And Now We've Reached the End of the Beginning

Before you know it eleven weeks go by and people back home are shoveling snow and thinking about Christmas break. You've been in stage (pronounced stahge, long 'a'), and December is the beginning of the dry season, and when you wake up at night to sweat, the thought of winter seems like just another Mefloquin dream. While everyone you know is looking forward to the holiday break, you, on the other hand, are just beginning to work.

They say the first three months at post are the toughest. No host family to cook for you, no other Americans hanging out at the tech. house, spending the better part of every day with you, speaking your language, talking coherently about the things you want to talk about. Now it's toothless farmers and tchouk-drunks and a chef who doesn't speak French. It's rowdy CEG students, and weather too hot and dry to cultivate. Do you start sensibilisations? What do you know well enough to gather your villagers together and try to teach them? Sure, you could try soap-making, but without an in-depth feasability study, you'd just be pissing money away if you can't sell it for the right price. So what do you do?

Here's my plan: I'm gonna paint my house. And order my furniture. And travel around the prefecture, taking my bike along the Route Nationale. My region is like a mix between Florida and Kansas, and for some reason this combo makes me feel like I'm in Ohio. The tall grass plains are dotted with oil-palm trees, banana trees, mango trees. Sorghum, dancing in the Harmattan wind, rises like oversized corn, and the red-tipped stalks stoop like old Togolese women.

I'm gonna talk to my community. The best way to be an effective volunteer is to be bien intégré, and that requires knowing the people you live with. My house is in a compound with three other families, so I'll start there. And one of the mamas sells tchouk Wednesdays and Fridays, bringing in many of the toothless farmers, who happen to sometimes be tchouk-drunks as well. I could talk to them about vitamin-rich Moringa powder, Neem pesticide, or alley-cropping with Albisia, which is less labor intensive than Lucuna. We could all buy each other a round, a callabash per man, and by the end of the night we'll love each other, and I'll be too drunk to care that I have to take my shits over a cockroach infested latrine.

It is now 0642h and I'm in the Peace Corps bureau in Lomé. In ten hours my fellow stagiaires and I will become official Peace Corps Volunteers. Anna, from GEE, will be giving a speech in Ewé, one of the most prevalent local languages in the southern part of Togo. I'll be giving a speech in French. I'm as honored as I am nervous.

I must go, since diarrhea is calling, but I want to say one thing first: I am incredibly happy here. The past eleven weeks have been spent with a group of individuals I can only think to describe as genuine. We are Peace Corps Volunteers, not hippies or raging tree-huggers. We are here to work, and we know it, and we've talked about this for over two months now, and we feel lucky. With the energy and enthusiasm that I've seen from these people, there's no doubt in my mind as to our success over the next two years. Naturally, this will be a pleasure as well. As Adri, our lead tech. trainer, told us when we asked him if this was the best stage ever: "I can't say anything except that I'm having a lot of fun right now."