The wireless in our hotel is ONLY in my room and ONLY if you sit on the right hand side of my bed… So our room is always crowded  (Sigh, no more wireless after today)

…

Today we learned how to filter our water and how to give stool samples to test for amoebas and giardia .   I also finished getting some shots, although we will get some more in a couple weeks.  Tomorrow we leave for our host families  about an hour and a half north of Lome.   This afternoon we have more meetings and we’re also going to buy some supplies (toilet paper, bucket, cup, sponge, pagnes, etc).

I was very sick last night but I feel better now, as I had the opportunity to take a nice nap before lunch.  Speaking of lunch, it’s off I go.

 the hostel

 my nifty med kit

Lomé is Togo’s capital – whether by virtue of its one paved road, or not, remains to be seen.  At night its streets’ sandiness trip Volunteers who may be balanced-impaired (yours truly). Fires burn on tables of Togolese still selling wares.  The moon is bright and when it is full it is supposed to be bright as day. 

 

Some updates:

The hostel has a kitty cat called Milo.  See pictures below. 

 

We are going to the training site on Wednesday where we meet our host families.

 

The Togolese are beautiful people!

 

We will be issued kerosene lamps and gas stoves and got a brief lesson on how to use them.  Great, more fire hazards.

 

Today we had demonstrations on how to use latrines, take a bucket shower, wrap a pagne around us, and talked about things to expect with host families (they will try to feed us too much).

 

We also learned how to put blood on slides to test for malaria, if the need should ever arise.  No one has even gotten malaria in Togo who has taken their medicine correctly, though.

 

We also got our medical kits.  Photos to come.

 

Yesterday we picked out our bikes and they will be at our training sites.

 

That’s all for now.  I’m feeling pretty nauseous so going to bed early.

 

Milo (the hostel’s kitty cat)

     

 My first Togolese friend

More Pictures!

Don’t expect this internet access to be regular.  However, the mysterious wireless (it’s only in our room) is still working although it goes in and out.  So here are a few photos.  I made the pictures smaller this time to make them easier to upload / download.  Let me know if they are not right

Updates:  

Today we received some shots at the clinic, we will be getting shots for the next three days. 

I also met one-on-one with the director of my program (Girls Education and Empowerment).  She was so amazing.  She started the program and Burkina Faso’s GEE program is based off of Togo’s.  I am looking forward to work more with her.

We have had delicious food so far.  Yummy salads, fresh fruit (although it’s no longer mango season, but the pineapples are delicious), meat, and starches.  

We all had our French placement exams today.  They consisted of fifteen minute conversations with an instructor.  We will find out soon how we all did.   Our group has a wide variety of French language background, ranging from none to advanced. 

I met Ian’s close friend who has been a Volunteer in Togo for a year, which was nice to feel a connection with someone.  

We are drinking so much water I have never had to go to the bathroom this much before.    Oh, we don’t flush the toilet paper, we put it in a basket near the toilet.

A bunch of us are going out tonight with some already-here Volunteers (the last group). 

That’s all for now — once again I have to use the bathroom (from all the water — I’m not sick yet).   We have Monday and Tuesday left till we go to our host families which will probably be the end of the wireless. 

 Lome beach

 Displaying the “walkaround and incidental” allowances we received on arrival

 the view from a bathroom window

 my swollen feet and legs

 Our hostel room (note the mosquito nets)

  The plane landing in Togo

   The Sahara Desert

Sept 22^nd – Arrival

 

HOLY (fill in the blank) I am picking up a faint internet signal from my bedroom in Lome! So I will type this in Word and then try and post it before I go to bed. I know that I should go to sleep to prepare for tomorrow, but I am worried that this miraculous internet will have disappeared.

 

Right now I am in a surreal situation.  I am lying crosswise on a mosquito-net-engulfed bed, with my laptop on my legs and my legs high above my head.  They are at a ninety degree angle to the wall.  They are swollen to at least three times their normal size and are freaking me out! I’m sure it was just from all the flying, but I am going to put them up above my head for a while and see what happens. 

 

I don’t really know where to start.  In no particular order, here are some snippets:

 

• The Sahara Desert: is incomprehensible.  You look down at it and think, “Wow, I should be amazed I’m over the Sahara Desert.” But instead your reaction is “Alright already we’ve been flying over sand for two hours.  How can we not be done?”  When you’re looking at normal scenery from a plane, it changes quite often, even if it’s the same type of scenery.  Even when flying over mountains you can see the individual crooks and crags and the shadows.  But the red sand of the Sahara stretches on and on until it becomes tedious, even, while also increasing in its imposingness.  I would not want to be lost there.  It was unforgiving and beautifully brutal – like a Jezebel.
• Cold Showers:  I just took my first one at our hostel/hotel.  It was incredible!! It felt soo good!  It wasn’t frigid and the coolness was a great relief.   It is a real shower just cold water.   we are all in a hostel taking up all the rooms.  Some of the Volunteers had to go to a different hotel too.
• Our luggage  took up the entire courtyard of the hostel.  I will hopefully be able to post some pictures soon.  I took some photos on the flight too of the views out the window.
• Arrival:  After a long flight to Paris, and a quick change to the next flight (even though we had an hour and a half layover, the transition took so long that we didn’t even have time to grab that French croissant I was looking forward to), we had another six hour flight to Lome.  When we got to Lome, there were men standing with Peace Corps signs who took us to a room in the airport (air conditioning!).  Oh even though it was 6pm it was already dark. When we were all off the plane, they took our passports and sent us to get our luggage.   Which took forever of course!  Peace Corps took care off getting our passports stamped and stuff – nice to travel with VIP status J .   We loaded all the luggage up into a big truck (photos to come) and got into Peace Corps land rovers and drove to the “hotel” where we were met by the rest of PC staff and some current volunteers.  We had some very very yummy Togolese food!  The staff introduced themselves, gave us a schedule for tomorrow, and by this time it was pretty late.

OK so my roommate and I just found out my plug adaptor sparks when we try to charge our computers, so I want to save the computer’s battery so I’ll close.   I’ll remember a lot more updates and post them when I can.  Oh, tomorrow we get bikes and language tests!

Departure – A very convulated entry

I’m in JFK Airport right now using the (ridiculously expensive) wireless internet access.  Volunteers are spread around the terminal, eating or phoning friends and family (those who still have cell phones) or crashing.  Everyone is exhausted and we’re all thinking about the long trip ahead and how much worse we’ll probably feel.  Family, I’m sorry I can’t phone any of you, but I turned off my phone service yesterday.   I hope you will understand and know that I was thinking of you all. 

So we went to the clinic to get some shots this morning.  We also started our malaria medication.  The innoculations we receive in the US are: MMR, polio, and yellow fever.  Everything else (including rabies three times) we will receive in country.   I will stay in Lome from three days then head to my training site.  During the three days we will be tested for our language abilities and also get given our bikes. (!)

I would just like to begin my first “official” entry by saying I feel under a lot of pressure given my repuation from the France letters.  However, this entry is not one of those spectacular creations.  This is a quick update, and I’m very tired, so I am just leaving some quick notes about the past couple of days.  

Some notable quotes:  “In Paris, if anyone isn’t at the gate- just leave them behind.” Our PC Staging Coordinator.   And “Um — I can’t get my malaria medicaiton open!”  

This last one would be from me.   Yes,  the doubters will feel vindicated that I have already found myself in ridiculous situations.  (Oh and I nearly fell over in the airport – again.  This would make the third airport in the world in which I’ve fallen over.)  Anyway, back to the malaria medication.   I couldn’t figure out how to open the foil packet.  (I would just like to point out that other people had problems too.)   There wasn’t any tab to pull apart and I couldn’t push it through.  I’m not sure if once delusional and hallucinating from the effects of the malaria medication I’ll be able to handle these simple motor tasks.  I can barely walk, talk, and open medicinal packets while “normal”.  

I also ended up buying a 26″ duffel because my plan to pack one big bag and one small bag, rather than two medium bags, backfired because of the weight limits.  So I bought a rolling duffel from Ross and redistributed everything.  I have no idea where anything is, though.  I managed to go through check-in without scraped knuckles (unlike Italy where they felt so bad for me they let me skip the line).

Staging:  There are 31 other volunteers here with me at the airport.  It is so fascinating to talk to everyone and hear their different experiences, backgrounds, where they’re from, etc.  There are 17 volunteers in the Natural Resource Management program and 14 in Girls Education and Empowerment (GEE) which is my program.    It was great to meet people finally and know that we were all experiencing the same things.  Staging was a rollercoaster and emotions flipped back and forth from excitement to sadness to stress to exhaustion.  I didn’t get a lot of sleep and we’re all pretty tired right now.  Coupled tat with the million goodbyes we’ve had to go through and everything we’re leaving behind, it’s pretty an intense couple of days.  Hard to believe we only started at 2pm on Wednesday and now it’s Friday.  It’s going to be a long night.  We will have a very short layover in Paris and then we will have another 6 hours to Lome, Togo.   

  During staging we talked about policies, the history of the Peace Corps, guidelines, what to expect, things like that.

      the laptop bag my mom made

my cat helping make a sleeping sack.

“packing”

Going to close now.  I’ll update again if I think of anything else that happened.  Very tired and I still don’t really believe I’m going to Togo. 

Floods in Africa

“TOGO: Floods kill at least 17, cut off access to some 60,000 people” :: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74144 

and Äfrican Towns Overrun By Flooding”:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/09/16/africa.floods.ap/index.html#cnnSTCText

Mandatory Reading

In PDF version at the link below is a publication the PC puts out for friends and family.

http://www.peacecorps.gov/multimedia/pdf/faf/homefront.pdf