#marcheing

A Togolese marché is a crazy blend of a coffee shop, a bar, a grocery store or farmer's market, and an open-air mall. It's where the whole town gathers to socialize, to drink, to buy food, to eat food, to buy clothes or shoes or medicine or any number of other things.

Can you say all-in-one?

Last week I went to the huge marché in Glei for the first time. It makes Atakpame's marché look tiny (which, comparatively, it is). There are rows upon rows of tchouk stands, heaping piles of dead yovo.* I found some soft blue fabric to have a dress made and some fun pagne. A shower pattern for my new shower pagne - fitting, no? I saw so many of the women I know and work with in village at the Glei marche, dressed in their finest pagne, selling everything from soap to sorghum. They greeted me happily, introducing me to their neighbors and explaining that I was "their" Peace Corps volunteer. 

I met up with Kelsey, a neighboring PCV, and we went to see the Majorette for some mid-morning tchakpa. The Majorette sells tchakpa every Tuesday at the Glei marché, as well as the next day in our village. No wonder she's willing to let me help out on Wednesdays! Two days a week of marché-ing is a lot - smiling, joking, making conversation for hours on end. I don't know how she does it.

I love marchés. I love speaking in Ewe with the women selling delicious produce. Ewe is the market language down South - it's Kotokoli and Kabile further north - so I offer my limited greetings. Now that I've gotten numbers down, I can go through an entire market interaction in Ewe. Can't really do a whole lot else, but the smiles and laughs - and occasionally cadeaux of these marché mamas - makes my day. Marché day means feeling integrated with my Ewe, it means fresh vegetables and other marché treats. In Glei I found a woman selling unsweetened yogurt - I can't even find that in Atakpame! She was a little startled when I pointed to the containers on top of her head and asked if it was degé, but that was nothing to my surprise when I realized it was an unsweetened version, as opposed to the degé I've had in Atakpame.

I was hoping to find peanut oil, and after asking all of the women who were selling palm oil, we found one who said she know where someone had some. It felt strangely illicit to be led over to a corner of the marché, where we found a woman with two bottles of peanut oil hidden under some pagne in a basket behind her. With the soy sauce I bought in Lomé, I've been enjoying some pretty delicious stir-frys this past week...

So here's to marchés!