there's something about kittens

as i write this, Bry's recently ex-kitten is purring on my chest.  Bry has been gone for a couple of days and her cat misses attention

how many Togolese does it take to kill a 7 inch snake?  As many as can find big sticks

when is a Togolese convinced that a snake is actually dead?  one word-- hamburger.

seriously, i watched a snake killing the other day and this one woman refused to accept that that the thing  was dead even though its head was mush

a snake-killing gave rise to one of the best ethnic cracks Ive heard in Togo.  I was drinking tchakpa with a friend of mine who is a primary school director.  Across the road from us, a couple of guys found a snake in a roll of thatch and beat it with sticks bigger than they were.  They brought it over for the director and me to examine.  A cluster of jumpy kids hovered over my shoulder.  Every time the snake twitched, they jumped.  Anyway, I was like "so are you going to eat this?" cause konkumba eat everything except for crocodiles.  The director was like no.  but then he was like "but if this was chez Lamba, the kids would already have it skinned and over a fire."  this was hilarious.  Lamba live across the river.  they and konkumba dont get along very well.

i found out that this weed that ive been pulling out of my garden by the armfull is actually edible.  I was at the nampoch marche with my friend a couple nights ago and I tried it. he was like "its konkumba salad"

since my nook decharged the other night, ive been watching this TV show-- "homeland."  its pretty good.  good acting, psychological and stuff.  i cant get into the plot though.  I feel detached from the terrorists-want-to-attack-the-us-and-we-have-to-stop-them motif.

since i promised kittens  . . .

 

they are cute. highly adorable. and do all kinds of kitten things.  like crap all over my my house.

it is funny to watch them when Ninghan brings in a lizard (often bigger than they are) and they try to eat it. 

last night i was sitting on my porch when Ninghan ran across the compound and jumped up on a 5 ft wall.  then she snatched a mouse out of one of the thatched roofs

then she took it inside for the munchkins to play with

having 4 kittens, ive decided, is a lot like having a kid.  they crap everywhere, yowl a lot, and keep you up all night

another thing that bothered me about "homeland" was that i couldnt recognize any of the cars in it

fyi- the kittens arent naturally pink.  the trim in my house is red, and the paint rubs off (it also scrubs off the floor along with kitten crap). 

continuing on the poop vein, Jacques drug me over to another compound yesterday afternoon to drink tchakpa.  there was this kid, maybe 2-3 asleep on a mat.  we sat there drinking.  he peed himself and woke up.  his mom brought over a bowl of rice to eat, and yelled at him to wash his hand first. they ate.  then he got up.  stood there looking at me-- and crapped on the ground.  plop plop plop.  his sister didn't even blink. she went and got some sorgham heads and scrapped it up. i tried not to read anything into this

ive been waging war on ants this week.  since it started raining, ant hives, colonies, whatever, periodically swarm.  there is this one kind of big brown ant that seems to prefer to live in concrete/mud brick walls- like my house.  i go around the outside of my house every couple of days and spray their holes.  im afraid of their burrows opening up on the inside of my house sometime.  that would be miserable

the same stuff that i used on ants, and that makes me afraid of 6-foot tall mutant ants/cockroaches coming to murder me in my sleep, is the same stuff that my friend Djabab sprays on his plow cattle to kill tumbu flies

village rumor has it that my oldest host sister, N'tido, is pregnant.  A fact that ive been hoping was my imagination for the past 2 months.  Ugh. 

existential speculations or life in Togo

I was in Kouka the other day talking to someone on the street when this guy walked past me wearing a skin-tight University of Wisconsin-Platteville tshirt.  its a small world

I dont think that god wanted me to come home from Lome.  D and I spent some quality time on the ride up from Atakpame sitting along the road in Blitta while the brake line in our bush taxi was repaired.  At least they caught it while we were stopped . . .
The next day, I called Richard at 830 to come pick me up from bina.  Then i called him at 11 something- he said that his moto was broken en route.  He finally got there about 1600 and we left.  Then I spent 2.5 hours in Manga with Jenn while he fixed a flat . . . and finally got home at like 2130.  . . .

 . . . to find bags of rice and gari shredded on my floor and the discovery that the kittens are not as litter trained as I thought.

I think that tumbu flies are best argument both for and against the idea of the world as the product of Intelligent Design.  They are definitely a great argument against the idea of a Loving God who cares about His Creation.  Unless He has singled out dogs as special objects of His divine displeasure. 

I am happy to be home. People in the south, specifically the Ewe, are different than they are up here.  The Ewe are more abrupt than people in the north.  People up here are more laid back and respectful. 

I am still amazed by how fast stuff grows here when it rains.  Including my garden.  My tomatoes are like 2 inches high after 9-ish days.  I found sweet potatoes, some kind of native squash, and marigolds coming up in my garden.  The marigolds are especially exciting.

The kittens are really cute.  They have figured out how to get up on my bed, so now they like to cuddle.  Then I feed them fish and fear for my fingers.  Oh well.

One of my new favorite things to do is to sit out with my family in the evenings and shell peanuts.  The kids can do it really fast; they crack the shells on the pavement and break them open with their fingers.  Adjai can do it with both hands.  I cant do it at all.  Well I can, but I destroy as many peanuts as I shell. So I shell them with 2 hands and sit there and let konkumba swirl around me.

Im kind of amazed by how much I read here.  I read all of Asimov's "Foundation" books.  Now I am working through McMaster-Bjuld's "Vorkosigan" series.  Jenn is re-reading "The Wheel of Time" so I dont feel too bad.

My Facebook feed is full of graduation announcements.  MDs, MAs, PhDs, BAs. . . . its kind of depressing cause that would have been me in a different life.  But, congratulations to all the grads.

The longer I am alive, the more I appreciate, or perhaps discover, all the shades of grey that color life.  For example, child trafficking is a problem here.  The other night Jenn was telling me how she interviewed a zedman who had been "trafficked" at 16.  He went to Nigeria, worked for awhile . . . and came back with a new moto and English.  He has more education and experience than a lot of people in Nampoch now, plus a way to earn a decent living in his moto.  Going to Nigeria worked out for him.
The flip side to this is the guy in Nampoch who, last month, tried to send a junior-high girl to Nigeria.  I cant figure out if she is his daughter or a relation or what.  Anyway, the director of her school noticed she wasnt in class, threatened her brother with beating unless he talked, found out what had happened to her, and called the Minister of Social Affairs, the national one, who happens to be from Kouka.  Within a couple of days, a warrant was issued for this guy's arrest and another warrant was sent after the girl to fetch her back from Nigeria.  Jack, and the rest of my forced marriage committee, take great pleasure in retelling the story of how the gendarmes came and arrested this guy.  He was in prison in Bassar for about a week and a half before he paid his fine and was released.  I have to bite my tongue whenever I see him around village now lest I say something untoward.  The girl is back now too.  Justice was served, the bad guy chastised (apparently his wife had to help him urinate after the gendarmes cuffed him . . .), and the victim returned.

Two instances of child-trafficking, one that benefited the "victim" in the long run, one that was basically a kidnapping.  The latter case makes my skin crawl; the former case makes it hard for me to universally condemn something that I found easy to trash before.  I could argue that, here, 16 is basically adulthood so the zedman wasnt really a "child" when he was trafficked.  I think that works.  I think it explains the discrepancy.  The age of consent, 18, in the US is an arbitrary rule that has become a socially relative fact.  It hardly works here where the concept of "childhood" is abbreviated at best and in no way resembles that culturally mandated period of societal dis-responsibility in the US.  The 10-12 year old girls I saw working in the fields as I biked in today bear witness to that.  They contribute directly to their family's well-being at the sake of their own education.  I find it easy to condemn people who dont send their children to school, but what about when its the choice between education and hunger?  A preteen girl torn from her home and shipped to Nigeria is tragic.  But what about when she comes back fluent in English, like the woman I met in Bina a month ago?  Still as tragic? Yes. Maybe.  I dont know.  Shades of gray.

Every time I see a horizon here, I wonder what cool stuff is over it waiting to be discovered.

Another goodbye

When I found out that I was coming to Togo, I spent a month or so checking out current Togo Volunteers' blogs.  One of them, I cant remember which, had a quote to the effect of "PC service is a series of sad goodbyes and anxious hellos."  As in you constantly have to say goodbye to amazing people as they finish their services.  They are sometimes replaced by new people whom you hope will be cool too.  I'm currently in Lome to see Jacqui off-- she was in Karen's stage but she decided to extend for 6 months.  Her post, Bassar, isnt being replaced.  At least not yet.  Her house was awesome; you could stand on her porch and look out at the Bassar mountain.  I have a lot of memories in that house-- I spent last Christmas in the bathroom there, got dumped there, made ravioli there, had a hooded onesie party (don't ask) there, etc.  More importantly though, Jacqui is leaving. A piece of the fabric of PC Togo is leaving.  She's done a lot of great things in her service.  She just finished building a school in a village in the mountains near Bassar for example.  People will remember her, like they remember most Volunteers, for a long time.  Jacqui is probably the best/ classiest dressed Volunteer I know in Togo.  That is saying a lot. Service goes on, but its like a stained glass window just lost a piece.


Anyway.

I was standing in front of my bookshelf the other day looking for something to read when I realized how much stuff by Russian, or Russian-born authors Ive read in Togo.  Asmov's Foundation series, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Rand (I refused to read Atlas Shrugged but the Fountainhead is really good), Pushkin, Boris Akunin, Boris Pasternak,  and some others I cant remember.  I have not read Tolstoy.  I am not sure what this says about me.

One thing I've always found interesting about Togo is the clouds.  I don't know if it has to do with elevation, latitude or what, but clouds here seem to hang lower than they do in the US.  It makes for spectacular thunderstorm viewing.  We were sitting at lunch today and I watched thunderstorms build out east of us, over the ocean and Benin.  They looked like towering flying saucers. The other night there were a couple developing south of Bassar during Jacqui's going away party.  The setting sun turned them into pink towers.  Then the light went out and lighting lit them up from the inside.

Its sort of amazing how much I look forward to coming to Lome just to eat.  Although, now that I think about it, its probably not that amazing considering I consider a bowl of rice covered in hot sauce a meal.  However, Lome does have the best faux pizza in Togo.  And Indian food.  And Vietnamese. And it has Lebanese food. A lot of Lebanese food.  I do not know why there are a lot of Lebanese in Togo, but I am thankful that they are here.  D likes to go to Lebanese places to celebrate her roots.

Speaking of food, I love my region, but the food situation there sucks.  We're entering the "season of famine."  Most of last year's foodstocks are gone, or used for seed.  This year's stuff isn't ready to harvest yet.  The staple food is pate . . . pate . . . and more pate . . .. Bush food ( i feel like there is a word for this but i can't think of what it is) is really popular.  Wild grapes are starting to come in.  Anyway, this is weird because I can drive south for 4 hours down to Atakpame and eat fresh grilled corn and avacados. Its the land of milk and honey -- just because its been raining there for a couple months longer than it has been up north.  oh well.

The rain difference is even noticeable between  Kouka and Bassar, and they are only like 55k apart.  Bassar is obviously greener than Kouka.  The other day, my host dad was like "Rain for Nampoch is just wind.'  Just goes to show that farmers are the same everywhere.  They are always griping about the weather. 

On the moto again: A saga of traveling in west Kara

Monday, I was in Binaparba, D's village, on my way home from Atakpame.  The trip on Sunday up to Bassar from Atakpame was hell-ish.  The bush taxi from Atakpame to Sokode was ok.  But we had to wait for like 3 hours in Sokode for the Bassar car to leave.  When it did, at like 1900, I was sitting next to a drunk guy who kept passing out on me.  And the driver went extra slow through the mountains, but I digress .  . .

So, Monday morning I called my regular zed-man from Kouka, Richard, to come get me.  Richard and I are good friends, so I call him whenever I can.  Anyway, later on, D and I decided to walk the 4k into Bassar from Bina to meet up with Saye.  I texted Richard to just pick me up in Bassar.  He called me about an hour later, said that his moto was broken, so he'd sent another guy who did not have a cellphone, so I needed to go back to Bina to meet him.  Back in Bina, the zedman showed up at like 1330, no problem, and we left.
The road from Bassar to Kabou is new and paved.  I was spacing out on the moto, listening to music and watching mountains and brooding thunderstorms pass when the back end of the moto started wobbling.  Flat tire. The zedman looked at it, and saw that the valve stem had blown off the inner tube.  He left me along the road while he went back to Bassar to fix it.  I sat there and watched thunderheads build over the mountains to the south.  Then I went and kicked a termite mound for fun.  It hurt my foot. 

The zedman came back and we continued.  We were about 8k out of Kabou, going through the new road construction, when the back of the moto wobbled again.  Same thing.  Only in the middle of nowhere between Kabou and Manga.  The only things in sight were a bridge construction crew and this line of dark clouds.  I had just been ruminating on how it looked like we could outrun this storm to Kouka . . .
I was all for finding the nearest tree and waiting out the storm, but the zedman was like, "we gotta walk to Manga to find a mechanic." Ok.  Then the rain hit.  I, for once, was really glad I had my Peace Corps-issued moto helmet.  Cause the rain was coming sideways.  Then I realized that rain shouldn't be making a "tink" sound when it bounced off my helmet.  This was just after the back of my neck really started stinging.  Pea-sized hail.  As shitty as I felt, I was glad I wasn't my zedman-- I at least had a helmet and a huge pack to protect part of me.  He had nothing. 

So we trudged down the road in the rain, him pushing his moto.  Then the rain stopped, eventually.  And the prefet came up behind us in his Toyota pickup.  He's a nice guy.  He had his driver stop, and I got in the back seat, and got a free ride back to Kouka.  This is roughly analogous to a state governor picking me up in the US.  If the US was the size of West Virginia . . .

Back in Kouka, I dried off, ran errands, and ate lunch/dinner.  The zedman eventually made it back, and came to pick me up at Bry's.  He was like "I just bought a new inner tube and a new tire. We're good now."  So, about 1600 we left for Nampoch.  Just over the bridge, the rear of the moto wobbled . . . we slide and spun around for a bit.  The inner tube blew. Again.  I was like "ok, I'm walking home."  Fortunately, a friend of the zedman passed and took me the rest of the way to Nampoch. 

I usually pay 5 mille for a trip that should take about 1.5 hours.  That day, I left at 1330, got home about 1830, and paid 8 mille cause I felt bad about the zedman blowing 3 inner tubes.

I slept all day the next day.

The kittens are getting big.  I got home and I couldn't figure out why my house smelled bad.  Then I discovered that the kittens figured out the concept of the litter box, they are just too small to get into it  . . .

 Flies bite.  They are more annoying than mosquitoes. 

So our term as the editing team of Farm to Market is finished.  It was fun.  We just finished the last issue in Atakpame this past weekend.  It was kind of a mess cause the Malaria Action Committee was meeting at the transit house at the same time we were so the place was crawling with Volunteers.  But it was good.  Read issues of Farm to Market here.

Seeing people is always nice.  After I am around a lot of Americans, though, I find myself wanting to go hide in village for awhile. 

some pics

 . . . and dust to dust . . .

working dredging the barrage

girl taking care of a baby at the barrage

kittens - -  just for you Manoba

here comes the rain

This time last year I sat on my porch and watched thunderstorms march across the southern horizon and wept. 

Now its been raining for about 2 weeks.  Not steadily, but rainy season is definitely here.  A couple weeks ago this big storm blew through Kouka (it missed Nampoch).  The marche looked like a tornado hit it.  There was this unfinished church (block walls, no roof) that was completely demolished.  Trees down everywhere.

The rain isnt good for the dam dredging project.  Shoveling/carrying mud is harder than shoveling/carrying dry dirt. 

The funeral that i mention in my last post was a lot of fun.  my cartier and a couple other villages all did theirs at the same time.  My cartier killed 6 cows (which never happens), and a lot of other stuff.  Slitting a cow's throat is kind of intense.  Bry came out for 2 days of it.  We went to a neighboring village and watched charlatan stuff for awhile (in which they tried to figure out why certain dead people had died).  The next day we went from house to house, drank tchakpa and collected hunks of pig.  It was a lot of fun.

I'm glad its started raining.  The haze has been, mostly, washed out of the sky and the landscape looks greener. 
The setting sun still looks like a vanilla wafer

I saw like 4 dead snakes on the road when i was biking into town today.  they come out in rainy season cause their holes flood.  The bad thing is that there is too much vegetation to see them . . .

So Ningan dropped 4 little bundles of joy on my bedroom floor one night a couple weeks ago.  I got back from training in Pagala and discovered that they are now mobile-ish.  Now my house is swarming with cats again.  Two of them apparently cant tell the difference between my foot and mommy . . . .

People talk about guard dogs and stuff, but what about guard cats?  Its so much more comforting to go to sleep at night with the knowledge that any creepy crawlies in my house will be a snack for Nighan.

Speaking of creepy crawlies, I am cursed with a screwed up curiosity . . . the kind that leads me to shine my flashlight down my latrine at night to see whats there.  This resulted in me spraying enough insecticide (the active ingredients of which, im sure, are banned in the US) down there to turn my latrine into a toxic hell.  Ants love immobile cockroaches.

One thing I love about it here is that there is always something new and cool to discover.  Like yesterday, I went up into the northern part of Dankpen prefecture to talk to a couple cantons about this gender equality thing we're going to do in a couple of months.  The last village i went to was up on this ridge overlooking two river valleys.  It was pretty amazing.  I could see Ghana on one side and a large chunk of northern Togo on the other. 

Does time exist where there are no clocks?  Yeah, seasons changes, stuff grows and dies, rains come and go, but does this require "time"-- the minutes and hours that constantly slip by like water droplets in a cosmically infinite ocean?  the more i think about it, the more i find that looking at my phone is a way to measure the passage of my own mortality rather than to see how long ive been sitting in a meeting. In the broad scheme of things, i really dont have much better to do than to talk to people about how to reduce child trafficking or repairing their pump.

My host dad got a cellphone.  Whenever it rings, its a big deal in my compound.  In Togolese culture (i think west african in general), there is this idea of "saluating" people.  That's franglais.  It means that when you see someone you say hi, ask how he or she is doing, ask how the kids are, etc. its a sort of a ritualistic, formulaic process that has deep social connotations.  If you dont saluate someone, its disrespectful, especially an older person.  Conversely, Togolese love it when you can say hi in local language.  No meeting starts without saluating-- late arrivals saluate everyone, and vice versa, no matter who is talking.  Anyway, basically, now that Petit has a cellphone, he calls me like twice a day when Im gone to say hi and see if i'm still alive.

So i decided to extend for a 3rd year. in case i havent mentioned this yet

Watching my host mom with my little host brother, david, is interesting.  She's tall, taller than Petit, has a gruff voice, and kind of an intimidating presence.  When I first got to post, I was kind of scared of her.  But watching her one on one with david is really cute.  He's a year and a half now, he's walking, sort of speaking, and not as scared of me as he used to be.  The other day he tried to help her lift a basin full of stuff up on her head.  He had this big grin on his face.  I cant really describe her reaction except to say that its probably in the dictionary next to "a mother's loving smile/laugh at her child."  Ive been meaning to blog about it for awhile, but i find it hard to describe.  Its just this example of unadulterated maternal affection that I dont see often. 

Yesterday we stopped in a village to fix one of the motos and like 20 kids came up to shake my hand and say hi.  then it started being a dare for the kids who were scared of me.  Just one of those things that makes me laugh on a daily basis.

I wrote this several weeks ago . . .

 . . . and i dont really remember what it was about, so happy reading

There are a couple of things I miss about the US:
~1. The ability to buy a $1 candy bar with a $50 bill.  Do candy bars still cost $1?  Here, breaking a 10 mille note (what usually comes out of my bank’s ATM machine, when it works) requires foresight and planning.  Like knowing which store is likely to have enough small bills to give you change without sending a kid on a 10 minute search for more.  You have to plan your shopping trips in order of the denomination of bills you can use.
~2.  Fans
~3. Decent haircuts.  Seriously, I’d come back just for a good haircut.  Here, haircuts for me are like Christmas—I never know what I’m going to get. Like today for example.  My barber sort of knows how to cut caucasian hair, although he shares the Togolese dislike of anything resembling bangs.  Hence why I look like I have a huge forehead in all my photos.  His clippers sort of cut my hair, after several passes.  He plays catch with the guards because they fall off constantly.  I sweat under the sheet.  I usually go home and use scissors to even out the random clumps he didn’t get.  Today, though, was especially special.  My barber shares his power line with a welder.  Every time the welder welded, the power went out. And he must have been building something big today. For every 10 seconds of cutting, there was 30 seconds of waiting.  Oh well, I have short hair now, that’s all that matters.

There is this little lake near Nampoch that was built sometime in the misty past by someone with a bulldozer for the purpose of watering cattle during the dry season.  Over the years, the lake filled up with mud, thus reducing its storage capacity.  A local NGO organized, and found funding for, a project to dredge the lake.  A lot of my friends are working on this.  I go down there some days to drink tchackpa, an essential part of a gathering of any type, and hang out with them.  Basically, people are paid a certain amount of money (1 mille 350 CFA) per day for a certain number of days (40) to work on this project.  Men shovel mud into piles, then into basins that women carry to the edges of the dam and dump.  There are like 5 wheelbarrows, but they are used more for lounging than for hauling dirt. Its not easy work.  Yesterday I shoveled an amount of lake bed in about an hour that I could have moved with a Bobcat in 5 minutes.  Or less.  Paying 100 people for 40 days of work in the dry season is better, and probably cheaper, than hiring a bulldozer or something like that to come do the same work in a fraction of the time.

The next time you are unhappy with life in the US, google images “noma”

I just worked out how about 1,350 CFA is in dollars.  About $3. 

Tomorrow is the start of a funeral fete in my cartier.  The simplest way to describe funerals is like this—the funeral doesn’t end after the burial.  There is a certain period of dancing/feasting/drinking etc that I’ve talked about before.  Then, after that, there is another period of the same thing.  This second period can happen a year later, or several years later.  Usually is what seems to happen is a group of households who have outstanding funerals get together and have a huge party every couple of years.  March is the month for this in the north.  Last year I went to one of these parties in a small village near Nampoch.  One of the traditions is that each household butchers pigs and gives chunks of meat to visitors.  I’d never seen so many dead animals in one place before.