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!”

Headin' Up Country

The past two weeks have been nuts – brace yourselves for an action-packed entry!

Two weeks ago was Site Placement Day. As volunteers, we have no input into our placement, other than our language abilities and our resume. Even though Togo is a small country, there are huge variations between areas in both nature and living conditions. Needless to say, placement day was pretty nerve-wracking.

While we spent the morning in language testing (I moved up to Intermediate-Mid, by the way), the training team drew a giant map of Togo in the sand, and stuck wooden posts into the ground to approximate the locations of all 47 sites. Our training host families poured into the compound, and when the hour finally arrive, we gathered around the map and waited for Jane, the programming director, to read out our fates.

I was among the first names called – along with ten other new volunteers, I would be heading to the Savanes region in the far, far north of the country, to a village called Nassiete. The “site summary” I was given had little information about the town – 15 km from Dapaong, the regional capital, a beautiful view of a mountain, no electricity. I’d have to wait to find out.

The week passed by in a whirlwind, our time filled with sessions scrambling to prepare us for our two-week visit to site. We learned how to ride on the back of a moto, we met our counterparts (who were in town for their own workshop), and we went to the big market in Tabligbo to buy last minute supplies.

Incoming EGE Volunteers!

Saturday morning arrived in no time. The Peace Corps van picked me up from my compound at 5:30, and drove me to meet the rest of the volunteers and counterparts in the neighboring town of Aheppe. We all said our goodbyes, and piled into our assigned vans. The three vans going to the Savannes would reconvene in the town of Kante, in the Kara region, to spend the night in hotel – the journey north is not a one-day affair!

Travel in Togo has a reputation for being dirty, unpredictable, and generally the worst. We kept ourselves cool by opening the windows, but that meant I was coated in a solid quarter-inch of kicked up dirt a half-hour into the journey.

As we barreled through the Centrale region, we heard a worrisome noise from the undercarriage. We pulled over, only to discover a shot transmission. Welcome to Togo.

We volunteers walked with our counterparts about 10 minutes to a neighboring village, where a family was kind enough to lend us some shade. In exchanged, we terrified their young son with our glaringly pale skin. We waited for about 45 minutes while the other Savanes vans, a little further ahead, pulled some switcheroos, and an (air conditioned!) van turned around to retrieve us and our luggage.

Switching Luggage Around

All Crammed In

The rest of the journey, we crammed three vans worth of people into two, but the company (and the climate control) was pleasant. We rolled into Kante just after the sun went down, and spent the evening chatting with a few volunteers who came up from their villages to greet us. I even topped the night off with a running-water shower.

The next morning, everyone woke up with nerves: we piled back into the vans to finish the journey to our new homes.

Nassiete is only a few kilometers off of the main route, but there’s a world of difference in that small space. We said goodbye to the paved national route and electrical wires, and were greeted by giant, lush fields and towering flat-topped mountains. You can’t take a car to get to my compound, so I was dropped with all of my baggage on the side of the road. All of the village chiefs were there to welcome me, along with the school director, and a handful of other folks.

As is the way here in the north, we celebrated my arrival right then and there with a quick chicken-slaughtering welcome ceremony – a weird mélange of honor and horror for me. (To do: get over American sensibilities about animals, and quick.) Once the poor bird flapped its last flap, we set off on a 10 minute walk through the fields to arrive at my compound.

View From Outside the Compound

I’m living on the Bouna family compound. My host father is the president of the APE – the Association de les Parents des Eleves. He has two wives (polygamy is quite common here), and there are a total of six kids in the family, none younger than eight or so. Also on the compound are chickens, pigs, goats, cows, a donkey, ducks, a million pigeons, two dogs, and a cat. It smells a little barnyardy. I have two rooms of my own, each with cement walls, a tin roof, and a little barred window. I also have a latrine and walled-in bucket-shower zone to call my own. The water pump is about a five minute walk from the compound, but after an embarrassing display of my water-carrying ability, my host family has taken over that task for me. I’ve got some learning to do, I guess.

My Building!

Nassiete is quite large, area-wise, but only about 800 people live in the village – there’s just a lot of space for farms. There’s a primary school, and a “college” (for kids approximately 13 – 17), but for the next level, called lycee, students need to travel to the next town. We have a little boutique which is sometimes open where I can buy cookies and soap. And we have two twice-weekly “markets,” which, in actuality, sell very little, and are more just pop-up bars for the local brew, made of fermented millet and called “Tchakpalo.” And that’s the extent of that. If I want to buy phone credit or a vegetable, I need to hitch a moto ride to a neighboring village.

My Mountain

And everyone is so, so wonderful. People are friendly, helpful, welcoming, and patient with my French. They try and teach me phrases in Moba, the local language, and laugh with what I hope is glee when I can stumble through a greeting.

I’ve even been given a Moba name: Yendoube, which means "God is There." I've got a lot to live up to.