Time in Togo

Reflections on Service: Looking back on my Peace Corps service, what have I learned, discovered, decided? How am I making sense of and finding meaning in the last two-and-a-half years of work and life in Togo?

Today: What will you remember?

I joined Peace Corps to learn more about grassroots international development. I chose Peace Corps because of the unparalleled experience it offered of doing that grassroots development work fully integrated into the same community for two years. Looking back on my twenty-nine months, it is the nature of that cultural and community integration that has defined my service. The heart – literally – of my service has been the people with whom I’ve cooked, danced and worked.

What will anyone remember of my two years here?

The women in the Red Cross Mother’s Club will remember that I showed up to meetings, that I smiled and laughed and talked with them in Ewe. They will remember me stumbling through my first training on sack gardens, trying to use Ewe, but inevitably falling back on French.

The members of my environmental association will remember how I showed up at 6 am every Thursday for work sessions, bending next to them with my hoe or machete. They will remember participatory community analysis and planning community outreach on the importance of environmental stewardship.

My students will remember soil health, composting and nutrition from our environmental club lessons. I hope they will continue to utilize the gardening skills we practiced in the school garden. They will remember our garden song, and that you can learn a lot while having fun.

Gaston and Delali will remember Sunday mornings at youth group and Sunday afternoons at my house, discussing the American political system. They can attribute their comprehensive knowledge of checks and balances, separation of powers, and civil liberties to our time together.

Msr. Yovo, Msr. Wenredama and Msr. Atchade will remember inquiry-based learning, participatory facilitation, and hands-on learning. They will remember me weeding and hoeing and watering alongside the students in the garden.

The women who participated in Women Against Hunger and WWEC will remember conferences that equipped them to grow as female leaders in their community, and to share new knowledge and skills in food security, health and women’s rights.

Selene will remember me making gari and tapioca with her, valiantly pretending that the smoke was not causing my eyes to tear and my throat to ache. She will remember my love for kalima, steamed bean cakes, without oil but with extra hot pepper.

The Majorette will remember many afternoons spent at the market, selling tchakpa together. She will remember teaching me to make rice pate with peanut sauce. She and the other women in the savings and loan group will remember how to distribute their return at the end of a savings cycle.

Georges will remember conversations about American social and cultural norms, particularly surrounding gender. He will remember our work organizing meetings, developing session plans and facilitating trainings.

My village will remember that I wore pagne and greeted them in their language, whether it was Ife, Fon, Ewe, Kabiye, Akposso or Moba. They will remember that I always smiled and laughed, even when they were laughing more at me than with me. They will remember that I always asked questions and wanted to learn, even if they couldn’t comprehend how I had reached adulthood without learning how to slaughter a chicken.

And I? I will remember generosity. I will remember that no matter how much food there is, there is always enough to share. I will remember that yes, it is possible to shower with a gallon of water. I will remember the joy of having a whole seat in a car, all to myself. I will remember how important it is to greet someone and ask how they are, how their family is, and to truly listen for the response.

On this blog I’ve shared images of so many people and parts of my life here in Togo.

Reflections on Service: Looking back on my Peace Corps service, what have I learned, discovered, decided? How am I making sense of and finding meaning in the last two-and-a-half years of work and life in Togo?

Today: Failure – How I developed an appreciation for the growth inherent in the process as well as the satisfaction of achieving the goal.

Resiliency is a word that gets trotted out at every single Peace Corps in-service training, but for good reason. If you learn nothing else in Peace Corps, you learn how to be resilient. (I learned much more, but failure and resiliency were surprisingly central to my growth over the past two years).

At first, I tried to be everything to everyone in my village. I realized that this a) would not ensure my happiness or fulfillment in the short- or long-term and that b) that’s not what anyone wanted anyway.

So, great. I failed. What does that mean for my community? Sure, I learned a lot from my failures. Does my community deserve to have well-meaning, often young American after well-meaning, often young American come and learn poignant life lessons about failure and resiliency.

During a winter term development course I took in Monterey, the three professors sharing the teaching load – all RPCVs – expressed exactly this conundrum. Their Peace Corps service was a formative experience in terms of their personal development and professional approach to international development work. They couldn’t tell another aspiring volunteer that it wasn’t worth it, that they didn’t find it life-changing, but at the same time, how could they send another volunteer back to West Africa just to learn? It’s just like that advice that my geography professor gave – to approach Peace Corps service as an opportunity for personal development, rather than a chance to save the world.

It’s not that a volunteer can’t learn and contribute at the same time. The best volunteers find ways to use their failures as catalysts for more effective work. Lessons in failure and resiliency can go hand in hand with designing more effective projects, with more effectively meeting community expressed needs in a sustainable way. I didn’t always approach it that way, but I learned how to do so by the end of my service.

And ultimately, the failures were not mine alone, and thus the growth that arose from moving past them was not mine alone. Capacity building work with counterparts means learning lessons – both the ones we planned and the ones we didn’t plan. Failure pushed us to reassess our goals, rework our plans, and ultimately engage in more sustainable and impactful work.

So, I failed. And I learned. I learned to balance an appreciation for the growth inherent in the process along with the satisfaction of achieving the goal. I learned to collaborate with my counterparts to set goals for our work in the community, and then fit my own personal and professional goals into this broader context. I made a point to try out a new facilitation technique at each training session, while working towards being able to participate in a meeting in Ewe, the local language. Learning to live with failure was a vital step in defining my own metrics for success and cultivating resiliency, in work and life.

Following the course of my service, from village we traveled to Lome. I have spent much time over the past year walking along the beach and these dirt roads...

You can’t introduce your parents to your village without a HUGE fete. So that’s what we spent Thursday doing - partying it up with my friends and members of the environmental association I worked with.

After a morning cooking rice pate and peanut sauce with my friend, Majorette, we sang and danced with the women in the environmental association. The members are from all over Togo, so the women performed different dances based on their ethnicity - the Moba shake, Kabiye, Losso, Ife, Fon. They LOVED watching my mom dance - and correctly intuited to let my dad just observe.

I’m not much for goodbyes, so this was the perfect way to celebrate with my friends and work partners in village before I leave Togo.

The best part of my parents’ visit was learning how to make batik with Chantal Donvide, the founder of Aklala Batik. We spent the day at her workshop in Kpalime, following each step of the process to make our own batik. Chantal, in addition to being a talented artisan, is also a social entrepreneur. She uses a portion of the proceeds from the sale of batik items to pay for girls’ school fees and to provide them with training in various income-generating activities.

My parents came to visit Togo last week - with three weeks until I move back to the States, it was rejuvenating to see Togo through their eyes.

Reflections on Service: Looking back on my Peace Corps service, what have I learned, discovered, decided? How am I making sense of and finding meaning in the last two-and-a-half years of work and life in Togo?

Today: How integration into another culture changed the way I value relationships, time, individualism and community

Togo has offered a completely different cultural context than the U.S., which provides a particular distance and space – physically and mentally – to re-examine what it means to live life, what it means to work and to succeed, and how to balance the myriad competing values that jostle for attention in the relative chaos of modern life. (Relative chaos, that is, for someone who seeks meaning outside of traditional religious institutions.) I had found this same distance and space while living in Russia; I had a chance to take a breath, to slow down and to reflect.

When I left for Togo I was looking forward to the same cultural contrast and the inevitable impact on how I articulated and prioritized my own values. The most notable change for me has been my affirmation to more actively cultivate generosity and empathy. I’ve sought a balance between the stereotypically American “time is money” attitude and the “time is always relative” perspective that I’ve found in Togo. However, I’m still seeking to reconcile what I might call my streak of American individualism in the context of a deeper appreciation for the importance of community.

Many aspects of Togolese culture stood in stark contrast to assumptions I had made about life and how best to live it. The “sitting culture” and intricate daily greetings helped me develop a profound appreciation for intentional relationship building and the need to prioritize time and energy for establishing and maintaining both personal and professional relationships. My neighbors conceived of time in a wholly different way. Whereas I saw it in more or less purely productive terms, something to be scheduled and organized so as to maximize output, my work partners and friends saw it as eternally flexible. Just as there was always enough food to share, regardless of how much there actually was, there was always enough time to go around for the things that really mattered.

I certainly didn’t adopt everything about Togolese culture wholesale. I did incorporate more intentional attitudes and habits towards relationship building. I did learn that food is always, always, always meant to be shared, and that no matter how little there might be, there is always enough for someone else. My experiences challenged me to become more empathetic and generous, and to value those qualities more highly in myself and others. Yet with time, I found – and am still finding – a way to reconcile a view of time as productivity with the view that there is always time for what you make time for, and prioritizing people should be at the top of the list. I can’t relinquish my to-do list – which in my case would be tantamount to a lobotomy – but I can make more space beyond it for people and relationships, and I can approach those interactions without expectations, with only a desire to enjoy and grow from the experience.

Certain aspects of my experiences in Togo also prompted me to reaffirm more strongly my commitment to values that I saw as particularly American. The emphasis on the “collectif” – the collective, the group, the unit – in Togo forced me to recognize that as much as I value community, I have a strong streak of American individualism that I am unwilling to abandon. First, I think there is a difference between the collectif and community. Or maybe it’s just that there is a time and place for everything. When all I want to do is get from one town to another, I care less about the collectif and more about getting the trip over and done with. When a driver tells me to be patient and just wait for a fifteen-passenger van to fill up – a process that would take several hours – instead of taking a small car, I am not particularly swayed by arguments in favor of the collectif. If the other passengers are willing to wait for the whole van to fill up, great. If I wait, I will miss a meeting I’ve scheduled, so I see no good reason why I should not take a small car.

Beyond the cultural values that I’ve adopted, reconciled or affirmed, I found so much in common with the people with whom I lived and worked. I found common ground with counterparts in valuing community and service; our shared identity as volunteers was a powerful connection and bridge to working together. My work with the Majorette and other women in the Red Cross Mother’s Club, as well as the women in the trainings and conferences I helped organize, prompted me to value much more strongly my identity as a young woman. (More on why Togo made me a feminist in another post).

With my time left in Togo now measured in weeks instead of months, the blog will be featuring a series of “Reflections on Service.” Looking back on my Peace Corps service, what have I learned, discovered, decided? How am I making sense of and finding meaning in the last two-and-a-half years of work and life in Togo? I know I have more thoughts and reflections than I could ever fit into one article or conversation about my service. (I have about six journals full, after all). But when I return to the U.S. and hear the inevitable “How was Togo/Peace Corps?” I hope that I’ll have articulated a few key ideas to share.

Today: Personal and professional growth, developing ways to meaningfully integrate the two, and the importance of intentional relationship building

Upon hearing that I was joining the Peace Corps, a geography professor at Middlebury warned me not to expect to accomplish much on the professional front. To be more precise, she warned me to expect to accomplish more or less absolutely nothing in terms of development work. “Make sure you go for personal reasons,” she advised.

Thanks in large part to my geography classes, I was already skeptical about the development industry – its impact, sustainability, the colonial undertones to Western involvement in West Africa, the neoimperialism of much of American foreign policy and intervention abroad. But my passion for social justice still prompted my interest in global inequality, and I figured that two years of Peace Corps service would be the most straightforward way to find out for myself what this looked like on the ground. How else would I have the opportunity to live and work with the people most affected by global poverty? I didn’t want to “help,” but I did want to learn, to work, and to see what grassroots community development looked like.

I took that professor’s advice to heart and identified personal goals for my two years of service. In fact, personal growth became the primary – thought not sole – lens through which I viewed my progress and achievements in Togo. I think this helped me thrive in the relative solitude at post, and also to feel centered despite the challenges and failures of work and life in village. Defining personal goals meant that there was a metric for accomplishment other than progress on work in my community; when projects moved slowly or hit roadblocks, this proved to be vital.

I think this particular focus on the personal growth and development side of the work-life equation provided much-needed balance to my tendency to focus on work to the exclusion of most other considerations. I didn’t abandon my work ethic or stop making extensive to-do lists, but I did find ways to prioritize the personal along with the professional. I developed my contemplative practice in journaling and yoga. I made time for reading, writing and reflection on philosophy and spirituality, further articulating my own values in work and life. I was intentional about relationship building, learning how to be a more inclusive colleague and more empathetic friend, both with work partners and friends in village and with fellow volunteers.

This emphasis on personal growth and goal-setting should not overshadow the professional development that Peace Corps has represented for me. From facilitation, programming, project management and monitoring and evaluation, I have honed a professional skillset that will serve me well in future endeavors. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work both on projects in village and on managing our food security projects at the program level. I’ve been able to undertake international development work from multiple perspectives, from grassroots on the ground to organizational considerations in the office. I am leaving Peace Corps not only with a philosophy of social change but also with more clearly defined professional goals. Despite the importance for me of prioritizing the personal, I’ve been lucky to have had incredible opportunities for professional development, as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between the personal and the professional as the transition from Togo back to the U.S approaches. In Togo I’ve become so much more diligent about prioritizing my personal growth and my relationships alongside my professional work. I’ve come to see them as the connected parts of an integrated whole, instead of the opposing sides of a work-life balance. In Togo, I’ve been able to integrate them into a whole, both in village and in Lomé. I don’t want to give that up when I return to the U.S!

I expect that back in the American cultural context, it will be much more difficult for me to maintain some of these habits, to be as mindful of some of these realizations. The American culture of “always busy” and “time is money” will challenge me to continue to prioritize relationships, to make time for contemplation and reflection. (Disclaimer: I’m speaking about my American cultural context. It likely has overtones colored by the state/region where I lived, the college I went to and the family I grew up in.)

As they near the end of their service, many volunteers in Togo compile a “bucket list” of everything they want to do and see before leaving. Particularly given the diversity of Togo’s different regions – in terms of climate, language, festivals and food – even after living in the country for two years, there is often much left to explore. One volunteer visited the village of every single volunteer in our stage. Pretty incredible way to see all of Togo!

I didn’t travel much while I was living in village, but after moving to Lomé, I ended up traveling a fair bit to implement WAFSP trainings in different parts of the country. However, there are still a few things I’d like to do with my last two months – some of which my parents will get to do with me when they visit in October…

Eat as much pineapple as physically possible. Ditto with piment. Take more long walks on the beach road in Lomé. Get some fermented pate with tomato sauce and tilapia. With my parents: Hike Mount Agou, the tallest point in Togo. Make batik with Chantal. Visit Café Kuma. Make a final batch of tchakpa with the Majorette. Fete with my counterparts in village.