Life in Togo

Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to the last couple months!

- I’ve been doing some follow up on our pig farm, and so far it’s been fairly successful. We recently had two sows give birth to 5 piglets each, so we’ve got 10 little oinkers running around. Their main caretaker has kept them enclosed and they are being well fed. I will be continuing to monitor their progress over the next few months.

-English club at our middle school has been one of my recent highlights. We mostly just sing and play games, but have also written penpal letters to students in Florida and occasionally do grammar lessons

- Our girls club has been meeting fairly regularly and we’ve mostly been focusing on goal setting, the importance of girls’ education, and teen pregnancy prevention

- I did a training with another volunteer in our villages on organic v. chemical fertilizers, soil nutrition, agroforestry, poly-culture, and erosion prevention. People will start planting their fields again in May and we are hoping that maybe they will take some of this information into consideration when they plant this year.

-I haven’t had to get tested for parasites in 4 months!

-The mango rains are arriving. Its not real rainy season for at least another month in the Centrale region, but we’ve been getting some tiny rainstorms about once a week.

My time in Peace Corps is nearly coming to an end. I’m coming up on my 24th out of 27 months of service. I would say time has flown by, but it really hasn’t. Life in village is so much slower and simpler and time just slowly drifts on here. As we are getting closer to the end of our time here and people are getting accepted to grad school, finding jobs, or deciding to prolong their Peace Corps contract, I am more frequently finding myself asking what’s next?

My honest answer is I have absolutely no idea. I had this same mentality when I joined PC, and haven’t really figured out much since then. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, and I figured hanging out in the bush in Africa without electricity and as many modern distractions for 2 years would give me plenty of time for self introspection and surely I would realize what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. However, with all this reflection time all I’ve done is thought up about 67 more things I want to do with my life.

As I look to the future, I am continually trying to remind myself to stay in the present and enjoy the time I have left; to focus on building relationships, educating people, and exploring all that this culture has to offer.

This past weekend I attended the annual Kotokoli cutting fete, which is also called Adossa. (In case you’ve forgotten, Kotokoli is the predominant ethnic group in the area I live in.) There are smaller ceremonies au village, but the main event is held in our regional capital, Sokode. The fete is held at our futbol stadium in the center of the city. There was a parade of dancers, horses dressed up in their traditional garb, drummers, and villagers who had come from all around the region to come and watch. Even President Faure was there! 

Inside the stadium, the crowds packed in to watch knife performers do their traditional dance. They typically take a large knife or machete and quickly run it across their stomachs and chest to the beat of drums. They believe that they are unharmed because of either magic or God’s protection, depending on who you ask. The ceremony is done in order to show the strength of the Kotokoli people, and has some religious significance as well, but I am unclear on what exactly the significance is.

So for those of you that don't know, I live in a predominantly Muslim region of Togo. Before coming to W Africa I had no idea that Islam was so widespread in this area, I just assumed it was a predominantly middle-eastern religion and didn't extend much outside of that region. I'm no historian, but apparently the Islamic-Arabic communities were some of the first to cross the Sahara and come into this area, and along with goods and new trading routes they also brought over new religions and customs. The native population here adopted Islamic beliefs, but often still tended to cling to their animist traditional beliefs as well and would return to their voodoo and spiritual ceremonies when they felt they needed to.

My village's main ethnic group is Kotokoli, and they are known for having adopted Islam early on and are devout followers of this faith. I have 4 or 5 mosques in village (along with a new one under construction), and an area in our market that is set aside as an area for the Muslims to pray. Very few women in my village wear a full hijab garment that entirely covers their face (too hot!), but you will very rarely see them wearing anything that exposes their legs, their arms, or their hair. They wear lightweight head scarves, and cover themselves whenever they are in public.

My primary work counterpart in village is Muslim and we get along quite well. We occasionally have discussions about religion  but it doesn't come up all that often. For awhile I went to the Catholic church within my village, but I didn't get much out of it and quit going once I was more settled in village and found more things to do. There is also a fairly large population of Assembly of God Christians and some Methodists in my neighborhood as well. The fact that I don't go to church here is considered odd by most of my villagers because everyone here identifies somehow with a religion, whether it be Christian, Muslim, or traditional Animistic faiths.

Most important things to know about the Muslim faith:

Not all muslims are radical! Typically when you hear about Muslims in W Africa, you hear Boko Haram mentioned. There is currently not any reason to believe that this group is active in Togo, although there has been reported extremist activity by this group in our neighboring countries of Benin, Niger, and Nigeria. All of the Muslims I have worked with are peace loving, gentle people who don't understand why some people in their faith are compelled to murder, kidnap, and cause harm to others.

Muslims pray 5 times a day. (Theoretically. Very few muslims in my village actually have the time to leave work and pray all 5 times, every single day). The first call to prayer is sometime around 4 in the morning, and is announced over a very obnoxious loudspeaker attached to the highest point of the mosque. The call to prayer is usually some kind of song or chant in Arabic. I literally have no idea what the call to prayer is actually saying, but depending on the announcer the song can be hauntingly beautiful. Other times the singer is not so great, and it is painful to listen to. When I am in the city of Sokode you can go up in the hills and listen to the calls coming from dozens of mosques all over the city, overlapping and meshing together into one big jumble of songs.

The two biggest celebrations in the Islamic faith are Tabaski and Ramadan. Ramadan is a month of fasting in order to show devotion to Allah, followed by a big day of feasting. Tabaski celebrates the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ishmael to Allah, and is a day of sacrifice. Typically people will fatten up sheep, goats, and cows, and then will ceremonially slaughter them and share with friends and family. These holidays are also called Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and are held on different days each year, depending on a lunar calendar.

Living alongside this culture has definitely taken some getting used to, and I still don't entirely understand this religion. I have attended mosque a couple of times and hang out with Muslims nearly every day. I have a new respect for their religion, and it is really hard to hear and see Americans mercilessly slandering Muslims and accusing them of all being radical terrorists when they themselves have never actually interacted with a person of this faith.

I do have a few issues with the religion, mainly with their treatment of women. I could never be a part of a religion that places men above women and requires that women be submissive (I know this is not the case in all Muslim relationships, but this seems to be a fairly common belief) and that it is completely the woman's responsibility to dress in a way that shields her from men's eyes. This is completely unfair and women should not have to follow such strict rules, and should be allowed to be independent and do whatever they want with their lives (and bodies). Women are also required to pray in the back of a mosque, usually behind a curtain or a brick wall with small holes so that they can see and hear what is going on in the main room of the mosque. It is very demeaning to me to be told that we can't be a part of the main event and have to be hidden away in the back.

Anybody who has spent much time with me in the last decade or so knows that I’m a strict vegetarian, and that I originally gave up meat because I felt bad for the animals when I was in elementary school. Now that I’m older if you asked me why I’m veg I would still say it is because I care about the animals (even more so now that I have learned more about factory farming/CAFO operations), but also because of the environmental impact of meat production; meat requires significantly more water, food, and energy than plant based foods.

Starting this pig farm was not originally my idea; a man in village approached me about it and wanted help getting started raising pigs for profit and figured since I’m in Peace Corps obviously I would know how to do this. I told him I don’t have a clue about raising animals, especially not pigs, but I would see what I could do. I got a hold of a few books and papers, but not much of it was relevant to the conditions of W Africa. I can’t just go down to my local ranch and farm store and buy pig nutrition supplements, steel gates, and some of the other equipment that was recommended. Initially this project was not something I really wanted to do, and it seemed beyond the realm of what I’m capable of.

However, I am now in the process of starting this pig farm. Protein deficiency is one of the biggest factors in childhood malnutrition and good protein sources are not easily accessible in village. No electricity means no refrigeration, which means no good way to safely sell meat. If you go into the city you can get fresh cuts of meat, but that is too expensive for most villagers. Most people have a couple of chickens that they will eat when they are having a party or some other special occasion, but it isn’t something they get to enjoy that often. Seeing children with kwashiorkor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor) is discouraging and your heart just sinks when you realize how much of the world has plenty of readily accessible resources while there are people who can’t get enough food to feed their children. Although this pig farm isn’t going to stop world hunger by any means, hopefully we can make a small dent and some of the kiddos in my village will get meat a little bit more frequently or at least their families will be making a little bit more disposable income to buy more nutritious food.

This pig farm is going to be a cooperative, meaning multiple families have invested and will work together to raise these pigs, and their families take first priority, however we are hoping that within a year or so, we can get the population stable enough that we can start selling a few for profit as well.

After doing some initial research, we started off by writing a grant. This was a lot of work and took a lot of revision before it was accepted, but eventually we got a grant to get us started through the West African Food Security Partnership & Feed the Future. Afterwards we went on a technical exchange to another volunteer’s village where pig raising is already being done and talked with 2 different farms to get more information about raising pigs. This was extremely helpful, and I think this visit gave my counterpart a better vision of what we could accomplish in the future.

Currently, we are in the construction process. We hope to finish by this fall and start raising those pigs!

Here is a photo we took while visiting the pig farms near Kati, Togo during our Technical Exchange.

Rainy season has officially arrived in the Centrale region where I live. I am writing this now as I am rained into our workstation in the city, and am enjoying the fresh smell and the coolness it brings. This past week I have been busy installing a fence and digging up a garden in front of my house. I already have some beans and okra sprouting, and am going to continue adding more planting beds this week.

Peace Corps promotes the use of what is called permagardening, which is a system that uses raised beds, trenches, and holes that are strategically aligned to minimize heavy rains, but maximize light rains. The idea is to direct water in such a way that things aren’t flooded and washed out in the torrential rainy season storms but also collects and holds rain during times where rain isn’t as plentiful. It also incorporates the idea of trying to mimic nature by mixing different vegetables and plants together (polyculture), using mulch and compost as natural fertilizers, digging deep troughs beneath the planting beds so roots can penetrate further into the soil (double digging), and typically doesn’t use pesticide/herbicide/any other chemical additives. I’m hoping that once my garden is finished other people will take interest and we can build more gardens. I’ll update with pictures once I am done!

Disclaimer: This blog post is sad, and slightly graphic. If you don’t want to read the details, the condensed story is that my dog died very suddenly this week, possibly from poisoning of some kind. 

The past few weeks have been quite busy indeed. We had another PC training with all of the volunteers in country, but this time our village counterparts came along to learn with us. 

Some parts of this training were helpful, but other parts were frustrating because we were supposed to be having open discussions with our counterparts about what they want in village, and all my counterpart wanted to talk about was how much the villagers need money and other physical objects which I can’t provide for them. Peace Corps approach to development is entirely education based and is meant to give capacity building skills to villagers, not just giving them material things and leaving. Overall though, the training wasn’t too bad.

After training I went back to village for about 2 days to meet with a French NGO called SPESS that was visiting my village to see about potential education projects and to provide some training at our local health clinic. They’ve done a lot of awesome work in my village so far and I look forward to seeing what they accomplish in the future. They spent about 3 weeks total working in my village, but unfortunately I missed out because I was busy at our training and then rushed off to vacation in GHANA!

The Ghana vacation was great. Michael and I crossed the border and hung out on a beach for a couple of days and relaxed, and then went to the capital city of Accra and met up with his parents who flew over from the United States for a visit.

On a boat ride to our beach hostel in Ada Foah, Ghana

Once his parents arrived we stayed at a fancier hotel with a pool in Accra which was absolutely wonderful. We then proceeded to cut West along the coastline of Ghana, and then headed up North. En route we visited a slave castle, a national park, some museums and craft centers, and some different memorials. Michael and I went to another beach and he surfed for awhile and then we lounged and had margaritas.

Kakum National Park Canopy Bridges

Michael’s parents were incredibly generous in letting me tag along on their family vacation and we had the luxury of traveling in a rented car with air conditioning and got to stay in hotels much nicer than what we are usually used to staying at in Togo and eat foods that I didn’t think we would ever be able to find in W. Africa (onion rings and mozz sticks? Yes please!)

Beach Art Guy trying to get us to buy his beach art

Ghana’s national language is English and overall it is much more developed than Togo so traveling there was quite pleasant. Their rainforests were gorgeous and so much more lush than anything I have seen in Togo thus far. They also just have a more developed tourist industry and they have better preserved their cultural heritage in the forms of monuments and museums.

We learned a lot more about the slave trade in W. Africa which was really eye-opening and it is really quite horrific to think about the part we as Americans played in not only the buying and selling of Africans, but also the torture and pain they went through in the process just to get to the Americas. They were forced out of their homelands and had to walk great distances to get to the coast where they would be shackled and chained and kept locked up in terrible conditions for extended periods of time until the next ship would come to port to pick them up and cram them into ships so they could serve the rest of their life in servitude to their white masters on plantations in the new world. We visited one of the main forts/castles where slaves were picked up, and also visited a memorial dedicated to all the slaves who were forced out of their homeland.

Eventually we crossed over into Togo, and I headed back to my village, and Michael continued farther North with his parents so they could see the village where he works and lives.

Overall I think Michael’s parents enjoyed their visit here. It was neat getting to see Africa through someone else’s eyes and see how they experienced and felt about things. We have gotten so used to so many of the things here that it doesn’t even phase us anymore. We recently passed the 9 month mark of being in country which means our service is 1/3 of the way done, which seems absolutely crazy to me. Some days I feel as though I’ve lived here forever and I totally know what is going on, but I still have days where I feel as though I know nothing at all and I never will understand everything that goes on here. Our vacation was a well needed break, but it does feel good to be back in village!

Click on the title above to see a neat video I discovered!

- I found out that my junior high students I am teaching at my after school environmental club don’t know what a giraffe is. Or a jungle. Or apparenty grasshoppers. We have been learning about ecosystems and the food chains that are found in these different ecosystems. We don’t currently have a science teacher at our school, and our school has no books, and these kids don’t know how to use a computer to access the internet, and giraffes no longer live in this area of Africa. So how are these kids supposed to know what a giraffe is?!? I guess I just hadn’t really thought about it that hard.

-I watched my neighbor and about 20 of his friends tear down an old storage building, bash it to pieces, and then reconstruct mud bricks out of it to build their new pig house with

-I discovered where the “river” in my village is. It is currently not really a river and more of just a sandy river bed way out in the bush. I am excited to go back in 3 months when hopefully there is some rain and the river is flowing again

-My environmental club put up the posts for the fence for our organic garden! We still don’t have any actual fencing material... but at least this is a start!

-My dog discovered how to howl... and he won’t stop.

-It’s getting hotter. Harmattan season is coming to an end and the afternoons are starting to get rather miserable.

-I think I have finally received all of my Christmas mail! Thanks to everyone who sent cards and letters and drawings.

I want to give a shout-out to the Reed family for sending me an envelope full of snowflakes! Now my house feels a bit like winter, even though its still 90 degrees!

As most of my friends/fam already know, I have found myself a boyfriend here. He is another Peace Corps Volunteer that I met during our training. He is also in the environment/agriculture sector, so we did a lot of our technical training classes together. However, he came into Togo with a much higher level of French than I did so we didn’t have any of our French classes together.

We started to hit it off around the 2nd week of training. Our host families were fairly close neighbors, so we hung out a little bit. I invited him over a couple of times to watch movies on my laptop after class, and we got to talking more and became fairly good friends. I wanted to wait until we found out where our permanent villages would be before we got involved in anything serious, so we had a weird “not really dating, but not really just friends” period while we waited around to find out where we would be living for the next two years. After site assignment we found out that we were going to be in Savannes and Centrale, which have one region in between them. After we visited our sites we decided long distance might be possible, and we were going to give it a try. (Our villages are roughly 6 hours away from each other by bush taxi on a good day)

Dating in Togo is weird. First of all, we don’t really go on dates. There are no swanky restaurants, movie theaters, nice bars, amusement parks, concerts, or any other kind of activities that you would go to for a normal date. We would hang out at Bar Chiffre in our training village from time to time, but we rarely got alone time because it was a regular hang out spot for all of the other stagiaires as well. Public display of affection is completely out of the question, so holding hands and kissing was something we couldn’t really do.

Togolese society tends to frown upon men and women hanging out together alone, so we couldn’t really hang out at each other’s host family houses very much. Towards the end we were more familiar with our families and less worried about offending them and would hang out at each other’s house, but we also left our doors open and I would tell my host mom he was a friend who was helping me with French. I’m pretty sure by the end of training our parents knew something was up between us because we went pretty much everywhere together but they are super non-confrontational and would never ask us about it or act like they knew.

PC Togo has a family plan for our cell phones so we have unlimited cell to cell talking within the Peace Corps fam, which has been a real life saver. We talk almost every day, and I look forward to hearing about his life in village and being able to share what I’m up to as well.

At our last Peace Corps training session we learned how to make improved cookstoves from resources that can be found in any village. They consist of natural clay, straw, sand, and water. Traditionally women balance their marmite (metal pot) on 3 big rocks over an open fire to cook all their meals. The improved cookstove is a U-shaped piece of clay that the the pot sits in, which means the fire is better contained, and the heat is better conserved within the stove, rather than the heat just escaping out the sides between the rocks. This structure enables water to boil faster, contains smoke better, and ultimately this method means you use less wood to heat up your food in the long run. I also used this training session to throw in a quick memo about re-forestation and how it is important to replenish the trees that you cut down to burn or eventually there won’t be any left for you to use.

We had a group of 7 women come to our first stove building session. We went to my neighbor, Delphine’s house, and me and a young man in village helped lead the session (he helped do the mixing of the clay and was my translator-women in village don’t have great french skills so I try to have a translator repeat things in Kotokoli when I am working with women). I originally was going to do this project with my official co-worker, however he was having a hernia problem and called me that morning to tell me he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going to come but he would find someone else to translate, so up until I showed up at the training, I had no idea who was going to be co-leading with me.

Mixing the clay and straw together

Preparing the stove site

Delphine making sure her pot fits

Delphine and I with her new stove!

Overall, the session was pretty successful. I was very nervous since the guy I had been planning this with wasn’t there to help, but the young man he sent as his replacement was awesome. The stove turned out decent, and I will check in with her next week to make sure it is drying properly, and see if she is using it and how she likes it. We are planning on holding a few more of these sessions in some of the different neighborhoods in my village and I told all the ladies who attended this if they want to build one I can totally come over to their house and we can build one together!