Almost a year in Togo. In less than a month, on June 7, to be precise, Joey and I and most of the other volunteers we arrived with will be celebrating our one-year anniversary in Togo. Before I give the usual recap of what we’ve been up to since the last blog post, I’ve decided to include a top-ten list that was inspired by a similar list we found in an old 1980s edition of the PC Togo newsletter. We call this the “You Know You’ve Been in Togo Too Long If…” So, here goes. You know you’ve been in Togo too long:
1. If you’re not turned OFF by girls’ armpit hair, but you’re not turned ON by naked breasts.
2. If you believe having a sink is a sign of affluence.
3. If the highlight of your week is receiving a month-old newspaper from the States in the mail.
4. If hearing “même mère, même père” [same mom, same dad] to explain filial relations is necessary to achieve familial comprehension.
5. If YOU find yourself saying “même mère, même père” to describe you and your siblings back home.
6. If you show up for your 4:00 meeting at 4:55 and congratulate yourself for being five minutes early.
7. When you start referring to your hometown as your village without thinking about it.
8. When you wash your hands after eating but not before.
9. If you seriously consider schemes to domesticate the cockroaches in your kitchen and ask around to see who has a copy of Joe’s Apartment so you can see how that guy did it.
10. If you’re craving something besides pâte [pounded corn] for dinner, and you think to yourself: “You know what would be really good right now is some kɔm [FERMENTED pounded corn]!”
So, on to what’s new. Project-wise, things are still moving along (albeit, at a snail’s pace) for the plan to build latrines at six of the primary schools in our village. We’ve gotten a schematic drawn up by a technician and have selected the six schools for the first phase of the project (we’re hoping the next volunteer will take on the next two phases after we’re gone), and we’ve also sent a request to the local cement company asking them to donate some cement for the construction. The village development committee wants to submit a proposal to the U.S. Embassy to get the funds to pay for the rest of the materials, and we’re helping them with that.
To reward my four best peer educator students for their good test scores, I nominated two girls and two boys to go to a Peace Corps-organized week-long camp for students this June, and they’ve all been accepted. I hope they have fun and learn a lot! I also sent eleven of them out into the community recently to do family planning surveys to find out what the local community knows about family planning methods and whether they use contraceptives. The kids surveyed ten women and ten men each, and I got some pretty interesting responses. There seems to be a lot more variety with regard to types of contraceptives used in our village than I thought, and a lot more women are familiar with the timing of menstrual cycles than I thought, so that was interesting. One of my counterparts works for the local Red Cross, and he’s interested in doing some home visits on family planning this summer, so the surveys were a good way for us to find out what people already know and what they’re interested in knowing about.
Joe is still doing accounting with the chicken farm, the chicken/turkey farm, and the group who makes the tote bags, and he’s also started doing some accounting with a small printing and copying place near our house. They’ve been really interested in working with him, and seem to be one of the only groups that really understand in detail what he means. For the chicken/turkey farm, he’s also been working on some advertising ideas. For Schalom, Joe has signed up a local resident to go to some local businesses in the capital with the catalog I made and try to sell some of their products to boutiques there. Oh, and speaking of that catalog, I finished it and mailed them out to Rick a couple of months ago, so many of you should already have seen what I worked on for the first few months of our stay here. What do you think?
The last project that’s currently in the works is this health clinic that I’m attempting to use a Peace Corps Partnership Proposal to fund. I submitted the project in March, but there were some problems with the budget, and I’m currently rearranging that to accommodate Washington’s demands to make the project feasible. Once it’s resubmitted with the changes, the project should be listed pretty quickly on the “donate” section of the Peace Corps web site. I’ll be sure to let you know when it shows up there. It’s my hope that the clinic will be fixed and stocked by this fall. Not sure if that’s a reasonable timeline or not, but we’ll see.
Other things we have in the works for this summer are a clean-up project using local apprentices and the village development committee, a community garden in our neighborhood (thanks for the seeds, Aunt Pat!), a nutrition class to take around to local schools, and a training class to teach mothers how to make soy milk and sell it as one of those ever-popular “income generating activities.”
In non-work-related news, we made a recent trip to the Mono River, which serves as the border between Togo and Benin, a couple of pictures of which you see here. We looked for the hippos we were promised, but never saw any; they’re apparently a lot rarer than we were told originally, unfortunately! We survived our first hot season and are coming up to the rainy season once again, so we’ll be changing back to mud from all the dust we’ve gotten used to in recent months. With only two “seasons” (wet and rainy or hot and dry), it’s hard to notice the passing of time, but the weeks are slipping by us. We’ve been having dinner with our neighbors across the street quite a lot recently, and they’ve become pretty good friends of ours. My plan while I’m here in Lomé is to buy some good chicken and make them some fried chicken and French fries. Not sure how well that will go over, but they’re excited about trying a meal cooked American-style!
Togo recently celebrated the 48th anniversary of its independence, so we went to the celebration for that on April 27, and we went to another party for the Fête du Travail on May 1 (Togo’s version of Labor Day). We celebrated with our neighbors across the street and another couple they know for the April 27 fête; the wife is from Cotê d’Ivoire, so spoke both English and French, as well as local language. It’s kind of surprising how many people you meet around village who speak English! We’ll be sorry to miss the big celebration that’s being planned for Togo’s 50th anniversary in 2011. That should be fun for the next group of volunteers.
So, we’re looking forward to celebrating the one-year mark in a few weeks. Other volunteers say it will all be downhill from there… (we’ll get back to you on the veracity of that claim) ;o). Till next time!
