Ca Va? Ca Va.

Stage is almost halfway over?! Where does the time go?

Monday is a big day, because it’s the day of site announcements – each of us will learn where in the country we’ll be spending the next two years. The five regions of Togo (Maritime, Plateaux, Centrale, Kara, and Savannes) each have their advantages and their disadvantages, but we’ll finally have a little bit of an idea about what we should be nervous about.

We’ll spend the rest of the week meeting our homologues (each of us will have an identified professional counterpart in our village, who we can rely on to help us with introductions, work, etc.), opening bank accounts, and otherwise getting ready for Saturday, when we’ll leave for a two week visit to our permanent sites. Am I ready? Nope! Is it happening anyway? You better believe it.

This Monday, we also take our mid-training French exams. If we’ve reached an “Intermediate-High” level, we get to switch to exclusively learning the local language of our site, after we return to Kouve from our visit. I started at “Intermediate-Low,” so we’ll see…

I have to remind myself to not worry too much about the stuff coming up, and to focus on what’s happening now!

This week was “French Immersion Week” - we spent the whole week in class, or doing activities and presentations enFrancais. Tuesday, we presented in a Talent Show. Thursday, we practiced presenting ourselves and our work to our communities (as performed by our formatuers, who hilariously hit us all with questions we’re likely to get – “Are you married? You should marry my nephew.” “The electricity doesn’t work at the hospital, can you fix it?” “Can you get Barak Obama to come visit?”). We took a field trip to the neighboring town of Aheppe, where we visited the bus station and the post office. And yesterday, we took our “Core Competency Exam,” where we sat with five different formatuers in turn, each testing our ability to navigate different cultural situations (the market, asking directions, etc.) in French.

We also had an “Iron Chef”

competition this week – in groups, we visited the market to pick up a list of ingredients, and had two hours to cook two different meals on little West African wood stoves.

Blair, Morgan, and Becky standing over our stove

With our showing of Peanut Sauce over rice, and beans with gboma (a vegetable kind of like collard greens), our group took a solid sixth place out of eight, but each group won a sleeve of Oreos regardless.

And day-to-day life is good – it feels like a routine here, now. On my bike ride to class, I’m greeted by absolutely everyone – some call me Diana or Abla (which is my Ewe name), many more call me Yovo (which basically means “white person”), and a few call me “Zoe” or “Natalie,” the names of other volunteers. My language class and I walk to our favorite boutique during our mid-morning repose each day to buy cookies, toilet paper, and phone credit, andUtsa tells us we’re stealing his time when we’re five minutes late, as we always are. Every Friday, the Kouve volunteers get together at our favorite bar, “Le Courage,” for a much-needed hour of beer and English.

Since last entry, I’ve taken a few more photos of my compound – check ‘em out!

My bed, complete with mosquito net

This is the house I live in... my room is on the right