BLOG POST:
Updates on My Life
- I’ve been forgetting to mention, anything vacuum-sealed (IE those packages of tuna and stuff) would be great additions to a package. Oh, and please tell me if you’re sending a package (not padded envelopes). We have accounts open at the PC office with some money down as a deposit, and the post office levies small taxes on our packages which the PC pays for us out of our accounts. If there isn’t any money in the account, PC won’t pick up the package at the post office and it has to sit there till it’s paid for (and bugs and stuff could get in it). I’m going to be sending in some more money next week (because someone from PC is stopping in my village and I can send it with him) but just remember to give me a head’s up so I can calculate if there is enough remaining. (Of course, don’t let this discourage you from sending mail…)
- I have a cat! His name is Acoco (the name for the second twin). As this is a pretty big indignity, since he’s male, I tend to shorten it to Coco (cocoa). He has longish hair, jet black, with white feet and neck and tummy, and pale green eyes. He is a good sized kitten, much older than the age they’re usually sold at (ie way too young to be separated from their mothers), which bodes well for his health if he’s survived this long. He’s settling in nicely, and alternately between tearing madly around and hunting dust particles, and sleeping. He also loves to chase my feet and I’ve tripped over him a million times already. At night (when he’s not hunting my feet under the sheets) he wiggles and wiggles till he is between my hands tucked right under my chin. Very endearing. I now have to sleep with my mosquito net raised up on one side so he can get in and out (and I’m in constant fear of him trying to climb the netting and knock the whole thing down, which he already did his first day here), but I figured nothing nasty would crawl on me while a cat was there! I like having him around because there is something in my ceiling (mice? Bats?) and I can hear it at night, but if I have Acoco I can either pretend it’s him or else figure that he doesn’t seem concerned so nothing will happen. He can be quite feisty and plays rough, and I’m convinced he has two personalities – one of psycho cat and another of needy obsessive controller. (Barely a week out of the Togolese market – where he probably would have been eaten – and he’s already learned that this owner is a sucker for meowing and pleas for attention.) Right now he’s starting at my fingers on the keyboard, and yesterday he ended up taking a nap with his head firmly on the backspace key. I’m sure you will hear much, much more about him in future blogs. Oh, one last thing – I found out AFTER I bought him that my village doesn’t like black cats. And by doesn’t like, I mean loathes. Whoops.
- The primary school director asked me to meet with him “about an project”. Excited that I was the one being approached, I went to the school at the appointed time. He launched into a speech about kids not going on to middle school because of lack of access to funds. Yes! This was all in my domain! It was like Projects 101! I leaned forward eagerly, excited to hear his project idea. He too leaned forward, full of importance and grandiosity. “Rabbits!” he said. “Rabbits?” I repeated. “Rabbits! We’ll raise rabbits! This NGO magazine I received says that rabbits are easy to care for, and can produce 60 babies in one year! We’ll get a couple, teach the kids how to care for them, and then they can sell the offspring in Lomé and help pay their school fees. I thought of chickens, but rabbits are better. No Avian flu, you see.” “Ah,” I said, a trifle faintly. “Yes. Rabbits.” So… good thing I had bunnies when I was younger, right? So, we’ll see where this goes (he wants me to write a project plan to present to his cousin who works with a non-profit org.), but on the positive side, at least someone’s showing some initiative in the community, right? Or, I have nightmaric visions of my village being overrun with bunnies and the Peace Corps glaring at me and saying “Why didn’t you do a feasibility study like you know you’re supposed to?”
- I feel awkward with my host neighbor. I eat with her and her husband pretty much every night, she does so much for me, we seem to get along. She is a tailor, and I didn’t want to offend her by going to some other tailor, and also I thought it would be a nice pay to repay her for the services she does for me. So I took her some tye-dye fabric to make into a dress, but when I gave her money she refused it. I ended up taking the money back after she said “If you leave that money here I won’t be able to say ‘good morning’ to you.” But I have no idea of knowing whether she really meant it, how much I was supposed to persuade her, whether she thinks I hinted for her to do it for free, etc. etc. I just feel bad now that she has extra work to sew but no money to show for it. That was on Monday and I have been feeling pretty weird about it, I guess it’s hard to explain, but I took a chance on offering her my business (and my money) and I lost. I just hope that awkwardness is just on my side. Argh!! Well, I guess I couldn’t go this long in Togo without some sort of social crisis , right? Now I feel weird eating with her but my gas has run out and it’s annoying cooking with charcoal.
- I’ve had two drum lessons so far! I love it ! The drummers seem to love it too! In fact they made me change my seat in church so that I can sit near them and watch them play. My drum lessons are right before the choir practice, which I go to anyway since my neighbor goes, and it’s fun listening to the singing even though it’s in Ewe. Now during choir practice, I sit with a drum and the drummers make me play along with the singing! Eventually they want me to play in church, but I’ve told them that I get stage fright and I need to practice a lot before that, haha….
- Yesterday I met with the collège (middle school) director to see how I can start working there. Collèges are big targets for GEE volunteers most notably because the kids have a good level of French, and they are teenagers and can participate in a lot of activities. The meeting was a little awkward, and the director kept turning to my homologue and asking questions like I wasn’t there (“Does she…”) but by the end of it, he said he would call a meeting of the teachers and then let me know later what afternoon I can come work with the kids. I THINK he thinks I’m going to be teaching Life Skills to 400 kids. Ah. So maybe next time I’ll have some interesting stories…
- For Mom: I got your last letter #12 last week (haven’t checked the mail yet today); before that was #11 and then #10 (in that order, they crisscrossed each other).
Salutations: Or, By The Time We Finish Saying Good-Day, It’ll Be Nighttime
Salutations are very important in Togolese culture. It’s pretty rude to forgo them. However, I’m constantly being introduced to new ones, leaving no recourse but to smile foolishly and say “Eh…” (Ewe for ‘yes’) tentatively. It would seem to be a safe bet, after all, 99% of the time the response is indeed “Yes, I…” Of course, this does mean I’ve already accidentally agreed to marry five different women’s sons, as I took a gamble on what they were saying (and lost, evidently). This has made the mothers very happy, although I’ll leave the sons to figure out their feeling on female polygamy. (But hey, at least I’m doing my job as a GEE Volunteer and increasing women’s empowerment.) Here is a sampling of salutations:
“How goes it?” (Well.) “Your household?” (They’re fine.) “Your kids?” (They’re fine.) “The folks from Lomé?” [if I've been away] (They’re fine.) “Your sisters? Husband? Countrymen?” (They’re fine.) “And yesterday’s work?” (It went well.) “You’ve come to market?” (Yes, I’ve come to market.) “What are you going to buy?” (I once marched up and down flapping my arms and squawking to imitate a chicken, to find out where the eggs were sold.) “So you’ve come out to walk around?” (Yes, I’ve come out.) [This last one never ceases to confuse me. I'm standing right before you, of course I've left my house.] “Where are you coming from? Where are you going?” [My vocabulary usually fails me at this point and I resort to pointing or saying 'Over there…'] “Well, return again soon.” (Yes…)
All these salutations can happen all within the same exchange. At this point, the tomatoes I’ve just bought from the marché lady have sprung roots, flowered, and dropped new tomatoes.
On the subject of salutations, with all those questions, there are certain things it’s very rude to ask: someone’s age, if they’re married, if they have kids. That is, you can ask after these people or the state of these people’s health, but you can’t ask if they actually exist. So it’s okay to say “How’s your wife?” but not “Are you married?” Thus, depending on the context (don’t do this to your chief), if someone – usually male – asks if you’re married it’s perfectly acceptable to say it’s not their business or ask why they want to know. But also, saying the kids are fine even if you don’t have any is okay too – it’s the spirit/meaning of the salutation that matters.
Malaria
Malaria is a very real concern here and all PCVs must take medication, as well as being issued a mosquito net and bug repellent. So every Sunday I swallow 250mg of mefloquine. Despite its reputation, I haven’t really had any bad effects. I have had a few freaky dreams but who’s to say whether this is the medicine or just normal reactions to moving into a new place, etc. (Although I did dream I was about to get hit by a truck and woke up to find myself cowering in a corner of my bed.) And I’d rather take a pill once a week than be struck down with “le palu”. (It’s hard not to have mixed feelings as I see Togolese who don’t take medication (money issues?) who then fall ill.) It becomes a vicious cycle, though, as, much like Americans label minor stomach bugs as “the flu”, many people here label everything “it’s malaria” and begin anti-malaria treatment, thus building immunity to the meds (so that when they actually do get malaria, the medication won’t be effective); and the malaria strain itself warps and mutates and becomes drug resistant, hence why there are different medications for different parts of Africa.
Lost in Translation I
There are a few vignettes, as it were, be they little conversations in passing or sights on the road, that I jotted down to write about later, not sure what they represent, but feeling that there was something significant about them, although I don’t want to analyse them, merely recount:
*
The young man pausing in front of me is probably closer to my age, or at least my generation, although he was still in the equivalent of middle school (a common phenomenon here). He had stopped by while I was eatining dinner with Justine. He began to wheedle me to tutor him in English. As this tends to be a pick up line of choice, and additionally I don’t wish to take work away from qualified Togolese citizens, I told him that I had just arrived, etc., that that was what his English teacher was for, etc. The conversation continued, and he was very persuasive, and I almost relented until he made a fatal mistake. For some reason we were talking about cooking and he said, “And then you can cook for me …” I said: “Why do I have to cook for you? Why can’t you cook for me?” And he looked at me like I was a complete idiot and said seriously, “Because you’re a women. That’s what you do.”
*
“What a beautifully fat baby!” I exclaimed, bouncing it on my knees. The little rascal was heavy, which I was happy to see. His father smiled proudly and told me: “Yes, but he’s getting too heavy to carry on his mother’s back. So here when babies get too big we give them teas to lose weight. It’s already starting to work. It’s necessary that he not be so heavy. We’ll give him more herbs tonight.”
*
Everyone I had talked to said that on market days, taking a moto to Vogan was the same prices as a car. Thus, I purposefully waited to go into Vgan until Friday so I could pay the car price of 350 CFA rather than the moto price of 700CFA. But upon arriving at Vogan the moto driver told me it was 700CFA. As this was pretty much the extent of his French, I couldn’t argue very much, and paid the 700 feeling miffed and convinced that I had been taken advantage of. Back in village that evening, I indignantly told my experience to both my homologue and my neighbor and received the same response. “Oh,” they said, “it’s 350 CFA if there are two passengers. It’s 700 if there’s one passenger.” They seemed to think I would implicitly understand this, and that it was obvious logic. (Never mind the logic behind paying less in order to put more strain on the moto.) I wanted to say, But you know I live alone and will always be a sole passenger.
*
When there is a new (absent) moon, the darkness seems absolute. But when the moon is full, you don’t have any need for a lantern and the sky is the same gray it is at 6am. And once, the moon was blue, and I’ll leave it at that.
*
Posted by togolesejourney 
Posted by togolesejourney 
