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.

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard

I’ve now been at site for two full months, and teaching for a full four weeks. And what an experience the Togolese classroom is! I feel a little lucky that I’m doing this having never taught before… I can’t imagine being an experienced teacher and having to adjust to the crazy differences in education between the two countries.

My School - CEG Nassiete

Every morning, I wake up at 5:00, giving me enough time to eat breakfast, get ready, and make the 15 minute walk to school by 6:45. At that time, the “major generale” (the head student of the school) blows his whistle, calling for each class to line up on the front lawn. We stand quietly and watch as the Togolese flag is raised up on the big branch we use as a flagpole, and then the major calls on one of the classes to sing the national anthem. Then the whistle is blown again, students scatter back to finish sweeping the classroom floors, and teachers do last minute prep in the office before first period starts at 7:00.

The school is a big cement building with five rooms – four classrooms and the office. Each room is big and airy, with a big grid of window holes built into the walls. Wooden desks fill the room, and each seats between one and three students, depending on the size of the class. (My largest class, 108 students, has kids packed like sardines three to a desk, with barely enough space for a skinny Togolese tween to navigate between the rows. Me walking to the back of the classroom is out of the question!)  There are two large blackboards, one at the front and one at the back of the classroom.

The school day goes until noon. Each grade has five classes, 55 minutes each, with a 25 minute break in the middle of the day. Each classroom houses one grade, and students stay in their rooms for all of their classes – it’s the teachers who switch around. At break time, two or three women show up near the school to sell snacks – beignets, porridge, and plates of rice with hot sauce.

I teach three grades – the sixieme (the youngest kids, just out of primary school), cinquieme, and I co-teach the quatrieme with Monsieur Kolani, the other English teacher at my school. I’ve already shocked you all with the size of my sixieme class (I repeat – 108 kids!), but the other two classes are more manageable, with between 40 and 50 students in each.

Not Actually Teaching, Just a Photoshoot

We’re expected to do three activities in each class – usually a vocabulary lesson, a grammar lesson, and some kind of reading or listening activity. Reading exercises are tough, because resources are tough to come by. The school only has about 13 books for each class – and those are ragged photocopies that my homologue painstakingly reglues at least once a week – and even in my smaller classes, three students need to crowd around each copy. Other exercises are tough, too, because of the number of students – Even if I could call on everyone each class, it wouldn’t be nearly enough talking for them to improve their English. Groupwork is a totally foreign concept in the rote-memorization environment of Togolese school, but I’m trying to introduce it little by little.

Though I’m not a Togolese student, I imagine the biggest obstacle is having school entirely in French. It’s nobody’s first language – children speak only Moba until they start learning French in primary school, and though that’s earlier than most American s start a foreign language, it’s still wild to me that by age 12, they’re required to attend a school where all subjects are taught in the second language they’re learning. I couldn’t do that. It’s totally impressive, and also no surprise to me if kids struggle!

There are five other teachers at my school – all men – and our director. Other, larger schools have other authority figures (like a senseur, or chief disciplinarian), but because we’re so tiny, a lot of those kinds of duties fall on the teachers and director. So far, everyone has been very welcoming, and are very lenient with the amount of non-teaching responsibilities I’m ready to take on at the school!

Fellow Volunteer Morgan, Me, Kolani, and Soyenou

Kolani, the other English teacher at the school, is my Peace Corps appointed counterpart. We’re all supposed to search out many homologues to collaborate with, but he is my springboard. He’s incredibly nice, and excited about being able to converse with someone whose native language is English. We’re hoping to start an English club at the school, and maybe a local English Teachers’ Club, for teachers in neighboring villages to get together and talk in and about l’Anglais.

My other best friend at school is named Soyenou. He teaches French and History/Geography, and has volunteered to help teach me Moba, the local language. Twice a week, we meet at the school in the afternoon, where we spend an hour learning new vocabulary words, and practicing sentences I can use at the marche. “N bwa n da dam piile,” I find myself saying often, “I want to buy 100 francs worth of Tchakpalo.”

Learning local language is a great key to integration. Nothing seems to make my neighbors happier than being able to greet me in their mother tongue. I’m not sure whether its sincere appreciation of the effort I’m making to be a part of the community, or glee at the ridiculousness of some white girl mispronouncing phrases they’ve known from childhood, but either way, I’m happy to put a smile on someone’s face when I can answer “A saa le?” – “Where are you going?” with a broken but confident “N saan kalatu je,” “I’m going to school, but I’m coming back!”

The Home Stretch

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 28^th.

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 7^th through 10^th 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.

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

Greetings from Kouve!

I can’t believe I’ve only been here for two weeks… it feels like I’ve never not been here!

I’m writing from the Cyber Café in the village of Kouve, where the Education volunteers are making their home during pre-service training. Kouve is a pretty sizable town (compared to neighboring Zafi, anyway) – my host family tells me several thousand people live here. There are boutiques, bars, and a big market every Thursday.

My home here is  in the district of Kouve called Boli, which is pretty quiet, as far as this town gows. There’s a cement wall with big red doors surrounding my compound. Inside the walls, the ground is covered in Africa’s famous red dirt, and a dozen trees bearing bananas and limes are scattered throughout. There’s a large well from which I draw my big bucket of water every day, and a shower stall where I take my twice-daily bucket baths. We have one large-ish house where my family relaxes and cooks, and another, smaller building where I live.

My building has two rooms. On the left, my host aunt Abla sleeps with her three children (including adorable 2-month-old baby Joseph). My room is next door. It’s a little smaller than the bedroom I had growing up, and has cement floors and bright blue walls. Bedsheets line the ceiling to help keep out bugs and lizards. (These second-hand bedsheets are themed with cats and Harry Potter – how did they know me so well before I even arrived?) I sleep in my Peace Corps issued twin bed, and make sure to tuck in my mosquito net every night. I have a small desk, a little table to store my coffee mug and other food accouterments, and a corner dedicated to my many useful buckets.

Each morning, the sun comes up around 5, and I’m gently woken up by the sounds of sweeping. The red dirt gets everywhere, so a daily pass through the compound with a palm-leaf broom is a necessity. I get out of bed, sweep my own floor, and take a quick shower before eating breakfast al fresco with my sister (cousin? aunt? It all blends together for me here) Odette. Sometimes, we have bread with peanut butter or eggs, but occasionally, she makes beignets (and these Togolese doughnuts are the best I’ve ever eaten).

After breakfast, I hop on my bicycle (Dad – it’s a red Trek 4100!) and pedal to school. Some days, we have French lessons all day. These days, I go to my classmate Danielle’s house, where I spend the day with her, our one other classmate, Zach, and our instructor, Utsa. We do some work in a textbook, but mostly, Utsa just tries to get us talking as much as possible (and, of course, it’s all French all day). I’m nowhere near proficient, but I can feel my French getting better every day.

Other days, we have big group learning sessions. All of the volunteers in Kouve pile into the white Peace Corps van and drive the bumpy road to Zafi, where we join the food security and health volunteers. We spend the day with the Togolese Peace Corps staff in sessions with names like “Roles of the Volunteer in Development” and “Dealing with Unwanted Attention.”

Wherever I am for the day, my family sends me along with a packed lunch. Peace Corps advised our families to ease us in to Togolese food, so I’m still eating a lot of spaghetti and hard-boiled eggs, but I occasionally have pounded corn (called pate) with a sauce made of tomatoes and fish.

After school, I rush home to beat the sunset, which happens promptly at 6:30 every day. I have dinner with Odette, and we are sometimes joined by my host father, Aristide (who is my age), and his brother, Justlan. I could not have asked for a more wonderful host family. Everyone that I interact with (mostly these three people) speaks great French, and are so incredibly patient with my terrible rendition of the language. They are warm, funny, and respectful, and just such a blast to be around. Each night, we spend hours sitting outside and chatting, and it’s often the best part of my day.

All in all, life is good here in Kouve. With so many unkowns ahead (I don't find out where my permanent site is for another few weeks), it's nice to have a routine, and to be surrounded by such great people.