The women of Togo are amazing; they are hospitable, gracious, resilient, both emotionally and physically strong, just completely and totally awe-inspiring, and good cooks to boot. Our grandmothers were also pretty impressive, working behind the scenes to run the household and raise the kids pretty much singlehandedly and often with little to no credit, but in so doing did they haul 25 liters of water on their head (weighing 25 kilos or just over 55 pounds!) from a river kilometers away from their house? Did they manage all their Susie Homemaker duties and simultaneously run a cottage enterprise, care for livestock, accompany their husbands to the field, volunteer on multiple village committees, and sit on the side of the road selling porridge until 8:00 p.m. only to wake up at 4 a.m. to sweep the yard with a giant leaf?
If your grandmother did all this, I salute her. Then again, if your grandmother did all this she was probably Togolese.
The women of my village are empowered and modern in their own way, taking on more and more commercial pursuits while still maintaining their duties to their family. If you go to the weekly market, you will realize that 90% of the vendors are female. If you observe very closely you’ll notice that although it is primarily men who grow the fruits and vegetables, it is nearly exclusively women who buy and resell the produce. I think the ladies of Togo have more of a stronghold on the economy than they realize, but that realization is all but inevitable with time.
And now I will share with you portraits of two remarkable women in my village:
I have a friend in village who moved back home from the town a day’s car ride away where her husband and children live to take care of her sickly aunt. She belongs to a women’s agricultural group but to break even she wakes up early every morning to make bean doughnuts that she sells to school children and people heading off to the farm fields. Though she is one of the most educated people in the village, she has joined a women’s literacy class to improve her French and to find a way to participate in the community and support her sisters’ self-improvement efforts. I met her because she approached me to see if I could help the women in this group discuss contraception methods with their daughters; to say that she genuinely cares about her village would be an understatement. Consequently, she is very well respected in the village and has even been asked to run for president of the Village Development Committee, the only, though unofficial, form of local government outside of the chief system that can be found on the village level.
Though all children are considered a source of joy, having at least one son in the family is highly valued as they are seen as being able to support the family and as houses are generally passed from father to son. A woman who lives near me with four daughters recently finally (as her family would think of it) gave birth to a son. It was an occasion for much rejoicing and seemingly every one in the village stopped by to visit and congratulate her. The child was born on Sunday, came home and was feted on Tuesday but by Wednesday night fell very sick, was shuttled between multiple health centers over two days and by Friday he had passed. The tragedy was recognized by throngs of visitors mirroring the congratulatory visits of only a few days before. The father was able to cope by returning to his work as a carpenter and smoking and drinking with his friends. The mother stayed at home, stayed quiet after the frenzy of consolation had passed. On Sunday morning, one week after the birth of her son, I saw her grinding tomatoes and peppers for sauce, preparing dinner for her family like it was any other day.
I suppose what is most remarkable about this second story is that it is not remarkable – misfortune strikes all the time and people accept it and move on, helped along by the cushion of the tightly woven safety net that is the village community.
As they say in Ewe, Babalo – it will be okay. Yes it will all be okay, and someday it will be better. I have full confidence that the ingenuity and work ethic of the Togolese will eventually push their country further in the way of economic growth. I just hope that when that moment arrives the ladies of Togo will get the credit that is due to them.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
First Impressions
Things I never thought I would be used to:
Speaking French 24/7
Going to sleep to the sound of snorting goats and waking up to a the crow of a rooster
Traveling cross-country in a five seat car with 7 passengers plus the driver
Eating pâte for breakfast
But here I am, a year in to my Peace Corps service as a Community Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention volunteer in Togo, a small sliver of country in coastal West Africa, and all these things that were so alien at first have become nearly mundane. They say that Peace Corps is the “hardest job you’ll ever love,” to me it’s really more of an experience than a job per se. I suppose it might be like being a stay at home parent: sure it’s technically your occupation and you exert a lot of care and effort, but it’s not just a nine to five job; it’s a lifestyle, an all encompassing endeavor.
My hope with these entries is to paint a realistic picture of my Peace Corps experience, and not just the work side of things. Before I applied to Peace Corps, I have to admit that I was hesitant; hesitant to leave everything that I knew and loved for what I expected to be two years of relative hardship. I will try to provide a realistic perspective for those of you who might be considering or in the process of applying to become a Peace Corps volunteer and in so doing demystify some confusions on the Peace Corps experience that I know I had before/during applying.
What we don’t know is always much more frightening than that with which we are already familiar. I remember during a recruitment event a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer said that the most valuable part of her experience was not necessarily the work she had done, but the friendships that she had formed in her community. Thinking back to that time, when I really only had a brochure-type knowledge of the people of Africa; pictures of smiling kids in uniforms waving and receiving mosquito nets, girls walking down red, dusty paths with jugs of water on their heads, a mother cradling her newborn baby, which she is successfully exclusively breastfeeding – these were the images and perceptions that I had of Africa at the time and it seemed unfathomable to me to find friends in this museum-like environment.
I arrived in Togo on June 6, 2009 at night with a group of 25 other volunteers. After a couple of days in the Lomé, the capital, we arrived at our training site where we were to spend three months living with families and covering technical material necessary for our work. When we rolled in, the village the “notables,” or elders/wise men met us on the path to the training center and commenced a ceremony with all the traditional garb and chanting and pouring of alcohol on the ground and at this moment I thought to myself my god here I am at the gates of the real Africa, that brochure Africa I had imagined and here I will remain sitting under a palm tree, pounding various roots into edible form until my two years are up.
Turns out I was wrong.
There a lot of international volunteers who come to Togo to spend a few weeks, drink a few shots with the chief, talk to some jaded middle-schoolers about AIDs, kick around a soccer ball, sit in on a traditional ceremony, and call it a day. To say at this point that one has experienced Africa would be like giving someone a couple of weeks during the Christmas season in the United States to go and see a showing of The Christmas Carol, taking them to a historical simulation park, stuffing them full of cookies, subjecting them to the craziness of a mall at that time of year, and then telling them they’ve experienced the real America. While at times I do feel I am living in a brochure, looking beyond the surface, the lifestyle even in a medium-sized village like mine is very modern and the people are just as real and individualistic as anyone.
I live in a village of approximately 1,500 people in southern Togo on the crest of a plateau. The prefecture primarily depends on the export a lot of coffee, avocados, pineapples, and other produce and consequently most people are farmers. Nevertheless, the Togolese village is much more than an agriculture hub; it is a contemporary vibrant organism blending tradition and modernity into a distinctly West African style of community. Unlike the typical layout of an American farming community – with farmhouses surrounded and thus separated by extensive fields – southern Togolese villages consist of households which are clustered together, usually roughly along a main road or around an intersection with family fields anywhere from a short walk to 15 km or more outside of the village.
The physical closeness of the houses creates a closeness of the people. As in a village many people are from the same extended family and your nearest neighbor is 5 meters away or literally on the other side of your wall, there is a very city-like atmosphere of activity – everybody running in and out of each others’ houses/courtyards at all times between the hours of 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., running errands, singing, pounding fufu, and always together. People in my village are always on the move, walking/biking/motorcycling/taxiing to another village, going to the regional or national capital for the weekend, attending funerals, visiting relatives, and the like. As a relatively major route and intersection run through my village people are always passing through and shipping out coffee and cocoa. So even though there are girls carrying water back home on their heads, uniformed school children, mothers breastfeeding everywhere and all that as I imaged, there is an underlying rhythm of hustle and bustle and a joie de vivre by which I have slowly but surely become intoxicated.
Guess I’ve officially drank the Kool-Aid. Stay tuned.
Speaking French 24/7
Going to sleep to the sound of snorting goats and waking up to a the crow of a rooster
Traveling cross-country in a five seat car with 7 passengers plus the driver
Eating pâte for breakfast
But here I am, a year in to my Peace Corps service as a Community Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention volunteer in Togo, a small sliver of country in coastal West Africa, and all these things that were so alien at first have become nearly mundane. They say that Peace Corps is the “hardest job you’ll ever love,” to me it’s really more of an experience than a job per se. I suppose it might be like being a stay at home parent: sure it’s technically your occupation and you exert a lot of care and effort, but it’s not just a nine to five job; it’s a lifestyle, an all encompassing endeavor.
My hope with these entries is to paint a realistic picture of my Peace Corps experience, and not just the work side of things. Before I applied to Peace Corps, I have to admit that I was hesitant; hesitant to leave everything that I knew and loved for what I expected to be two years of relative hardship. I will try to provide a realistic perspective for those of you who might be considering or in the process of applying to become a Peace Corps volunteer and in so doing demystify some confusions on the Peace Corps experience that I know I had before/during applying.
What we don’t know is always much more frightening than that with which we are already familiar. I remember during a recruitment event a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer said that the most valuable part of her experience was not necessarily the work she had done, but the friendships that she had formed in her community. Thinking back to that time, when I really only had a brochure-type knowledge of the people of Africa; pictures of smiling kids in uniforms waving and receiving mosquito nets, girls walking down red, dusty paths with jugs of water on their heads, a mother cradling her newborn baby, which she is successfully exclusively breastfeeding – these were the images and perceptions that I had of Africa at the time and it seemed unfathomable to me to find friends in this museum-like environment.
I arrived in Togo on June 6, 2009 at night with a group of 25 other volunteers. After a couple of days in the Lomé, the capital, we arrived at our training site where we were to spend three months living with families and covering technical material necessary for our work. When we rolled in, the village the “notables,” or elders/wise men met us on the path to the training center and commenced a ceremony with all the traditional garb and chanting and pouring of alcohol on the ground and at this moment I thought to myself my god here I am at the gates of the real Africa, that brochure Africa I had imagined and here I will remain sitting under a palm tree, pounding various roots into edible form until my two years are up.
Turns out I was wrong.
There a lot of international volunteers who come to Togo to spend a few weeks, drink a few shots with the chief, talk to some jaded middle-schoolers about AIDs, kick around a soccer ball, sit in on a traditional ceremony, and call it a day. To say at this point that one has experienced Africa would be like giving someone a couple of weeks during the Christmas season in the United States to go and see a showing of The Christmas Carol, taking them to a historical simulation park, stuffing them full of cookies, subjecting them to the craziness of a mall at that time of year, and then telling them they’ve experienced the real America. While at times I do feel I am living in a brochure, looking beyond the surface, the lifestyle even in a medium-sized village like mine is very modern and the people are just as real and individualistic as anyone.
I live in a village of approximately 1,500 people in southern Togo on the crest of a plateau. The prefecture primarily depends on the export a lot of coffee, avocados, pineapples, and other produce and consequently most people are farmers. Nevertheless, the Togolese village is much more than an agriculture hub; it is a contemporary vibrant organism blending tradition and modernity into a distinctly West African style of community. Unlike the typical layout of an American farming community – with farmhouses surrounded and thus separated by extensive fields – southern Togolese villages consist of households which are clustered together, usually roughly along a main road or around an intersection with family fields anywhere from a short walk to 15 km or more outside of the village.
The physical closeness of the houses creates a closeness of the people. As in a village many people are from the same extended family and your nearest neighbor is 5 meters away or literally on the other side of your wall, there is a very city-like atmosphere of activity – everybody running in and out of each others’ houses/courtyards at all times between the hours of 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., running errands, singing, pounding fufu, and always together. People in my village are always on the move, walking/biking/motorcycling/taxiing to another village, going to the regional or national capital for the weekend, attending funerals, visiting relatives, and the like. As a relatively major route and intersection run through my village people are always passing through and shipping out coffee and cocoa. So even though there are girls carrying water back home on their heads, uniformed school children, mothers breastfeeding everywhere and all that as I imaged, there is an underlying rhythm of hustle and bustle and a joie de vivre by which I have slowly but surely become intoxicated.
Guess I’ve officially drank the Kool-Aid. Stay tuned.
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