"Ca Donne La Force"

You're warned before coming to Peace Corps Togo that much of West African culture places a big emphasis on drinking alcohol. Are you, the applicant, okay with this?

It's a tough line to walk. Drinking at the market with my neighbors has been an incredible key to integration - they appreciate that I'm excited about something so culturally important to them, and a drink sure helps my local language flow a little more fluently. After school meetings, it's expected that we share a drink, my director sometimes treating us to a real bottled beer (warm, of course - no electricity to power a fridge). However, setting a precedent like that can become a little less comfortable when I find myself encouraged to share a round during recess, before my last two classes, or to help wake us up in the morning before my family heads off to the fields for the day ("ça donne la force" - a drink gives you strength!). It's a balancing act, and a good lesson in big cultural gaps.

In the south of Togo, everyone drinks Sodabi, which is a moonshine made of distilled palm wine. But here in the north, it's tchakpalo (which is, unexpectedly, the French word. In Moba, we call it "dam.") Tchakpa is a beer brewed with millet or sorghum, a major crop here.

Tchakpa, though enjoyed by everone, is women's work. Most of the women in my village brew it, and I sometimes see older girls from my classes proudly selling their own tchakpa at the market.

Brewing is a process of several days. First, millet grains have to spend a day or so in a big clay jar of water in order to germinate. After that process has finished, the millet is piled into giant metal marmites which are then filled to the brim with water. A stalk from an okra plant is added to give a certain je-ne-sais-quoi (but really, je ne sais quoi), and the whole mixture is boiled for a few hours, until the water is more like millet juice. The liquid is scooped into big clay jars to cool overnight, and the sapped millet is drained, and then tossed to the pigs for a delicious breakfast.

The next day, the pre-tchakpa (which is drinkable already) is moved back to the marmites where it's boiled again, along with the yeasty remains of yesterday's brew (usually purchased from a neighbor) in order to get some good fermentation going on. The tchakpa is left to cool overnight and, voila, is ready to be presented to a sleepy Peace Corps volunteer in her pajamas at 7:00 am.

Slaving over the tchakpa stove

Because it's all done at home, and the fermentation process continues throughout the day, you can never be sure how strong the tchakpa you're drinking is. Sometimes one calabash (the dried gourd bowls it's drunk from) is just a pleasant way to pass the time, and other times, one calabash will knock me out for the rest of the night.  Some tchakpa mamas add hot pepper to their brew, which supposedly increases the potency of the alochol (and also, according to my village friends, gives you diarrhea).

Tchakpa is one of the most important - or at least ubiquitous - staples of Moba culture. It's everywhere. Sold in paillotes at the market, crowdsourced at funerals to get a good block party going, and offered to neighbors who come over to help with work, or just to talk, it's an inescapable part of every day life.

Fortunately, it's delcious.

My village market, where tchakpa is sold every Thursday and Sunday (and, really, most other days too)

Mama in her Sunday Market best, sitting on her stool, serving up calabashes of Tchakpa to neighbors.

Un Bon Repose

Summer Vacation is here, and for me that means a (much needed!) break from teaching. What am I doing? Smaller side projects, being a camp counselor, traveling a bit, and practicing the great Togolese art of the repose.

Weather is hot here, and work - mostly physical labor in the fields - is hard. This means that a big part of Togolese culture and daily life is resting. My Togolese family and friends return from farmwork each day around noon, and commence their repose. Usually this involves both lying around doing nothing, and sleeping.

The cement houses we live in absorb heat throughout the day, so the beat place to repose is outside in the shade, where you can catch a nice breeze. Just outside our compound, my host family has a "paillote," a small straw structure that provides a little shade, and is populated by a reclined bamboo chair and a few wooden benches. Thus is my host dad's preferred repose spot - lying back in his traditional chair, he conks out for an hour or two each day. By his side, my host mom will sometimes lie supine on the wooden bench, one hand brushing the ground, equally out of it for a while.

Other members of the family spread out in the compound, face down on the cement floor, or sprawled out on more wooden benches, making the whole household look like victims of a gas leak.

Three o'clock rolls around and we head out again, sometimes for more work or just socializing. And each night as the sun goes down, my host brother brings Dad's chair back into the compound, setting the battery powered radio beside it, to prepare for the evening's encore performance.

My little brother, lazing around in Dad's chair before he gets home to claim it.

Three Fêtes

January 1, 2016

I woke up at 5 AM. Still dark, but in the distance, I could hear the shouts of a horde of small children. “BONNE ANNÉE,” they yelled, “BONNE ANNÉE!”

Bonne Année, what the French-speaking Togolese call New Year’s Day, is arguably the biggest celebration of the year. Especially because November and December are when many farmers are finally able to make money from selling what they’ve harvested, there is money to be spent on gifts, candy, booze, and parties.

I pulled myself out of bed and started brewing a necessary cup of coffee, wishing my host parents a Bonne Année as I moved around my compound. I could hear the children getting closer, and as I walked out of my kitchen, a group of six or seven kids ran into the compound.

“BONNE ANNÉE!” they said to me, and looked at me expectantly. Fortunately, I’d been prepared for this moment. “Bonne Fête,” I replied, and reached into a bag to give them each a few pieces of candy. They gleefully pocketed the mints, and scampered off to try their luck at the next compound. 

I spent the early morning with my host family, welcoming more groups of kids and drinking the Tchakpa that my host mom had spent the last three days preparing. At one point, my teacher friend Sonyenou rolled up on a borrowed moto and presented me with a guinea hen. I was flattered – gift giving is a part of any holiday here, but guinea hens are like chickens’ fancy older cousins. Eating and giving them here is often reserved for special occasions and important people.

I had been planning on cooking a chicken that I had been gifted a while back for my family on Bonne Année, but my host dad took me aside. “Yendoube,” he said, “when you get a new guinea hen, it’s really difficult to make sure that they recognize their new home and stay in the area. Chickens are easy, but guinea hens run away all the time.” He suggested that maybe, just to make it easier on everyone, I could cook the guinea hen instead. No problem! He and my 10 year old host brother took me outside, we grabbed the guinea hen, and papa went to town killing the poor guy for me. He tossed it to little bro, who plucked and butchered it, and before I knew what was happening, I had a bowl of guinea hen meat ready to be cooked. Throughout the day, we had people drop by to greet us and wish us Bonne Année, and we shared the meal I cooked with our guests, along with the seemingly endless supply of Tchakpa.

Late in the morning, my host dad took me on a little promenade to greet the chief and a few friends and neighbors. Each stop on the trip brought a drink, a small meal, or both – Bonne Année is all about eating and drinking. The quotidian meal here is typically made of corn or millet, along with sauce and occasionally meat, and tchakpa is what’s preferred to wash it down. But Bonne Année is different – it’s the one day a year when Togolese villagers indulge in pasta and beer. (And did we ever indulge!)

The afternoon took my host parents, a neighbor and I to the neighboring town of Sangkpong where we continued to greet the world with Bonne Année wishes. In Sangkpong, we sat at a bar (a first for me and my family!) powered by solar plaques, and enjoyed a rare (for me, rarer for them) cold beer. My host father expounded on the merits of mixing tonic water into the beer, and he wound up ordering a tonic to mix up the concoction. (Spoilers: it’s not very good.)

We returned to the compound as the sun was going down, to have one more quick meal of macaroni. Full, exhausted, we all headed off to bed, shaking our heads at my younger brothers and sisters heading out to the market to keep celebrating.

January 8 2016

“Today I’m very happy,” said my counterpart, Kolani, as he walked into the class we co-teach. “Ask me why I am happy.”

“Why are you happy?” the students chorused.

“Because today is my birthday!” He tossed a big bag of candy to the major – the class president – to hand out to everyone. The class cheered, and we continued the lesson.

At the end of the school day, the six teachers crowded around the office door as we locked up for the afternoon.

“Alright,” said my friend, Sonyenou, “let’s go.”

“Go where?” Were there plans I had forgotten about, or misunderstood?

“Over there.” He pointed to a compound situated a few hundred yards from the school.

A strategy I’ve adopted during service – important, when I’m only ever 75% sure I know what’s going on – is to let go and just say yes. So I followed Sonyenou and my other teacher friends to what turned out to be Kolani’s birthday celebration.

We greeted the head of the household as we walked into the little clearing with chairs and stools waiting for us. After a moment, another man from the household came and sat down with us. He came bearing a big metal bowl, 3 feet across, covered in a cloth and buzzing with flies.

Something about this didn’t seem to bode well for the last vestiges of my vegetarianism.

Our new friend with the metal bowl pulled back the cloth to reveal a pile of aging brown meat. Where did it come from? How long had it been in that bowl? Was there anything sanitary at all about this situation? These questions did not cross my teacher friends’ minds, and they leapt up, drooling, to take a closer look.

As I struggled to control waves of nausea, they pawed through the different unidentifiable cuts of meat and ordered what looked most delicious – 100 CFA worth of that brown lumpy stuff, 50 CFA worth of that long chewy-looking thing, and so forth. When finally they’d filled a small metal serving bowl, our host topped it off with Maggi powder (more or less just MSG), and they began to dig in.

“Yendoubé,” they said to me, “It’s Kolani’s birthday. You have to eat.” So eat I did.

February 5, 2016

The time between November and March is “funeral season” here in Togo. Funerals are big, important celebrations for which whole villages turn up, and these dry season months after the harvest are when work is scarce and money is rolling in from crop sales, so deaths from throughout the year are fêted now. Typically, funerals are two day affairs. The ceremony and – sometimes – the actual internment are spread across these days, interspersed with dancing, eating, drinking, and gift giving.

This week, my host mom invited me to go with her to a funeral in Bombuaka – a neighboring village where she grew up. The deceased was a member of her extended family, so she was very excited to bring me to meet her parents and see “chez elle.”

Friday afternoon rolled around, and she and I hopped on our bicycles to head out to the event.

Stop number one was her brother’s house. “Brother” is kind of a loosely applied word here – because men have multiple wives, you and your brother probably do not have the same mother, and cousins and uncles are often referred to as brothers, too. The brother in question was, I believe, a half-brother of my host mom’s father, but in any case, it was important to stop and greet.

The culture of greeting is incredibly important here – before getting down to any business, you must first ask after someone’s health, family, and work. It’s important to even quickly greet anyone you pass along the street, and stopping by a friend’s house to greet them is an important way to maintain your relationship.

Anyway, we sat down with my host mom’s grand frère, and said hello as his wife trotted out a few calabashes of tchakpa for us – my first of many.

After a few minutes of chatting, we hopped back on our bikes and continued on to the house where my host mother grew up – her father’s house. We were greeted by him, his second wife, and a horde of children who may or may not have been related. It was really a blast to meet him and see the family resemblance, and my host mother was excited for me to break out my camera and snap a few family pics.

Finally, it was time to continue on to the funeral itself. As we got nearer to the hub of the celebration, we encountered more and more people, including many friends of mine who had come over from Nassiete.

Another calabash of tchakpa was pushed into my hands as we greeted, and mama and I sat down on a mat on the floor of the compound. It was time to eat. We were served a small mound of pate each, and had two different peanut sauces to dip into.

After the meal, we got up and followed the sound of music. Moba music is a handful of drummers and some small, almost atonal flutes that sound like birds. Musicians stand in the center of a circle, and funeral-goers dance around them. The “Moba shake,” which is the traditional dance in the north, involves some rapid hip shaking while slowly making your way around this circle. Some dancers will hold tree branches in their hands, or wear belts made of small shells. We joined the dancing circle for a few minutes before night started to fall, and we needed to take off.