now it’s raining. So much for going to look for street food for lunch.

July felt like that it lasted forever. That’s probably because I spent most of it traveling. One of my stops was in Kabou and then, the next evening, Kara, for the post visit parties for the new CHAP/SED stage (Community Health and Aids Prevent/Small Enterprise Development cohort). Kara gets 5 new Volunteers this stage—3 CHAP and 2 SED. Post visit is when the new people come up and spend a week at post before going back down south to complete their training. The end of the week sees welcome parties thrown by the current Volunteers.

Last weekend, the new people got to post, except for the ones who stayed down south to improve their French. My friend, and cluster mate, Emily left her post in Namon on August 5th. Her replacement, Abby, got there that night. So I am officially no longer the ‘new kid’ in my cluster. Abby will only be the new kid until November when the new people from the next GEE/NRM stage get to post and Karen is (hopefully) replaced.

Two of my good friends COSed this month—Emily and Matt. Another round of people will COS (Close of Service) in November, including Karen. It’s a constant cycle of apprehensive hellos and sad goodbyes. You hope that the new people will be as cool as the awesome people that they are replacing . . . unless you don’t like your neighbors, in which case you just hope that the new people are cool.

So last Saturday I was covering for Karen at meeting for the trash collection project in Guerin-Kouka. The meeting didn’t really happen, but that’s another story. Anyway, during the sitting around and discussing the lack of a meeting time, one of the trash collectors came and said that one of his colleagues was in the hospital and could the trash collection bureau help out with the bills? This meant that I, with the President of the bureau, went to the hospital to see what was up.

It was the first time that I’d been to the hospital in Kouka. I bike past it all the time, and all I knew was that it had an actual ambulance parked out in front. Turns out that’s the most modern thing about it. I walked into the guy’s room. The first thing that I noticed was that none of the windows had screens. The walls were cruddy. The guy was laying on a gurney covered with a sheet. It looked like the vinyl was blue at one point in time, now it is brown. The room smelled of something too. When we got there, the guy was asleep, but there was this loud, deep rattle in his chest that I hope I never hear again. His family and the President started arguing, loudly, because the family wanted the Bureau to pay for the hospital bills. During the course of the argument, the guy woke up. He had wet himself and his wife brought in this stagnant bedpan for him to use to complete his business. We went out in the hallway where the yelling continued. After a while the President stormed off. I gave the family 2 mille and left. The yelling was in local language, and I just wanted to be out of the place. The money didn’t do much good though. The guy was dead the next day.

In other news, I lost my phone last week. It bounced out of my backpack on the way from Nampoch to Kouka. Luckily for me, someone from Nampoch, from my cartier no less, saw it and claimed it from someone else who also saw it. I got my phone back the next day, but the interim, before I knew that someone had found it, was terrible. It is sad how much I depend on a little hunk of plastic and rare-earth metals.

It takes 68 downward strokes on the pump to fill a 15 liter bucket.

Monday, July 25, 2011

two ears of corn

That is the title of a book about development. Another good book for those of you who are inclined towards gardening is "How to Grow More Vegetables." It is a book about bio-intensive gardening. We use a lot of its techniques.

Nampoch has a new (replacement) pump. I will write a post about it later.

Its grilled corn season! Women and girls grill young corn over charcoal and sell it along the roads. So freaking good. Its not sweet corn, but I love it.

It got me thinking about how seasonal the foods are here. Like cashew fruit or mangos or grapes-- stuff comes into season, gets eaten intensively, then disappears for a year. Its kind of an exaggeration but not quite.

One thing that I like about Peace Corps is that there is a high possibility every day of something happening that completely surprises me. Today, for example, I went with Alisha, Katie K, Maggie, and Ben Conway on a field trip to this farm where this guy uses extensive agro-forestry techniques. It was pretty cool. On the way back though, we were walking to town along the Route National in hopes of finding a car back to Kara. This Chinese engineer in a crew-cab Tundra pulled up and gestured at us to get in. He spoke about 5 words of French and no English. His Togolese helped told us that he is part working on the road construction projects that bracket Kara. It was really cool/bizarre. The engineer took us to Kara and even went out of his way to drop us off where we needed to be.

I am really tired of traveling. I got back to my village on Wednesday. Then, on Saturday, I went to Bassar for a west Kara going-away party for Matt and Emily Pike. Their service is done, and they are leaving in a couple of weeks. It is really sad. This is monday, and I am in Kara.

I am sort of scared to go back to Nampoch though. Last Wednesday a 1.5 year-old kid dropped dead. then Friday, a 9 year old came back from the field and dropped dead. No noticeable symptoms in either case. Seriously. Its weird.

The river has ceased to be challenging and is now scary. I took a boat across it on my way home.

I fed Nigarmi and Mullet (Nigarmi's big brother. I am babysitting him for Jen) sardines the other night when I got home. Then Nigarmi caught a mouse. Which he apparently ate whole . . . then barfed it up on my lit picot. I just wanted to share that.

I don't have any weird bug stories this time. Unless you want to check out poultry lice. Alisha's compound was infested with those. They drove everyone nuts.

I hate PCs. I have this virus that is screwing up my computer and I don't have the resources to take care of it.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Disease

I usually do not think that life here in Togo is all that different than life anywhere else in the world. Sure the details change, but the essentials are the same. Most of the time.

So a couple weeks ago I went to visit the prefect with Karen and Emily about a project. It was kind of a big deal, so I wore my Chaco sandals instead of my usual tapettes—50 cent flipflops that everyone wears. I was not paying attention when we were walking home, and the top strap on my right sandal rubbed a blister on my ankle. The next day, I spent like 14 hours installing pumps, also in my Chacos, and still did not have the presence of mind to make sure my strap was adjusted right. The day after that, Thursday, I could barely walk.

The little blister had gotten infected. Since it was right on one of the tendons in my ankle, it really hurt. I did a little surgery with a pair of finger nail clippers to get it to drain and the next day I could walk just fine. In the States, a little blister like that would heal in a day or so. If it got infected, antibiotic ointment would have it cured over-night. Ha. Another rule of thumb in the States is to leave small injuries uncovered. Again, ha. A couple months ago, I tripped over a rock one night in Kouka (don’t take street lights for granted) and messed up my toe. The next day I was sitting out side playing Settlers of Catan with Karen and Jen (don’t laugh, its cutthroat). After 10 minutes I felt a stab of pain in my toe, looked down, and discovered that flies had eaten of the scab. But I digress.

My sore didn’t heal. Every time I was outside, which is most of the day, flies were at it. Band-aids didn’t last long. Ointment was more of a stop-gap measure. I can’t remember the last night I wore shoes, let alone socks. Squeaky clean feet are the mark of a PCV who just got back from a trip to the US. I finally had to resort to putting ointment on it, followed by a Band-Aid with athletic tape wrapped around my foot.

When I first got to Togo I was bemused by these circular, nickel-sized scars everyone seems to have on their shins. Now I have one on my ankle. Well, actually now two. I scrapped the same ankle in Kouka and That eventually got infected after I forgot about it.

Anyway, the point of this lengthy diatribe about trivial health issues is this—in the US, rather, in the Midwest to be more accurate, we take for granted basic, general, cleanliness. There are fewer bugs, fewer microbes, far fewer parasites that can get us.

Case in point—rainy season has, slowly, started. This means that the bug population is burgeoning, especially mosquitos. I think that my host mom spent the entire week before last taking David and Jiddah to the infirmary because they were sick with malaria, or intestinal parasites, or both. Most likely both. The majority of kids in Togo have intestinal parasites and almost everyone has had malaria, or has it, depending on the type. One of my good friends in village had malaria symptoms this past week.

A lot of people here know that mosquitos carry malaria, and they sleep under mosquito nets and use mosquito coils etc. Basic sanitation, like hand-washing, is by no means universal, but personal hygiene is important; my host family showers more than I do I think. Kids play in the dirt here, but they do that everywhere. Disease, and parasites, are much more powerful facts of life here than in the US.

A side note. Togo, along with other West African countries, undertook a massive campaign, starting in the 90s I think, to eradicate Guinea Worm (Google it!), a particularly nasty bug that used to be endemic to the region. The campaign has been successful in Togo; there haven’t been any reported cases here for a while although I think there was one in Ghana recently. Jimmy Carter played a role in this—he is one of my heroes. Anyway, the next time you’re complaining about sub-zero temperatures, just be thankful that, because of them, you can garden barefoot without worrying about nearly as many things trying to get in you, unlike me.