Some pics

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.

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 United States.” He is then ridiculed by the others.

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.

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 Bad

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 Africa open between noon and two-thirty. Schools, banks, hardware shops, the occasional marché maman, all take a break. Supposedly, it was the African who first said, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon-day sun.”

“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 Togo with no money, and after two months they open up a shop. How did they get the money? They make counterfeit. They steal. Eventually they kill. All of them are like this. So, when one Beninois kills a Togolese, we find one and kill him. It does not matter if it is the same one who committed the first crime. There are no innocent. They are all guilty.”