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.