Two More Obama Village Pics

What a lovely place!

Reflections on Obama Village

There is an Obama Craze in West Africa, and it has been going strong for two years now. As an American living in West Africa I was subjected to the Obama craze well before there was an Obama Presidency. During presidential campaigning, I was politely but firmly told by more than a dozen Togolese that I HAD to vote for Obama. During the inaugural address, which I was privileged to watch on a Dutch NGO television run on a generator in one small village, I was greeted with many handshakes and treated as a small hero for voting for our first African American president. But in recent months the infatuation with the president has morphed from idolization into industry in West Africa. There are Obama T-shirts, bumper stickers, and baseball hats coming out of Nigeria and yards and yards of cloth with the president’s likeness emblazoned on them being sold in Ghana. There are buildings with the president’s face painted on the side; local businesses are named after him (Obama Café in one village, and my favorite Obama Hairstylist in another); and one of the most popular baby names in the area where I live is Obama. There is even a village in Togo which is pushed back in the bush, four miles from the nearest road, which has changed its name from Agbassou-Kopé (translated from the Ewé language, it means “male goat village”) to Obama Village and erected a life-size statue of the American President, complete with big ears and great shoes.

But despite all the idolization and the influence the American President has had on African pop culture, the people I have spoken to have little or no knowledge of Obama’s personal or professional life or his administration’s stances on many issues. When I talked with a group of people sitting in a bar in the Togolese capital city of Lomé about what the Obama administration was doing in America, no one could give me an answer. And when I pressed them to answer questions concerning the administration’s policies toward things like health care, terrorism, torture, and unemployment all I received for a response was silence. But when asked about Obama’s African policy, the answer I received was a chorus of: “Obama is African and he is going to help Africa.” In fact, little is known about the popular American President beyond the fact that his father was Kenyan. Most people don’t even know that Obama’s party affiliation is with the Democrats or who Joe Biden is. Over the past year Obama has become a brand name in Africa, and sadly enough, the icon has become more important than the essence. It has become a way to sell products and services, make money and, in the case of Obama Village, attract the attention of NGOs, which are handing out grant money to organizers of development projects in Africa. What Africans are lacking in knowledge of Obama’s history, they are making up in their knowledge of marketing strategies and American-style capitalism: Obama sells - and Africa knows it.

During my time in Africa, the Obama craze has been a double-edged machete. On the one hand, President Obama has managed to rehabilitate the American image in Africa. He has done this partly with his moderate style of governing and his willingness to create a dialogue between himself and other countries, but mostly by having family ties to Kenya and by being black. Whether good or bad, this has made being an American in West Africa great. Here I’m a hero just because I’m an American. Besides having the random family scream “OBAMA!!,” at me I have received more cadeaux of chicken eggs, papayas, and what passes for moonshine from poor Africans than I and my wife can consume, thus making us bigger heroes when we re-gift the local hooch and fruit to our neighbors.

Remember, the machete does cut both ways. Because President Obama has African ties, many Africans believe he will “help” Africa. This I’ve come to realize is just a polite way to say that Africans expect Obama to send over boat loads of USD to the African continent and that obviously I must have been sent to Africa to be the distributor of this money. The people I have met in West Africa have become emboldened by the belief that Obama is sending “help,” for me this translates into daily requests for money and a constant badgering for “gifts.” Imagine a world where you are Britney Spears and the rest of the world is paparazzi watching your every move: that’s what it’s like being an American in West Africa.

Two more Pictures for Today

Here's a picture of on of the neighborhoods which now has access to the health clinic. This was during our 19-neighborhood walk.

The other picture is of a soap making demonstration I did with a women's group. Liquid soap is pretty cool!

Winding Down...

It’s been an interesting couple of months. In January, I made several trips to Lomé with the nurse who’s running our health clinic to a pharmacy where we bought all the medicine and equipment we needed. After getting everything set up and organized, we finally opened the clinic in February. We had an opening ceremony and spent an entire Sunday driving around the 19 quartiers (neighborhoods) that will benefit from the clinic to inform people of the opening and to answer their questions about what we’ll be doing at the clinic. On that first day, the chief of the village made it a point to be one of the first clients to set a good example for the other villagers, and told everyone he was coming back to get a shot from the white girl to make him strong. The groupement president I worked on this project with has assured me that my presence there as a white person will make people even more likely to come. I was skeptical of this claim after hearing about the experience of a fellow health volunteer in a tiny village on the other side of the country who had the exact opposite experience: women in her village were afraid that she put curses, evil white people voodoo, and various other hexes and diseases in the birth control shots and implants that they were advertising at her health clinic. The president assured me that since “we live in a city, we know better and don’t believe that stuff – people will come if you’re here.” Of course, a couple of days later, we did a voodoo ceremony of our own to ask the gods to bless our clinic. So, I guess what I take away from that is that regular gris gris is okay, but we draw the line at believing in white people gris gris. That would just be too ridiculous! Oh, Togo, how we do love you.

We were also planning an official inauguration, but all of the important personages around the village (like the prefet and the mayor) asked us to wait till after the presidential election when they would have more time. So, we should be doing that in the next week or so. I’ve posted a picture here of two of the village chiefs consulting with the nurse in his new office. This past week, the nurse and his wife, who is a birthing attendant, selected four kids in their early twenties from the surrounding villages who recently finished high school to come and work as trainees and learn how to work at the health clinic for the next three years. It looks like things are well underway and under control out there, so I think we can finally call this project finished!

Joe has been working with another of our counterparts to build the new chicken farm that we raised the money for with our second Peace Corps Partnership Proposal for the last two months. The mason has built the foundations for the chicken cages and the other buildings, made hundreds of bricks, put up the walls, and he is now working on installing the beams, roofing, and windows. That counterpart has also gotten the official paperwork signed to start his own groupement to help run the farm and is working with them to write another proposal to a local NGO to pay for their first purchase of baby chickens for the farm. The other picture posted here is a picture of the outer walls of the farm, partially finished in this shot. The construction for this project has been moving along pretty quickly (unlike that damn health clinic!), so it should be done within the next month or so.

So, those are our two big projects. We recently got word from Peace Corps that Joe will definitely be replaced by a new business volunteer here in Tabligbo and that my health volunteer replacement will definitely be going to the nearby village of Ahepé (12km from us) where I’ve been working with a new counterpart to set up some work for the new volunteer. There’s a women’s groupement there who has asked me to work with them on some income generating activities, and so far, we’ve had meetings to talk about a community garden project and how to make and sell liquid soap. The garden idea is currently under discussion, and I went out and did a demonstration on how to make liquid soap there just last week. It went pretty well, and the women seem interested in hearing more ideas about income generating activities, so Joe may have to brush up on the soy milk making that he perfected last summer!

I also recently made the acquaintance of another women’s groupement in another nearby village attached to Tabligbo (a little en brousse, like the village where we put the health clinic). This group has 177 members (!!) and I did another soap making demonstration with them a couple of weeks ago, which they were really excited about. They’re working with their local village development committee to save up money to start a health clinic out in their village. At the end of the soap-making demonstration, the women were already selling some water bottles filled with soap to some curious onlookers, and were confident that they would be able to sell lots of it and save up money to put toward the health clinic project. I talked with their CVD members about the materials and equipment necessary for starting a clinic and gave them copies of all of our receipts from the other health clinic project, which should help them decide what they need. They seem like a really motivated group of women, and I hope I can help them get started on their project before we leave.

What else has been going on lately? Our neighbor’s baby, my little buddy Emmanuel, was really sick recently with fever, dehydration, and diarrhea, so I took the opportunity to teach the family and some high school kids that were hanging around for lunch how to make oral rehydration solution (volunteers swear by it!) to keep him hydrated and get him through the diarrhea. It’s sad how many kids die of that easily preventable and treatable problem because they don’t understand the concept of dehydration. Thankfully, Emmanuel got better and is back to his usual cheerful self, tearing around our compound and shrieking happily at the dog. Such a good dog to be so tolerant of kids! More than I can say for me and Joe, who have taken to waving sticks and yelling in English at the kids behind us when they throw stuff over our compound wall at the dog.

The presidential election was pushed back from February 28 to March 4 (does anyone else think it’s a little too much of a coincidence that the election was changed to March FOUR, when the president’s name is FAURE? Maybe I’m just weird). Anyway, a few weeks before the election, campaigners went nuts driving around villages in their “VOTEZ FAURE” shirts with huge speakers and music blaring and people yelling with megaphones turned up so loud that you had no idea what they were actually saying. We volunteers went on “lock down” status in our villages for a couple of weeks (restricted to village for safety), but things have been calm as ever here in Tabligbo. Joe and I walked past a voting station near our house on election day and were pleasantly surprised at the orderliness and organization of the voting process. The day after the election, the president declared unofficial victory with over 60 percent of the vote and then declared official victory a few days later. The opposition party claimed shady vote counting procedures and there were some initial protests in Lomé where opposition supporters were dispersed pretty quickly by the army with teargas. No one around our village seems to think the protests or the fact that the opposition party has contested the results will amount to anything, so it looks like President Faure Gnassingbe will stay President Faure Gnassingbe.

So, we’re winding down our service here in Togo. It’s hard to believe that we arrived here almost 22 months ago and we only have four or five months left! I suppose we’ll have to come up with a “things we’ve learned” or “how we feel about our service” kind of blog before we leave, but I think I’ll leave that till next time. In the meantime, we’ve come up with a little list of things in Togo that we’re looking forward to exchanging for things in America.

THINGS WE’RE LOOKING FORWARD TO EXCHANGING:
Lizards for squirrels
Hippie Chacos and bare feet for real shoes and socks
Mango trees for apple trees
Tampicos from the Fanmilk guy for banana cream pie shakers from the Twist and Shout
Celebrity status for anonymity
Vache Qui Rit for real cheese, any kind of cheese
Awooyo (the beer, not the dog) for Guinness
Laissez-Passers for Driver’s Licenses
A straw mat on the concrete roof to stay cool at night for a nice soft bed and air conditioning
CFAs for American dollars

Over the next few months, we’ll be finishing up the new chicken farm, monitoring the training of the health clinic trainees, working with the two women’s groups on ideas for other income generating activities, and trying to set up some potential projects for our replacements who will be arriving in Togo in early June. Before we go, we’d also like to see a few things around Togo, an initiative I started last month with a short stay at a hotel in Aneho, the former capital of Togo (when it was a German colony) down on the coast. We’d like to see the waterfalls over in Badou, for example, and the reputed bird-eating spiders near Zafi, that allegedly spin webs so massive that they catch birds in them. Worth a look, no? For those who know me best, I’m sure you’re impressed with what Togo has done to my fear of spiders. I can just hear my brother thinking: “Bree kills spiders? And she wants to go see a spider that’s big enough to eat a bird? What the hell happened to her over in Africa?”

We’ll be heading down to Lomé for our COS (close of service) conference at the beginning of May and should get to decide our COS date then, likely late July or early August. So, look for another blog in May – I promise to try to make that one a little more thoughtful and a little less just a list of what we’ve been doing (which I find boring, but hopefully you all don’t!). For the next couple of months we’ll be enjoying (yeah, right) the rest of our last hot season and planning what we’re going to do when we get home. Till next time!