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.
