It’s happening!
Stage is essentially over for us. We’ve wrapped up our
technical training, taken our final language placement tests, sat through our
“readiness to serve” interviews. We go to the US embassy and officially swear
in as volunteers on August 28th.
Some Last Looks at Kouve
These last few weeks of training focus on technical skills,
so education volunteers have been spending our days at the local college. In
the Togolese school system, kids start with kindergarten and primary school,
and then move to college, which is roughly equivalent to 7th through
10th grade. Once they move past college, they spend two years in
lycee. If they are on track, age-wise, and complete all grades, children are in
school until they are about 20, but many start late, get left back, or drop out
early for work or marriage.
The sixteen of us split into groups of two, and each pair
was assigned a class to teach for a two-week “vacation school.” We’d each take
an hour with the class in the morning, and would spend our afternoons
debriefing (a favorite Peace Corps word) our lessons, and learning new
strategies and realities for teaching in general, and in Togo specifically.
My buddy Andrew and I were assigned a Quatrieme class.
Quatrieme is the third year in college, and the oldest class volunteers are
allowed to teach. It’s also arguably the most difficult, and many volunteers
opt not to teach it (though my school is so small I’ll have to, in order to hit
my minimum classroom hours). Quatrieme is when kids start to learn more complicated
grammatical structures – tricky, for a fluent English speaker/untrained English
teacher such as a myself. More challenging, though, is that in the Togolese
system, students can pass a year of college without passing all of their
classes. Some Quatrieme students will be rockstars in English, and others will
have used their other grades to balance out terrible their English ones. In
Quatrieme, even more so than in the younger grades, you have to teach to a huge
range of skill levels. And did I mention that each class usually has 50 or 100
kids?
Anyway, Andrew’s and my vacation class Quatrieme was none of
that. Because the school was an optional event in the community, Peace Corps
took what we could get in terms of sign-ups, so we taught an average of 11 kids
each day, many of whom were almost done with lycee, and were just in class for
review, or for something to do, or to hang out with some Americans. They were
great kids, who breezed through the review lessons we gave them. It was
definitely a good experience to be in the classroom, but I think I’ll still
feel a little unprepared when the school year starts, and I have to stand up in
front of 75 kids who don’t speak a lick of English.
My host family is starting to get very sad that I’ll be
leaving soon, so they’ve been cramming in a lot of family activities and
Togolese food. Last weekend, my host dad, uncle, and cousin took me to the
fields to show me how palm wine is harvested. I’m sorry to tell you that I
forgot my camera for this excursion! First, big palm trees are felled, and a
shallow four-inch square is carved into the top of the trunk. Only a tiny whole
extends all the way through the trunk. Palm farmers use a giant stick of fire
to clean and sterilize this hole – a process the repeat regularly during the
tree’s 30 days of wine harvest. They stick a jar or plastic jug underneath the
tiny whole in the trunk, cover the square with a leaf to protect it from bees,
and let the palm wine drip from the whole tree into the square and through the
hole. It comes out as sweet as candy, and is ready to drink directly from the
source.
We also took a trip to a neighbor’s house, where they have a
still to turn palm wine into the local moonshine called “sodabi.” Sodabi is
incredibly popular here, and a great business to be in. Many drink sodabi after
a long day in the fields, but it’s also used in many ceremonies, and is often
toasted with before eating a meal of fufu (but never before rice, I’m told, or
you’ll get very sick). Because it comes from palm wine, it has a sweet taste. I
think it tastes a bit like tequila, but friends of mine swear it’s just like
Sake. Either way, because it’s home-brewed, it’s sometimes about 80-proof, and
sometimes it’s straight rubbing alcohol.
Moonshine a la Togo
We’ve also been eating more Togolese food, instead of
Togolese renditions of what Americans eat. I’ve been eating a lot of pate
(pronounced like “pot”), which is basically like polenta or grits, but without
any ingredients other than corn. Togolese eat pate alongside a variety of
sauces – peanut sauce, tomato sauce, okra sauce. My favorite meal, which is
called something like “Djankuman,” is pate cooked directly in a spicy, oniony
tomato sauce. My host sister has promised to teach me how to cook it before I
leave for site.
The Whole Family
It’s definitely a bittersweet time. I’m really heartbroken
to leave my host family, and to be so far away from close friends I’ve made
over the last few months, but am very excited to be settled in to my permanent
site.
