-I get to go home tomorrow!  I can’t wait to see my kitty and my friends in village.  I might not even go into Vogan on Friday comme d’habitude. 

Anyway it turns out that I have amoebas and this probably contributed to the severe dehydration.  Aurelia said that I was the sickest PCV she had ever seen in the Med Unit.  (See, I always have to excel at everything.)  Anyway the pain in my neck and ribs and back is getting better and we went to another doctor just to be sure but he is just as sure that it’s simple trauma from falling down so much.  So I get to go back to village tomorrow and rest and monitor the pain but it’s been steadily improving so I don’t foresee any complications. 

I may or may not post again tomorrow before heading back to village.  I’m planning to stick around the bureau while the mail is being sorted so I can see if there’s anything for me, so I don’t have to go to Vogan for the mail the next day.  

Aurelia told me a story that around 3 years ago the WHO distributed a free mosquito net to every child in Togo.  That’s right, every child.  And then they did a follow up survey (she knows this because at the time she was working at a hospital and she was the one in charge of the survey).  For every case of confirmed malaria, they asked the mother if they used their mosquito net, and very rarely was the answer “yes”.  Some people had left it in its package and put it away in a drawer; some people had hung it up but complained that they were too hot or that their child “coughed once” while under the net, etc. etc…   Food for thought.  Malaria and dehydration are the biggest killers of children in Togo and both of them are preventable , yet it’s always tempting to think “oh, that won’t happen to me.” (And most Togolese in villages only drink water after meals or after a long trip – not on a regular basis.)   I  think in the States we think, “oh, dehydration — a little dizziness, give ‘em a little gatorade and they’ll be fine.”   But dehydration here is most serious than that (as I can attest…); its symptoms are pretty much the same as malaria’s, and both diseases are quick-arriving and quick killing.  

-I’ve been forgetting to mention that my internet schedule may change.  Normally I go nearly every Friday, but first of all, since I’ve spent so much time in Lome I won’t be going to the internet cafe this Friday, and second of all the internet cafe in Vogan is starting a new rule where there has to be a minimum amount of people before they open up the phone lines, so I may not have the patience to wait around every Friday.  We’ll see what happens though.

 

Quotes / Projects / Musings

So today Aurelia said not to go to the bureau so I had all day to type up a blog entry while I was at the health unit  (now I’m at the bureau in the evening).  So here is a very eclectic , all-over-the-place entry:

 

Blog Post April 7, 2008

 

Quote of the Day:

Kassie: “I feel like I wouldn’t share an apple in the United States.”

-said in the middle of happily munching an apple that we’d given to her, Daniel, Fabiola, and Danielle when they visited us in the med unit.  The four gleefully took turns taking bites out of it (apples are luxuries in Togo… even when you do find them, they’re pretty expensive)

 

Kassie to me: “You have this gift that would be really annoying in the States but here it works – you twist Togolese people into thinking that you really need them to help you and then you get all this stuff for free.   …You’re going to have a lot of problems when you go back home.”

 

Me: “So I had to figure out a way to get my bike to Vogan…”

Danielle: “So you rode it in?”

Me: “Wait, why would I ride my bike? Oh… I guess that’s what it’s for.”

 

My sister: “Is the med unit a tent or a hut?”

Me: “No, it’s like AMERICA.”

 

Me: “No one would steal vacation days to travel in Togo.  Who takes public transportation for fun in Togo?”

Becka: “Actually there are people that do so believe it or not.”

Me: “What kind of a SICK world is this?”

 

Kassie: “My brother says he misses me so much that he hasn’t taken my toothbrush out of the bathroom.”

Me: “Awwwww.”

Kassie: “Actually I think he was just buttering me up so they could turn my bedroom into the baby’s room.”

 

Kassie: “What would you say if someone said they had a master’s in dairy farming?”

(Me: “I’d say that’s not a pick up line.”)

 

 

Ridiculous Situations I’ve Found Myself In Togo:

• Moto’ing A Bike.  So my bike hadn’t been ridden for a while and at this point I was scared to get on it in case something was going to fall off because it hadn’t  been properly maintained.  It also had a flat tire and I couldn’t get the pump to work.  Our bike instructor from stage was making his way around the country performing annual maintenance and repair checkups.  It seemed too good to pass up.  The only problem was his closest scheduled stop was in Vogan (he couldn’t go to each visit so they designated stops that multiple volunteers could easily get to).  Even if I had decided to ride my bike into Vogan, I couldn’t because of the flat tire.  Finally I started asking people in my village: “So, how would you get a bike into Vogan?”  “Oh,” they’d reply, “if you were a boy you could hold it on the back of a moto.”  Ah.  Finally the fifth person to say this, I answered, “Wait, why is it that it has to be a boy?”  “Well, you’re a girl.  You won’t be strong enough.”  At some point – this is where the insanity kicked in – I went into GEE mode and decided that some gender equity demonstration was called for.  Besides, I had asked the moto drivers, and they said, “Yes it’s possible, it’s hard though.” I chose to focus on the second half of this sentence.  (Although I failed to take into account that they may have been a little biased since I was the one who would be paying them while I did all the hard work.) So I said “Great!” and went and got my bike.  In my absence, the driver with the nice, cushiony, big moto left with another passenger and I got stuck with a little rickety moto (you learn to appreciate the difference when going over uneven roads).  So the driver mounted his moto… I got on the moto behind him… Then another driver turned my bike upside and placed it between us , on my knees… With my arms and hands I supported the wheels and tried to keep it from leaning on the driver.   (Bear in mind that these are big, high quality mountain bikes.)  This was easy!  Wouldn’t be too hard at all!   ….        …..          ….   Ten minutes later I knew that this was possibly the worse idea I’d ever had.  My arms ached from holding the bike, and the metal gear wheels were positioned right against my shoulder (I was wearing a tanktop and my shoulders were bare), and every time we hit a bump they dug deeper and deeper into my skin.  Anytime we passed someone or something on the road I cringed at the thought of my bike’s wheels clipping that person/thing.  It was the longest ride into Vogan I’d ever taken .  Normally I’m slightly disappointed to arrive at my destination and get off my moto, but this time the distance seemed to crawl.  It didn’t help that the moto was also going slower than usual due to balancing problems and the added weight and just safety issues in general.  By the time I got into Vogan, I was mollified only by the thought of “Well, at least one day I can tell people that my bike was so spoiled I used a motorcycle to take it places.”  My shoulder bore that marks of that trip for a week.  For the moment my bike is still in Vogan, and on a market day I’ll put it on top of a car and bring it back to village.   (But at least I proved that a girl can do it too…)
• Bush Taxis:  Even though I have moto privileges to Vogan, it gets expensive to take them all the time and besides, sometimes I have a lot of stuff coming back from market (the problem is the day that I buy something heavy like pineapples is always the same day I end up getting a package or maybe a fellow PCV sent me some books).  So I take one of the market cars that shuttle back and forth on Fridays between my village and Vogan.  In the mornings, if I take it early enough , I get a five-placer (places, not people, it would be about seven or eight people) but if it’s later in the morning and definitely when I’m leaving Vogan, then I take a fifteen placer van (fifteen placer means at least twenty people, not including children which don’t count, and not including any animals).  Now sometimes I actually enjoy bush taxis (from here to Vogan or to Lome, that is.  After that I’m out of my comfort zone ie been in one longer than an hour and a half.) in an odd sort of (masochistic) way. I like striking up conversations with other passengers, particularly if they were the kind to give me a “oh it’s another yovo” look and then I bust out a funny phrase in Ewe and their attitudes change.  Particularly taking the bush taxi back from Vogan is always fun, because it’s always crammed full of women from my village and they love it when I go around the car asking them what they bought at the market in Ewe. (OK , granted this is more fun because I tend to get the front seat where only two passengers can sit (for some reason no overcrowding in the front seat but the back is fair game?), and once I was with Justine and I made her sit up front and I sat in the very back seat and after ten minutes I was considering writing “Help me I’ve been kidnapped get me out of here” and passing to a gendarme through the window)  Also, all the chauffeurs know me as do the driver apprentices, and I’ve never been charged for putting my luggage on top of the roof like everyone else has to do.Lately though, I’ve started to experience stronger and stronger senses of “I’m in a Fellini movie.” To begin with, the first time I rode in the white van, the driver got in besides me – actually it was his apprentice – and he looks like he’s about fifteen years old.  While I’m texting this observation to fellow PCVs, I look down and I realize I can see the ground through the holes in the floor.  Well, not that unusual in a bush taxi.  I forget about these observations until a few weeks ago when I was in my customary seat and my apprentice got in beside me to start the car.  By start the car I mean he ignored the key that was in the ignition and instead rubbed together two wires that were hanging underneath the steering wheel.  “Um, this is just a suggestion, but I think I saw someone get a car to start by turning that key,” I said humbly.  “Oh,” he said, giving me a tolerant look, “something in the engine broke last week.” Ah, ok.  Something clattered onto my lap.  It was the handle for the passenger window.

  Yet a few more weeks later, I arrived in Vogan too late to take the front seat.  It wouldn’t have mattered if the front seat was free anyway, as the handle was missing from the inside of the door and the only way to get out was reach through the window and fiddle with the outside handle.  Anyway, since the middle seat was broken, they had taken it out and replaced it with a bench and a chair.  My perch was the chair, which was right by the door.  As we all piled in and started off another apprentice hopped in through the side window and started passing a cord from the roof around the door frame in order to keep it closed.  He saw me starting at him and grinned maniacally. No big deal right?  Lots of doors have problems closing.  He repeated this procedure each and every time we stopped to let passengers off.  

  Finally, the inevitable (or unbelievable, depending on which side of the ocean you live on) happened.  Moments from my house, a woman descending the vehicle turned too quickly and something (possibly the goat) knocked against the car door, which had been untied to allow her to exit.  With a groaning complaint, the door fell off the van. 

  (I don’t actually remember the conclusion to this story, but I believe they tied the door back on and continued on their way. I’m considering asking the chauffeur how much it costs to fix the car and then saying I’ll loan him the money and he just lets me ride free for two years.)

 

 

Some Projects:

• Village Savings and Loans:  VS&L is a system that has been implemented in many rural communities across the world.  It is specifically designed to promote autonomy and also for groups with low literacy rates (only one person in each group needs to know how to read and write). Also, there is no reliance on outside funding or external banks.  Basically at every meeting, members of the meeting buy “shares”.  The value of a share is fixed (say 100CFA), and you can buy between one and five.  Everyone must buy at least one share.  The money is put in a box and there are three keys and three different people keep the keys.   After a certain amount of time (in order to build up the fund) members can take out loans.  They pay a certain amount of interest on these loans which then goes back into the central fund.  After a year, the amount of shares are counted, and then you divide the amount of money in the box by the number of shares.  So if you had 700,000 CFA and 5000 shares, each share would now be worth 140 CFA.  Then everyone takes back their shares that they had paid through out the whole year.  So someone who had bought 100 shares originally (x100CFA = 10,000CFA) now gets to take home 14,000CFA .  They were able to earn that extra 4,000 CFA without opening a bank account or a micro-financial institution account, which often require both a minimum deposit and a fee for opening an account.  Additionally, the group has learned that it can function independently and confidently.  Anyway, that’s just a little summary.  Anyway my cluster-mate David from Vogan and I are hoping to start this in my village with the women’s groups.  Next Saturday we are going to have an information session about it.  I hope the women are interested in it.  This morning was supposed to be my first day of starting to visit the women’s groups and ask them to come to our information session but as I’m at the health unit I can’t so hopefully this doesn’t fall through… Anyway I thought it would be great to work with women’s groups because financial independence often goes hand in hand with gender equity.   So as the project continues I will keep you updated.
• Vacation Enterprise (with a twist). So Vacation Enterprise is a program that was started by a PCV in Togo (and continued by other PCVs) to help school girls earn their tuition for the following school year.  A certain number of girls are chosen to receive a certain amount of money to start income generating activities and every week they must save yet again a certain amount .  At the end of the summer the PCV pays over the tuition to the school and returns any excess money to the girls.  That’s a short summary.  Anyway, for the moment, I’m not planning on doing this with the school girls because I can’t figure out where the PCVs got the money to give the girls (or maybe they just paid out of pocket).  If I said it was a loan, then by the time the girls pay me back there won’t be anything left over for the tuition.  However – apprentices don’t have a “school fee deadline”.  They just have to save for the big lump sum apprentissage fee at the end of their apprenticeship (typically three years).  So it doesn’t matter if first they have to repay me their loan back because they will have already gotten their activities moving and they can continue to save after they pay me back and then pay for their apprentissage fee.  So I’m going to do this program with apprentices.  Now, here’s the clinch:  Apprentices often don’t speak French.  Apprentices often don’t know how to read or write.   Sooo normal people would think this project doesn’t seem suited to them.  But, I’m going to adapt this project to fit a “pre-literate” and non-French speaking audience.  I want to figure out a system where perhaps through pictures they can make their budget tables.  (Oh, every week they have to keep track of their business expenses and profits, etc., hence the emphasis on reading and writing) . And I’ll find someone to work with me to help me with the language barrier.  I’ve already approached one of the hairdressers, who is the head of the hairdressers’ union, and she said the apprentices would be interested in a project like this.  She will get in touch with the head of the tailors’ union and thus the two of them will help me disseminate any information I need.  So now I just have to work on adapting the project’s audience (oh, I could figure that out while I’m here in Lome!).  As soon as I have a confident presentation hammered out I’m going to call all the apprentices together and then through a competition of business plans select 10 girls and each will receive 5,000 CFA.   After three months they’ll have to pay me back, but then the profits are theirs to keep.  However they will forced to actually save , not just use their money for odds and ends,  by handing in at least 500CFA a week.  Maybe I could have a prize for the girl who saved the most at the end of the year in order to promote the savings aspect. 
• So those are the two projects that are looming ahead of me and that were supposed to start sometime next week (just to clarify that it’s not just me rambling and saying “this is what I want to do in my village…”).  I also realized I never really explained what I do at the collège so here goes…
• Life Skills:  So on Mondays and Tuesdays I teach Life Skills at the collège.  I teach the quatrième (eighth grade?), cinqième (seventh grade?), and sixième (sixth grade?) classes.  There’re about 100 kids in each class so that’s 300 kids total.  Even though these are the equivalent of middle schoolers, the ages vary widely.  In any one session I can look at the faces of a ten year old sitting next to an eighteen year old.   This often throws off lesson planning for age-appropriate materials.  Also since many do not speak French in the home they struggle in school even though they have already gone through so many years of schooling (hm this sounds like it could have a place in the California courts).  Particularly the sixième struggles to understand me, the quatrième tends to be pretty good.  (And lycée students are fine.) Anyway, on Mondays I alternate between the cinqième and quatrième and Tuesdays are the sixième.    Each class is on a different subject track (they’ll all do the same thing eventually):  6ème is on Communication Skills, 5ème is on Relationship Skills, and 4ème is on HIV/AIDs.  The fourth track is Decision Making Skills.  I’ll rotating them on different tracks so that they don’t tell each other what to expect and thus know the “right” answers.Yes, but what exactly is Life Skills?  What I do, with the aid of the Peace Corps’ “Life Skills Manual”’s lesson plans along with information that I get through other volunteers, the internet (just found a great life skills section on the UNICEF website!), and brainstorming activities, is basically talk about all the things – leadership abilities, peer pressure, weighing pros and cons, how to read body language, how to avoid unhealthy relationships, drugs and alcohol – that may see “simple and straightforward” but if you think about, were all those things we learned ourselves as little kids through activities like Boy/Girl Scouts, interacting with our peers, youth groups,   etc., about “healthy life styes”.  (In fact the French translation of Life Skills is les practiques d’une vie saine [healthy life]).   We use a lot of interactive teaching methods such as skits or role plays or games.  So in the Relationship module, we are in the middle of talking about gender roles.  In the Communication module we’re in the middle of learning how to create assertive (not passive, not aggressive) messages, and we’ll be moving on to responding to peer pression.  In the HIV/AIDS module we’re talking about empathy and human rights.

  The premise of why Life Skills is so important and why it’s been implemented in so many programs all over the world is that young people are already saturated with information but they’re not given the tools to use that information.  So they’re told “Don’t do drugs” but they’re not told how to stand up to friends (whose opinions they respect and want!).  They’re told “Finish school” but they’re not shown how to set goals or to reach good decisions.   

  Life Skills aligns perfectly with my personality and philosophy on youth outreach so I enjoy teaching it (although I hate lesson planning with a passion).  Even in HIV/AIDS prevention, I refuse to tell kids not to have sex point-blank.  Me taking this approach would completely backfire.  Women’s place, and girl students’ places in particular, in society is so complicated that to ignore all the socioeconomic factors that go into high-risk activities would be naïve.  What I can do is say : “Let’s talk about what to do if ever you’re in a situation that makes you uncomfortable and you’d like to leave.” Or, “Let’s roleplay what you’d do if your father’s friend offers you a ride home from school.” Or, “Let’s do a group discussion on drawbacks to early pregnany to the mother, father, family, and community.”  Or “Let’s build your self-esteem so that you insist on a monogamous relationship.”  Little by little we build the solid foundation of a health lifestyle. 

 

 

At the Health Unit

So I’ve been at the Health Unit since Friday night – well, I guess Saturday morning.  I wasn’t sure I was going to put details up because I didn’t want anyone freaking out (cough cough ahem mom).  However, I can’t resist the temptation to show how , as the typical overachiever, I wait seven months to get sick and then proceed to do so with a ridiculous dramatic flair.

 

Anyway, I passed Thursday night in Agou.  It was lovely to see my host family.  They were so happy to see me too.  I went around and greeted a lot of other volunteers’ families too.  Friday was market day, so first I went to the market with my mama, then I went into Kpalime for the bank and some quick pagne shopping. 

 

Thursday late afternoon I started feeling sick.  I felt really cold, then hot, and very tired.  I figured it was just a typical 24-hour-bug thing, and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed. I kept on waking up every hour though either hot or cold.   Whenever I got up to use the bathroom I was very weak and dizzy and had to keep sitting down.  I could tell I had a very high fever.  My host family started sponging my skin down with cold water to cool me off, and they went out and got me cold lemonade to drink.  After this point, it starts to get a little hazy. 

 

I think I was either delirious or unconscious for the rest of the evening.  I just remember certain points, like falling on the cement pavement and having my host family trying to get me to get up.  I wasn’t thinking very rationally either, I kept on thinking “Why do they keep yelling my name, why can’t they just let me sleep?” I fell down  (fainted) at least twice but I think it was over three times.  My family started talking about taking me to the dispensaire.  I lay down on a mat in my courtyard and drifted in and out of consciousness.   I”ve never before experienced such loss of an entire evening, even when I’ve been sick with the flu or whatever I still know what’s going on. My host brother told me later that when he got there everyone was standing in a circle yelling at me to respond and I’d just open my eyes and look at them and finally close my eyes again.  I think I kept on thinking that “If I just go to sleep in the morning it will all be over.” Seriously, I don’t really remember much more than that. Whenever they’d try to help me up I couldn’t even stand and I’d just go back to the ground.  My host brother, who lives in Lome, showed up later that night, and my host parents were (obviously) freaking out.  They wanted to take me to the hospital in Kpalime but my host brother knows a lot of PCVs and said “No, the Peace Corps like them to be treated at the Peace Corps office.”  So he carried me to his car and my mama and her daughter piled in with me.  Apparently they also brought all of my luggage that had been in my room but I don’t remember that at all.   I think it was around 1am at this point, I’d been feeling queasy at around 5pm and that’s when I had gone to lie down.  We got to Lome at 2am (my host brother sped).  We arrived at the Health Unit and the guards called Aurelia, the PCMO on duty, and she arrived shortly thereafter from home.  Meanwhile my host brother had to carry me inside to a room.  Charsha was also at the Med Unit for some tests and she said I freaked her out.  Sorry, Charsha. J

 

Aurelia got there – I love our PCMOs. They’re amazing – and immediately did a test for malaria since all the symptoms were there.  (That’s another thing, most Togolese always say everything is malaria, and I had been terrified my host  family would take me to a local clinic which would just give me anti-malaria meds.) Luckily it wasn’t malaria.  Aurelia stayed up with me till 4am making me drink a liter of water with oral rehydration salts.  She said dehydration often has the same symptoms of malaria so that’s probably what it was, but we’d see how I was doing in a couple days.  (Although if it was dehydration, it’s very ironic since I think I drink the most amount of water out of anyone I know.) So yesterday (Saturday) I just drank a lot more oral rehydration salts and puttered around on the internet.  (Wow, at least I’m getting a free weekend in Lome, with my food paid for and everything… too bad I feel too weak to enjoy it fully) Today was much the same thing, and tomorrow I’ll talk to Aurelia about when I can go back to village.  I definitely don’t feel like I did on Friday night.  The only thing is that now I have a lot of physical aches (probably from falling down), like I can’t even move my neck backwards, and I have a nasty mark on my back that makes it look like I was beaten, and it hurts to have anyone hug me.  So I’ll talk to Aurelia about it and see what she says tomorrow.  I already called my collège to tell them I wouldn’t be teaching tomorrow as I didn’t know what time I was getting back to village. I’m still trying to get in touch with Justine and Simon to tell them I won’t be back Monday morning like I had told them.  (I hope my kitty is okay though…)

 

So there you have it.  I just feel bad that I freaked out my host family so badly.  Apparently my papa cried.  My host brother came to visit me today and we called my family together to tell them I was feeling better.  And I’m disappointed my time with my host family was cut so short.  I don’t know when I’ll get the opportunity to go up there again since I don’t like leaving my village all that much.  

 

OK I’m writing this in the med unit now I’m going to go to the bureau (they’re basically in the same compound) and post it and then I’m going to work on some more updates that aren’t health-related. 

 

Cheerio  (and don’t WORRY – you know who you are, you worriers).

 

 

                                                             
 so I went a little nuts in Agou and bought six different pagne, here’s a picture.   I figure it’s an investment though, I just won’t buy any more for a long time, and now when I have to get something made I’ll already have some fabric lying around the house.  After I spent a lot of money I then remembered I have three more pagnes at home that I haven’t used yet.  So that brings the total up to nine, whoops…

And here’s a picture of my back, I think it’s from falling down when I was half-unconcious before I came into the Med Unit: (More updates later this afternoon)