The Girls Club at CEG Mogou. They loved the letters from BEHS!

 Club des Filles!

 Big day in Mogou: Electricity!! Almost. They came to install the counter box on our house. Still waiting for them to turn on the generator.

My neighbor with her new foyer-- improved cookstove. So proud.

 TOBY!! When I first got him. He was about 2 months old.

Toby now! Emily says he looks like Toby from the Office. He's chewing up everything in sight...so far he's gone through 2 pairs of my flip flops and 2 chew toys.

I’m almost at the end of two really busy weeks in village… yeah, busy! Village! Wild, huh?

Last week my neighbor from Gando came over and we organized a tree nursery with a women’s group (project to be continued tomorrow) and made an improved cookstove for/ with one of the women in my compound. She makes tchuk (local beer made from sorghum) in a huge pot to sell every week, but until now she’s been cooking it over an open fire, and that takes up a lot of wood. The improved cookstove is made out of clay, sand, and straw all mixed together and molded over three big rocks to fit to the shape of the pot. It went really well and she’s super stoked about it. Now I’m getting requests to make stoves for other women in town, and judging by how much tchuk and tchakpa is in the marché every week, something tells me I’ll be busy for a while.

Then on Monday I ran a neem soap demo for my Gangam teacher’s women’s group. The oil from leaves of neem trees is a natural mosquito repellant, so when you make soap with it, it helps keep off the mosquitos. The women loved it, and afterwards asked if I knew how to make lotion too, (in theory, yes, I was taught how to make lotion. Expert levels of lotionmaking, remains to be seen) and they had a ton of questions about what kind of oil they could use. When I told them they have to get the nice oil in bottles from the stores in Mango, they were discouraged for a second, until one of them said, “No, wait, why can’t we use this oil we have here? It’s oil of karité, and we can make it here ourselves so it’s much cheaper.” Karité? Where had I heard that before…. Omg yeah that’s shea! As in shea butter. Yes, ladies we can most definitely use this really cheap local oil that just happens to be perfect for making lotion! I don’t think they believed me when I told them how in America, shea butter is one of the more expensive lotions you can buy. So, we’re planning to work on that project in a couple weeks when I get back from the women’s conference in Kpalimé… should be fun!

Other news headlines from Mogou:

-The electric company came through and installed counter boxes on some of the houses (including ours!!) that have already paid for the installation. Now we’re waiting for our landlord to install outlets and light bulbs and all that, and for the electric company to come back and turn it all on. Apparently we’re second on the list of villages waiting to be connected, so my estimate is that we should have it by Christmas this year. We’ll see, tho.

-They’re arrangé-ing the road from Mogou to Tchimonga, a medium-sized village to the north of us. When it’s done it should be really nice, but for the moment there are four foot deep trenches on either side of the road, which makes it pretty hard for anything that isn’t a donkey to get around.

-My taxi-moto guy, Express, got a new moto! It’s a black Sanya. Runs like a dream.

-On marché day, three teenage boys showed up on my porch with 10 Euros. “You need to exchange this for us,” one of them said. “Um, no, wait where did you get 10 Euros?” “In a pair of pants I bought.” Ah yes, the dead yovo clothes. There’s actually been a surge in Bucks jerseys in the clothes piles recently… and even knock-off Bucks attire. I saw a lady wearing a shirt that said “Milwakey Bucks” with a picture of a buck that looked more like a moose than anything else. Anyways, the bargaining continued. “Just give me 2 mille for it! Please, this is your people’s money!” “No, it’s not my people’s money. I’m an American, and we use dollars. And I don’t know the exchange rate for Euros to francs CFA. And even if I did, I am not a bank. I have no use for Euros right now. I use CFA just like you do. You can try taking it in to the bank in Mango, but since it’s two 5 Euro bills, I don’t know if they’ll accept it.” “Aw, c’mon Hélène! How about 1 mille 500?”

Sometimes, I really don’t like being the yovo.

Happy May Day!

The first of May (Premier Mai, aka Labor Day) in Togo is a HUGE holiday. Or at least it was in Mogou. Granted it was wild, but it was definitely the most fun I’ve had in village thus far. One of my Mango PCV’s and I joke about “potential friends”: people in village we would like to be friends with, thus a work in process. There are lots of great colleague-type people, the marché lady who always slips you an extra onion, and packs of kids sing/chanting your name, but vrai friends, that’s not always there. My Gangam teacher, however, is one such potential friend, and we made great strides on Premier Mai. She took me in her group of 8 women to celebrate together, and we were quite the scene, parading around town in our neon red and yellow pagne. I really won points when I tied the third pagne around my head “à l’africaine.” Oh yeah. Pictures to follow.

The holiday continued for about three days afterwards, and it put my whole village in a great mood. In Girls Club this week, the girls opened their letters from the BEHS French Club—GIANT success!! The girls were so thrilled with their correspendentes and the pictures, silly bands, etc that were included. Decorated with markers, some of them typed up with pictures from prom printed on the same page… really impressive. They read and showed each other their letters for about 20 minutes straight, and then the room was dead silent as they worked on their responses. It was really hard to tell who was more thrilled, though: me or the students.  If you’re reading this, bon travail et grand merci aux élèves de BEHS ! Les réponses viennent : )

Besides that, things in Mogou are continuing to go along. I got a new kitchen cabinet (garde manger) to keep the mice out of my food, and it has transformed my kitchen! I really like cooking now, and with an organized food situation, it makes it even better. Toby’s getting bigger and bigger and continues to follow me around… well, like a puppy : ) I don’t know what I’d do without him.

Really good news: our Camp Etoiles du Nord was approved! It’s going to be a Take Our Daughters to Work-style camp for 30 female students from middle schools in southern Savanes, set for the second week in August. We’ll bring them into Mango and do career-related activities, have them meet with women of different professions, and try out computer skills, etc. It should be really fun, and so far the girls and women sound equally excited for it. For the funding, we’ve been granted a Peace Corps Partnership, meaning some of the funding comes from the community itself, with the rest from outside donations. If you or someone you know would be interested in donating to Camp Etoiles du Nord (Northern Stars), please check out our project on the PCPP website: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=693-374. If it has you search for the project, use the project number 693-374. Merci beaucoup!!

Love you all-- I’m thinking of you all the time! Take care and ttys!