A Petite Update

This past week, Joey and I hit our one-year anniversary at our post (12 months in Tabligbo, 15 and a half months in Togo!). That means, for those of you who keep asking, that if we come home sometime between June and August of next summer, we only have somewhere between nine and eleven months left here in Togo. Our COS (close of service) conference will be held in May, I think, and PC will assign COS dates to all the volunteers in our group then. We’ll be sure to let you know what our date will be when it gets assigned.

So, in our less than a year left, we’re going to keep working on two projects that have become our pet projects in the last few months: the community garden and the health clinic. We have some other secondary projects still going (like the latrine project and clean-up projects with the CVD, working with peer educators, and working with the chicken and turkey farm), but these two projects have become our focus, at least for now.

The community garden project is going pretty well, so here are some pictures of that. One is of Joey and two of our neighbors planting carrots, and the other is of Joey and our neighbor making their first harvest and sale of lettuce to a local marché lady. Other vegetables that are currently growing are zucchini and a local green leafy thing called gboma. We also have a few scraggly beets and a few peppers. We should probably get another harvest in before the next dry season, and the neighbors are talking about the possibility of using some of the money from selling to build a well next to the garden to make watering easier.

The health clinic is still under construction, although we’re almost ready to paint. The walls, windows, and doors are up, and the masons have installed a concrete ramp leading up to the door (for those who can’t manage stairs, they tell me). Last week, we had a meeting with a couple of the quartier chiefs and representatives from all the quartiers that will benefit from the clinic. About 25 people attended the meeting, and they voted in an 11-member group of people to serve as a committee to manage and oversee the income and purchases of the clinic. The group who donated the building and is organizing the project has met with the nurse and birthing attendant (a husband and wife team) who will be coming to run the clinic, and we’re all now waiting for our project web site to earn the rest of the money we need to order the furniture, equipment, and supplies. We’ve already raised more than half of the money we need, so things are looking pretty good. Thank you so much for your donations and for helping to fund our project! Once the clinic starts to look like a clinic, I’ll be sure to post some pictures.

I’m going to post some other pictures after I post this update, so scroll up!