GEE stage 2010!

 My host maman and Junior. Someone please call Baby Gap and tell them to call this kid. Adorable.

 When I had my hair braided...which lasted 4 days. Ouch. On doit souffre pour la beaute, I'm told.

Chez moi! The view from my terrace, before all my neighbors moved in. Now there are also 6 hens, 2 roosters, 3 ducks, 2 dogs, and a cat out roaming the courtyard.

Me and my host sister Ruth at swear in...she was so excited to be there, she jumped into all our group pics too.

Joyeux Noel!

I think this is going to be the most unusual Christmas ever, but I’m looking forward to it just the same. After a month of Mogou (with a couple breaks up to Dapaong), I’m ready to kick back at my friend’s house with some running water, electricity, and vegetables. She’s been a great hostess: overhead shower, yogurt, vegetable soup, Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”… it’s been quite the vacay, and it’s just started. It was so nice to talk to my fam and hear about the snow and Christmas-y things.  It was about 90 degrees again today, and since her town is about 80% Muslim, it’s not exactly “beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” But we’re celebrating just the same. I splurged and bought 2 music video DVD’s: Toofan and Akon.  We jammed to “On va vous deloger” all afternoon, which roughly translates to “Our music is so good it’s gonna drive you out of your houses.” I love how French has a verb for that. But anyways, tomorrow we’re killing a chicken and making chicken fajitas, decorating the house, and probably singing “Deloger” all day. A very joyeux Noel.

To update, Mogou is going well. It’s been slow moving, but I’m getting more and more comfortable living there. I had quite the pump saga, which is actually still continuing, but is getting better. There are 6 pumps in Mogou, 3 of which are functional right now, for 2,000 people. With the end of rainy season, the creeks dried up and the pressure on the pumps is really starting to be noticeable. There were a couple days in a row in which I couldn’t get water because there were too many people at the pump (so my water girl told me—don’t worry, I’m still too wimpy to carry all that on my head across town). So I talked to Affaires about it, and the next day he had organized meetings to discuss fixing two of the broken pumps. Great! Let’s get to it.

Pumps in Mogou come with committees, I’ve found out, so we met with the committees and discussed what was broken, where we can get parts, and how much it’s all going to cost. Unfortunately for the pump closest to my house, the part is a $40 cable that may or may not be in Lomé (the secretary of the committee is going to call his brother down there and see what he can find). At one point during one of the meetings, (after we had decided that families with multiple wives did in fact have to contribute more to the fundraising for new parts) someone turned to me and asked, “Damigou, what does your village do when the pump breaks?” Ummm, call the plumber?  Togo is teaching me more and more about what I don’t know about infrastructure. Similarly, after contemplating my gas stove, which runs off of a tank that I have to refill, I asked my parents how the gas gets to our stove in our house in America. And why don’t we have to turn the gas off when we’re done? Gas lines, I’m told, that run underground all over the country. And then there’s a meter that says how much we use. Magic! Stuff I should have thought about more… or should have asked Carrie about.

Besides problemes d’eau, I’ve been doing lots of hangin’ in Mogou. I’ve been to all the churches and the mosque, and even the Catholic churches’ picnic last Sunday. They had a clothes auction to raise money for the church, and some ladies made rice and beans and tchakba. So fun.

It was exams last week, so the director of the CEG asked that I not come up to the school because the students would be distracted. Fair point. When I head back this week it will still be winter break, so my activities will have to resume after New Years. Have I mentioned I have a chicken? Her name is Eloise, and I’m planning on cooking her up for New Years.  It sounds kind of like Halloween: people come to your house to greet you, and you serve them food and drinks, and then they continue on to the next house.  I might hand Eloise over to my neighbor to cook… she actually knows what she’s doing with la sauce.  I’ll let you know how it all goes!

Happy Holidays to everyone! I’m thinking about you and sending all my good vibes westward. Daz, I totes thought of you the other day when I was having a moment… Forward, forward, forward! ; ) THANK YOU for the letters! Megan, I’m writing back as soon as humanly possible!! I miss you all tons and will post again soon!  Xoxox

Welcome to Mogou

Good morning, Mogou! I’m working on getting used to my new routine: which involves waking up at 5:45 am. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that much different from my old routine…

It’s Harmattan season right now, which means "cold" and windy. People wear winter coats and ski caps in the mornings. I was really curious how cold it actually was when I woke up shivering, so I checked my thermometer: 71 degrees. And by 5:45 I was late and had already missed a visitor: the girl who does my laundry and gets water for me from the pump on the other side of town. In my head, I had grand designs of fetching all my water, doing all my laundry, and cooking all my meals for myself… reality set in pretty fast.  Cooking a meal (that I actually want to eat) is enough of a challenge to keep me preoccupied. I bought a bottle of ketchup in Dapaong that has saved a few meals this week.

I’ve learned quite a lot since moving to post. Number one: while “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is a really excellent book, it’s about serial killers. DO NOT read this book at night, in a house all alone, by candlelight… thought I was going to die. I’m going back to “Last of the Mohicans.” It’s at just a high enough literary level that even it there are scary parts, I’m sure they’re lost on me. Number two: Mogou is getting electricity! The electricians have been here from Lomé for the past two weeks, and they tell me they’ll be done by New Years. Really though, besides charging my computer, I don’t have much need for electricity.  Mom sent me a really baller solar charger that can charge my cell phone up to full battery after about 6 hours of being in the sun—just two days of repos. And I go through my full battery about every 3 days, so it works out perfectly.  I have another smaller solar charger I use for my iPod, and that’s it. I am, however, looking forward to what other people are going to do with the electricity. TVs? Refrigerators? This could mean a whole new world of food and information availability in Mogou. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the world right now, and have been craving yogurt for days.

It’s been really fun slash nerve-wracking getting settled in my house. I ordered furniture from the town carpenter, which is all done and looks… solid, at least. I’ve got a large bookshelf that I’m using as a dresser, and I had him put pegs on the sides so that I can hang some stuff. The cement walls are kind of tripping me up. I wanted to put nails into the walls to hang curtains over my door and front window, so I asked my neighbor if he had a hammer that would work for cement walls? Is there such a thing? I didn’t know the word, so I just said “Can you help, I don’t have the right *hand motion like I’m using a hammer*”. “Oh, right, you don’t have the strength for that! I’ll come help, I put up the curtains in my house, I know what to do.” So he shows up with a rock. And pounds the nail into the concrete wall, with the rock. Well heck, I guess I could have done that. I asked him to borrow the rock, and finished the job. I was feeling so pleased from how handy I was, I then decided to sew my own curtain for my bedroom door. Well, it’s up. It’s a curtain. As it turns out, Mom, my hand sewing skills are still just as good as they were when you taught me at age 8 : ) I’ll be leaving my front door and window curtains up to the couturière.

The really fun part, though, has been every time I walk out of my compound. Just when I start to get bored or frustrated with something (like my terrible sauce d’arachide), it’s time for me to go and meet up with someone or go do something, and that’s what turns my day around. Yesterday was World AIDS Day, but unfortunately I was not organized enough to put anything together. So I went with Affaires to Brotouga, a neighboring village, to supervise elections for their CVD: Village Development Committee. It’s kind of like a local government, in collaboration with the chief and other local officials, and they’re in charge of all new development projects. The whole process took all morning, mainly because of the time it took to translate French-Gangam. The coolest part was the actual voting. All the candidates for a position would stand in a row, and then the village members got up and stood behind whomever they wanted to vote for. Literally, standing behind their candidate.  Affaires had a lot of sway over who was nominated, and thus convinced the people of Brotouga to elect women, young people, and members of the often-excluded Fulani ethnic group to the 9-person committee.  All in all, a really interesting experience.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I met with the girls from the CEG (middle school) to talk to them about starting a girls’ club. There are 48 girls officially enrolled (out of 300 total students), and about 20 of them came to the meeting: the perfect size for a club. I don’t know how much they really understood of what I said… I got kind of nervous actually talking to them and choked on my French a bit, but I think they just liked being in the same room as “the American,” and they all were really enthusiastic about the idea of a club. We’ll try again next week.