When I was helping with the training group in Agou at the end of November, I didn't go eat as often with Maman and Daniel as I had when I was there in October. I'd gotten a little sick last time, and by the end of the week wasn't eating any of the food that Maman was preparing, so this time I didn't want her to waste anything on me. Nonetheless, I would go over there when I could. Daniel was out and about most of the time, or wandering around the courtyard searching for something he wasn't sure he'd lost. I helped Maman make the couscous she served me one Tuesday, and when I couldn't find an egg sandwich on the side of the road, she insisted one night that I buy the necessary ingredients so she could make it for me at the house. She really is a great mother.
I've recently come to enjoy fufu, the pounded yam dish that is a staple of the Togolese diet. A few days before we were to leave Nyogbo for the swear-in in Lome, I asked Maman to prepare it for me. She says she'd eat fufu every meal of every day if she could, so I wanted her to eat with me, instead of just serving me my couscous or salad at the table and then retreating to the kitchen to make her own lunch. Okay, she said, and we agreed on the next day.
She let me pound the yams along with Daniel and the little girl she took in shortly after Gerson died. When it was done and the sauce was hot, she scooped blobs of the white pasty yams into aluminum bowls and poured the sauce all over it.
We sat in the mini courtyard in front of the kitchen, in the shade of the overhanging tin roof. Daniel was off playing in the abandoned church next door, the little girl was washing some clothes in the yard, and the trainee was studying in his room. We ate in silence at first, my fingers burning against the sauce, my tongue scalded by the chicken. It was delicious.
It's not a Togolese habit to talk and eat at the same time, but Maman knows me well enough to humor me with conversation. She's a lively discussionist, her face a panoply of expressions. We were probably talking about the training, the upcoming departure, my work in village. Whereas before it was I who would steer the conversation towards Gerson's death, this time Maman picked up the thread.
"I still don't know why he died," she said. Her confusion is both physical and existential. The doctors have been unable to tell her what killed Gerson; she cannot understand why God would take such a good man so soon.
"They say," I said, "that only the good die young." It was weak, but I had nothing else. "Maybe God takes the best of us early because he needs them with him."
She didn't like the explanation any more than I did. "He had so much left to do here," she said. Then, in a voice a little more broken: "Why would he leave me?" I didn't look up to see if there were tears in her eyes, but I heard the sniffles.
"I don't know, Maman. But he was a good man. We were the ones lucky enough to be here with him. We have to remember that." My eyes were moist now, too. Maman wiped her nose silently on her apron.
"I worry about Daniel," she said. "He doesn't want to study. He doesn't want to go to school. I tell him to go to his uncle's house during the breaks, but he refuses."
"He's afraid to leave you. He's afraid he might lose you too."
"He used to be first or second in his class. Every year. But now he doesn't care. I said, 'Daniel, why have your grades fallen?' He says because now that Papa has died, no one will buy him a bike if he gets first, so he doesn't try. He's looking for his father, and he knows that he won't find him."
"Maman," I said, and I looked up at her. "You don't need to worry about Daniel. He's a good kid. A great kid. And I know this for two reasons: he had a great father; and he still has a great mother."
She was no longer sniffling. Her face was constricted, as though she were slightly in pain. She was looking away from me, into the fronds of a palm tree behind us. Her voice was shaky now.
"Lately I've been waking up at night from my dreams. In each one I'm some place I don't recognize. I'm surrounded by people I don't know. I get scared, and in the dreams I start to cry. I go into a corner to try to hide, and I hide my head in my hands, wanting to escape. And then I hear a voice calling 'Maman, Maman!' I see Daniel. He's waving at me, running toward me. And I know that he's coming to protect me."
We finished our meal in silence, and I helped Maman with the dishes. "Do you want me to get you some plantains for when you leave again?" she asked.
"No, Maman. Then I won't have an excuse to come back here and eat with you."
"You need an excuse to come back here?" She looked at me with her not-really-insulted smile.
"Never, Maman," I smiled, "Never."
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
AIDS Ride
On the last day of biking for AIDS Ride Centrale, both teams headed from Wassarabo to Agoulu, stopping in one village each along the way for a morning sensibilisation. The road was hilly and rocky and beautiful, and some of the bikers had to walk up the hills. Those that pedaled up stopped at the top for breath. Going down the hills was absolute, wonderful terror.
AIDS Ride consists of groups of volunteers and Togolese counterparts riding to hard-to-find villages and giving sensibilisations about AIDS prevention. Each region coordinates their own routes, and how they'll perform every sensibilisation, but we all do it the same week. Funded by two organizations here in Togo, we were 'required' to sensibilise at least two hundred people at every village, the majority of them from the target demographic, which group is obvious when I tell you that we handed out lots and lots and fucking lots of condoms. It was tons of fun.
The two Centrale teams ate together almost every meal every day, but we rode to different villages to maximize the number of sensibilisations per day. Each group did one in the morning, one in the afternoon, with the time between spent biking or eating.
On Wednesday, orange team did a morning sensibilisation in a Muslim village (no alcohol), and then headed two kilometers down the road to our village for the afternoon, where there was, while not a bar, a small boutique with Flag beer and a fridge. We ordered some beers, and sat under the big ugly tree in the center of village, where in two hours we would do our afternoon performance.
Depending on the day, I either hate kids in this country or love them. As I rolled up under the tree on my bike, a group of about twenty kids had gathered round the rest of the volunteers already seated on straw mats on the ground. One of the easiest ways to amuse ourselves in this country is by chasing little kids, so I rode straight into the group, dispersing them, and then hunted one down to give him a pat on the head. The fear in his eyes was entirely real, and the laughter of the men and women sitting on the fringes of the public square echoed between the mud walls of houses.
One rule of thumb when dealing with kids is to never pay attention to them if you want them to go away. Thanks to my little pursuit on the bike, the group had swelled to at least fifty kids. I opened my beer, and saw several little ones smiling and pointing at me, so I casually got up and then chased them on foot, capturing one, who was crying when I reached him. This, naturally, made even more kids want to come around. By the time I reached my mat and took another sip, there were well over a hundred children encircling us.
It's a feeling I always hate, even if I provoke it: being trapped by children, stared at like a zoo animal. They smile and laugh and call us Whitey, they point and imitate and ask each other questions, but the moment you approach them, no matter how calm your walk or benign your intentions, they scatter in utter fear. I've seen kids too scared to even run properly, and in the melee they stumble, nearly trampled by their peers, while the very white man he or she was running from comes over to pick him up and dust him off.
I decided I would no longer chase the children, so as they crept closer and closer to us, I tried calling them over. Only one was brave enough to come, and when I shook his hand the rest of the kids giggled. I get a real kick out of speaking to them in English, so I started telling the kid a knock knock joke. He started repeating me, and did pretty well with it, especially the word "banana." I noticed other kids in the crowd mouthing along, wanting to get special attention as well. I started the joke again, indicating to all the kids to repeat, which they did. Call it a simple pleasure, but that was one of the funniest things I'd heard in a while, and I was so giddy when they finished that I just had to chase them again.
Since white people can hold a kid's interest for hours, we decided to change the strategy from trying to run them off to trying to wear them out enough to go home. Another volunteer taught them freeze tag; I taught them the hand jive; we played a rousing round of the Hokey-Pokey; the freeze tag guy, Marcus, taught them Red Light Green Light, which they didn't understand at all; at the end, just as the hour of our sensibilisation approached, Marcus just started clapping his hands, trying to work them into different rhythms. When syncopation failed, he went with the classic Queen stomp-stomp-clap. By the end he had all the kids singing "We will rock you."
Things have been going well for me here, and AIDS Ride was amazing in all its aspects, and that afternoon with the kids gave me enough happy memories to last for a little while now. School has started again, and I'm much better prepared for it this year. I'm teaching the kids how to write expository and persuasive essays, so that they can articulately express the concepts they learn in class. Tomorrow I head off to Agou, to spend a week with the trainees. I saw the gf for her birthday, and we 'celebrated' our one-year-together mark on the twentieth, while she was sleeping in a dispensary in some small village and I was sinking into the cushions of a couch at the volunteer's house in Tchamba. There exist every day small and large frustrations, and the desire to get this second year over and done with is big. But I understand things better now, I'm more patient, less influenced by smooth talkers, and I've begun cutting my own hair. Things have, if not gone on the upswing, at least levelled off. I'm hoping to keep this up for awhile.
p.s.
I haven't written any letters at all in a long long while, so to those who think I've forgotten about them I say "Nay." You are just as loved and missed as before.
AIDS Ride consists of groups of volunteers and Togolese counterparts riding to hard-to-find villages and giving sensibilisations about AIDS prevention. Each region coordinates their own routes, and how they'll perform every sensibilisation, but we all do it the same week. Funded by two organizations here in Togo, we were 'required' to sensibilise at least two hundred people at every village, the majority of them from the target demographic, which group is obvious when I tell you that we handed out lots and lots and fucking lots of condoms. It was tons of fun.
The two Centrale teams ate together almost every meal every day, but we rode to different villages to maximize the number of sensibilisations per day. Each group did one in the morning, one in the afternoon, with the time between spent biking or eating.
On Wednesday, orange team did a morning sensibilisation in a Muslim village (no alcohol), and then headed two kilometers down the road to our village for the afternoon, where there was, while not a bar, a small boutique with Flag beer and a fridge. We ordered some beers, and sat under the big ugly tree in the center of village, where in two hours we would do our afternoon performance.
Depending on the day, I either hate kids in this country or love them. As I rolled up under the tree on my bike, a group of about twenty kids had gathered round the rest of the volunteers already seated on straw mats on the ground. One of the easiest ways to amuse ourselves in this country is by chasing little kids, so I rode straight into the group, dispersing them, and then hunted one down to give him a pat on the head. The fear in his eyes was entirely real, and the laughter of the men and women sitting on the fringes of the public square echoed between the mud walls of houses.
One rule of thumb when dealing with kids is to never pay attention to them if you want them to go away. Thanks to my little pursuit on the bike, the group had swelled to at least fifty kids. I opened my beer, and saw several little ones smiling and pointing at me, so I casually got up and then chased them on foot, capturing one, who was crying when I reached him. This, naturally, made even more kids want to come around. By the time I reached my mat and took another sip, there were well over a hundred children encircling us.
It's a feeling I always hate, even if I provoke it: being trapped by children, stared at like a zoo animal. They smile and laugh and call us Whitey, they point and imitate and ask each other questions, but the moment you approach them, no matter how calm your walk or benign your intentions, they scatter in utter fear. I've seen kids too scared to even run properly, and in the melee they stumble, nearly trampled by their peers, while the very white man he or she was running from comes over to pick him up and dust him off.
I decided I would no longer chase the children, so as they crept closer and closer to us, I tried calling them over. Only one was brave enough to come, and when I shook his hand the rest of the kids giggled. I get a real kick out of speaking to them in English, so I started telling the kid a knock knock joke. He started repeating me, and did pretty well with it, especially the word "banana." I noticed other kids in the crowd mouthing along, wanting to get special attention as well. I started the joke again, indicating to all the kids to repeat, which they did. Call it a simple pleasure, but that was one of the funniest things I'd heard in a while, and I was so giddy when they finished that I just had to chase them again.
Since white people can hold a kid's interest for hours, we decided to change the strategy from trying to run them off to trying to wear them out enough to go home. Another volunteer taught them freeze tag; I taught them the hand jive; we played a rousing round of the Hokey-Pokey; the freeze tag guy, Marcus, taught them Red Light Green Light, which they didn't understand at all; at the end, just as the hour of our sensibilisation approached, Marcus just started clapping his hands, trying to work them into different rhythms. When syncopation failed, he went with the classic Queen stomp-stomp-clap. By the end he had all the kids singing "We will rock you."
Things have been going well for me here, and AIDS Ride was amazing in all its aspects, and that afternoon with the kids gave me enough happy memories to last for a little while now. School has started again, and I'm much better prepared for it this year. I'm teaching the kids how to write expository and persuasive essays, so that they can articulately express the concepts they learn in class. Tomorrow I head off to Agou, to spend a week with the trainees. I saw the gf for her birthday, and we 'celebrated' our one-year-together mark on the twentieth, while she was sleeping in a dispensary in some small village and I was sinking into the cushions of a couch at the volunteer's house in Tchamba. There exist every day small and large frustrations, and the desire to get this second year over and done with is big. But I understand things better now, I'm more patient, less influenced by smooth talkers, and I've begun cutting my own hair. Things have, if not gone on the upswing, at least levelled off. I'm hoping to keep this up for awhile.
p.s.
I haven't written any letters at all in a long long while, so to those who think I've forgotten about them I say "Nay." You are just as loved and missed as before.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
A Brief Entry on Health, With No Theme
Yesterday, instead of going to the Embassy to meet with the relevant secretary, I spent pretty much all day sleeping on the couch in the volunteer lounge, or shitting out my guts in the volunteer lounge bathroom. Whereas in the States, bodily waste is either number 1 or number 2, here in PC/Togo we have 1,2,3, and 4. The first two are the same; 3 is when you don't so much shit as you piss out your ass; 4, which is more common than I care to reflect upon, is when you both shit (either type-2 or type-3) and puke at the same time. Yesterday I held steady at number 3. This was accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, extreme headache, extreme nausea, and general weakness that left me either unable to get up or on the brink of fainting every time I did.
Today, however, I am fine.
In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.
I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.
So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.
My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't want to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.
Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.
I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.
The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.
Today, however, I am fine.
In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.
I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.
So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.
My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't want to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.
Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.
I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.
The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.
Je suis dumbass
Also, I just found out that 'quotidian' is an English word used much like the French word 'quotidienne', which I misspelled in the email post.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
An Email to My Friend, Which I Decided to Share With You All, Except for the Juicy Parts
I've been away from my village for sixteen days now, and I'm loving it. Kara, Lome, Agou, Atakpame, and now back in Lome. I don't really want to go back, to have to start again teaching sixty kids to a class, with their inability to spell or form complete sentences. But the money won't last me here in Lome, and as much as I hate my village, I suppose I'm committed to helping them out. After all, it's only one more year.
I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.
I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.
I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.
So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.
If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.
As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.
One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.
What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.
I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.
I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.
I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.
So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.
If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.
As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.
One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.
What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.
Monday, September 15, 2008
I Believe in You
Maman had heard we were coming, but she hadn't the credit to call me and confirm it. When the Peace Corps van rolled into Nyogbo, Maman was at the end of the driveway, standing behind a table containing bowls, colognes, and expensive woven shirts. I waved to her, and she stared at me, which I always take to mean, "Oh, really, so you're back now?" but which I like to think is just Maman's way of saying, "You're home, and this is good, this is what normal should be."
Catching up started as it always does; I complained about my village, Maman gave out the locations and status of my host-siblings, all away on summer break except Daniel. Daniel was shy at first, like he was at the funeral, but he remembered me, and after some minimal prodding he was showing me the completed pages of the coloring book I'd brought for him a year ago, as well as his new cat, Chance. "Tony, regardes." He picked Chance up by her back, turned her upside down, and without hesitation threw the cat feet up into the air. When she landed on her feet and tried to slink away, he laughed and grabbed her and repeated the trick six or seven more times. Daniel's smile is more space than teeth.
We were in town for just three days, designing the training program for the new group coming soon. I'll be teaching them about the joys of working in the Togolese school system. Yippee. Because we were there as volunteer trainers and not trainees, we slept at the tech house, and not with our host families. Many of us ate from fufu stands along the road, or grabbed cent francs of koliko and fried plantains. Aside from a communal trip to a fancy restaurant in the nearby bigger town, and pizza night at Edith's house, I ate every meal with Maman and Daniel. Couscous with fried chicken and veggies; rice and tuna spaghetti sauce; koliko and fried plantains with spaghetti and chicken; etc.
Meal time was Our Time during training. If I wasn't helping prepare (they only let me do that rarely), I was always sitting on a small stool in the kitchen, talking to Maman, Kommi, and Angel while they cooked, playing with Daniel while we waited to eat. Then, because the children ate apart from us, and Papa usually enjoyed his meals in the living room, Maman and I would sit across from each other at the table and go over the day's events. This visit, things were no different, except, of course, that Papa was not there.
I'd been wanting to ask her about how she's been since his death, but didn't know how to approach the subject. On our last day in town, eating the spaghetti she'd prepared for me the night before, not knowing that I was at the fancy restaurant, I saw an in to the subject and took it. "Since he died, I don't understand anything," she said. Well, I said, all we can do is keep living. God knows his affairs.
It was at this last comment, a common one in Togo, that she looked up. She seemed tired, like a person who has finally settled for an argument by giving up her side completely. "Do you believe that?" she asked. "I guess I have to," I said. She stared at her plate, resigned, and said simply, "Oh."
One of our big lunchtime discussions during training had been about religion. Maman had pried out of me that I didn't go to any church, and that this was a conscious decision. We had a conversation eerily reminiscent of one my grandmother and I had had years ago, and almost as reassuring. God was what she loved, church was just the easiest way to get to him sometimes.
The distance between these two conversations is a long and disturbing whisper. I don't believe in religion, but I believe in Faith, in the comfort and necessity of believing in something beyond yourself. Often, we rely on this Faith, attribute to it powers, make it divine, expect it to let things ride when all is well, and to support us when times are hard. It is there to explain the inexplicable. When it can't, there is no hope, simply devastation.
Catching up started as it always does; I complained about my village, Maman gave out the locations and status of my host-siblings, all away on summer break except Daniel. Daniel was shy at first, like he was at the funeral, but he remembered me, and after some minimal prodding he was showing me the completed pages of the coloring book I'd brought for him a year ago, as well as his new cat, Chance. "Tony, regardes." He picked Chance up by her back, turned her upside down, and without hesitation threw the cat feet up into the air. When she landed on her feet and tried to slink away, he laughed and grabbed her and repeated the trick six or seven more times. Daniel's smile is more space than teeth.
We were in town for just three days, designing the training program for the new group coming soon. I'll be teaching them about the joys of working in the Togolese school system. Yippee. Because we were there as volunteer trainers and not trainees, we slept at the tech house, and not with our host families. Many of us ate from fufu stands along the road, or grabbed cent francs of koliko and fried plantains. Aside from a communal trip to a fancy restaurant in the nearby bigger town, and pizza night at Edith's house, I ate every meal with Maman and Daniel. Couscous with fried chicken and veggies; rice and tuna spaghetti sauce; koliko and fried plantains with spaghetti and chicken; etc.
Meal time was Our Time during training. If I wasn't helping prepare (they only let me do that rarely), I was always sitting on a small stool in the kitchen, talking to Maman, Kommi, and Angel while they cooked, playing with Daniel while we waited to eat. Then, because the children ate apart from us, and Papa usually enjoyed his meals in the living room, Maman and I would sit across from each other at the table and go over the day's events. This visit, things were no different, except, of course, that Papa was not there.
I'd been wanting to ask her about how she's been since his death, but didn't know how to approach the subject. On our last day in town, eating the spaghetti she'd prepared for me the night before, not knowing that I was at the fancy restaurant, I saw an in to the subject and took it. "Since he died, I don't understand anything," she said. Well, I said, all we can do is keep living. God knows his affairs.
It was at this last comment, a common one in Togo, that she looked up. She seemed tired, like a person who has finally settled for an argument by giving up her side completely. "Do you believe that?" she asked. "I guess I have to," I said. She stared at her plate, resigned, and said simply, "Oh."
One of our big lunchtime discussions during training had been about religion. Maman had pried out of me that I didn't go to any church, and that this was a conscious decision. We had a conversation eerily reminiscent of one my grandmother and I had had years ago, and almost as reassuring. God was what she loved, church was just the easiest way to get to him sometimes.
The distance between these two conversations is a long and disturbing whisper. I don't believe in religion, but I believe in Faith, in the comfort and necessity of believing in something beyond yourself. Often, we rely on this Faith, attribute to it powers, make it divine, expect it to let things ride when all is well, and to support us when times are hard. It is there to explain the inexplicable. When it can't, there is no hope, simply devastation.
DFW, 1962-2008
David Foster Wallace is dead.
There's the old cliche which has now reared its head with the news of his death: "His writing meant so much to me." I can't see any way to get around that.
It was just so damn good. I've recommended him to anybody I've ever met who likes writing.
I'd like to write more, but I never knew him beyond his writing, and I think speculation on his final thoughts (which I can't help but to do) would be grotesque and insensitive to put in writing on a fan's stupid blog.
Read him.
Monday, July 7, 2008
So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World
Gene Wilder is a genius. On my two most recent trips to the regional transit house, I've watched the old Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I love the song "Pure Imagination." My favorite scene is the one I hated most as a child: on the boat, going through the tunnel, images of insects crawling across people's faces, of a chicken being decapitated; Wonka reciting, at first calmly and lyrically, but then hysterically, madly:
There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing
Absolute madness. In one of the next scenes everyone (save the chocolate-drinking German boy and his mother) is passing through a room with strips of fruit-patterned lickable wallpaper. Wonka is giddy as a child. "The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!" Veruca Salt, the little bitch, turns to Wonka and says, "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?" Wonka grabs her spoiled little face by the cheeks and says "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
The first day that the kids learned to play, one of the professors at the primary school came over with some friends to drink. I am not a fan of this man. Two wives, ten children, overweight, and unfunny. The boys were playing as he sat down, callabash in hand. Adele, who had just served him, came back under the paillote to get into the game. "What's she doing?" the fat man said. "She doesn't know how to play." This man often walks into my house without knocking, and his idea of a joke is to tell me he's going to sleep with my girlfriend. "She knows how to play," I said. "C'est toi qui ne sais rien." Adele slapped in, and won the game.
It sounds crazy to make this connection, but I believe that the card games have given Adele more self-confidence. She smiles more often, and won't let the boys cheat her when they play. I haven't even seen her get hit in a long time. She still gets yelled at occasionally, but no more so than the boys. And when the brat cries, he's left to cry.
Even the village seems to be nicer. Recently, a middle-aged man was watching the kids play, and when the game was finished, he took the cards to teach them another game. It was a partners game, and he put two of the boys together, and set Adele at his side. Many of the things I wish to describe seem so lame in words, but imagine if you can, the impact of this move. With the man as her partner, Adele came into a position of power. Not a significant position, and you could argue that it didn't continue following the end of the game. But whereas a week ago somebody was saying she didn't know a thing about cards, now somebody took the time to teach her, and declare her, by making her his partner, his equal. I only wish the first asshole had been there to see it.
There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing
Absolute madness. In one of the next scenes everyone (save the chocolate-drinking German boy and his mother) is passing through a room with strips of fruit-patterned lickable wallpaper. Wonka is giddy as a child. "The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!" Veruca Salt, the little bitch, turns to Wonka and says, "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?" Wonka grabs her spoiled little face by the cheeks and says "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
--
I've taught the children card games. Togolese kids are absolute murder to a deck of cards, but I won't begrudge them a little over-enthusiasm as long as they're having fun. They've learned Egyptian Rat Screwer, and two forms of Speed, and they play them remarkably well. In turn, I've learned the game Huit Americaines, which is a bit confusing at first, but lots of fun. We often all play together under the paillote, sitting at old school desks in various stages of disintegration. The chickens run around the yard, stalking beneath our feet for discarded peanut shells. The women of the compound prepare meals, or serve tchouk, or sit and watch. When somebody new wants to learn, I have the kids teach them. Nowadays both the women in my compound and even a local pastor can sometimes be found sitting on a small stool in a circle of children, slapping doubles, and sweeping up cards.The first day that the kids learned to play, one of the professors at the primary school came over with some friends to drink. I am not a fan of this man. Two wives, ten children, overweight, and unfunny. The boys were playing as he sat down, callabash in hand. Adele, who had just served him, came back under the paillote to get into the game. "What's she doing?" the fat man said. "She doesn't know how to play." This man often walks into my house without knocking, and his idea of a joke is to tell me he's going to sleep with my girlfriend. "She knows how to play," I said. "C'est toi qui ne sais rien." Adele slapped in, and won the game.
It sounds crazy to make this connection, but I believe that the card games have given Adele more self-confidence. She smiles more often, and won't let the boys cheat her when they play. I haven't even seen her get hit in a long time. She still gets yelled at occasionally, but no more so than the boys. And when the brat cries, he's left to cry.
Even the village seems to be nicer. Recently, a middle-aged man was watching the kids play, and when the game was finished, he took the cards to teach them another game. It was a partners game, and he put two of the boys together, and set Adele at his side. Many of the things I wish to describe seem so lame in words, but imagine if you can, the impact of this move. With the man as her partner, Adele came into a position of power. Not a significant position, and you could argue that it didn't continue following the end of the game. But whereas a week ago somebody was saying she didn't know a thing about cards, now somebody took the time to teach her, and declare her, by making her his partner, his equal. I only wish the first asshole had been there to see it.
--
On occasion I get five or ten francs pieces as change, usually when making a photocopy. They're annoying to have because there's little you can do with them except buy candy. Therefore, I usually save them until a night when I need something from the boutique across the street but am too lazy to go over myself. I'll call a kid over, give him/her the money for the spaghetti or soap or whatever, and then squeeze a ten francs piece into his/her hand. They usually buy the milk candies, little white chewy squares without much flavor, but which are still delicious.
A few weeks ago I'd promised Adele that, since I hadn't brought her anything back from my little trip (I went to Atakpame, or Sokode, or someplace; everybody asks you to bring them something back, it's a cultural thing), I'd get her a sucker from the boutique, which is a whopping twenty-five francs a pop. For some reason I'd never found the time to sneak her the money without the other kids seeing it, or to go myself and get her one. Last Tuesday she was hanging out, doing nothing, and she asked when we could go and get the bonbon (candy). Let's go now, I said.
We looked all over the shelves of the boutique, on the front counter, in the clear buckets, but the suckers were nowhere. "Ils sont finis," the owner said. We had thirty francs on us, so we bought six milk candies instead. "Now," I said to Adele as we walked back home, "I'm going to take one, because I'm hungry. That leaves five. You can share them if you like, or you can have them all to yourself, but if you do that, just make sure you keep them in your pocket so the others don't get jealous." Naturally, I assumed and expected her to keep them for secret treats at night.
We continued in silence, the air sharp and delicious with the scent of the lime trees along the path. After a moment, Adele handed me another candy. "What's this for?" I said. "I want you to have another," she said, "and then I'll give one to Lidao, one to Theo, one to Maman, and keep one for myself." She stored three in her pocket, and took the one she'd reserved for herself, unwrapping it carefully, and bit into it deliberately, neither devouring it, nor savoring it. Her eyes wandered over the corn in the field, the women at the water pump, the fruits hanging from the baobab, and when she looked at me, her mouth broke into her shy smile and she giggled. And let me tell you, I could have stayed right there with her forever.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Il y a la fatigue
How are things, you crazy Americans?
Things here? Okay, I guess.
Don't really feel like talking.
Going to Europe soon, I hope.
Ready to get out of Togo for a bit.
Have stories to tell.
But don't want to write them now.
Au revoir.
Things here? Okay, I guess.
Don't really feel like talking.
Going to Europe soon, I hope.
Ready to get out of Togo for a bit.
Have stories to tell.
But don't want to write them now.
Au revoir.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Hugs and Kisses
Tomorrow, my little brother and sister will turn seventeen. They have jobs and drivers licenses and interests in the other sex. They will be seniors in high school come August. This all freaks me out just a little.
After giving birth, Mom was laid up in bed, exhausted and whatever else women are after having twins. I was six years old. I'd just finished kindergarten, was going to start first grade in the fall. I don't know what Gaetano was doing with his time. Dad, obviouly, was at work.
Mom and Dad had decided to use reusable cloth diapers from a service in lieu of the disposable ones they'd had for Gaetano and me. I don't know if it was the diaper service or the hospital who'd given it, but as I was wandering one day, alone as far as I can remember, bored because those tiny human apostrophes were sleeping, I found an instructional video. How to strap the baby seat in the car. How to burp, I think. And how to fold the cloth diapers.
I guess this is the long of way of telling you that I was the first one at home to change Nick and Anna's diapers. I remember teaching Mom how to do it. Honestly, for all I know, Mom and Dad had done it before and were humoring me, or maybe I just don't remember this well at all. But anyway.
We pushed them around in a twins stroller, a long basket in which they could both lay down. It was a light sky blue, the color you see behind wispy clouds. There was a mosquito net. I remember a day many years later when we all gathered to look at that stroller, and nobody could comprehend how those two were ever tiny enough to fit inside. I still can't imagine it.
We have pictures of their first birthday, when Nick blietzkrieged his cake and Anna negotiated with hers like a one-year old Neville Chamberlain.
I look at recent photos of them, remembering their dirty and dainty birthday faces, and can't help but wonder what the hell's been going on in the past sixteen years that made them decide to grow up.
Anna is still short. When I was in college, if, when I would call home, Anna answered, conversations were often like this:
Hello?
Hey, kiddo, how's it going?
Good.
Still short?
Yup.
Alright. That's all I needed, talk to you later.
One time she actually said, "Okay," and hung up on me.
Nick is gangly; skinny, but muscling out (at least since the last time I saw him). He and I used to lean on the counter in front of the answering machine, thinking of stupid shit to record. If you called us anytime in the past five or six years, you probably heard some of it.
The point is, seventeen is no longer a little kid, though it's not the adult they think it is. But for some reason, no matter how big they get (save Anna), they are always, in some way or another, the tiny little babies sitting in that stroller, in diapers I likely folded around them.
I love those kids. I once made a list of the people in my life I loved the most. Number one was Grandma. Tied for second were those two.
Happy birthday, kiddos. I miss you like hell, and then some.
After giving birth, Mom was laid up in bed, exhausted and whatever else women are after having twins. I was six years old. I'd just finished kindergarten, was going to start first grade in the fall. I don't know what Gaetano was doing with his time. Dad, obviouly, was at work.
Mom and Dad had decided to use reusable cloth diapers from a service in lieu of the disposable ones they'd had for Gaetano and me. I don't know if it was the diaper service or the hospital who'd given it, but as I was wandering one day, alone as far as I can remember, bored because those tiny human apostrophes were sleeping, I found an instructional video. How to strap the baby seat in the car. How to burp, I think. And how to fold the cloth diapers.
I guess this is the long of way of telling you that I was the first one at home to change Nick and Anna's diapers. I remember teaching Mom how to do it. Honestly, for all I know, Mom and Dad had done it before and were humoring me, or maybe I just don't remember this well at all. But anyway.
We pushed them around in a twins stroller, a long basket in which they could both lay down. It was a light sky blue, the color you see behind wispy clouds. There was a mosquito net. I remember a day many years later when we all gathered to look at that stroller, and nobody could comprehend how those two were ever tiny enough to fit inside. I still can't imagine it.
We have pictures of their first birthday, when Nick blietzkrieged his cake and Anna negotiated with hers like a one-year old Neville Chamberlain.
I look at recent photos of them, remembering their dirty and dainty birthday faces, and can't help but wonder what the hell's been going on in the past sixteen years that made them decide to grow up.
Anna is still short. When I was in college, if, when I would call home, Anna answered, conversations were often like this:
Hello?
Hey, kiddo, how's it going?
Good.
Still short?
Yup.
Alright. That's all I needed, talk to you later.
One time she actually said, "Okay," and hung up on me.
Nick is gangly; skinny, but muscling out (at least since the last time I saw him). He and I used to lean on the counter in front of the answering machine, thinking of stupid shit to record. If you called us anytime in the past five or six years, you probably heard some of it.
The point is, seventeen is no longer a little kid, though it's not the adult they think it is. But for some reason, no matter how big they get (save Anna), they are always, in some way or another, the tiny little babies sitting in that stroller, in diapers I likely folded around them.
I love those kids. I once made a list of the people in my life I loved the most. Number one was Grandma. Tied for second were those two.
Happy birthday, kiddos. I miss you like hell, and then some.
In the Ground, On the Mind
Land disputes led me to essentially abandon the field for about two weeks. The president of the community development committee, the group that had given me the land, croaked his way through an angry explanation. I've never really been able to understand him, and it's worse when he's pissed. He said he'd put sticks in the ground at each of the four corners of my field. He said the quantity of land would not be diminished.
Last Monday my homologue took me to the president's farm, since we hadn't been able to catch him at the house. He took us, speaking only in Kabye, to where my land was. There were no sticks. The size had been cut by more than half. He showed us the northeastern corner. "Where are the other limits?" I asked. He waved his hand in a southerly direction and spoke in Kabye. "What'd he say?" I asked my homologue. "Over there, over there."
The next day I went to the director of the CEG to ask him for several students to help me cultivate. What followed was a patronizing conversation about just what the hell did I think I was doing out there? If the village gave me the land, the villagers should help me. If the students are going to be cultivating, the school must receive the harvest. But, wait. I must not have understood, he said.
After twenty-five minutes of calling in other professors--all whom bitch about the director as much as I do--to agree with him, I finally understood that he was asking me just what would happen with the trees I was planting after I leave. You know, a year and a half from now. I don't know, I told him. I guess that's your problem, not mine. He wasn't buying that.
In the end, I got the students. They worked, turning up the earth and sweating and talking about me in Kabye. They worked through the rain. They worked till an hour before dark, and then we left.
I spent all of Thursday and Friday in the field, sowing seed. Rows of trees, rows of corn, a few sunflowers. Tapping small holes in the dirt with a branch I cut from a tree in the field. Throwing in two or three seeds, tapping the dirt back into the hole. Friday night I could barely move my wrist. My skin was more red than brown, hot to the touch. My eyes felt sunburned. Next week I have to finish the second half.
Had this been a few weeks ago, the president and the director would have pissed me off to no end. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe it's realizing that these assholes will always stand in the way of my work, and there's no way around it. Regardless, I didn't give a shit, and it was nice not to.
A Togolese friend and I were washing my clothes one day. I was quiet, fuming, having been kicked off the very land I was cultivating that morning. Land where I'd transplanted trees, raised seedlings, watched pigs and cows trample and eat my garden beds. "Thoughts," he said, "make a man crazy. Leave the thoughts, hold your sanity." Not too long after that, following several straight days of inebriation, the emotional crisis of a friend, and Papa's funeral, brought me to my regional capital. I took my friend aside, and told him what my clothes-washing Togolese buddy had told me. "Sure," said my friend, "but what kind of life is it, when to enjoy it, you must not think about it?"
He's right, maybe. But I'm not going to ponder on that too much. I want these good days to ride along for awhile.
Last Monday my homologue took me to the president's farm, since we hadn't been able to catch him at the house. He took us, speaking only in Kabye, to where my land was. There were no sticks. The size had been cut by more than half. He showed us the northeastern corner. "Where are the other limits?" I asked. He waved his hand in a southerly direction and spoke in Kabye. "What'd he say?" I asked my homologue. "Over there, over there."
The next day I went to the director of the CEG to ask him for several students to help me cultivate. What followed was a patronizing conversation about just what the hell did I think I was doing out there? If the village gave me the land, the villagers should help me. If the students are going to be cultivating, the school must receive the harvest. But, wait. I must not have understood, he said.
After twenty-five minutes of calling in other professors--all whom bitch about the director as much as I do--to agree with him, I finally understood that he was asking me just what would happen with the trees I was planting after I leave. You know, a year and a half from now. I don't know, I told him. I guess that's your problem, not mine. He wasn't buying that.
In the end, I got the students. They worked, turning up the earth and sweating and talking about me in Kabye. They worked through the rain. They worked till an hour before dark, and then we left.
I spent all of Thursday and Friday in the field, sowing seed. Rows of trees, rows of corn, a few sunflowers. Tapping small holes in the dirt with a branch I cut from a tree in the field. Throwing in two or three seeds, tapping the dirt back into the hole. Friday night I could barely move my wrist. My skin was more red than brown, hot to the touch. My eyes felt sunburned. Next week I have to finish the second half.
Had this been a few weeks ago, the president and the director would have pissed me off to no end. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe it's realizing that these assholes will always stand in the way of my work, and there's no way around it. Regardless, I didn't give a shit, and it was nice not to.
A Togolese friend and I were washing my clothes one day. I was quiet, fuming, having been kicked off the very land I was cultivating that morning. Land where I'd transplanted trees, raised seedlings, watched pigs and cows trample and eat my garden beds. "Thoughts," he said, "make a man crazy. Leave the thoughts, hold your sanity." Not too long after that, following several straight days of inebriation, the emotional crisis of a friend, and Papa's funeral, brought me to my regional capital. I took my friend aside, and told him what my clothes-washing Togolese buddy had told me. "Sure," said my friend, "but what kind of life is it, when to enjoy it, you must not think about it?"
He's right, maybe. But I'm not going to ponder on that too much. I want these good days to ride along for awhile.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
I don't have everyone's email. That's why there's a blog.
Here's a mass email. If you didn't get it, I'm too lazy to look up your address. So here you go.
Dear y'all:
I have not written in a while. And now that I am writing, and am using an American keyboard, I keep typing as though it were a French keyboard. "Some" becomes "so;e" and my name looks like Qnthony. If I wanted to type "wezelo," the Ewe word for welcome, it would be "zewelo." Those French are loony.
That notion is reinforced by the story I found in the "Readings in Intermediate French Prose" book I liberated from the essentially abandoned library in village. It's clearly a donated book, published sometime in the 60s. It was in between a history of the United States (in French), and old homework assignments past volunteers assigned to kids. All was surrounded by rat shit.
I've been reading this book to improve my French, obviously. I learned the word "desespoir," the opposite of "espoir;" the latter also has its synonym "esperance" (they both mean 'hope,' though espoir is masculine and esperance is feminine; please excuse any lack of accents). Within this book I found a story of a Frenchman who decided that too many people died on shipwrecks. After months of research into the nutritional content of seaweed, the amount of ocean water you can drink, etc., the maniac set off in a rubber raft with a bottle of water, some string, a knife, and a hook. He lived.
I decided to read this story to my troisieme class, to give them an example of the importance of being well-acquainted with the environment. I sent three kids home early, and stopped reading to make the kids put their heads down on the desk. I hate teaching.
That's the real reason I haven't been writing. The truth is I've been miserably depressed for about a month now. The only things I have to write about are my frustrations, and I was tired of sending out letters like that; they made me even more depressed.
To cap off this month, I'm going back to Agou-Nyogbo, the village where we trained. That really is a beautiful place, and I did love it there. During our Thanksgiving field trip the girls made a superlatives list, and we all voted. I was elected Most Likely to be Adopted by my Host Family. Daniel was as much my brother as Gaetano or Nick. My host mom used to call me "TH," for Tony Hadzi (their last name).
But when I called Maman last week to tell her I would stop by to see her, neither of us were too excited. "Ca va?" I asked. "Ca ne va pas," she replied. Papa had died.
While my bond with Maman was as strong as my bond with my real mother, Papa and I were not quite as close. Nevertheless, Papa was a good father, and the only Togolese man I've ever seen horse around with his wife. We used to sit and listen to the radio together, watching soccer on Ghanian television. The day I left Nyogbo for good, he called me into the living room. He looked me in the eye, through his crooked glasses with the prescription sticker still on, and he said, "Tony. Stay healthy. Stay happy. The work will follow from there."
I don't ever ask this, but if you could, whether it be by prayer or some hippie method, send good vibes to Chez HADZI this weekend. Maman is a good woman, with good kids, and she loved her husband as he loved her. They have been the best part of Togo for me, and Papa's death is taking its toll on Maman, and I'm sure the kids as well.
Sorry for the downer email. I'm changing malaria meds, so hopefully the hallucinations and depression will stop. Then I'll be able to write positively "instead of bitching to [my] ever so supportive and beauiful and wonderful girlfriend all the time."** Till then, toodles. I hope you're all doing well.
-Tony
**quote forcefully inserted by said girlfriend
Dear y'all:
I have not written in a while. And now that I am writing, and am using an American keyboard, I keep typing as though it were a French keyboard. "Some" becomes "so;e" and my name looks like Qnthony. If I wanted to type "wezelo," the Ewe word for welcome, it would be "zewelo." Those French are loony.
That notion is reinforced by the story I found in the "Readings in Intermediate French Prose" book I liberated from the essentially abandoned library in village. It's clearly a donated book, published sometime in the 60s. It was in between a history of the United States (in French), and old homework assignments past volunteers assigned to kids. All was surrounded by rat shit.
I've been reading this book to improve my French, obviously. I learned the word "desespoir," the opposite of "espoir;" the latter also has its synonym "esperance" (they both mean 'hope,' though espoir is masculine and esperance is feminine; please excuse any lack of accents). Within this book I found a story of a Frenchman who decided that too many people died on shipwrecks. After months of research into the nutritional content of seaweed, the amount of ocean water you can drink, etc., the maniac set off in a rubber raft with a bottle of water, some string, a knife, and a hook. He lived.
I decided to read this story to my troisieme class, to give them an example of the importance of being well-acquainted with the environment. I sent three kids home early, and stopped reading to make the kids put their heads down on the desk. I hate teaching.
That's the real reason I haven't been writing. The truth is I've been miserably depressed for about a month now. The only things I have to write about are my frustrations, and I was tired of sending out letters like that; they made me even more depressed.
To cap off this month, I'm going back to Agou-Nyogbo, the village where we trained. That really is a beautiful place, and I did love it there. During our Thanksgiving field trip the girls made a superlatives list, and we all voted. I was elected Most Likely to be Adopted by my Host Family. Daniel was as much my brother as Gaetano or Nick. My host mom used to call me "TH," for Tony Hadzi (their last name).
But when I called Maman last week to tell her I would stop by to see her, neither of us were too excited. "Ca va?" I asked. "Ca ne va pas," she replied. Papa had died.
While my bond with Maman was as strong as my bond with my real mother, Papa and I were not quite as close. Nevertheless, Papa was a good father, and the only Togolese man I've ever seen horse around with his wife. We used to sit and listen to the radio together, watching soccer on Ghanian television. The day I left Nyogbo for good, he called me into the living room. He looked me in the eye, through his crooked glasses with the prescription sticker still on, and he said, "Tony. Stay healthy. Stay happy. The work will follow from there."
I don't ever ask this, but if you could, whether it be by prayer or some hippie method, send good vibes to Chez HADZI this weekend. Maman is a good woman, with good kids, and she loved her husband as he loved her. They have been the best part of Togo for me, and Papa's death is taking its toll on Maman, and I'm sure the kids as well.
Sorry for the downer email. I'm changing malaria meds, so hopefully the hallucinations and depression will stop. Then I'll be able to write positively "instead of bitching to [my] ever so supportive and beauiful and wonderful girlfriend all the time."** Till then, toodles. I hope you're all doing well.
-Tony
**quote forcefully inserted by said girlfriend
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Adele, part two
The next day was normal. School was cancelled in continuation of the May Day celebrations. I don't remember anything that I did.
Towards evening, the sky clouded up. It had the texture of hand-whipped cream, and the color of a quiet pebble. Monsieur was standing outside the compound. He'd spent the day playing board games beneath the rafia tree. "Que pensez-vous?" I asked. "La pluie va tomber?" He was positive that it would not. I decided that I would not walk to the field to water the trees.
The night before I'd heard Monsieur chastising the boys. It was in Kabye, so I didn't understand it. There was no punishment doled out as far as I could see. Monsieur is a good man, but a product of his culture. Punishing the boys was not necessary. Warning them not to do it again would suffice.
What kills me about the whole thing is that those boys did something terrible to her. Adele is not a crier. I've never seen anybody weather the injustices doled out to her with such dignity or patience. To find her drenched in tears, shaking with sobs, barely able to breathe because of it, I knew whatever happened had been bad. I told this story to a volunteer friend, and she asked if I'm sure hitting her was as far as the boys had gone. I don't want to entertain the notion. Besides, I think those boys are homosexuals.
Back to Friday, the day after. After quizzing Monsieur on the weather I piddle around for a bit in the house. It's tchouk day chez moi, so several of the old men in the community have stopped by to drink. I tell them I'll join them as soon as I take a shower. As I shiver under the first callabash of cistern water, the rain begins to fall.
While I'm inside changing, the boys and Adele are running around the compound, putting buckets in strategic spots to catch the rain water. I close my windows against the wind and head under the paillote to wait out the downpour with the old men. Everybody is under some sort of roof.
Pretty soon the wife of the history professor is yelling across the compound. "Adele! Adele!" A bucket of insufficient size has been placed under the gutter runoff on the roof near their part of the compound. She wants Adele to empty the bucket into the cistern. Adele does not protest, but sprints across the compound and takes care of the job. When she puts the bucket back under the gutter, the wife tells Adele to wait for it to fill up again. She does not invite her inside.
I'm wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and my fleece jacket, a clothing combination unheard of in this climate, but I'm freezing. Adele is under the gutter; the wind is blowing the rain straight at her. She is dancing, hopping from foot to foot, her hands clasped together across her body, trying to keep warm. Her skirt and thin blouse are completely soaked.
She empties the bucket into the cistern again, places it under the gutter, and continues to wait. Nobody in the compound is paying attention to her but me. She's absolutely freezing. And I decide I hate this place. I hate that a day after what must have been a heartless beating, if not worse, Adele is called out in the rain, tiny and shivering, to empty water from a bucket she did not place into a cistern she will not use. I hate these people and their customs. I hate the mentality that says cultures aren't wrong, just different. I want to wake up Adele one night when she's fallen asleep on the concrete patio, wrap her in a blanket and take her home. I want to give her sisters, and friends, and coloring books, and a day with no chores. I want to save her, but I have no idea how.
As I'm watching her, as guilty as any of the indifferent men under the paillote, I wonder what she's thinking. What she must wish for in the face of a life like this. Then Adele takes a stutter-step running start, and dives on her belly across the smooth concrete porch. She must have slidden ten feet. I can't help but laugh out loud. She gets up, turns to me, and buries her hands in her face. All I hear is the sound of the rain, and her giggles. She smiles at me, checks the bucket. She dives again.
Towards evening, the sky clouded up. It had the texture of hand-whipped cream, and the color of a quiet pebble. Monsieur was standing outside the compound. He'd spent the day playing board games beneath the rafia tree. "Que pensez-vous?" I asked. "La pluie va tomber?" He was positive that it would not. I decided that I would not walk to the field to water the trees.
The night before I'd heard Monsieur chastising the boys. It was in Kabye, so I didn't understand it. There was no punishment doled out as far as I could see. Monsieur is a good man, but a product of his culture. Punishing the boys was not necessary. Warning them not to do it again would suffice.
What kills me about the whole thing is that those boys did something terrible to her. Adele is not a crier. I've never seen anybody weather the injustices doled out to her with such dignity or patience. To find her drenched in tears, shaking with sobs, barely able to breathe because of it, I knew whatever happened had been bad. I told this story to a volunteer friend, and she asked if I'm sure hitting her was as far as the boys had gone. I don't want to entertain the notion. Besides, I think those boys are homosexuals.
Back to Friday, the day after. After quizzing Monsieur on the weather I piddle around for a bit in the house. It's tchouk day chez moi, so several of the old men in the community have stopped by to drink. I tell them I'll join them as soon as I take a shower. As I shiver under the first callabash of cistern water, the rain begins to fall.
While I'm inside changing, the boys and Adele are running around the compound, putting buckets in strategic spots to catch the rain water. I close my windows against the wind and head under the paillote to wait out the downpour with the old men. Everybody is under some sort of roof.
Pretty soon the wife of the history professor is yelling across the compound. "Adele! Adele!" A bucket of insufficient size has been placed under the gutter runoff on the roof near their part of the compound. She wants Adele to empty the bucket into the cistern. Adele does not protest, but sprints across the compound and takes care of the job. When she puts the bucket back under the gutter, the wife tells Adele to wait for it to fill up again. She does not invite her inside.
I'm wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and my fleece jacket, a clothing combination unheard of in this climate, but I'm freezing. Adele is under the gutter; the wind is blowing the rain straight at her. She is dancing, hopping from foot to foot, her hands clasped together across her body, trying to keep warm. Her skirt and thin blouse are completely soaked.
She empties the bucket into the cistern again, places it under the gutter, and continues to wait. Nobody in the compound is paying attention to her but me. She's absolutely freezing. And I decide I hate this place. I hate that a day after what must have been a heartless beating, if not worse, Adele is called out in the rain, tiny and shivering, to empty water from a bucket she did not place into a cistern she will not use. I hate these people and their customs. I hate the mentality that says cultures aren't wrong, just different. I want to wake up Adele one night when she's fallen asleep on the concrete patio, wrap her in a blanket and take her home. I want to give her sisters, and friends, and coloring books, and a day with no chores. I want to save her, but I have no idea how.
As I'm watching her, as guilty as any of the indifferent men under the paillote, I wonder what she's thinking. What she must wish for in the face of a life like this. Then Adele takes a stutter-step running start, and dives on her belly across the smooth concrete porch. She must have slidden ten feet. I can't help but laugh out loud. She gets up, turns to me, and buries her hands in her face. All I hear is the sound of the rain, and her giggles. She smiles at me, checks the bucket. She dives again.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Adele, part one
She stays with Madame and Monsieur, but she's not part of the family. Eleven years old, the only girl in the compound. She usually walks around in just a skirt, no shirt; she's not developed yet. Her hair, like that of most Togolese children, is close cropped. Her head has a long shape to it in the back, which counterbalances the bulge of her under nourished belly. The scar under her left eye is thick and off-angle, and looks more like an accident than the ritual scars of the others. She is a beautiful girl. Being a guest in the house, she does the majority of cooking, cleaning, and laundry than any of the other kids. She is also the scapegoat when anything goes wrong. Madame frequently smacks her, usually on the back of the head, or on the arms; once across the face that I've seen. The boys pick on her mercilessly. She is forbidden to touch any of their possessions, and they exclude her from most of their activities; or they would, that is, if she wasn't constantly occupied by chores. Sometimes they hit her, too. I had never seen her cry.
The May Day party ended and I went to water the trees. When I came back to the compound, no one was around. The only sound in the air was the static and music blasting from the speakers in the abandoned school building which now houses the mill, and is a favorite site for parties and pick-up soccer. As I came toward the rear of the compound, I heard the rapid hiccough of air that signifies crying. Leaning against the wall near the shower stalls was Adele. Her face and chest were soaked in tears; her body was shaking. I knelt beside her and put a hand on her back. "What happened?" They hit her. "Who?" She wouldn't say. I told her to come sit down with me, have a mango, drink some cold water, calm down. "I can't," she said. "I have to make dinner."
The May Day party ended and I went to water the trees. When I came back to the compound, no one was around. The only sound in the air was the static and music blasting from the speakers in the abandoned school building which now houses the mill, and is a favorite site for parties and pick-up soccer. As I came toward the rear of the compound, I heard the rapid hiccough of air that signifies crying. Leaning against the wall near the shower stalls was Adele. Her face and chest were soaked in tears; her body was shaking. I knelt beside her and put a hand on her back. "What happened?" They hit her. "Who?" She wouldn't say. I told her to come sit down with me, have a mango, drink some cold water, calm down. "I can't," she said. "I have to make dinner."
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Moon Was Bright
It was okay with Sam that I stay over at his place, but when we got back to the compound I decided to make the trek. Only four kilometers back to my village, a heavy moon, nothing to worry about. When I got back to the compound it was near ten o'clock. The other families have stayed up later before, but this was a school night, and the door was locked. Blame it on whoever you choose, but I was never given a key to the front door. Rather than wake my compound-mates, I decide to vault the wall. Not wanting to leave my bike in plain sight by the door, I wheeled it with me to the corner, where it would be hidden. A gap in the roofline provided the perfect place for scaling the wall. I locked the bike, intending to retrieve it in the morning, and placed my hands on the concrete, ready to hoist myself up.
I'm flat on my ass, my back against a tree stump. Despite the dark and the shock I can clearly see half of the concrete wall, about three feet by four feet, lying on top of what used to be the front wheel of my Peace Corps issued bike. I telephone Lao. There is irony.
The next morning M. Bamazi asked me, essentially, "What the fuck were you thinking?" Kpekpou said the same thing, sort of, with, "You should have knocked on my window." Despite their assurances that the only important thing is that I wasn't hurt, the general feeling was that I was a dumbass.
This all came at a bad time. Following two great weeks in village, with attentive classes and significant farm work, things began to decline. A visit from a stranger searching for plastic bags (for a tree nursery), that just had to be bought from my boss. A short and crowded weekend with the girlfriend, held in the regional capital instead of her village, as originally planned. Her mild illness, and thusly affected mood. A second visit from the stranger, who spent 600 CFA in travel to ask me a question in person; the answer: "No." And then a flat tire, which, due to a faulty hand pump, took me a total of three hours to patch and pump on Tuesday morning. Yet, by Tuesday night things were better. Tchouk with Sam's friends, dinner and beers at a local hotel (which is too expensive for local people to ever use. One room, with AC: 9,000 CFA a night. The average salary of a waiter, which is a damn good job in that village: 12,000 CFA a month). And now this.
I could blame the sudden destruction of the wall on sorcery, if I wanted. Two weeks ago was the first time I'd heard anything about my village's history with with the dark arts, but since then, I've heard nothing else. Even the CEG science teacher, who declared that he doesn't believe in God because of the Truth of Mathematics, stated (not ten seconds later) that sorcery was the only unknown to be feared in this world (where was God, he asked, when the sorcerer made that boy's penis disappear? [do you want to know the details? No.]) But in the end, when I tell the story to other volunteers, the consensus of the cause seems simply to be Togo.
Once again, I'll declare that what I'm writing comes after a period of intense dislike of, well, everything. This is, I've heard, simply how life is going to be for the next two years. It never really levels out, or gets any easier to deal with the frustration. The thing to do is remember there's always a bright side. I've got tree nurseries and sensibilisations planned in two other villages. As soon as the rain hits for real, my six village volunteers are going to start our agroforestry experiment. And despite my stupidity with regards to the destroyed wall, and thusly affected bike, there is still something to smile about: somewhere in village there's a mason wondering just how the hell a white man ever got the best of his handiwork. Right now, I'll take whatever satisfaction I can get.
I'm flat on my ass, my back against a tree stump. Despite the dark and the shock I can clearly see half of the concrete wall, about three feet by four feet, lying on top of what used to be the front wheel of my Peace Corps issued bike. I telephone Lao. There is irony.
The next morning M. Bamazi asked me, essentially, "What the fuck were you thinking?" Kpekpou said the same thing, sort of, with, "You should have knocked on my window." Despite their assurances that the only important thing is that I wasn't hurt, the general feeling was that I was a dumbass.
This all came at a bad time. Following two great weeks in village, with attentive classes and significant farm work, things began to decline. A visit from a stranger searching for plastic bags (for a tree nursery), that just had to be bought from my boss. A short and crowded weekend with the girlfriend, held in the regional capital instead of her village, as originally planned. Her mild illness, and thusly affected mood. A second visit from the stranger, who spent 600 CFA in travel to ask me a question in person; the answer: "No." And then a flat tire, which, due to a faulty hand pump, took me a total of three hours to patch and pump on Tuesday morning. Yet, by Tuesday night things were better. Tchouk with Sam's friends, dinner and beers at a local hotel (which is too expensive for local people to ever use. One room, with AC: 9,000 CFA a night. The average salary of a waiter, which is a damn good job in that village: 12,000 CFA a month). And now this.
I could blame the sudden destruction of the wall on sorcery, if I wanted. Two weeks ago was the first time I'd heard anything about my village's history with with the dark arts, but since then, I've heard nothing else. Even the CEG science teacher, who declared that he doesn't believe in God because of the Truth of Mathematics, stated (not ten seconds later) that sorcery was the only unknown to be feared in this world (where was God, he asked, when the sorcerer made that boy's penis disappear? [do you want to know the details? No.]) But in the end, when I tell the story to other volunteers, the consensus of the cause seems simply to be Togo.
Once again, I'll declare that what I'm writing comes after a period of intense dislike of, well, everything. This is, I've heard, simply how life is going to be for the next two years. It never really levels out, or gets any easier to deal with the frustration. The thing to do is remember there's always a bright side. I've got tree nurseries and sensibilisations planned in two other villages. As soon as the rain hits for real, my six village volunteers are going to start our agroforestry experiment. And despite my stupidity with regards to the destroyed wall, and thusly affected bike, there is still something to smile about: somewhere in village there's a mason wondering just how the hell a white man ever got the best of his handiwork. Right now, I'll take whatever satisfaction I can get.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
To Clarify
Rereading the previous two posts, I detect a certain negative spin. I would like to first mention that anything and everything I say is my opinion only, and does not reflect the hopes, thoughts, etc. of the Peace Corps or the United States government. I'm required to say that. Weird, huh?
Secondly, those posts were written on a friend's computer late at night in my village, after frustrating, long days. My friend lives 26 km away, and does not have electricity, so she lets me keep her computer. Last week I biked to see her, and was 'harassed' on the way back. I use quotations around harassed because it's something that bugged me but may not necessarily be a problem. The 'harassment' consisted of a Togolese man following about six inches behind me on his bike. This happens nearly every time I go on a long ride. I don't know why. Following uncomfortably close behind white people just seems to be the thing to do.
Normally I slowly come to a stop, let the man pass, and wait for him to stop fifty yards ahead of me, and turn around as if to ask, "What's taking you so long?" Then I stare until he goes away. But this time, thanks to a combination of heat, lack of water, and a frustrating meeting that morning, instead of slowly stopping I slammed on my brakes. The man crashed into me, knocking my saddlebag off the rack. He looked at me with his mouth open, pointing at his front tire. "Fais attention! Tu vois?" There was nothing wrong with his tire. "Ne pas suivre," I said. I mounted and rode off. A few minutes later he overtook me, pedaling furiously, elbows and knees flapping out to the sides, his back hunched over the brakeless handlebars of his undersized pink bike.
The whole point of this story is that later that night I wrote three pages about how Africa will never develop, using the bike story as a leadoff. What I wrote is not the truth of Africa. The truth of Africa is that there are extremely frustrating difficulties faced by development workers, especially those like Peace Corps Volunteers, who have to rely on teaching life-skills classes, or talking about women's equality to a group of drunk men at the tchouk stand, and for two years nonetheless, instead of building schools and wells and leaving before they fall into misuse and disrepair.
It's hard not to become frustrated when not a single house in village has running water, but nearly everyone has cell phones. Or when walking into the internet boutique I have to sidestep a goat shitting in the street. Or when I pass a child standing in nothing but dirty underwear, rubbing his swollen belly, as he watches a soccer game on satellite TV.
The fact is that the retention of sanity relies heavily on the ability to see the big picture. What do villagers want? Buildings and funded projects. What do we give? Sustainable farming techniques and lectures on AIDS. So we feel like we do nothing to benefit our community, because they feel like we do nothing. But in my village all the PLAN (an NGO) buildings are abandoned and in shambles, yet my 5eme students are doing a garden project totally independent from me. The buildings failed, but the gardening techniques, likely taught to them two or three volunteers ago, continue. So there's still hope.
Okay. Gotta go. Au revoir, mes amis. Je vous aime. Vraiment.
Secondly, those posts were written on a friend's computer late at night in my village, after frustrating, long days. My friend lives 26 km away, and does not have electricity, so she lets me keep her computer. Last week I biked to see her, and was 'harassed' on the way back. I use quotations around harassed because it's something that bugged me but may not necessarily be a problem. The 'harassment' consisted of a Togolese man following about six inches behind me on his bike. This happens nearly every time I go on a long ride. I don't know why. Following uncomfortably close behind white people just seems to be the thing to do.
Normally I slowly come to a stop, let the man pass, and wait for him to stop fifty yards ahead of me, and turn around as if to ask, "What's taking you so long?" Then I stare until he goes away. But this time, thanks to a combination of heat, lack of water, and a frustrating meeting that morning, instead of slowly stopping I slammed on my brakes. The man crashed into me, knocking my saddlebag off the rack. He looked at me with his mouth open, pointing at his front tire. "Fais attention! Tu vois?" There was nothing wrong with his tire. "Ne pas suivre," I said. I mounted and rode off. A few minutes later he overtook me, pedaling furiously, elbows and knees flapping out to the sides, his back hunched over the brakeless handlebars of his undersized pink bike.
The whole point of this story is that later that night I wrote three pages about how Africa will never develop, using the bike story as a leadoff. What I wrote is not the truth of Africa. The truth of Africa is that there are extremely frustrating difficulties faced by development workers, especially those like Peace Corps Volunteers, who have to rely on teaching life-skills classes, or talking about women's equality to a group of drunk men at the tchouk stand, and for two years nonetheless, instead of building schools and wells and leaving before they fall into misuse and disrepair.
It's hard not to become frustrated when not a single house in village has running water, but nearly everyone has cell phones. Or when walking into the internet boutique I have to sidestep a goat shitting in the street. Or when I pass a child standing in nothing but dirty underwear, rubbing his swollen belly, as he watches a soccer game on satellite TV.
The fact is that the retention of sanity relies heavily on the ability to see the big picture. What do villagers want? Buildings and funded projects. What do we give? Sustainable farming techniques and lectures on AIDS. So we feel like we do nothing to benefit our community, because they feel like we do nothing. But in my village all the PLAN (an NGO) buildings are abandoned and in shambles, yet my 5eme students are doing a garden project totally independent from me. The buildings failed, but the gardening techniques, likely taught to them two or three volunteers ago, continue. So there's still hope.
Okay. Gotta go. Au revoir, mes amis. Je vous aime. Vraiment.
Some Africa Thoughts
Little trees with little leaves and long seedpods sit spaced in fields, the distance between like the steps of Jack’s giant. Afternoon and the sun fuzzy behind dust. Fuzzy like the fruits of other little trees with little leaves. A goat between the forgotten sorghum rows, chewing whatever he can find. I am there. Watching the goat spray little BB pellets of shit into the dust.
Waking up is never much fun. I dream of the States, of luxury, of running water, of being able to find nearly anything I want within three hours and fifteen miles thanks to malls, small stores, and my car. But the chickens are loud and the dust comes through the windows—protected only by iron bars and screen, both of questionable quality—and they settle inside my thoughts and my mouth. I have to get up because people notice when the only white man in village is gone. And my mouth is dry.
In the mornings during the dry season they talk about how cold it is. “If it were any colder,” they say, huddled inside nylon parkas and two or three t-shirts, “we’d die.” Occasionally someone will add, “This is why there aren’t any black people in the
I wish I’d brought my yo-yo. Both for amusement and symbolism. The spin of the world, the up and down of emotions. Three days wanting to quit and go home. One day thinking I’m really doing something. An hour hating everything that brought me here. Another hour glad that life worked out the way it did. I’d do that cradle move. I’d walk the dog. I’d do around the world, thinking of places I’d rather be, or glad I wasn’t.
A circle of men beneath a mango tree. The sky orange and thick with dust. Trucks on the Route, rusty and half-broken, overloaded, driving too fast. Children walking nowhere for no reason. Women sweeping, selling, singing. Drinks. Sitting on warped benches, tree stumps. When the pail is empty, they leave.
We talk about what to do. Each conversation ends with, “But there’s no money. You see?” All these ideas, but no way to carry them out. No way at all. Because there’s no money. And no time, either. Never mind the two and a half hours of repose every day, nor the four or so months of (male) idleness between rainy seasons.
Neruda. Only a partial quote. Maybe a misquote. “We don’t get far, though, beyond these teeth.” I think that now I know what that means.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The G,B, and U in Togo
The Good
After two and a half months at post (twenty-six rotted tomatoes, fourteen spoiled carrots, two bowls of day-old rice with a foul taste) I bought a fridge. I'm one of the few volunteers in country with electricity, which is rare to begin with, but even more rare for an NRM volunteer. Two shelves, no fruit drawer, nothing on the door to hold jars or ketchups, but a good fridge nonetheless, and a good price thanks to a fast-talking but honest young entrepreneur based in Sokodé. Now, no matter how frustrating the days become, I can return home to ice cold water, cool cucumbers, even last night’s meal.
The night Affo arrived with the fridge I went across the street to the little boutique to stock up. Babadé is a small village along the Route that seems to exist simply because people farm here. There are only two boutiques in town, providing soap, tomato paste, spaghetti, and cigarettes. Other fairly regular, but not guaranteed-in-stock items include red onions, small bags of peanuts, sugar, salt, and dried red peppers. In an attempt to pump money into the local economy, I only travel to outside towns to buy what I cannot find here: most major vegetables, oil, flour, butter, processed cheese, tins of corned beef hash. For all the rest I visit the boutiques, most especially the one across from the abandoned building next to the path leading to my house. The boutique’s compound also houses a coiffeuse, and the CEG French professor, a friend of mine. Aside from the short walk, the appeal of this boutique (as opposed to its only competition 500 meters down the road) is that the proprietor regularly stocks bottled beer, Coca-Cola, and orange Fanta. It was amongst these last three items from which I chose the night the fridge came. One bottle of Lager brand beer, one bottle of orange Fanta. The following week consisted of two Coca-Colas, after which the ‘vendeuse’ was all out of sodas. I’d drank myself silly over the weekend in one of the regional capitals, and so did not want beer again. “Next week,” she told me, “we will have Coca.” I left for the weekend, to another regional capital, anticipating some ice-cold luxuries for after classes Monday night. When I returned Monday morning, however, the boutique was closed.
The Ugly
I greeted the tchouk maman who lives in my compound. She was heading home, I was off to the boutique. It was near noon on Monday, and I wanted some Fanta for the night. The vendeuse had told me she’d go to the bar in Adjengré over the weekend to pick up some more sodas. Halfway down the path to the road, I saw that the boutique was closed.
Back in the compound, the tchouk maman asked me why I was back so early. “La boutique est fermé,” I said. “À cause du repos.” It’s hard to find anything in
“No,” my tchouk maman said. “Ce n’est pas à cause du repos….” She explained the reason, but maman doesn’t speak French well enough for me to understand it all. Maman is a woman of indeterminate age. She blinks a lot and is beautiful all the time, but especially when she laughs. My favorite outfit is her Tuesday outfit: a white t-shirt and a pagne wrap for a skirt. The t-shirt has a black and white outline screen-print of one woman tying a corset onto another; both are in their underwear. “Les benois,” she said, “Un problème avec les benois.” Still blaming the noon-day sun, I nodded and went to my apartment, hands empty.
Later that night, after classes, I passed by the boutique, but it was still closed. In my compound there was only the young coiffeuse who lives with her husband in the apartment next to mine. Her shop is in the same compound across the street as the boutique. I asked her why I was being prevented from stocking my new fridge with glass-bottled sodas. The story that follows is a mix of what she told me, and the details that I picked up from others over the following days; it incorporates responses to questions I asked after being told what happened.
“There was a zed-man [taxi-moto driver] who lived in Aouda [4 km north]. His parents live there too, but he drove to Adjengré [4 km south] to work. This weekend he was stopped by a Beninois who wanted to go to Blitta [about 30 km south]. The zed-man took him. It was along the way that the Beninois killed him.
“Because of the murder we are hunting the Beninois. We are going to do to them what they have done to us. The vendeuse who runs the boutique is Beninoise. She has left, along with the others like her. That is why the boutique is closed.
“After the murder, over the weekend, we found a Beninois man, and we beat him. Probably he will die. We hope so. The vendeuse hides because she does not want to be next. But we do not want to be next either. What if she kills one of our children? The Beninois are nasty, dishonest people. They come to
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Brush Fire Thoughts
The sky, if I could see it, would be blue. Instead there is the color of a robin's egg picked up from the dust, the cool, cotton-candy color of five p.m. clouded by sand from a desert wind and the rising smoke of brush fires. I'm sitting next to my homologue on the sidelines of a soccer game. A little girl in a purple dress, the daughter of the French teacher, fidgets between us. I am miserable.
Say something, I think. What better time to talk about the dangers of brush fires than right now, with the flames licking across the field directly behind the soccer pitch? Well, pitch may be too strong a word. The boys are running on khaki-colored dry spots that haven't seen green in years. Where there is grass, it is tall, and scrapes the tough skin of their shins. A southern slope to the land gives the younger boys the advantage of momentum.
A triangle of flame attacks a teak tree just behind the field. The flames are violent and unhinged. But how, three days into service, do I gather all these spectators, rip them away from their fun, and lecture them about an activity they've done every dry season of their lives? I don't. Several weeks before, late at night, protected by darkness and a mosquito net, the air cool after a rain, I'd asked L what she was thinking. "Nothing at all," she said. "I'm just enjoying the moment." I think of that here, while the trunks of trees char and the older boys celebrate another goal. I have two years to work. I can enjoy a soccer game tonight.
Say something, I think. What better time to talk about the dangers of brush fires than right now, with the flames licking across the field directly behind the soccer pitch? Well, pitch may be too strong a word. The boys are running on khaki-colored dry spots that haven't seen green in years. Where there is grass, it is tall, and scrapes the tough skin of their shins. A southern slope to the land gives the younger boys the advantage of momentum.
A triangle of flame attacks a teak tree just behind the field. The flames are violent and unhinged. But how, three days into service, do I gather all these spectators, rip them away from their fun, and lecture them about an activity they've done every dry season of their lives? I don't. Several weeks before, late at night, protected by darkness and a mosquito net, the air cool after a rain, I'd asked L what she was thinking. "Nothing at all," she said. "I'm just enjoying the moment." I think of that here, while the trunks of trees char and the older boys celebrate another goal. I have two years to work. I can enjoy a soccer game tonight.
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