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!

La vie continue here in the M-O-G-O-U. Toby is about the best thing that has happened to my village life… he follows me around all day, makes friends with people and other dogs, has learned “sit,” and is (fingers crossed) house trained. My neighbor’s dog, Jabinjezou, and Toby are bff’s, and I usually have the two of them following me around to meetings, through the marché, to girls club, etc. I also got a new rooster as a cadeau from a neighboring village, and named him Billy. Let me know if I start to sound animal crazy… or just plain crazy.

I had a really busy day last Friday. Affaires woke me up yelling “Good morning! Bonjour! Hélène est la?” outside my door. It was 5:37 am. I stumbled out on to the porch and told him it was not yet morning and that it had better be important. Turns out it was. The night before, one of the rockstar girls from my girls club came to Affaires’ house at 11pm, saying her family was trying to marry her off to some guy who wanted to take her to Nigeria to work. She said she didn’t want to marry him and wanted to stay in school. We had just talked about good communication skills and standing up for yourself at girls club, and she was one of only three girls who volunteered to participate in skits. I was so proud. Affaires arranged for her to spend the night at the Chef du Canton’s house, and now this morning we had to go sort it all out.

So we interviewed the family: Maman and three older brothers, who all claimed to know nothing about it. All Maman did was yell at her daughter for telling us and embarrassing the family. Affaires then took the girl to Gando to talk with the police chief, who issued warrants to the whole family and the potential husband, and we all showed up to court Saturday morning (except the potential husband, who fled to Nigeria). I really like the CB in Gando: super nice guy who seems really good at his job. He explained that girls who go to school, no matter if you think they actually want to marry someone or not, don’t get married. Especially if they’re only 17. He even pounded his fists on the desk a few times. It was awesome.

Now I’m in Mango for a couple days turning in my VRF (Peace Corps reporting form) and basking in the electricity. I slept all night last night! Gotta love fans. Then it’s back to Mogou for the week. We’ve got a parajuriste (paralegal, maybe?) coming in from Gando to talk with the Girls Club on Wednesday, and we’re working on putting together a skit to present at Premier Mai, the next big fete in village. I’m really stoked for Premier Mai: my Gangam teacher included me in her group of women who are celebrating together, and we’re going to have matching pagne outfits. She’s just about the most stylish woman in Mogou, so it’s a good group to be in : )

I can’t believe it’s already April! The months are flying by… even though every day takes about a year. Love you all! xoxox 

Toby!

I did it! I got a puppy! I’ve been asking around village since December for a puppy, but with no luck. Then last week I saw a dog with two puppies following her… so I asked all the kids in the quartièr which house the dog belonged to, tracked them down, and got Toby. He’s about two months old, and has been a lot of work, but so worth it. Seriously, I don’t know how I did it before having a dog. We go for walks and he follows me around village, and everyone is learning his name already. One really awkward moment (thank goodness there is no ‘awkward’ in Togo): I was in the marché with Toby and a group of people asked me his name. “Toby,” I said, and everyone nodded and said “Toh-BEEEEE” except this one guy who said, “Toby? Isn’t that the name of that slave?” He then proceeded to act out the scene from “Roots” in which the nasty slave owner yells “Yer name’s Toby!” and hits him with the whip... to a captive audience. Of course, Mogou has no electricity. Two people have TVs that run on generators that they turn on once or twice a week. But we’ve all seen “Roots.” Thank you, globalization. What are the odds? Mortified, I grabbed Toby and ran off to buy mangoes.

In hot season, there are not too many good things. But there are a couple. One, no bugs. It’s too hot and dry. Two, mangoes! I’ve been eating them til my mouth gets sore. First it was just the little stringy ones, but now we’ve got the nice big normal mangos almost every day in the marché.  It makes the 115 degree heat kinda bearable. We were hoping to get the electricity up and running before hot season, so we could all buy fans, but no such luck. Maybe by next year…

Apart from the heat and the dog, I’ve been working on a planning a girls camp for students in our canton this August. Working title: Camp Etoiles du Nord. It’s been really fun planning it with my Mango PCV neighbors and Togolese homologues, and the girls from Mogou are already getting really stoked for it. More details to come, as we’re turning in our application for funding this month, so stay tuned!

Hope you’re all doing well—I miss you tons! xoxox

Vacay au Ghana

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With hot season fast approaching, I was really excited for my birthday vacation to Ghana—the beach! Delicious food! Electricity! Nothing could go wrong.

It got off to a rocky start, to say the least. I planned to take the Poste bus down from Mango to Lomé on my birthday même to meet Joe, get my Ghana visa the next day, and then kick it to Accra. This all happened, but for about 8 hours I was not so sure. The Poste bus, which had been running later and later recently, wasn’t showing. I got there at 8 for the 8:30 arrival. 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 passed with no bus. “Ca arrive, ca arrive,” (it’s coming, it’s coming) we were all assured by the Poste staff, with varying degrees of certainty. I was sitting outside on the steps of the office with my iPod, listening to “This American Life” and probably looking pretty miserable, when one of the Poste employees came out to talk to me. “Come with me,” she said. “I’m going for a walk, and I think you should come with.” “Huh? What if the bus comes? Where are we going?” “Trust me, sister, leave your stuff behind the desk and let’s go.” So I went. It turns out this was Madame la Chef de la Poste, the manager, and she could tell I was having no fun. Most of Mango’s population is Anufo, Muslim, and therefore doesn’t drink. This is a big change from my Gangam tchuk and tchakpa drinking community, and from the Moba in the north. As this woman was Moba, she led me to a Moba hangout on the other side of town: someone’s compound that had about 30 people in it, drinking tchakpa and eating roast pork. Quite the party! When I walked it, three guys were arguing over how to read the meat scale, on which was a precariously placed pig head, and someone pushed a calabash of tchakpa in my hands. “I thought you needed to get out of there. You looked miserable,” Madame de la Poste told me. “But what about the bus! What if it comes while I’m here?” “Hun, it hasn’t left Dapaong. It broke down last night and the mechanics didn’t show up to fix it until 8 this morning. The Dapaong office will call me when it leaves. Relax!” And with this, I did my best to relax. She took me on a tour of hidden drinking spots in Mango along with a policeman would-be travel buddy of mine, who tried to reassure me the whole time that I would leave Mango that day. I stayed calm and patient until about 2:30... it was getting late, and I was ready to take drastic action. If I didn’t get to Lomé until the next night, I couldn’t get my visa, couldn’t go to Ghana, plans ruined. Joe called, and I was in the middle of explaining my plan to hitchhike with a trucker (“It’s ok, they call it ‘autostop!’ I’ll pick a nice looking trucker!” “Um, no, absolutely not, you’re crazy. Do not hitchhike with truckers that’s a terrible idea.”) when Madame de la Poste got a call from Dapaong. The bus just left! I was saved! It arrived in Mango at 3:30 and we got in to Lomé at 3:00 am… happy birthday!

The rest of the trip went really well after that. Ghana was amazing—parts are very much like Togo, and parts (Accra) are like America. There were 4-lane highways, a mall, a movie theater, and diet coke! And the best roadside fried chicken ever. We stayed in Kokrobité, a beach town west of Accra, and it was fantastic. I really missed water-- just seeing the ocean helped. And it was awesome being really off the job. Even when I’m not doing “work” I still have a village full of people watching what I do, so sitting at the beach surrounded by people who don’t care who I am was just the thing I needed. But then, as much fun as it was, we were really relieved to get back to Togo where everything was familiar. I eased my way back up north, stopping in Atakpamé, Sokodé, and then finally Mango. My neighbor PCVs found these nuns who make pork chops and sausage, so we got some of that and made chili for dinner and sausage sandwiches for breakfast. Delicious. Seriously, I’m very lucky to have culinarily-inclined neighbors : )

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hi everyone, don’t worry I’m still here! I’ve been almost ‘busy’ in the American sense these past few weeks, and haven’t had my act together re: the blog. Our GEE stage had In-Service Training for a week, which was really fun, and I think we all left excited to go back to village and get some work done. A lot of the information was repeated from stage, but expanded upon, and now we each had a context to put it in, so it seemed like we learned a lot more. We went on a couple field trips to see a girls science club and a Village Savings and Loans program that PCVs have started, which were cool to see in action.  I want to start a VSL in Mogou, but it’s going to take a lot of organization and enough motivated people… Affaires thinks we’d have to keep the safe at the gendarmerie (police station) in Gando with a couple guard dogs on it. On verra.

On my way back up north after IST, I stayed in Dapaong for a couple days to do some errands and banking and whatnot.  As it turned out I was really glad I went, because I got pulled into some work with SOS Children’s Villages, aka super-awesome NGO. There’s a Village in Dapaong même, and the PCV in Dapaong and I went over to check it out. They want him to come in every week and teach English to the elementary school kids, and I’m going to come once a month to do games, art projects, etc. with the ‘petit petits’ (kindergarteners). The campus is beautiful—the best-looking school I’ve seen in Togo. The teachers seem super motivated and excited to have us work with them, and there’s even electricity and running water. Score.

OH, other news, I got accepted to the Gender and Development Committee (GAD) as one of three editors of ‘Lève-Toi Jeune Fille,’ a Peace Corps newsletter for girls in Togo. I’m super stoked about it! LTJF is like American Girl magazine, Togo-style, only smaller, in French, and released 3 or 4 times a year. But it’s so cool to see how, for example, my girls club reacted to it when I showed them a copy. There are next to no printed materials of any kind in Mogou (even in the schools only the teacher has a copy of the books), so showing them a newsletter geared specifically towards middle and high school girls—rocked their world. And this means I’ll have solid work to do on a regular basis, get to improve my French, and ‘bouge’ (move around) un peu. My PCV neighbor in Gando says she’s turning into a ‘village rat,’ because she stays in village all the time, and I’m turning in to an ‘all of Togo rat.’ What can I say? I like to go with.

But things in Mogou are going really well. I came back from Dapaong last Wednesday at 16:00—already an hour late for girls club. But the girls were all still there, waiting for me! Love that. And I explained everything I learned at IST to Affaires, who can’t wait to get back to work.  We’re in the midst of a ‘tour des villages’ in the canton de Mogou: there are about 30 smaller villages in our, um, county? and Affaires and I are making the rounds, greeting all the chiefs and explaining who we are to everybody. Affaires loves these trips because we usually end up with chickens and yams, and I’m not complaining either. I have a new egg-laying hen, Nelly, so I’ve been making omelets and pancakes… yumm.

Anyways, hope y’all are doing well!! Du courage with all the snow—I have such a hard time picturing that. Harmattan is over, and we’re in hot season now. It’s been 90-95 degrees in my house at night…the electricity should (fingers crossed) be coming soon. I need a fan.

LOVE! xoxox

Ce n’est que le debut de la commencement

There are a few things I’ve wanted to blog but haven’t yet. I spend a lot of time thinking about food… like hamburgers. And pizza. And anything with cheese. I’ve also come up with a couple lists.

Strangest foods I’ve eaten so far in Togo:

- An entire frog. Legs, body, arms, head. Including bones and eyeballs.

- Sheep intestines

- Chicken necks

Strangest foods I’ve been offered but have (politely) declined:

- A monkey

- Pig ears and intestines (this one was disguised under the question “Do you eat pork?”)

- Rooster testicles

- Dog

- Iguana

Another thing I’ve wanted to do is just write what I’ve done in an entire day. Today was marché day, meaning it was about as animated as Mogou gets, so I figure today is as good as any. Here goes:

I woke up at 6:30—kind of on the late side because I didn’t have a morning meeting or déplacement (outing, quoi), which would probably have been at 7 or 7:30. I went outside and hung my phone on the nail on my terrace to get reception, said good morning to my neighbors, and went to my kitchen to put water on the stove to boil for tea and oatmeal. I was majorly bummed to find mouse poop in my box of oatmeal… it might have been old though because I cleaned up a dead mouse last week. Here’s hoping that was him. So, took my oatmeal and tea back to the house and ate breakfast and wrote a letter. I then swept out my house, latrine, and shower and cleared out some wasp nests.  After that, unlike most days, I had written Peace Corps work to do. I filled out an application for a committee position and worked on my shadowing report (from shadowing my neighbor PCV in Mango who’s been here a year already) to present at IST.  At about 9:00, the mason showed up to work on my latrine seat. Yess! He found cement. I explained what I wanted twice more and he had me sit on a few cinder blocks as a height reference. Then he got to work and I went back inside to draw up a visual aid for girls club tomorrow.  I worked on that and ished around the house, packing for IST and whatnot, until around 11, and then headed out for the marché.

My neighbor wanted tomatoes but couldn’t find any, so I told her I’d keep an eye out.  My first stop was the generator guy, where I dropped off my cell phone to charge. I then found tomatoes and carrots (!) and tossed them in my bag along with some string and bread. Looked for ant killer but couldn’t find any. Stopped by the lady who makes salads (She’s new. Comes in from Mango. ) and sat and ate one for lunch. I already have a reputation for liking salad… she knows me by name and scolded me for not telling her I was traveling last marché day. I then took the veggies back to my house and my neighbor was so thrilled she said she’d make me a salad for dinner. Score! Two salads in one day!

Back at the marché, I headed for the Kabyé hangout: the tchuk stand. Beau Père, Affaires, a couple Directeurs, my Gangam teacher… everyone was there. Chatted and drank tchuk for a bit. My Gangam teacher wants to start, ou bien re-start, a girls club at the elementary school, so we hashed that out a bit. Five old, drunk men stumbled in one after the other to ask to marry the white lady. Dèja mariée, dèja mariée, bye bye yo. The tchuk ran out early, so the tchuk mama and my Gangam teacher and I went shopping. They had to get stuff for dinner: yams, dried fish, dried peppers, etc., and I was just happy to be tagging along. Then they showed me the “good pagne” lady. Gangam teacher and I got matching pagne to make dresses like the one tchuk mama was wearing; the three of us are going to wear them to church together when I get back. So stoked!

After making all the rounds, we went to the couturière’s house to order our dresses. I brought along another pagne to make a skirt, as well as a skirt with a hole in the side for her to fix. She said she would have it all done by tomorrow evening for mille cinq cent ($3). Done deal.

Then I headed home for the day. Bought some colico on the way (fried yams) as an appetizer before my salad. You can’t be too healthy, tu vois? I ran into Affaires on the way and we fixed a time to leave for our déplacement tomorrow morning. Got home, put my phone back up on the nail, and mange’ed my colico. My water girl brought a bidon of water for me, which was really awesome because the mason had used up all I had for mixing the cement. And now here I am, sitting at my desk/ table quoi waiting for dinner at 8. After that it’s bucket shower and bed. Day in the life, yo : )