Hello, all! Long time no post... and sorry, this one is kind of a teaser. I promise more to come very soon (right after I finish my Men As Partners training conference this week).
In the meantime, Camp Etoiles du Nord is back again this year! Like last summer, we're bringing 30 top female students from villages all over our prefecture into Mango for a week of fun! The girls will meet professional women from the area, tour workplaces and learn about different careers, and gain life skills through sessions on self-confidence, contraceptive use, time-management, setting objectives, etc. This is a really great project and one of the best things I've done during my service; last year's participants still talk about their time at camp, and I have seen such a difference in their confidence, leadership, and schoolwork. Check out the link for more info (and to donate!): https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projdetail&projdesc=693-401

Grand merci! : )

I had a really great moment with a Togolese friend of mine, the director of the elementary school last marché day. We were sitting in the bar, chatting like usual, when he asks, “What does your shirt say? GW woohhmeenss creuugggh?” “Oh dear,” I thought. How do you explain rowing to a guy to whom “sport” means only soccer? And who has maybe never been in a boat. So I started… “Well, when I was in university, I did a sport that I don’t think we have in Togo… there are these long boats with 8 people in them, all using, uh, sticks to make them go fast in the water, and they race other boats. And we got these shirts made for the team.” “Oh yeah, I think I saw that on TV once,” he replied, and then looked kind of pensive. “Village life sure is interesting, isn’t it?” he asked. I didn’t know what he was going for… I assured him that I was very happy here… “No no, I mean to say, isn’t life interesting? You look at where you’ve been, where you come from, where you are now, and can’t help but wonder where you’re going to go next. Interesting.” I was floored. First that he’d seen rowing on TV. But also because it seemed like he really got it: how strange it is for me to be here, coming from my old American life and living in rural Togo. Mogou is so familiar to me now—I’m not shocked every time I walk out my front door. But thinking about how two years ago (wow, that’s sounding long) I would spend large portions of my day rowing, something so beyond foreign to Togo that I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it… I was glad my friend made me stop and appreciate where I am.

In other news, I got a cat! A kitten, really. It seemed like a good idea… I’m sick of my mouse problem, and walking behind my house I saw that my neighbor’s cat had cute little white and black kittens, so I bought one. His name is Leo, and he hates me. Well, all people, I guess, and he’s scared of Toby. I kept him in my house, terrified, for three days, before he made a mess of the place and I moved him to the yard. I’ve kept Toby away from him as much as possible, given him lots of milk and dried little fish, but he’s still scared to death of me and hisses if I get too close. I guess he wasn’t petted or handled at all by my neighbors, and getting taken away from his mother must have been traumatizing…but really now, he’s definitely big enough, and I am not a scary human. Toby liked me and let me hold him from day one. Leo tried to claw and bite my hand off when I set him down next to the milk. I just don’t get cats. My friends and neighbors say he’ll get over it soon, so here’s hoping.

I’ve been spending lots of time in Mogou, which has been relaxing if nothing else. We just had the fete of Dako, which is the “quiet festival” of Mogou. For four days, the village has to be very quiet so as not to upset the fetish (sacred area/ rock/ the gods in animist tradition) of Mogou, who doesn’t like noise from radios, singing, dancing, cars/ trucks, etc. So everyone is supposed to make lots of tchakpa (sorghum beer) and sit around with their family and drink it. Very quietly. They turned off our electricity so as to remove the temptation of playing loud music at night, and told the road construction workers to come back next week because their trucks were upsetting the fetish. Besides the loss of electricity and trucks (our road is a mess), this was awesome… normally people play their radios at top volume all night, but with four days of silence, I got plenty of sleep. My PCV friend came in from Mango to celebrate the end of the fete with us, which was really cool to see. All the women from Mogou danced bambatti, a group dance where the ladies go two by two into the middle of the circle and bump butts, with not a little bit of force. Then the fetishers (witchdoctors) got together and did the ceremony for the fetish, pouring water and sorghum flour on the rock to thank the gods for a good harvest and to assure a good planting season and harvest next year. Dako also marks the beginning of hot season, so now it’s been getting warmer and warmer… I’m not sure if I’m ready! I still need to get a standing fan.

Girls’ Club goes on… Affaires and I decided to mix it up last week and included the boys. We did a Men As Partners (MAP) activity with the mixed group, which introduces ideas of gender equity and challenges the students to debate and question gender norms. The event was fueled by American candy and by the end, the students were more interested in the Starbursts than the debate, but I’d still consider it a success. My girls did had some fierce responses and did well defending their position for the statement “Soccer is only for boys, agree or disagree.” Another PCV friend and I are organizing a MAP Training of Trainers for the Savanes region in May, so this was good practice. Affaires loves MAP, and is really stoked to help out for the Training of Trainers. We’re hoping to take two adult participants from each PCV village in Savanes for a 3ish-day long training in Dapaong… the idea then is that they will go back and run MAP activities in their villages. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

Update on the gas situation: the prices went down, and then back up again. From my new shortwave radio, the BBC World Service (LOVE it!) tells me that Nigeria is pretty much a mess right now, and with Ghana taking away part of their subsidy too, Togo’s in a jam. My “bike everywhere” solution to the high prices has brought mixed results. My first trip to Mango on the back route (through some fields and then over the river in a canoe), I got hopelessly lost. I hadn’t biked it in months, and in my early-morning haze, I took the wrong tiny path and ended up circling in the wilderness for an hour. It takes a lot to find yourself somewhere in Togo without anyone else in sight, but somehow I managed it, and it freaked me out. I finally ran into some lumberjacks who got me back onto the main road, and from there I found the real path and Mango. On another trip back from Mango, my brakes seized up, and I have yet to get them back to normal. With all the dust and rocks, I’m surprised I don’t have more bike problems than I do (knock on wood). Still, sometimes I wish I could travel like this guy, on his way down to Lomé from Niger:

For once, the kids weren’t staring at me : )

Women in Mogou coming back from harvesting millet (sorghum... its a grain) at 6:00 am. And I thought I'd gotten up early!

Brian with my biggest fans in the whole village. 

Brian on top of the mountain! We went to see the mountain caves up by Dapaong where the Moba people hid from the Tchokossi during the war in the 1700s.

With my wonderful brothers in London! Check out the Starbucks in my hand... so exciting! And the red double decker bus in the background... so London! 

Awww what a cutie! Hard to believe he has it out for baby animals...

Happy New Year, everyone!! Toby and I wish you all prosperity, health, happiness, good work, money, and lots of babies in 2012 (a la Togolais). My friend and I were looking through our planners, trying to set the dates for Camp Etoiles du Nord 2012, and got a little freaked out… this year is going to fly by! I’m organizing three major conferences (Women’s Conference in March, a Men As Partners training for my region in May, and Camp Etoiles in July/August) on top of my usual village and national activities. 2012 looks much busier than my 2011 planner, and the best part is, I’m so much more comfortable here now, so things like Girls Club and Camp are not nearly as scary as they were last year. I just have to stick to my plan and excecute.

Also, I’m in a great mood because I just got back from a fantastic vacation with my family in London. It was awesome getting to see them for Christmas and spend time hanging out and seeing the sights, eating delicious food and taking hot showers : ) We saw so many museums, did lots of tours, saw “the Mousetrap” play, and had teatime everyday. I brought back loads of tea to Togo and I’m trying to continue the teatime thing.  My fam was really patient with all of my requests (Indian food, sushi, cereal, a pedicure) and I think they had fun watching me marvel at Harrod’s food hall and Diet Coke in to-go cups. Dad told me to pick out a loaf of bread at the grocery store… it took me 10 minutes. There was so much bread! It was all sliced, half was wheat, and then there were different thicknesses and brands… so overwhelming. Brian finally had to put a loaf in my hands and tell me it was time to move on.

Then, Brian came back to Togo with me for a 10-day visit! It was a great way to transition back to my Togolese life. He was such a trooper and didn’t complain at all as he rode bush taxis, climbed mountains, and saluer’d (greeted) everyone in Mogou with me. Here, everyone is your “brother”: your cousin, your friend, or your moto driver can be your “brother.” So when I introduced him, most people then asked, “Oh, where is his post?” thinking he was another volunteer. “No, no, he’s my brother, same mother, same father,” and then their eyes lit up. “All the way from America?!” He was a big hit.

So now, I’m back in Mogou, working a lot on the Women’s Conference. This weekend, my co-coordinator and I will be reading all the applications and selecting the participants, which I think might be hard…in the process of collecting the applications, I’ve met a lot of really awesome women, and I hope we can accept them all. Also, our website is up, and it looks great! Check it out: http://wwectogo.wordpress.com/.

Some news from Mogou:

- Toby got a lil overexcited when chasing a baby goat (one of his favorite activities), and ended up killing it. Fun fact: current price of a baby goat is 2 mille fCFA ($4).

- Today is January 13^th, a sorta-minor national holiday. It was the day President Eyadema (the current president’s father) took power, and is not celebrated very much now since his death. But, my compound (the party house) doesn’t let much get between them and a holiday, so we’re fête-ing it up.

- Gas prices are skyrocketing because of the Nigerian oil subsidy repeal. Gas had been between 500 and 550 fCFA ($1.00-$1.10) per liter for almost all of my service. Yesterday, it was up to 750 fCFA ($1.50) in the morning and 850 Fcfa ($1.60) by the afternoon. Which, by my calculations (yiiikes math..) is over $6 a gallon. It now costs me $8 to get in to Mango by moto, so I’m pumping up my bike tires. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We had quite the turkey day up in Dapaong. All of the Savanes volunteers plus some guests from down south gathered together at the Campement Hotel in Dapaong for a real feast. We had everything from stuffing to green beans to mashed potatoes and gravy to pumpkin pie, thanks to a couple super-chef PCVs. Our Country Director came and brought three turkeys with her on the Peace Corps car for us. About two hours into the twelve-hour journey, one of the turkeys tried to make a break for it and launched himself off the roof of the car. He traveled the rest of the way on ice, and the other two were moved into the trunk. Just like the pilgrims, right?

It’s been a busy month for me, or rather one with lots of change. I’ve now been an officially sworn-in volunteer for a year…fourteen months total in Togo. It’s kind of reassuring to be seeing everything the second time around, and other volunteers have told me that the second year goes by so much easier and faster than the first. Some of my really good PCV friends are COS’ing (close of service, aka going home), so it’s been not very fun getting used to going to Mango and Dapaong and not seeing them there. But! We’ve got a great new group of volunteers that just swore in, and I’m really stoked for my two new neighbors in Mango and Takpakpieni.

The season of Harmattan, the windy season, has just started. It’s super dry and dusty and very cool at night, which has been great. I have to sweep out my house a couple times a day, but the fact that I can sleep with a sheet over me at night totally makes up for it. It was amazing watching how fast everything turned from green to brown… the last rain was in October, and within two weeks it was a completely different landscape. Now everyone is busy with the harvests: corn, beans, sorghum, soybeans, rice, peanuts, and cotton. Our soybean field did really well—Aichetou says we got six sacks of soy out of it. It was a tough year for beans, however the cotton is looking good, so people seem pretty pleased overall with the harvest. And that’s all for the farm report… : )

Now, a plug for the 2^nd Annual Women’s Wellness and Empowerment Conference! I went to the Plateaux regional conference last year, and it is one of the highlights of my service so far. This year, the conference is expanding to three conferences, and I’m one of the regional coordinators for the Kara/Savanes Women’s Conference which will take place in March 2012. Thirty dynamic women from villages and towns all over the north will participate in this four-day long conference focusing on health and wellbeing. There will be sessions on personal finance, family planning, agricultural techniques, goal setting, nutrition, and much more. The project is being funded through a Peace Corps Partnership, meaning we’re looking for donations from people like you! If you’d like to donate, or just learn more about the conference, check out this link: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=693-389. Grand merci!

Of all the times to forget my camera, I thought as I watched three men load a cow into the back of a bush taxi. The red Toyota Starlet, from whatever year Toyota was making Starlets, looked like it would buckle under the weight of the animal, or maybe the sacks of grain, bicycles, and people already loaded into the vehicle, but miraculously it did not. You could tell from the windshield (held together with tape) and the doors (held closed with rope) and the ignition (hot wired) that this car had seen worse than cattle in its long life, and was up to the challenge. This bush taxi is my favorite car on my route into Mango, which involves biking 32km on “dirt” (read: sand/mud/rocks/river, depending on the season) roads, and then 25km in the Starlet. The driver has spent time in Ghana, and always greets me with “Good morning, sister! Let’s go to Mango! You go take your tea, and I will wait. Go and come.”Awesome. I get coffee in a can to go from the egg sandwich guy at the corner (and a sandwich, of course) and off we go, cow mooing all the way, to Mango: the big city.

But the big city is quickly coming to Mogou—this past week, big news—we got electricity! They turned on the big generator! The streetlights are on every night, and I have a lightbulb and a socket in each room in my house, which work from 6:00 pm until 11:00 pm. Other (larger) villages have electricity periodically throughout the day, but we don’t have quite the office worker population to support daytime electricity. So for the time being, it’s five hours. But what a difference! The first night we had it on in our compound, I was so excited I started dancing and hollering around the house, once again confirming my neighbors’ theories that I’m crazy.  I then plugged in everything I own and watched ten episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” until it went off at 11. Wild times in the village.

Girls Club is going again this school year: we meet every Wednesday and talk about different Life Skills topics for about an hour, and then dance it out in the courtyard. We’ve also started Reading Club with all of the donated books. The students LOVE them, and have started checking them out to read at home. I’ve had lots of other people in village asking to borrow books as well, from the teachers to the bartenders. Go reading!

I’ve been pretty busy with my national project work: Our first Lève-Toi Jeune Fille (our girls magazine) issue came out (theme: Girls in Science), and we’re working on our second right now. I’ve also been spending time in Kara getting ready for the Women’s Conference, scoping out hotels, getting our team together, etc. And, of course, taking advantage of the pool at Hotel Kara : )

And now, a shout out to all my readers who remember the battle I had with cockroaches in my apartment: check out this bug, which was in my house. It was one of many, attracted by the electric lights. Enjoy : )