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!

New Year’s Report Part 4: Miscellaneous

First, thanks to everyone who sent us boxes to help us celebrate the holidays! We really appreciate the things (read: food!) from home. Awooyo and Elliott von Tusky were very happy with their treats as well, so thanks again!

Second, we finally figured out where Mr. Tusky goes when he jumps over our compound wall every night. Turns out that there’s a little brown and white female cat that lives kind of around the corner from us, and lots of people in the neighborhood have seen the two of them running around together at night. So, he’s got a little girlfriend, who we’ve dubbed Cinnamon, who also, according to her owner, happens to be pregnant. Maybe we should get a gris gris collar made for her and all her babies, too? Seems to be working pretty good so far!

Presidential elections are coming up here in Togo on February 28, and a lot of people are getting things ready around village by setting up voting places. As our cluster’s “contact volunteer,” (volunteer who serves as the organizer and meeting place in the event of some kind of crisis), Joe will be heading off to a Peace Corps conference at the beginning of February to hear more about the election and what kind of local response the administration is expecting. I imagine it will get more interesting as things get closer, so we’ll try to post an update before the big day arrives.

Here are a couple of last pictures, one of Tusky peeking over our back wall in search of his girlfriend, and the other of Awooyo, chilling in her favorite spot under my chair.

Happy 2010 to everyone! Oh, and 2010, is it? We come home this year!!!

New Year’s Report Part 3: Work!

Well, to turn to the serious side of things, we currently have three big projects going. Number one, the health clinic project that I started writing the proposal for this past March. After three rewrites of the budget, giving an extension to the groupement to raise their local contribution money, reducing the amount of the local contribution, kicking out a management committee treasurer who didn’t have time to help with the project then appointing a new one, and a fight with the groupement president about honesty, money, and beds (a long story, but suffice to say that the beds will be real mattresses, not old rice sacks stuffed with straw), I finally made the trip to Lomé to meet up with the infermier to order medical equipment, medicine, and a examination/birthing table on December 23. I was pretty impressed with the infermier and his confidence choosing and ordering what he deemed would be necessary for the clinic, so hopefully that’s a sign of good things to come with him. We’re ordering a few more types of medicine and a few other small things, but I think that immediately after the New Year, we’ll be able to open for business. I can’t believe that it’s taken almost a year to get this project done, but we’re finally almost there.

Number two, is the new Peace Corps partnership that Joe is doing to expand a chicken farm and provide training for local farmers who want to learn how to do poultry breeding. As we wait for the last few hundred dollars to accumulate for the project on the Peace Corps web site, Joe has been working with the owner of the farm on marketing and selling his turkeys commercially. He got a few orders for turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas from Peace Corps and American Embassy employees in Lomé, but the most exciting thing that’s happened recently is that the he’s had meetings with a couple of large grocery store chains in Lomé for really big turkey orders. For that, he has to get a tax ID number and become a “real” business instead of just a local farm, so he’s looking into that process. He also just had a talk with his first potential paid employee who wants to come work on the expanded farm once the project is fully funded. Ultimately, things are looking promising there, too.

The last big project is the community garden, which we’ve had a lot of problems with the in the last few months. First, the owner of the land we’re renting for the garden apparently neglected to tell his brothers who are partial owners that he was renting the land to us. Hence, he was apparently just pocketing that rent money and not dividing it between all the brothers. Second, the people who are renting the adjacent land and were using the garden part rent-free before we got there, are angry that we “took” the land from them (although they were perfectly happy to buy our lettuce when our neighbor was selling it). Needless to say, this has been frustrating, but the real kicker is that our neighbor’s nephew who was doing most of the weeding and watering went back to school and took his labor with him. Hence, a lot of vegetables died recently. Our neighbor is convinced that the previous users of the land cast some bad gris gris (aka voodoo) on the garden, despite our efforts to convince him that simple watering would have prevented the problem. Either way, our contract for the land is up at the end of the year, and with all the problems we’ve been having, the best thing seems to be to pick up and move the garden to a more hospitable location. The neighbor recently bought some land of his own, and he’s expressed interest in starting a new garden over there, so we’ll see how that goes.

So, that’s all for big things. For little things, Joe recently did a small training project with a farmer on how to grow better corn, which turned out pretty well. On World AIDS Day in December, I went to another volunteer’s village to help her organize a race and some health-themed games for her middle school students. The day was kind of taken over by the local NGO, but it was well done and it was good to see how many right answers the kids gave to the questions about AIDS. Also, I’ve started working with a traditional healer to investigate the possibility of putting the next health volunteer (my replacement) in his village rather than in Tabligbo (Peace Corps would still send a business volunteer to replace Joe here). So far, we’ve had meetings with the chief, village development committee, and a local NGO to talk about their needs; we also found a potential house for the new volunteer. We sent the request off to the Director of the health program, who says they’ll likely make a decision in January or February. Since they haven’t had a volunteer in that village for many years, it’s been kind of fun talking to them over there and having some excitement about the possibility of a local Peace Corps volunteer. While people are always excited to see a yovo, it’s another thing to be excited about working with a yovo, which we’ve had a little difficulty with here.

Like last year about this time, things have been a little slower than usual with the holidays, so I think that’s all to report about work for now. In the absence of interesting work pictures this time around, here are a couple of Joey and me enjoying the things our wonderful friends and family sent us for Christmas. Thank you!

New Year’s Report Part 2.3: Fêtes Continued!

Here are a couple more pictures from our Christmas fête. Even in Africa, kids can’t resist the temptation to play in a cardboard box! You might recognize the animals in the second picture; despite popular belief, these are likely the only tiger and elephant in Togo. ;-)

New Year’s Report Part 2.2: Fêtes Continued!

As Christmas approached for 2009, the bar across the street from us celebrated by pointing a speaker out into the street (I think they pointed it right at our house on purpose) and blaring music from about 6:00am till about midnight for several days in a row. That’s really not at all an unusual way to celebrate, so we were kind of expecting that. What we weren’t expecting was the soundtrack: a standard repertoire of the usual African music, but as background to the music….every few minutes….to celebrate the Christmas season….you could distinctly make out the sound of….a howling wolfman. Wolfman is always a good way to ring in the holidays, don’t you think?

On Christmas morning this year, we celebrated with our neighbors across the street. A lot of volunteers were getting together to celebrate Christmas with a yovo party, but as we did that last year, and are kind of yovo partied out besides, we decided to fête village-style this year. And we’re glad we did! My Christmas present to Lydia and her two daughters was to have matching complets made for all of us, with fabric that Lydia chose herself. Her husband, Dominique, reciprocated with matching complets for himself, Joe, and the two boys. So, here were all are in our fancy Christmas attire! I’m only sorry (wait, who am I kidding?) that you all didn’t get to see us doing the famous dance locale, otherwise known as the infamous CHICKEN DANCE. And yes, you really do look like a chicken when you do it, in case you were wondering…

New Year’s Report Part 2: Fêtes!

After our Catholic church experience, we went to celebrate baby Natalie’s baptism with Amelie and her family. We ate fufu with peanut sauce and fish, Togo pancakes (made of beans and soy) with oil and peppers, popcorn, and red wine: quite the mélange for the stomach, although I think our stomachs are biens habitués after all this time! Here are two pictures from that fête, one of Joe trying his hand pounding fufu and the other of our little friend Stella enjoying a glass of watered-down red wine. It’s a novelty for the yovo to try pounding fufu, but the experts took it away from him after less than a minute, of course. Stella had a fancy new tresse hairdo (what back in the States would be called a weave) to make her look way older than her three years, hence, I suppose, the celebratory glass of wine to make her feel even more a part of the adult crowd.