the tatas of togo

bonjour mes amis!

I saw the tatas of Togo and no, I am not talking about the drooping breasts of mothers on vaccination day at the hospital. The tatas are the typical compound used by the people of the Tamberma valley in northeastern Togo. I had the opportunity to see one of the more famous historical sites of Togo this past weekend when I went to Kande to visit Taylor after the Christmas festivities. Since I was going up to see AED-Kande and see what I could learn up there to bring back to Sotouboua, I thought it prudent to do a little sightseeing. As for the tatas, this is what Lonely Planet has to say about them, since I didn’t really learn that much more about them at the actual site:

“A typical Tamberma compound, called a tata, consists of a series of towers connected by a thick wall with a single entrance chamber, used to trap an enemy so he can be showered with arrows or hot water. The castle-like nature of these extraordinary structures helped ward off invasions by neighbouring tribes and, in the late 19th century, the Germans…life in a tata revolves around an elevated terrace of clay-covered logs where the inhabitants cook, dry their millet and corn, and spend most of their leisure time.”

“Skilled builders, the Tamberma only use clay, wood and straw – and no tools. The walls are banco, a mixture of unfired clay and straw, which is used as a binder. The towers, capped by picturesque conical roofs, are used for storing corn and millet. The other rooms are used for sleeping, bathing and, during rainy season, cooking. The animals are kept under the terrace, protected from the rain.”

“There may be a fetish shrine in front of the compound, as well as animal skulls on the walls inside. You may see a man and his son going off to hunt with bows and arrows. Traditionally, when a man is old enough to start his own family, he shoots an arrow and, where it lands, builds his own tata.”

It was cool to visit the tatas, a very “African” experience. An interesting note to add: the Tamberma valley stretches from northeastern Togo into northwestern Benin. Although only about 10% of the Tamberma people live in Togo, the official UNESCO World Heritage Site for the tatas are in Togo; however, one can still see tatas in Benin.

Okay backtracking a bit, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I headed to Niamtougou to celebrate Christmas with my stâge-mates. It was good to see people that I hadn’t seen in a really long time, particularly my friends in the southern most part of the country. Nothing too exciting happened apart from catching up with friends, playing dirty Santa, eating fondue (courtesy of Reid’s family) and watching Christmas movies all morning; however, I FINALLY watched the original “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” (I’m convinced the directors had to be on acid when making the clay-mation movie) and “A Christmas Story” (I was thoroughly unimpressed by this movie. I guess it’s just one of those movies you have to grow up on in order to appreciate). After the festivities like I said, I headed up to Kande. Brittany and her mom joined me up there for our sightseeing trip and it was good to hang out with them outside the large group setting of Christmas. We even headed out to Nadoba after seeing the tatas to visit Karen, the new NRM volunteer there working on eco-tourism. After several wonderful days in the north (with great food courtesy of Taylor), I headed back to Sotouboua to celebrate the arrival of the New Year.

reporting live from Togo,
- Nikhil

a good day

Do you ever just have one of those days where you realize that you are having a good day? Nothing spectacular needs to happen, like no one big defining event, but when you reflect back on the things that happened to you, they are all good. Well today was one of those days. Reid stopped by Sotouboua on her way up north so we could travel up to Niamtougou together for our stâge Christmas fête. After waking up and making a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and pancakes, Reid and I spent the whole day relaxing and preparing for our trip up north. We walked out to the Route to pick up some supplies and I ran into several friends. First at the bank we ran into Mr. Kaditche, the owner of the buvette across the street from me and also the guy who works for the Ministry of Health and introduced me to everyone in the hospital. Next we stopped by the post office and I had a brief conversation with the guy who works there and he invited me to fête with him for the New Year. Next we headed to Genevieve’s, my couturiere, to get Reid’s dress fixed. On the way to the petit march we ran into Mr. Claude who works at CEFRET and he told me about the HIV/AIDS film screenings he was working on and invited me to the next film viewing. At the petit marché we picked up some vegetables and “shot-the-breeze” with my marché mama who sells me tomatoes and onions.

I know it’s silly but for the first time in Sotouboua, I feel a semblance of integration. It’s great to be stopped in the street because people know who you are and I can small talk with co-workers. I definitely have a long way before I feel “integrated” into my community but life is about baby steps right? One step at a time…

the 7 circles of hell

When Dante wrote his book Inferno describing the 7 circles of hell I think sometimes he was describing life here in Togo. Okay so not really and I think that previous statement came out offensive so strike that from the record. Anyways, here are my 7 circles of hell starting with circle #1 (or circle #7…what ever is the outer-least “hellish”-circle)

#1 – the yovo song

“yovo, yovo bon soir
Yovo yovo bon soir
Ça va? Tres bien
Il faut donner moi bon bon”*
*or something like that

This song has become the bane of my existence. Normally I don’t mind the song; you learn to tune it out, ignore it, or maybe even sing along to it. But after the 100th time it’s like geez you silly kids, I have a name and you know exactly what it is because I tell you every time. The first words that come out of your mouth do not need to be yovo (“white person” in Ewe) or anasara (Kotokoli) or ansai (Kabiyé). I know exactly what I am; I don’t need you to tell me that I’m a “white” person. Thank you for stating the obvious. Shall I state the obvious…noir(e)? It’s funny because the song really didn’t affect me at all during stâge, but since arriving at post, it has slowly come to annoy me more and more.

#2 – chickens

Chickens, roosters, “noisy, feathery and tasty” pieces of meat, etc. Whatever you call them, I think they are finally getting to me. My compound mate’s rooster never used to bug me this way but then a month ago he decided that the best place to “cock-a-doodle doo” would be right outside my bedroom window, exactly 5 minutes before my alarm is about to go off. Thankfully Marc sold the rooster after it did its job and knocked up two hens. Their several cute black, white and yellow baby chicks were cute for the first three days. Then they decide that it would be fun to replace the “cock-a-doodle-doo”-ing by my window with incessant chirping outside my window just like daddy. Not to mention coming onto my porch with mom and pooping all over my patio, stealing food from my dog and taking a bird bath in my dish-washing basin. I mean seriously, will there ever be peace and quiet in my compound? At least the baby goats give it a rest but there is something about the high-pitched squawking of chickens, reminiscent of fingernails on a chalkboard that is slowly driving me insane.

If I find 5 more circles, I’ll update the list…

three months, and then some...

Bonjour from Lomé!

Before I jump into a reflection on my first three months at post, I just wanted to start off by talking a bit about my amazing Thanksgiving dinner. In case you don’t know, Thanksgiving happens to be my holidays back in the States. What I mean by that is I’m usually the person responsible for putting the dinner together. It has become a sort of tradition between my family and two other families to celebrate thanksgiving together in Atlanta. Since me and my brother are the only ones in our group who care about the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, and since I’m the more responsible one (sorry Nish but you know it’s true), it rests on me to gather all the supplies for our big family dinner. We’ve had some successful dinners (like the one last year I catered from Boston Market) and some unsuccessful ones (like the one three years ago where I accidentally bought non-vegetarian versions off everything from Kroger when half my family is vegetarian) but regardless, we have a lot of fun. This Thanksgiving was the first time ever that I was not there to celebrate with my family making it hard for me emotionally. Thanks to my amazing mom though, who sent me two care packages filled with some items I requested, I was able to have probably the most American Thanksgiving dinner I’ve had in a while. My mom sent me mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, cream of mushroom soup and stuffing (you can’t really make these things in Togo feasibly). I improvised the rest of the meal from scratch: a green bean casserole, macaroni & cheese, a “pumpkin” pie (it was actually made from green papaya but tasted just like pumpkin), a coffee crumb cake, sweet corn, southern iced tea and honey butter with bread. Since I didn’t feel comfortable cooking meat in Togo, I asked my neighbour to help me purchase, kill and cook a turkey in return for an invitation to join our meal. A few other volunteers from my stâge (plus Sam) came down to Sotouboua, along with three of my homologues (Kpango, Bello and Marcus’s homologue Goslow) and we had an AMAZING meal together. Even though it wasn’t the same since I couldn’t share it with my real family, I was glad that I was able to share my holiday with my Togolese “family”.

Okay, reflection time…

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I survived my first three months at post! Woohoo! Everyone says that the first three months are the hardest and if you can get through them, you are in great shape. It’s funny because although people said the first three months were hard, they weren’t hard in the way that I thought they would be hard.

For starters, I love my house. There wasn’t a lot of adjusting going on there since I had electricity, running water and a fridge to store food. Okay, so I did have to get used to taking cold showers, which I never will, but in terms of everything else I am dealing with, it was no big deal. Second, I really like Sotouboua. The people are nice and I feel safe. True, I still don’t feel like I know a lot of people but when you live in a large town with a big population, I think it’s going to take a bit more than 3 months to feel any sort of community. I have an awesome cluster although I am still on the fence about whether or not having a site mate is good for me. Third, in general I like Togolese people and I like their culture. The “yovo song” and their constant pleas for me to help them financially certainly makes life a bit annoying but it’s nothing I can’t manage. Language issues have probably been the single biggest cultural factor that has pushed me to my limits. Dealing with a double language barrier (not knowing French and not knowing the local language) has left me sometimes regretting my decision to come to a French-speaking country but I know that even if I went to a Spanish-speaking country, I would still have to deal with a local language barrier that might prove just as exasperating. And in the long run, my French is coming, even if it is at a snail’s pace. All in all, I think that I have dealt with moving to a foreign country by myself very well, especially since I don’t have a pre-existing social support system.

Work on the other hand is another story. Out of all the factors that are supposed to make your life hard, work was the only part of my life that affected me in any way and made me want to ET several times. I had joined the Peace Corps to work. To gain public health experience, whatever that really means (although it’s hard to quantitatively measure whether I have gained enough “public health experience”, I have certainly observed and learned a lot more about health issues than I did before coming to Africa), so that when I apply to graduate schools in a few years, I can put my education in context. I did have other reasons, but like I said, I came to work. So when I found myself without any homologues, with an AIDS association on the verge of collapse, and a lack of viable work opportunities, I began to fear that I would not accomplish anything in two years and thus be unsuccessful at fulfilling my main motivation for joining the Peace Corps. Sure I had done a few events and participated in a few activities, and it was nice to have days where I could laze around and read books / watch movies / cook / etc.; however, there’s only so much free time one can have before starting to feel restless. And I felt restless a lot. Grad school requirements and a collapsing US economy had some effect on preventing me from ETing. Participating in AIDS Ride also had some effect on preventing me from ETing as I was able to put my health work in context. However my visit by Tchao, my APCD, probably had the biggest impact on my staying in country. It wasn’t as much as what he said but what he did. He was able to put me in contact with several people that Bello didn’t introduce me to that set off a chain reaction of positive outcomes. Tchao introduced me to M. Kaditche who in turn in turn introduced me to the hospital C.P.C. program and also the community health workers at the dispensaire. By finding even some work to occupy my time, not only was I finally able to get exposed to some of the public health issues I was hoping to better understand but, more importantly, I finally felt busy; something I hadn’t really felt since stâge. And busy was good. I like being busy. Busy also means that I’m getting the “experience” I need and that’s good too.
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Aside from work issues, I have spent some time self-reflecting and better understanding myself. One thing I realized is that I need to stop comparing myself to other volunteers, particularly those in my stâge, as it has been negatively affecting the way I perceive my service. I have a very bad habit of looking at what other people have or do and judge my situation against theirs. And I need to remember that every volunteer’s experience is different because each community is different and everyone comes into their service with different skill sets. It has taken me a while to realize that I wasn’t doing less work than some of the other volunteers during my first three months; instead, I was merely at a different starting point. Some volunteers like Mitch and Kristina and Rayan came into Togo and had enough French to start working pretty much immediately; since I came in with not a lot of French, I needed to start with French and as my French picks up, my work should pick up too. Some volunteers did not have issues with homologues the way I did so they were able to jump into projects while I had to spend time making new contacts and finding new work. Additionally, since it’s much easier to feel part of a community when you are in a small village, some volunteers appeared to have integrated into their posts more rapidly than I did; however, being in a fairly large town, it’s unlikely I’ll ever feel the sense of community and family those volunteers feel, at least for a while. Finally, I have to remember that I have a lot of things going for me because unlike other volunteers, I have a site mate so I don’t have to deal with the loneliness that some volunteers feel, and unlike other volunteers, I have access to electricity and running water so I don’t have to deal with the hassle that some volunteers feel by not having access to those utilities. In the end, by comparing myself to other volunteers and feeling like a failure, I am not going to improve my own situation. All I can do is deal with the situation I am in and use the resources around me to move forward.

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So that’s my reflection on my time in Togo so far. I am in Lomé right now for the new stâge swear-in and to do a little bit of grocery shopping for post. Tomorrow I head back to Sotouboua and it’s off-to-work-I-go getting Vie Saine back in shape and jumping into my new projects with the mother’s club and the national malaria campaign. I’m glad things have picked up and I look forward to seeing where my service takes me in the next few months…

Till next time,
- Nikhil

P.S. Thanks to Megan Kelly for the awesome postcard! Hope you get mine soon and look forward to planning your mid-service vacation in West Africa :) Also thanks to everyone who responded to my personal e-mails (Kasey Kask, Benji White, etc.) and messaged me on Facebook (Anu, Matt Ward, etc.). It’s good to know what’s going on in your lives even though I can’t be there…

P.P.S. Seriously Georgia Tech? Seriously! Why did you have to wait till I left not only Atlanta but the continent before FINALLY kicking U(sic)GA in the ass? Seriously?!? The worst part is that I can’t even gloat to anyone in country. Do you not realize how unsatisfying this makes the win? Funny enough, I sort of knew this would happen…

le systéme scolaire au togo

As part of the whole Peace Corps goal #3 (something to the effect of sharing Togolese life and culture with the American people), here is my attempt at explaining the Togolese school system. Since Togo was once a French colony, many French systems were adopted by Togo after independence; therefore the Togolese school system is apparently the same as the French school system. For those of you unaware of the French system, here is a brief summary:

The Togolese school system consists of 13 levels. Children begin their education at the age of 6. There are many public & private jardin d’enfants (kindergarten) schools for children under 6 but those are mainly for the upper economic classes that can afford to start their education early. Most children start their schooling at the E.P.P. level (école primaire publique) or basically elementary school; the second “p” could also be private, catholic, muslim, etc. The elementary school level consists of 6 levels: CP1 (cours préparatoire), CP2, CE1 (cours élementaire), CE2, CM1 (cours moyen), and CM2. After finishing CM2, students take the CEPD exam and have to pass in order to move onto the “middle school”.

Middle school or the C.E.G. consists of 4 years of schooling: 6eme, 5eme, 4eme and 3eme. I’m not sure why but starting in middle school, the grades move backwards (6eme à 5eme à etc.). During elementary school, your classes are pretty much fixed; however during middle school you get a little leeway and are allowed to pick and choose certain classes based on what direction you want your education to take. After finishing 3eme, all students must pass the BEPC exam to move onto “high school”. If you don’t pass the BEPC, you can take it again (but you have to pay for it again) and many students take it several times explaining why there can be an age gap greater than 1 between the youngest and oldest student in the 3eme level.

High school, or lycée, consists of 3 years of school: 2eme, 1er and Terminale. If a student is likely to stop their education, it usually takes place either after C.E.G. or during one of the years at lycée. By this point in their education, the student has typically selected the career path of their (or their parent’s) choice and narrows down his or her education to a few select topics related to that field. The two most popular routes are science (for something in the medical field perhaps) and language (for something in the education field, particularly to become an English teacher). Unlike elementary and middle school, lycée students take 2 exams, the BAC1 after the 1er level and the BAC2 after Terminale level.

As for after high school, university options are limited to the University of Lomé and the University of Kara. We did not learn too much regarding the university system so I can’t tell you much more. However, it’s much cheaper than college in the US (then again, most colleges outside the US are lol). Lycée students seem to be obsessed with going to school abroad (which probably speaks to the quality of education one can receive at the university level in Togo). A few try to study in Europe and many try to study in the US; however due to the difficulty in getting a US visa in Togo, very few but the very wealthy can afford that. Interesting fact though is that President Faure actually received his undergraduate degree from George Washington University (hmm Shilpa, I wonder if your Togolese roommate knew him then? lol…).

Unlike the US, schooling is not mandatory and is not free. Well let me rephrase that: just recently the Togolese Ministry of Education decreed that schooling at the elementary school level (E.P.P, etc.) should be free in an attempt to abide by the UN Millennium Development Goals. Therefore schooling from the C.E.G. level and upwards is not free and definitely not mandatory. Yet, the whole situation of paying for one’s education and not making it mandatory brings up a plethora of questions.

First of all, is free elementary schooling going to do anything to help Togo? By making elementary schools free, but not making them mandatory, children who aren’t going to school will not attend, even if they had the money. From another angle, since 1 in 3 children are unregistered by the government (yes, that is a fairly accurate fact which makes it all the more shocking!) even if elementary school was free and mandatory, the government can’t make someone go to school if they don’t exist to the government. From yet another angle, how does making sure children complete an elementary education, or 6 years of education, do anything for Togo? Is 6 years of education worth anything? Finally, even if elementary schooling is free and mandatory, doesn’t it make sense that more students would not continue at the middle school level when schooling gets harder thereby making the ministry of education decree pretty much inconsequential?

Second of all by charging for schooling above the elementary level, it would seem that economic selection would take place and only those who can afford to school would continue. First of all boys would be more likely to continue over girls (being in a patriarchal society, girls are more likely to drop out of school to take care of her family, work to earn money, etc…hence Togo’s need for the GEE program!). Second of all, even if boys continue their education, that’s no sign that they will complete their studies due to failing the super hard exams (trust me they are hard, I’ve seen a copy and even I don’t understand all the questions and part of the exam is in English). Then again, even if the boys finish high school, that’s no guarantee that they will go to college. And since college is definitely not free and can take anywhere from four (for a general degree) to eleven (for a medical degree), that’s a lot of money to invest in one’s education. If only the upper economic groups can afford that much education, an economic wormhole will appear that would tend to favour the rich continuing their education and continuing to hold the most specialized jobs while the poorer economic groups continue to hold the more general positions such as those working for the government. And there is definitely no such thing as financial aid from the government, especially not for college (however college is considerably cheaper here in Togo than the US).

Education is valued in the US because it is only through education that people have an opportunity to move upwards through the socioeconomic classes. A classic rags-to-riches story, you can be poor, get a good education, find a good job and then enter the middle class. However if being poor in Togo, keeps you poor in Togo due to financial restrictions on your education, then there is no hope for upward mobility. No hope for economic mobility leads to economic stagnation. Hmm, did I just equate all of Togo’s economic problems to its system of education? Umm a speculative maybe?...I’m not saying that the ministry shouldn’t be applauded for the positive steps it is taking to follow the MDGs; it’s more a question of what is the REAL effect the new policy has on improving life in Togo?

(BTW another interesting note, the school calendar was pushed back two weeks due to the flooding issues in the southern part of the country; last year when major flooding occurred in the Savannes region, schools all over the country started 1 month late. Unlike the US, when weather-related issues affect one large area in Togo, all the schools throughout the country are shut down.)

If you have any questions about anything specific to life in Togo, please don’t hesitate to send me a message and I’ll gladly do my best to educate.

- Nikhil

roller coaster-ing

hey y’all,

When they said you’ll experience your “highest highs and lowest lows” they really weren’t kidding! I apologize for not having posting in over a month but the past few weeks have been a roller coaster of emotions. Not so much with adjusting to life here in Togo, as I am feeling pretty well “adjusted”, but a series of good and bad events have been seriously playing with my mental state. One moment something amazing is happening and I am on top of the world; the next moment and something is dragging me down to the ground. Let’s go back a few weeks and watch the Ferris wheel of my life spin…

September 13th: I finally attended my first VST meeting in Sotouboua. Every month on the second Saturday, all the members gather to discuss various issues from updates by the administrative bureau to discussing the role nutrition plays in keeping one’s CD4 count high. It was great to finally meet many of the members whom I had not met before; it was also the first Togolese run meeting that I had attended so it was interesting to watch the group dynamics of how they facilitate. Although the meeting started off as a “high”, it slowly progressed into a big “low” when two events transpired during the meeting. First of all, Fortuné, my official homologue who works as a lab technician at the hospital and was also one of the founding members of Vie Saine announced that he was being “affectée-d” (or transferred) to Kpalimé. As a government worker, people are constantly being affectée-d to various parts of the country to meet the needs of those communities; no one really has a choice because you either move or you get fired. Since working “for the government” (technically) is probably one of the best and most stable jobs one can find in Togo, everyone pretty much does as they are told. Anyways, with Fortuné being transferred to another part of the country, at least 6 hours away, this poses a problem for Vie Saine since he was not only a driving force in the community for HIV/AIDS advocacy but also as the lab technician, he was aware of the HIV status of any person in the community who got tested. Losing Fortuné is a huge loss for VST.

Second, after Fortuné’s announcement, a fight breaks out between Bello, my other homologue and also the Executive Director of VST, and the members. Due to a misunderstanding in communication and in how exchange rates work, the members accused Bello and Fortuné of “bouff-ing” (stealing) money; this is apparently a huge problem and something we as PCVs need to watch out for when planning projects. The misunderstanding occurred because the previous month, a Spanish group of volunteers (led by Fortuné’s brother who lives in Spain) visited VST and donated about 200 Euros and a bunch of old clothes. The members misunderstood and thought the group had donated 200.000 CFA which is a very different amount (200 Euros is about 150.000 CFA). Even though the admin bureau tried to explain the situation, things got heated. I think this is where some other issues came into play such as Bello being Nigerian and untrustworthy (they REALLY HATE Nigerians not just here in Togo but in Africa in general apparently…If you call someone a Nigerian, it’s a HUGE insult!) and I think someone was called a whore but since at this point the group switched to a mixture of French and Kabiyé, I was totally lost (most of the drama that I am discussing is part what I was able to understand and part what Bello explained to me the next day in a post-meeting recap). Anyways, drama drama drama and next thing I know Bello is announcing that he is resigning. So now I’m left with zero homologues.

Oh and to top it all off, instead of saving that money that was donated by the Spanish group and putting it towards developing projects for VST, the bureau decides to donate the money out to all the individual members which turns out to be very little (each members received between 3.000 and 5.000 CFA which is between $6-$10). This substantially decreases the amount of money VST has to work with for the upcoming months.

So basically in one meeting, I find out that I am losing both of my homologues and that my AIDS association is pretty much broke. Fan-freaking-tastic...

September 18th: Tami from Tchamba meets me in Sokodé to present me with the cutest puppy ever: Swarley! During post visit, Tami was asking around to see if anyone wanted to get one of the new puppies from her compound. Since I had always wanted a dog and mom can’t stop me since I’m on a different continent, I agreed and Tami gave me the puppy and all her old dog supplies for free. Score! Definite “high” as I FINALLY get to own a puppy! Should be interesting…

September 27th: My phone is stolen in the Sotouboua marché. I was running around in the late afternoon picking up some soja and tomatoes for dinner when I reach into the outside pocket of my bag and discover that my phone is gone. I try retracing my steps and frantically search the marché and my house for it but can’t find it. After locating Marcus and having him call my phone, I discover that it has been turned off which means that it was definitely stolen. So now I have to go to Sokodé to get a new phone…I also receive word through Marcus that Taressa has decided to ET (early terminate) and that Krissy is contemplating ETing as well. Definite “low”…

Oct. 1st: I head to Pagala and then Atakpamé to participate in the CREJE training of trainers (TOT) for a new OEV club based on the AED-Kara Club Espoir model. It was awesome to not only see my volunteer friends in the Plateaux Region but great to play with kids for a weekend. I want to start a similar project in Sotouboua through Vie Saine so it was good to learn about kids clubs and to know that I have support from the Atakpamé crew. Big “high”…

On the other hand I find out Allison has already ETed and quiet Mikey is about to ET. There must be something is the Peace Corps water cooler because quiet Mikey makes him the 4th person to ET within a span of 2 weeks from our stage. “Low”…

October 8th: I help out with a dépistage at the Sotouboua hospital that is co-sponsored by VST. It’s nice to feel productive. Fortune let’s me sit in on some pre- and post- test counseling sessions with patients so I get exposed to HIV testing and counseling. “High”…

October 11th: Reid wants to have a big party for her birthday and cook jambalaya so I offer my house since it’s made for hosting large parties. It’s nice to have people over at my house and show off how amazing it is. Also great that I get to see a bunch of my friends from around the country and hear about their experiences at post so far. Of course with our group things get ridiculous as usual, but in a good “reminds-me-of-training” way. Big “high”…However it’s a “low” as this is the last time (for who knows how long) I’ll see Taressa and Krissy (who officially decides to ET). It’s bittersweet b/c although I get to see them before they leave, it doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye to two good friends.

Krissy leaving has been one of the hardest emotional blows the past few months. When we come to Togo, we leave everyone behind, family and friends. We are thrust together very suddenly in a foreign environment so emotional bonds between people typically form rapidly and with great strength. What we create is our own close knit circle of friends who become our “family” in Togo. When Krissy ET’d, it broke a strong emotional bond and left the sort of gap in our family the way it would be if you were to lose a cousin you were close to. I have created several strong friendships with many people, inside and outside my stâge and Krissy just happened to be the person I felt closest too. No rhyme or reason and I don’t even know if she felt as close to me as I did to her. And there was nothing romantic there; she was just someone who I felt understood who I was and where I was coming from. We had several things in common but most importantly of all, I trusted her, which is a big deal because it usually takes me a while to trust anyone having had my trust broken several times in the past. I mean I know she made the right decision and I only really care that she’s happy back in the US, but it’s still shitty to lose one of the few people who you really click with. So Krissy, it sucks that you are gone but know that you are very much missed…

So yea, as you can see the past four weeks have been tough. It’s funny because they haven’t been tough in the way that everyone else said the first few months are tough. I was totally not expecting this. But it’s happened and I’m dealing with it. It’ll take time to figure out where to go from here but hey, I have 2 years right?

*sigh*
- Nikhil

P.S. Shout out to Andrew DeRussy, Dustin Hipp & Michael Lindsey for sending me e-mails/facebook messages. Much appreciated guys. They definitely made my day…

yam fête

hey everyone!

So who knew I would ever be so excited about yams in my entire life but I just spent this past weekend celebrating yams up in Bassar for the annual Yam Festival. Here in Togo, yam season is upon us and to celebrate the first harvest of yams, the Kara region plays host to an annual festival filled with lots of good food and the traditional fire-dance. This year the official festival (as in the official party that the President was planning on attending; due to the rain however he cancelled at the last minute) was in Bassar so I headed up this past Friday to partake in the celebrations and also to spend some time with my fellow volunteers.

I arrived in Sokodé on Friday morning where I met up with Heather, Golda, Conner, Barrett, Russ and Rachel at the transit house so we could all carpool up together. Since it was the official day of the festival, we had no problem getting a bush-taxi up there. Although it was a much longer ride up there then I thought it was going to be due to our driver who appeared to be in no hurry at all to get up to Bassar, it was nice to spend time with Golda since I didn’t really know her that well and she was one of the few volunteers in my region. We got up to Bassar, dropped Heather off at Taressa’s (since she was staying there with a bunch of people from my stâge and the rest of us were staying with Amy) and headed to Amy’s place. Since Amy’s last few weeks in country overlapped with Taressa’s arrival, Amy ended up moving into another house so Taressa could settle in to her new house; although this would have been a frustrating situation for any volunteer, Amy ended up moving into a spare suite of this HUGE MANSION-type house that belonged to an officer in the Togolese army. The officer was apparently a friend of Tchao, our CHAP APCD, so that’s how Amy found the place. And it was a BEAUTIFUL house. It sat on top of a hill overlooking the entire city and although it was painted in pink, it had marble-tiled floors and this huge open patio that presented a gorgeous view of the surrounding countryside. Although the suite was slightly small for our huge group that was staying there (about 9 people in a one-bedroom suite) we made it work and Amy was an awesome host.

After settling into Amy’s place, Conner, Russ, Amy and I headed out to the “tourist” spot of Bassar: the Bassar Iron Smelters. One of the lesser known tourist spots in Togo, the Smelters are basically a cluster of tall mud furnaces that were used decades ago to melt iron in the region. Even though the smelters weren’t that interesting, the highlight was the trip out to the smelters. The route to the smelters takes you around a hill that overlooks the city of Bassar and it leads to some beautiful panoramic views of the Togolese countryside.

One of the main reasons for coming to Bassar specifically for the yam festival this year was to see the Bassar Fire Dance, a traditional Togolese dance native to the people of the Bassar region. Now I must warn you, although it was an interesting dance, the name inspires much more awe than the actual performance. The dance consisted of a group of dancers wearing foot-long ankle bracelets and skirts made from straw and strips of pagne who danced in a circle around a small bonfire. The “fire” part of the dance basically involved each of the dancers stepping over the bonfire to show their “invincibility” at defeating death by fire. Although the dance was a bit disappointing, it was cool to see my first traditional Togolese dance, and I got some good pictures out of the experience.

Food

Since I’m talking about yams I might as well describe the culinary situation here in Togo. Togolese food is awesome, or at least it’s awesome now that I’ve been eating it for a while and it’s not soo strange anymore. Togolese base their diet upon two staples: a starch and a sauce. The starch can be anything from rice, couscous, macaroni, or fried yams. Three Togolese traditional starches are pâte, fufu and ablo. Pâte and ablo are similar in texture, resembling sticky white paste. Ablo, a small round and flat cake, is made from corn or rice and actually looks and tastes like an idli (South Indian dish). Pâte is also made from corn or rice, can be fermented or unfermented, and resembles a sticky off-white paste. Fufu, which can be made from either manioc or yams, on the other hand resembles play dough and tastes a bit like sticky mashed potatoes. Pâte, fufu and ablo are all eaten with the right hand (NEVER the left hand as that’s the hand you use in the latrine) by tearing off a piece and dipping it in some variety of sauce.

There are many types of sauces popular in Togo: tomato, peanut, gumbo (made from okra), sesame, spinach, etc. and many of these sauces include pieces of vegetables (green beans, spinach, pimento, etc.) and pieces of meat (beef, chicken, pork, fish, etc.). Meat however is usually reserved for special occasions since meat is always expensive. Sauces are always spicy with heat levels anywhere from pleasantly mild to “my-mouth-is-on-fire”. Instead of meat, the vegetarian options include eggs, fried soy (kinda like tofu), and wagash (a dry cheese made by the nomadic Fulani people; tastes like Indian paneer).

Other traditional Togolese dishes include colico, watchi and beans & gari. Colico, or fried yam/potatoes/sweet potato/manioc, is eaten by dipping it in a spicy piment sauce. Watchi, or beans and rice, is usually eaten with a tomato sauce, some meat, some garlic oil and a piment sauce. Sometimes you can add macaroni to the mix and some green beans. Beans & gari is made by boiling black-eyes beans and covering them in gari (granulated manioc) and a tomato-onion-piment sauce.

Beignets, though not traditional to Togo, have also become a popular snack. Sweet beignets taste a bit like fried doughnuts and they can either be moist or dry. Spicy beignets are usually made from beans and interestingly enough they taste like a vadaa (South Indian dish again).

My favorite Togolese dish hands down would have to be fufu from yams with a peanut sauce and some fried wagash. I don’t know why I like it so much but it just tastes so amazing.

Alcohol

You can’t talk about food and not talk about drinks. I’ve discussed some drinks at random points in this blog but I’ll try and summarize. First let’s talk local drinks: sodabe and tchouk. Sodabe, the preferred drink of southern Togo is basically Togolese moonshine. It kind of tastes like a mix between everclear and tequila. It’s very potent and you drink it as a shot. Speaking from experience, there is a very fine line between taking one shot of sodabe and two shots of sodabe so if you ever come and visit, be warned. Tchouk, the preferred drink of northern Togo is basically a low-alcohol-content sour apple cider. It’s made from millet, you drink it out of a calabash (hollowed out gourd shell), and comes in two varieties: unfermented (sweeter) and fermented (more sour). There is a definite regional difference when it comes to tchouk. I prefer Lhosso tchouk as it has less of a bite compared to Kabyé tchouk but to each his/her own. It’s pretty easy to find tchouk stands all over Togo; they consist of a marché mama sitting under a peyote (gazebo) serving tchouk out of large trashcans. Tchouk stands are great informal places to have random discussions with strangers about anything from politics to the weather. A tchouk stand is a Peace Corps volunteer’s best friend as most informal information exchange, regarding ways to prevent malaria or the importance of sending girls to university, is best done over a few calabashes of tchouk.

Liquor is another story here in Togo. Unless you are in Lomé where most popular alcohols (Captain Morgan’s, Jack Daniels, Smirnoff Vodka, etc.) can be found, your liquor choices are very limited outside the capital. Whisky and Scotch is the liquor of choice and there exists all the levels between from whiskey found in a small plastic sachet sold at the local boutique to handles of Chivas at some of the “higher end” liquor stores. Most whiskey is pretty foul but if it’s liquor you want, it’ll do the job. You can also find sachets of gin at the local boutique although I am yet to find handles of gin anywhere in country. Some of the bigger towns have access to bottles of Malibu and Bailey’s, but without other mixing liquors those two bottles are pretty much useless. Vodka is exclusive to Lomé and Kara.

Wine selection is pretty much shit all the way around. Boxed wine and boxed sangria can be found at any boutique but they are pretty revolting. Bottles do exist and they are usually imported from France but considering that, the imports are shit as well. White wine is unheard off outside Lomé. The severe lack of good wine in country has been pretty frustrating for a wino like me.

This brings us to beer! First let’s cover Bière de Benin or B.B., a bottling company from Benin that produces a wide range of beers to soft drinks. Pils, Lager, Eku and Awooyo are the beers and they are all right. Pils tastes like water and Lager and Eku remind me of a Coors Light. I have many friends who love Awooyo but I can’t stand it and it’s probably my least favorite beer in country. My two beers of choice are Castel, a locally bottled beer (I think, or from Ghana), and Beaufort, the beer with the highest alcohol content. I can’t think of any beers that compare to Castel and Beaufort. Guinness is also found everywhere but it’s bottled in Nigeria so it’s not as good as the original. Draft beer is unheard off, everyone drinks from bottles are roughly equivalent to 2 beers in the US, but the one exception is Cheap Bar in Lomé that is just down the street from Mammy’s and rotates one beer on tap each night.

So that’s pretty much it for me. We ate great fufu and colico from yams at the AIDS association that Amy and Taressa work with on both days. Nothing else too exciting happened in Bassar aside from the fire dance. A group of us headed back to Sokodé to hang out and chill and then Marcus and I headed back to Sotouboua on Sunday for another exciting week at post…

Pilaba,
- Nikhil

bonjour sotouboua...

*note* Before I begin this post, I just wanted to say that now that I’ve had some time to go back and edit some of my blog postings from the past few weeks, today I finally posted a few blogs that I’ve saved on my computer but not had the time or the appropriate access to the internet to post them. So if you are wondering why my blog appears twice as long as when you last checked it, it’s because I’ve finally back-blogged since the beginning of July. Hope you go back and read about my “exciting” life the past 8 weeks...

Not quite sure how I did it but I managed to survive successfully (well okay, that’s up for debate) for one week at post. One down, approximately one hundred more to go. Just kidding. I am not trying to live my life one week at a time (although I am trying to live more in the moment) and I am not trying to base my time here in Togo upon some countdown, no matter how real the sand falling in the hourglass that is my time here in Togo. Adjusting to life here in Togo is going okay. Automatic processing hasn’t quite kicked in so I do spend enormous amounts of energy just doing daily tasks like cooking and sweeping my patio, doing dishes and washing my clothes. I think after a few weeks these things will become second nature to me but right now I actually have to put a conscious effort to these routine tasks. I’ve spent the past week cleaning up my house. As I already said Joelle and my landlord basically left me with a fully stocked house, so now I’m just trying to make the house into a home. So far, Togo is not quite home. During stage I decided that right now I feel like I’m on a really long study abroad program where I decide to stay an extra day each day. Dunno when it’ll feel like home; maybe after I go away on a long vacation and come back it’ll finally feel like home. No sense in rushing it though right?

Apart from routing activities like cleaning and cooking I’ve been biking a lot. I can’t remember if I mentioned or not but the Peace Corps supplied all the volunteers with these awesome 21-speed TREK mountain bikes that are pretty sweet. I’ve biked north and south on the Route and there is this beautiful dirt road leading to Korie’s village that Marcus and I biked this past Thursday. It goes on for a while past her village so hopefully I’ll try and bike it further and see where it takes me. I’ve found that I really enjoy biking. Unlike other workouts like running or doing weights where I do it but don’t really enjoy myself, I actually find myself looking forward to going out for my morning bike ride. I feel really at peace when I’m biking and for some reason it sort of accentuates the African/Peace Corps experience. I usually do at least 10km every day and it’s a great way to pass the time while exploring my community. I’m also biking in preparation for AIDS Ride (a week of bike riding in the bush to deliver AIDS sensibilizations to rural communities) at the end of October.

As for the work, well I haven’t been able to do anything major yet. Vie Saine doesn’t have its monthly meeting for a few weeks so I can’t really do anything with them until I’ve attended a meeting. I’ve gone to the hospital a few times to see if there’s any work but nothing big. I have had two interesting house visitors. My first evening in Sotouboua, I was visited by one of the local traditional healers who invited me to the prefectural healer association. Apparently they were trying to host a conference for all the healers in the Sotouboua prefecture and they wanted me to do a causerie on something for the conference. I didn’t really feel comfortable with my French yet so I told them I just didn’t feel ready but would love to attend and would definitely do something the next time round. My other visitor was from a local ONG called A.V.D.D. that is involved in various development projects in Sotouboua. They wanted to start some type of girl’s scholarship program for the local lycée students. Although girl’s education is a bit outside my area of “expertise” I told them I would consult with some of the other GEE volunteers. Hopefully my work in VST will pick up soon. Although it’s nice to be on my own schedule and sleep in till whenever I want (not that I sleep past 6:30am most days with the bleating goats outside my compound and my neighbour Marc’s chickens cock-a-doodling every morning), I am looking forward to being productive.

Cooking…so I know it’s weird but I’ve been cooking a lot of Indian food recently, or at least my own version at approximating Indian food. It’s weird because I never had any inclination to cook Indian food when I was back in the US (well except for that one time I made tandoori chicken in Atlanta that came out “ehh”). And why should I have tried to cook Indian food when Zyka was a 15 minute drive away or better yet, the best Indian food in the world (duh mom, that’s your food!...although Poornima Aunty’s chicken-anything is a close second) was 30 minutes away. Anyways, Joelle left me TONS of spices as she loved to cook and I picked up tons of spices as well when I was down in Lomé so it’s been pretty easy to experiment when you have a fully-stocked kitchen. I tried to make a rasam and rice the other day and then yesterday, I found these things called haricots beignets which are beignets made from beans. Believe it or not, they taste incredibly like vadaas; so I made a sambar of sorts and poured it over the beignets and voila! Vadaas & sambar!

Okay so week’s over and now I get to survive another one. So far so good, I think I’ll extend my stay here in Africa another day…

peace out,
-Nikhil (a.k.a. “Somiabalo,” my Kabyé name; pronounced “So-me-ah-bah-low”)

the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the next...

What’s up everyone!

I am officially a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer! I did it. I really did it. The swear-in ceremony is over, I have spent five glorious days shopping, and eating and drinking in Lomé and as of 7:30AM tomorrow, I will finally be on my way to post. It’s ridiculous to think that just a few months ago I was working a 9-5 job [an amazing one at that though…hi everyone at Childspring :)] and living a very comfortable life with my family and friends in Atlanta. And here I am now, about to move to post where I can finally live out my dream of saving the world, or at least begin to live it out as saving the world takes more than a day lol.

The past few days here in Lomé have been amazing; the perfect way to transition between the structured life of training and the great unknown of moving to post. I didn’t get to do much exploring of Lomé last time I was here as we had just gotten to country and technically we weren’t allowed to explore (our schedules were so packed with PC stuff that there wasn’t much time anyways). However after spending a few days here, Lomé is definitely an interesting city. It’s not quite the metropolitan city it aspires to be, but it’s much more “developed” than the rest of the country. There is no McDonalds or Wal-mart here but it still felt like being back in the “western” world. And Lomé sits on the coast with some pretty beautiful views of the “other side” of the Atlantic Ocean.

After packing up and saying one last goodbye to our incredible host families and our beloved training sites, we drove 2 hours south to Lomé to officially swear-in as volunteers, shop for post and enjoy some “comforts” from home. We arrived at Mamy’s again and spent the rest of the day going over PC policy, banking and relaxing. Alicia came by with a few of the older volunteers and we went out to the beach bar to grab a beer and chill. The bar, a few blocks from Mamy’s, is a beautiful covered bar on the actual beach with a spectacular view of the ocean. Although the beach is not the cleanest, at first glance it’s pretty beautiful. At sunset Krissy and I tried to take some pictures on the beach but the light wasn’t the best and my pictures didn’t turn out the best. It was still a pretty awesome sunset though. For dinner that night, I went out with Mikey, Taylor, Lou & Ilona for Chinese food and it was AMAZING! Okay so I’m sure that I’ve had slightly better Chinese food elsewhere but after not having eaten any sort of Asian food in over 3 months, my stomach could not have been happier. I never knew I missed spring rolls and lo-mein noodles so much! After dinner it was off to cheap bar for a few drinks before heading off to bed.

Although we officially swore-in on Wednesday at the bureau, our actual swear-in ceremony was on Thursday at Brownie Lee’s (the PC Togo Country Director) house. She has a beautiful house that very much reminds me of our house in Bangalore, yet slightly more tropical. The ceremony took place in her huge front yard and in front of our host moms, the formateurs (language and technical), people from the US Embassy, Marines, volunteers and some other random people in Togo. It’s an unwritten tradition that all the trainees are supposed to dress in traditional garb so we arrived all decked out in pagne and ready to party. After brief speeches by Blandine (our training coordinator) and the presentation of certificates of service to some COS-ing volunteers, it was finally time for me to give my speech (btw I’ve posted scripts of my speeches at the end of this post). I was super nervous but luckily everything went well. All my friends cheered loudly for me and I was so relieved when I made it to the end (the fact that Raymond came up to me after and said that my French was perfect was probably the biggest compliment I received!). After my speech, the rest of the trainees did short speeches in our local languages. Kristina and Rose gave awesome “formal” speeches, Kristina in Kabyé and Rose in Ewe. I even gave a second, much much shorter speech in Kabyé. All the trainees finished with the speeches and we closed off the ceremony with speeches by Brownie and also by the interim US Ambassador to Togo (the previous ambassador was headed to his next country of service and the new ambassador had not yet arrived in country). After speeches, we took our “official” oaths of service and then it was PARTY TIME! We mingled for a bit at Brownie’s house with drinks and snack food but after 15 minutes all the food and drinks were gone so a bunch of us headed out to grab street food. Another unspoken tradition of swear-in is to hang out at Reagents (the bar that we went to for our welcome to Togo party) after the ceremony so we all headed there to grab drinks and celebrate. It was nice to just chill with the volunteers and hang out. We drank, danced and had a really good time hanging out all together for the last time.

The next few days were a blur of touring Lomé w/ Djotang, shopping at Ramco, LiterPrice and the Grand Marché and of course the bi-annual GAD Beach Party where we headed to Coco Beach to raise money for the Gender & Diversity Committee. It was awesome to chill on the beach, play football, swim in a swimming pool and eat awesome food. Okay gotta talk really quickly about shopping b/c it was kind of a surreal experience. Ramco is the biggest and probably the most expensive supermarket in Togo. And when I say supermarket, I mean authentic western-style supermarket with rows and rows of food, cooking utensils, liquor and cleaning supplies. I felt like I was back in Kroger or Wal-mart in the states as I was pushing my real shopping cart and everything (I don’t know if it’s funny or pathetic how excited I can get by something like seeing a shopping cart…). They had tons of western ingredients (cereal, marshmallows, Jell-O, etc.) and even pretty much every Indian ingredient I might ever need from channa daal to coriander seeds! LiterPrice is MUCH smaller than Ramco but also much cheaper. The best part of LiterPrice however is their deli where you can order a real deli sandwich!!! I think over the course of three days I bought like 10 turkey sandwiches, complete with sliced cheese, pickles and all…

This brings me to today where I’ve spent the entire day chilling in the volunteer lounge taking advantage of the Ethernet internet connection to upload photos on Picasa and surf the internet. We head to post tomorrow, bright and early at 7AM, as we say bye for now to our many friends who are now a part of our family here in Togo. It’s the end of the beginning (no more stâge!), but this is also the beginning of the next so I hope you will wish me luck as I board this great journey of service and self-exploration over the next two years. It won’t be an easy one, as these past few months have acutely demonstrated, but then again they never said it would be. What’s that old Peace Corps saying? The hardest job you’ll ever love! Hmm, I guess only time will tell. But here’s to hoping…

Du courage et de fromage,
-Nikhil

P.S. I really hope everyone goes and check out my Picasa website that I linked to this blog ASAP as I FINALLY uploaded a ton of pictures from stâge. I have random pictures taken during class, pictures from my hike up Mt. Agou as well as pictures from post-visit week and field trip week. Although I do have a few more albums of pictures from fête-ing, the last few days in Agou and from swear-in, I ran out of time here in Lomé to organize the pictures and upload them. Since I only get “fast” internet connection here in the Peace Corps lounge, those pictures will have to wait till my next trip to Lomé which unfortunately might not be until December when the new stâge swears-in (or earlier depending on if I get to have a “Lomé medical vacation” or if the new satellite internet in Sotouboua is functioning well).

P.P.S. As promised, here is a copy of both of my speeches. The first one is the “official” French speech I gave at the beginning of the swear-in ceremony; the second one is my Kabyé speech. Although I did include a translation for my Kabyé speech, I didn’t include one for the French speech as the speech is long and it would “waste” space on this blog. But if you want the gist of what I was saying in the French one, send me an e-mail and I’ll happily explain it to you.

Nikhil’s French Swear-In Speech

Excellence M. le représentant du Ministre de la Sante
Excellence M. le représentant du Ministre de l’Economie et des Finances
Excellence M. le représentant d’ambassadeur des Etats-Unis au Togo
Madame la Directrice Nationale du Corps de la Paix
Madame la Directrice de Formation
Honorables invités
Chers collègues nouveaux volontaires
Mesdames
Mesdemoiselles
Messieurs

Je m’appelle Nikhil. C’est un grand plaisir pour moi de prendre la parole ici au nom de tous mes collèges. Nous sommes 30 Américaines dont 14 hommes et 16 femmes. Nous représentons les différentes parties des Etats-Unis comme la Californie á l’ouest, Indiana et Texas au centre, Alabama et Géorgie au sud, New York et Massachusetts á l’est, etcetera. Nous avons des formations différentes allant de la licence au doctorat. C’est ainsi que nous avons parmi nous deux docteurs, une avocate, etcetera. Nos personnalités sont aussi différentes à cause de nos backgrounds différents. Cependant nous avons en commun un but: l’amélioration des conditions de vie et le changement du monde. Et c’est là, notre raison d’être au Togo.

Nous constituons deux groupes : le premier c’est le groupe de développement de petites et moyennes entreprises basé á Kumawou et le second groupe est celui de la santé communautaire et la prévention du VIH/SIDA basé á Nyogbo. Avant de commencer notre travail nous sommes passés par une formation du 11 semaines. A notre arrivée, nous étions très contents d’être au Togo mais à la fois nous étions très dubitatifs en ce qui concerne notre habileté de nous adapter au nouvel environnement et de pouvoir opérer quelque changement que ce soit. Une fois arrivée sur les sites, les différentes communautés et les familles hôtes nous ont accueillis à bras ouverts. La formation a commencé le jour suivant dans le deux programmes. Nous avons suivi des classes de langue, de technique, et d’adaptation culturelle. En technique nous avons couvert la micro finance, le paludisme, le développement de compétences et le VIH/SIDA. En adaptation culturelle nous avons appris entre autres l’importance du protocole au Togo et comment porter un pagne. Nous avons eu l’occasion de visiter nos postes du travail pour prendre goût à la vie de volontaire. Nous avons travaillé dur et nous avons étudié beaucoup aussi. Maintenant nous somme prêt à commencer notre travail de volontaire.

Le Corps de la Paix vient de célébrer ses 45 ans au Togo en décembre dernier et nous sommes heureux de porter le flambeau que nos prédécesseurs nous ont passé pour continuer le legs du service. Nous allons à nos postes maintenant avec toute notre motivation et notre passion de travailler aux côtés de nos homologues Togolaises pour les deux ans ou plus pourquoi pas ? Nous demanderions au Togolais d’être patients et tolérants envers nous, de nous aider à les aider.

Avant de finir, je voudrais remercier tous ceux qui ont contribué à la réussite de notre stage. D’abord, merci a nos vaillantes familles hôtes de Kumawou et Nyogbo pour leur patience et la nourriture délicieuse. Elles nous ont gavés. Ensuite, merci à Blandine et à tous les formateurs de technique pour nous avoir donné les informations nécessaires pour faire notre travail avec succès. À tous les formateurs de langues qui nous ont aidés malgré nos fautes en français et langue locales, merci beaucoup. Aux volontaires sur le terrain, merci pour vos encouragements et pour vos conseils. Personnellement, je voudrais remercier mes collègues nouveaux volontaires pour leur support moral. Vous étiez plutôt ma famille au Togo qu’un groupe de soutien pour les « yovos » que nous sommes. Je suis très content de passer les deux ans qui suivent avec vous.

Pour conclure, je voudrais dire quelque chose que ma mère hôte m’a dit la première semaine, « peu à peu… ». Bien que cette expression ait été une source de beaucoup de frustrations, elle a été aussi une source d’encouragement. Que cette expression nous soit un rappel pendant les 3 mois au poste et même durant le reste de notre service au Togo. Je cite : « le changement prend du temps. » Fin de citation le changement se passe lentement et il arrive en fin de compte. Il ne faut pas se presser parce que deux ans c’est un long temps. Petit à petit. Doucement. Ça va aller, un peu de courage et voilà, du fromage !

Bon Appétit, Bonsoir et Bonne fête !

Nikhil’s Kabyé Speech

Mina danaj! Payam se Nikhil. Melina Atlanta. Menge Corps de la Paix soolim tumiye ladu. Mowoki Sotouboua tonuda alafia tumiye labu. Pilabi tasi.

English Translation: Good evening! My name is Nikhil. I come from Atlanta. I am a Peace Corps volunteer. I am going to Sotouboua to do health work. See you later!

mail & packages

Hey!

Two posts in one day! Ridiculous you say? I agree. Well this is a very specific post regarding mail and care packages so forgive me. I already thanked Katie Roan, Jamie Rabb, Megan Kelly & Christina Morton for their amazing-ness at writing to me in Africa. If you want to be amazing, you should write to me as well! E-mails are great; postcards are better; but letters are the best! And if you send a care package…well in 2 years from now, you will receive a very special present :) what may that be you ask? Well you’ll just have to send me something to find out lol! Just kidding, I really don’t need care packages, letters really are all I want. BUT if you honestly feel that you positively NEED to send me a care package, here are some ideas for what to send me…

- Pictures (of you and me, of you and other people, etc.)
- Music (the latest music, popular and underground; you know what kind of music I like); burn onto a CD so I can upload to my iTunes and iPod
- Peppermints
- Books
- Magazines (Time, Newsweek, People, GQ, Maxim, etc.)
- Newspaper articles; Technique articles
- AAA Batteries
- DVDs (a little pricey but if you want to send me DVDs of good new movies that I might not have seen; basically anything after April 2008 I probably didn't have time to see)
- Recordings of all Georgia Tech Football/Basketball games, particularly GT vs. UGA and GT vs. any ACC team
- Calendars with pretty pictures
- Interesting public health related research papers (I know it's lame but if you find anything that might be of interest to me based on my work here, it would be super helpful)
- Seasoning packets like chili mix, taco seasoning, etc.
- Soup mix, pasta mix, Mac & cheese, etc.
- Tea Packets
- Bandanas (REI has them for $1-$3 I think?)
- CHEESE! (packaged, in a can, string, etc. Anything would be amazing since real cheese is hard to come by!)
- Nuts from Trader Joes
- Special K Protein Bars (anything w/ chocolate)
- Ziploc Bags (large)
- Arts & crafts supplies
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Sriracha (sp?) sauce (that’s red chili Asian sauce with a rooster on the front?)

As I said before, you REALLY DON’T need to send me a care package or if you do, you don’t need to send me anything expensive. But if you do send me something, let me know so I know to look for it. Packages go missing every now and then so make sure you follow the mailing rules I posted in my communications post. Thanks!

happy mailing,
-Nikhil

goodbye agou-nyogbo

Today is our last official day as Peace Corps trainees in Agou-Nyogbo. My bags are packed and loaded into the luggage truck and starting at 7AM tomorrow morning, I will officially be saying “A bientôt Nyogbo. Bonjour Lomé, encore”. Weird. To think that a few weeks ago I was praying for this day to come and now that it’s finally here, I want it to last just a little bit longer. I am torn between wanting to be done with training and between sadness at saying goodbye to a place that is so familiar to me it was almost beginning to feel like home. I am torn between looking forward to missing my friends (as Heather would say) and actually already missing my many new friends whom over the past few weeks have transformed from strangers, to friends, to what amounts to my “family” here in Togo. But most of all, I am torn between the freedom that being an official volunteer will bring to me and the safety of being a trainee where life was dictated by schedules and I never had to wonder where my next meal is coming from. Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited about bringing a little more control into my life; but the issue is that I am going from a stage in my life where I had little control over what I did to a stage in my life where I have too much control and no idea what to do with it, all within the span of a few days. Although I have no way of pressing pause on the remote control of my life, all I can do is take a deep breath, pause for a moment and remember the fact that countless volunteers before me survived so there is no reason that I won’t either. Or at least, here’s hoping to that…

Hmm, so I was originally planning on updating you on what I’ve been up to the past week and half but I’m not really in the mood to write a really long post so I’ll try and keep this short (short post! Can I even write a short post?)…After coming back from Kara, our days have pretty much been spent reviewing all the health themes from the past three months. We’ve been doing a few more French classes and this past Saturday we took our final language test. Although I was nervous, I knew that I had practiced as much as I could. Luckily my interviewer was my favorite formateur, Ismael, who is really easy to talk too. He made me talk about Atlanta and somehow I ended up talking about the Westin hotel and seeing the new baby panda at the zoo. I must have done okay because they told me that I scored an intermediate high yesterday and I must say I’m pretty pleased. I don’t think I’m REALLY at that level but it’s pretty subjective and at least it’s a passing grade to head to post. I know that I have a LOT more French to learn because I don’t feel anywhere fluent, but it is good to see that my French has improved a considerable amount in 11 short weeks (if you remember, I came in around novice-mid at the beginning of stâge and tested a few weeks ago at intermediate-mid “weak”). Other than doing our final presentations on the 4 domains which went pretty well, the week was pretty uneventful. We did get to learn though about making “foyer amelioré” or an improved cook stove which meant playing in the mud and this past Friday we had “Free University” which is where all the trainees are supposed to teach the rest of us something in French (to practice speaking French). We had everything from teaching how to juggle and clogging lessons to how to play Sudoku and how to kill a chicken! I ended up doing a presentation on “how to speak like a volunteer” that everyone seemed to enjoy a lot (explanation: here in Togo there is an unusual accent most volunteers pick up that I’ve only really heard from volunteers; it’s a strange accent with alternating increasing/decreasing cadences…it’s a bit hard to describe in words so just ask me to demonstrate next time). The best free university lesson however came from Whitney as she taught us CHAP-ers some Togolese dance moves she made up. As you know, in the US there are some “white man” dance moves that are based on routine actions like “starting the lawnmower” and “reeling in a fish”; Whitney created her own moves based on routine Togolese actions, with my favorites being “pounding fufu”, “drawing water from a well”, “washing clothes” and “swinging the coupe-coupe”. All in all, a very funny class. Oh and I’ve also been biking a lot. There is this BEAUTIFUL 15km dirt road between Nyogbo and Kpalimé that’s tough but so worth it just for the view. I’ve done it a few times and it allows for some pretty spectacular views of Mt. Agou. Check out pictures when I post them.

I’ve spent the past few days writing and practicing my speech for swear-in. For the ceremony, all the trainees are supposed to give a speech in their local language. In addition to a speech in my local language, the formateurs asked me to give the formal “graduation” speech in French. I’m not sure why they asked me, but it’s apparently a huge honour to give the speech. My French was NOT at all at a level where I could fluently write a complete speech in French so I ended up doing a mélange-d speech and Cyrille helped me translate the rest of my speech to French as well as fixing all my grammatical mistakes. It’s been a bit nerve-wracking working on the speech as apparently not only am I giving the speech to all the people who attend the ceremony in Lomé but they are also supposed to broadcast all the speeches throughout Togo. Eek! So I’ve been practicing my speech like crazy so I don’t look or sound like a jackass when I get up to speak on Thursday.

Before I forget, I do have to mention about the infamous night of the moustache. So I made a deal with myself at the beginning of training that I wasn’t going to cut my hair or shave my face for the entirety of training. Part of it was laziness and part of it was curiosity as I’d never grown my hair and facial hair out like this before. Well I actually did it (and I’ve decided never to do it again…my facial hair comes out weird) and since this past weekend was our last weekend before Lomé and I wanted to “clean up” before swear-in, with the help of Kristina I got probably one of the best haircuts I’ve ever had, so much that even I thought it was perfect (and Andrew, you know that I’ve never been completely happy after everyone of my haircuts back in Atlanta). I also shaved but decided, thanks to Taylor’s request, to leave a moustache for one night only. That Sunday also happened to be the night we decided to do our Nyogbo Buvette Crawl so as a treat for my fellow CHAP-ers, I left my moustache on specifically for them. The night turned out to be a blast as we all hung out one last time as a CHAP stâge, visited all 3 buvettes in Nyogbo and took loads of incriminating photos of me and my sketch-stache lol! Look out for pictures online at some point soon…

As for our last day here, I pretty much spent it just walking around Agou-Nyogbo and taking in the beauty of this village. I really will miss everything here from my host family and their beautiful house to our tech house, Afrikiko and of course the incredibly gracious people of Nyogbo. Taylor and I went on a picture tour of Nyogbo and we took tons of pictures to remember our amazing training village. Okay, my host mom is calling me to dinner so I’ll leave you with that. Hmm, so much for a short post lol… When I next post, I will be an official volunteer! Till then…

ciao,
-Nikhil

P.S. okay before I forget, I just wanted to do one quick thing: I would like to give a huge shout out to four amazing people who sent me letters during the course of training. You are amazing and I will treasure your letters dearly. Thanks to Katie Roan, Jamie Rabb, Megan Kelly & Christina Morton!

field trip - kara

Wow! I didn’t think we were going to make it all in one piece but somehow we managed. It was one hellava ride back from my week-long field trip in Kara-même. What should have been a 7 or 8 hour journey ended up being close to 10 hours. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s go back to the beginning of the week…

So last week as you hopefully deduced from the title of this post, Peace Corps sent us on our mid-training field trip. The purpose of the field trip is to not only break up the “monotony” of training but to mainly let trainees see volunteers at work in their domain in other parts of the country. Unlike the business group, our health group was divided into two groups: half of us got a week-long field trip to Kara and the other half of us got only 3 days in Kara. The reason for the split was so that the first half of the health trainees who would be working with HIV/AIDS associations at post would have the opportunity to visit a real association to learn how to work with them as we did not have that opportunity in Agou. Tchao, our APCD, sent us to Kara so we could observe and learn about ONG development and management from AED-Kara, or Association Espoir pour Demain – Kara. Since my main work in Sotouboua deals with working with an AIDS association, I was one of the lucky few to go for the whole week…

AED-Kara

Founded by PC Volunteers a few years ago, AED-Kara is one of the few associations for PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS) being funded by a partner NGO in Boston called Hope through Health (check ‘em out online…they are awesome!). The unique partnership makes AED-Kara very different from most HIV/AIDS associations in Togo. To start off with, I use the term ONG loosely. Unlike the traditional definition of a non-governmental organization, ONGs in Togo are merely grassroots organizations that try to fulfill the needs of their communities where the government is unable to. A great majority of supposed ONGs aren’t even officially registered with the government. I would love to go into more detail about this issue but we were never presented with straight up facts about tax brackets and Togolese laws during training so that is the most that I can tell you for now. Maybe one of the older business volunteers might understand the ONG situation in Togo a little better. But back to AED-Kara, which is a registered ONG in Togo…

AED is an association of “pris en charge” (PEC). I have never been able to get a proper translation or definition of PEC but it basically means “care of people”. Therefore AED is an association that cares for people living with HIV/AIDS. AED was originally founded to solely provide psycho-social support but it has now expanded its services to 6 domains based on Paul Farmer’s (yay!!!) model for integrated care of people living with HIV/AIDS in resource-poor communities: the base composed of home visits (“visite domicille”) with 4 pillars of nutrition programs, access to drugs (against opportunistic infections), OVC support (orphans & vulnerable children), and a PMTCT program (prevention of mother to child transmission) with the roof representing psycho-social counseling and support. Since AED doesn’t get a lot of support (particularly financial) from the government, it’s partnership with Hope through Health allows it to sustain when other similar associations struggle to survive. We didn’t go into too much detail about the exact nature of the cooperation between the two organizations but it does allow AED to serve as a jaded beacon of hope for other associations. I say jaded as it’s a bit unfortunate to have US funding thanks to the help of Peace Corps volunteers. This leads to problems elsewhere since now other similar associations expect the “same” from other volunteers which will most likely never happen as I said before since AED is in a unique and rare position, a position other volunteers most likely can’t and really shouldn’t put themselves in as it leads to dependence on foreign support.

Anyways, using AED as a “model”, we spent the first 4 days at AED learning about the model of care and meeting with various members of the association. We spent the first day talking about Paul Farmer’s model and learning about how to come up with a strategic plan. On our second day at the association we learned about the various programs and we had the opportunity to shadow several health workers. I went to a session on finances to learn about AED’s financial model hoping it would be useful in helping VST with financial support. I also sat in on a few counseling sessions with infected patients. It was really heartbreaking to hear about people’s situations, although it was motivating to see how passionate all the health workers were about their work and their desire to help the patients. On our third day we spent the morning doing home visits with the “accompagneuters”. During home visits, the health workers basically visited homes of people who did have access to ARVs and made sure the people were taking their drugs properly. It was cool because they modeled their home visit program off the tuberculosis DOTS (directly observed treatment short-course chemotherapy) program, a strategy where health workers make sure patients adhere to a strict regimen of medications over a specific period of time. That afternoon, we sat around discussing the HIV/AIDS & ARV situation in Togo (more on this later). On our fourth day, before the rest of our health stâge came up to Kara, we split up into groups and discussed various strategies we could implement in our communities to develop and manage AIDS associations. Luckily we ended the day on a hopeful note as the various members of AED held a fête in our honour. After singing some songs and eating some food, several members had the courage to tell us their stories of how they became infected and how they were coping with AIDS. It was so inspiring to see members who had nothing but were optimistic enough that they could fight the disease.

HIV/AIDS & ARVs in Togo

The HIV/AIDS situation here is not only frustrating but extremely depressing as well. When I first did research on the AIDS situation last year based on data from the CIA World Fact book, the situation seemed hopeful as unlike many other countries in Africa, Togo’s HIV/AIDS prevalence rate was around 4% (compare this to countries like South Africa and Botswana where prevalence rates are between 15 % - 25 %!). This is not to say that the statistics are wrong but merely that the statistics are not representative. Statistics such as prevalence rates are great when surveys account for the true population; however if there are hundreds or thousands of people unaccounted for in the true population, which is very easy to do in a country like Togo where people live in remote areas, then it’s impossible to find a true prevalence rate. Let me describe it another way: Say there is a population of 1000 people and the prevalence rate within that population is 10%, meaning there are 100 infected people. That 10% rate is only accurate if all 1000 people got tested. If only half the people got tested, then the 10% is an inaccurate rate because there could be many more sera-positive people making the true rate much higher. But now the question is why did only half the population get tested and not the other half? It can’t just be because people live in rural areas otherwise other countries in Africa would have similar problems. The underlying reason is stigmatization against the disease & discrimination against infected people. People don’t want to be tested because they fear being shunned from the community, a valid fear in a collectivist culture. One of the biggest challenges of the PC health program in Togo is not only correcting misinformation surrounding HIV/AIDS (many people in Togo still believe that you can get HIV by sharing razors, through mosquito transmission, and through “gri-gri” or evil sorcery) but also fighting against stigma and discrimination and helping those infected to live peacefully among their Togolese brethren. The disease is largely misunderstood, particularly in the often neglected rural communities.

Now moving on to the ARV situation. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Togo obviously does not have the financial resources to purchase ARVs for all the infected people in country. A few years ago, thanks to a large donation of about $40 million dollars from the Global Fund, Togo was able to purchase ARVs from India & South Africa. Although the original price for the purchased ARVs was around $17 per month, after a carnet system was implemented, the price dropped down to about $2 per month. The carnet system involved entering a lottery for a prescription carnet which would allow you to receive ARVs at the reduced price. However last year, The Global Fund decided to cut the 2nd round of funding for Togo’s ARV program due to corruption issues (not sure where it was occurring but it was either within the Ministry of Health or else within Global Fund Togolese partner: the PNLS program, the national non-governmental program against HIV/AIDS). This now has dire consequences for all infected people in Togo as ARV treatment is a life-long commitment and it’s very dangerous for a patient to not adhere to his/her ARV regiment. The Global Fund agreed to continue donating ARV drugs to people on the carnet until a few months ago but no new people were allowed to enter the lottery for a carnet and the Global Fund would only re-start the ARV program if Togo re-applied in the next round of funding contingent upon Togo cleaning up its act. However until then, the real “losers” are the infected Togolese who now have no hope of receiving any sort of treatment…I could go into a lot more detail but I think that pretty much highlights the important parts.

Sooo, to better understand the interplay of the HIV/AIDS situation and the ARV situation, let me recount a story of a lady I met during a home visit session. There was this one lady who had lost her job selling vegetables in the market because a “rival” marché mama had spilled the beans that the lady was infected. Due to the heavy stigmatization of AIDS, people stopped going to her vegetable stand making it hard for her to earn any sort of income. No money meant she was now unable to pay rent or care for herself in any way. Even though she was one of the few women with a carnet, she was now in danger of stopping treatment since she didn’t even have the money to buy the necessary food to eat with her medication. This is the kind of stories that you will hear all over Togo. And here we are pretty much powerless to do anything. If we just donate money to the women, then we run the risk of destabilizing our roles as agents of development and instead become agents of funding; however if we don’t do anything at all, the lady is sure to die. Talk about a catch-22…

Where we as volunteers will go from here, I have no idea. Hopefully the situation will seem less bleak the more I find resources within the Sotouboua community.

Hotel Kara

Since field trip week is supposed to be a sort of mini-vacation from training (or at least that’s what it felt like), Peace Corps treated us by paying for us to stay at the amazing Hotel Kara. My how my standards have changed! In reality, Hotel Kara is probably comparable to a Howard Johnson or Budget Inn back in the US but by Togo standards, we might as well have been put up at the Ritz-Carlton (okay so maybe it was more like a really nice Hilton but you get the point). We had air-conditioned rooms, hot water, flushing toilets, maid service, televisions and A SWIMMING POOL!!! This was my first time being at a swimming pool in over 2 months and it was amazing! The hotel really is quite beautiful (check out pictures online), again by Togolese standards. Taylor, Bree & I spent all of our lunch breaks during the week laying out by the pool and taking it all in because who knew when we would be able to swim in an actual clean swimming pool again for a while! We lucked out with beautiful weather for the first three days so I even got to tan a bit (not that I need to, but like I said, I was relishing the fact that I could!). Luckily when the rest of the stâge came in on Thursday evening, they lucked out with about 2 hours of good swimming time with us. It was great to just hang out by the pool and relax as a stâge, complete with diving contests and chicken fights :) We never did find out how much rooms are but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to “afford” staying there again and even if I could, I don’t think I would want to waste the money when that money could be put to more important stuff (like real cheeseburgers from Chateaux!).

Ketao

When the rest of our health stâge came up at the end of the week we spent that Friday in Ketao, a small village about an hour east of Kara-même. The purpose of our trip was three-fold. In the morning we went directly to a guerisseur-traditional or traditional healer to learn about traditional medicine and its impact on the Togolese health system. It was interesting to hear about traditional healing and how the tradition was passed along from generation to generation. The healer we visited was a Peace Corps certified healer and he showed us a list of ailments he was certified to treat as well as showing us some of the natural medicines he used. He also explained how he understood the gravity of the AIDS situation and how if a healer is legitimate, they know to refer potential AIDS patients to the local hospital as there was no known herbal cure helpful for AIDS patients, regardless of the superstition around it as being a “curse” disease. As I mentioned in the AIDS section, many people still believe “gri-gri” or evil sorcery plays a role in the spread of the disease and many traditional healers play into people’s fear by making false claims of being able to cure AIDS or being able to “give” AIDS to people they disagree with. It’s a terrible situation and only through education (and working with the healer community) can we hope to dispel this myth.

After our informative trip to the traditional healer, Aimee showed us to AED’s satellite association in Ketao. They had recently completed construction on a building and we got to see the final results. The health workers who ran the association explained what they did and the type of services the satellite association offered to its members. After touring AED-Ketao, we headed to the school to watch part of a peer educator training session. Aimee (who’s from Long Island and went to Emory btw!) was currently hosting a friend from Emory who was now in grad school at Columbia. Her friend was studying under a professor who had written a manual on how to incorporate West African traditions into peer educator trainings. Using the manual, Aimee and her friend were training several HIV/AIDS peer educators. The session we observed was a role-playing game. The presented scenario was that half the participants were members of an international AIDS conference that was taking place on a boat off the coast of Lomé. Due to a storm, the boat was sinking and there was only place for one person on the boat to escape safely and report the conference’s results to the rest of the world. The objective of the participants was to convince the jury (the other half of the training participants) of why they should be the ones saved. All the members of the conference represented different people involved in the AIDS crisis such as the Togolese minister of health, a publicly-open infected AIDS activist, a scientist who discovered the virus, etc. Funny enough and much to the chagrin of my fellow volunteers, after the first round of debating, the jury selected a member of a western ONG who was fighting for the rights of AIDS victims. We are pretty sure their decision had to do with the fact that there were about 20 PCVs watching the game. But then the rest of the participants became angry and demanded that the jury rethink it’s decision because they weren’t happy with the outcome which I don’t believe has ever happened before (usually the jury picks the mother with an infected child). The jury re-voted and this time they picked the scientist who was searching for a cure. So that’s was interesting to watch. After watching the role-playing game and eating an amazing meal of rice with peanut sauce and wagash (probably the best wagash I’ve eaten in country) we headed back to Kara to grab cheeseburgers and pizza from Chateaux.

Club Espoir

On our final morning before heading back to Agou, we went back to AED for one last activity: Club Espoir. Club Espoir, not to be confused with Camp Espoir, is a once-a-month children’s camp that is run entirely by PCVs. Open to all children who are members of AED, the children spend the morning and afternoon with volunteers playing games, sports, educational activities and arts & crafts. It’s a funded activity so the kids even get a free meal out of the club day. The purpose of the club is for the kids to have an opportunity to just be kids and interact with others in similar situations. We only had a few hours with them but we got to meet all the children who came in during our trip and after singing some songs and doing some dancing we went out to the field and played some games. I’m blanking on his name right now but this adorable kid who couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 attached on to me and didn’t leave my side all morning. He was really cute and had this goofy smile. He stood by me during the sheep song and then pulled me by my hand to the field. I was heartbroken when I had to tell him I couldn’t stay much longer and had to go back to Agou. I don’t think he understood because he asked me if I would come back to the next Camp in September. I don’t know if I will but it would be awesome to go back and play with the kids.

So I just have to mention this one ridiculous game that we played because it was probably one of the funniest things I had ever seen. The game was called “Adam & Eve” and it was kind of like a mix between Marco Polo and Pin the Tail on the Donkey. To play, everyone needs to get in a big circle. Then two people are selected, a boy and a girl. Both are blindfolded and then spun around until they become dizzy. The object of the game is for the boy and the girl to find each other by yelling “Adam” and “Eve” (the boy yells “Eve” and the girl yells “Adam” obviously). While the boy and the girl try to find each other, the rest of the people need to yell as loud as they can and distract the participants from finding each other. It was one of the most ridiculous games ever but all the kids had a great time playing. I was sad to leave but having participated only got me more excited about starting a kids club at Vie Saine in Sotouboua.

Togo Bridges Falling Down

So back to the beginning where I mentioned how our 7 hour trip turned into a 10 hour trip. Backtracking a bit, training here in Togo for my stâge takes place during rainy season. This year apparently rainy season has been pretty bad, so bad that many bridges across the country, particularly in the southern parts of the country have flooded over or worse broken down. I believe right before we left for field trip, one of the main bridges on the Route Nationale near Notsé collapsed. Since the Route is the main pathway for trucks travelling north to south, this was obviously a HUGE problem. Luckily (or depending how you look at it, unluckily) the part of the Route with the bridge was south of Atakpamé meaning trucks were now being re-routed to go through Atakpamé and west to Kpalimé and then down to Lomé thereby bypassing the Route all the way south of Atakpamé (check out a map of Togo to better visualize what I’m talking about). This however was not the best decision in the world since, as I mentioned in my post-visit week post how bad the road is between Atakpamé and Kpalimé. That road was not meant to handle the kind of traffic of trucks and buses that were now being diverted that way. For all you civil engineers out there, I’m sure you can guess what happens when you add unnecessary stress on a road not built to handle trucks: collapsed roads. Due to additional rain and the increased stress from the increased traffic flow, part of the road between Atakpamé and Kpalimé sunk into a mud hole blocking the one of the only other ways south. Unfortunately, our car HAD to go on that road since our training site is ~15km from Kpalimé meaning we hit a HUGE traffic jam about two hours north of Kpalimé. We were stuck sitting for nearly 2 hours before we finally got the go ahead to pass by the sink hole. It was lucky that they were letting bush taxis through or else we would have been stranded in the “middle” of nowhere Togo. I really hope this situation clears up soon or else it is going to make travelling in the southern part of Togo a real b****! So yea, got back around 9pm and we were so exhausted, most of us skipped dinner and went to bed, getting ready for our last week and a half of training…

Pilabi che (Kabyé also for “good night”),
-Nikhil

post visit week

Bonjour mes amis,

After a pretty grueling 7 hour journey from Sokodé back to Agou, we finally made it home from post-visit week last night. I had a GREAT post-visit week and although I do have a “meeeeeeeee” moment to vent about in a bit, I am super excited about Sotouboua and my work there. So let’s go back to last-to-last Saturday…

Waking up nice & early (5AM) to get ready and load into our vans for our trips to various parts of the country, we finally left the prefecture of Agou around 7:30. It was strange to be travelling to lands unknown as Lomé and Agou were pretty much all most of us knew about Togo. As we ventured on the road from Kpalimé to Atakpamé (btw, if you want to get an idea of the places I am talking about, I HIGHLY recommend checking out any basic map of Togo) it was incredible to see how green the land was. Although the road was pretty shitty with tons of potholes, the view from the van was gorgeous. Just north of Kpalimé the sun came out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and we had these awesome unobstructed views of Mt. Agou in the distance. Although it’s a strange mountain, rising from the ground without a “mountain” range in sight, it struck me as quite majestic. We made it to Atakpamé without much trouble and after a brief restroom break we finally joined the Route National heading north to la Region Centrale. Just quickly, the Route National is the main “highway” connecting Lomé in the south to Cinkasse in the north. It’s paved the entire way and pretty much free of potholes. Oh and it’s a 2 lane road, but lanes don’t really mean anything here in Togo. After a few more hours we finally made it to the Sotouboua prefecture where my van (with me, Marcus, Heather & our homologues) detoured from the rest of our caravan of cars to drop Marcus & I off (Heather is headed to Tchamba, so she had another 2 hour drive north east).

We dropped Marcus off first with all his stuff before heading to Joelle’s house where I was greeted by Joelle and two other volunteers from the Centrale region, Korie & Jillian. Korie is in my cluster and is the closest volunteer to me besides Marcus. She’s about 7 km away in Dereboua en brusse (in the bush) and is an NRM (new resource management…basically agriculture/environmental education) volunteer. Jillian is a GEE (girls education & empowerment) volunteer near Sokodé and was just visiting. Apart from Marcus, I have two other volunteers in my cluster (a volunteer cluster is a group of volunteers who are posted close to each other with one of the volunteers being the contact volunteer who rounds everyone up in the case of an emergency), Tony & Sam. Sam is an SBD volunteer in Adjengere (and a transfer from Kenya after volunteers were evacuated last January) and Tony is an NRM volunteer in Babade. Both of them are north of me on the Route. Unfortunately, both were away for Camp Espoir so I didn’t get to meet them until the post visit party in Sokodé.

My post visit week was pretty uneventful but informative. Joelle showed me around Sotouboua which is a lot different than I imagined it would be (but more on that later). She took me over to Vie Saine Togo (VST), the HIV/AIDS organization I was assigned to work with for the next two years. The building consists of a 4 four room building about 3km away from my house. The building has an office where one of my homologues, Bello, does his work as Executive Director. Nothing else goes on at the building except during meetings which are once a month on the 2nd Saturday or every month. VST as an organization was founded a few years ago by one of my other homologues, Fortuné, a lab technician at the hospital and also by one of the hospital doctors who is no longer there. Joelle had spent the past two years working with VST, getting them organized and helping them come up with a strategic plan. My main work objective with them is to help them achieve their objectives in the strategic plan as well as hopefully help them expand their services. Right now they do some psycho-social counseling with the Red Cross and have a limited medical drug program, offering discounted prices on medicine to treat opportunistic infections (the ARV situation is very complicated here in Togo and I’m hoping to learn more about the situation after my field trip to Kara in two weeks). Joelle was also trying to start a moringa garden in front of the Vie Saine building as part of a nutritional program. The trees were planted but she was hoping I could show them how to cultivate the leaves and turn them into a powder which can be used as a nutritional supplement in most foods. Finally with VST, there used to be a kids club for the children infected or affected by AIDS but due to funding issues, the program was cut; hopefully I can get it re-started with the help of the kids who went to Camp Espoir (the PC funded summer camp for children infected/affected by AIDS).

Apart from VST work, Joelle and Bello showed me around to the different ONGs in Sotouboua that deal with health and development work. I met with PLAN (one of the business organizations that Marcus was assigned to as well as they also do some health work ALL over Togo), RADAR, ESD and a ton of other small ONGs (sorry ONG is the French acronym for NGOs…more on NGOs later) in town. I have some opportunities to work with the schools here but as all the children are on summer break, I didn’t get to meet the directors of any of the schools. Joelle used to do some English clubs and some Anti-SIDA clubs (I know, that sounds horrible but that’s just what they call them) so I’m hoping to do some similar work once school starts again.

One last thing that was really cool: Joelle took Marcus and I to the hospital to go and see the lab that Fortuné works in. It’s pretty shitty compared to what you might find even in a high school biology lab in the US but it was nice for Togo. When we got there, Fortuné showed us all the work he did and even let us use his microscope to see some slides. He showed us malaria falciparum and even a schistosomiasis egg. Since Marcus and I both enjoy biology he told us that we were more than welcome to stop by anytime and help out in the lab if we wanted which is AWESOME! So yea, Bello (who came to the homologue conference in Kpalimé) and Fortuné are incredible counterparts and I really look forward to working with them. They seem super motivated and I know we will accomplish GREAT things together.

Chez Moi

As I said in one of my previous posts, I have a gorgeous house! All the volunteers who I talked to kept repeating “oh, you’re replacing Joelle? She has a beautiful house.” And they weren’t kidding. When you pull up in front of my compound, it looks like the African version of a “castle”. There is a huge yellowish wall surrounding my compound. In front of the wall, several short palm trees stand. In order to enter the compound, one has to cross a “moat” (a deep concrete gutter) and then open two metal gates (“my drawbridge” lol). My compound consists of an L-shaped house divided into 3 sections. My neighbour is Marc and he lives in the part of the L that is furthest away from the metal doors and is the short part of the “L”. He works for the prefecture and we both share utilities (I pay the electric bill and he pays the water bill). I live on the long part of the “L” and that part is essentially two houses. I live in the bigger one and my landlord who actually works a few hours away lives in the smaller one. He’s essentially never there but whenever he does come it’s only for a day or two to collect rent. So back to my house: My section of the house consists of 5 rooms and a long covered patio. Oh and a shared garden with grass and some moringa trees as well as a spigot where I get most of my water from for cooking. When you enter my patio it’s approximately 20 ft long by 5 ft; on one side is some patio furniture and the other side is a place to store my bike next to a lit-picot (a folding mesh & metal bed) for when I want to sleep outside during hot season. There are two doors to enter my house, one opening up into my main room and the other opening up into my kitchen. My main room serves as both my living room and my dining room (most of the furniture, including the refrigerator, is provided by my landlord which is very unusual). From my main room a door leads to a small salon that serves as my bathroom with a sink and two small rooms connected to it in the back which are for my shower (with a detachable shower head) and for my toilet (flushing, even accepting toilet paper…so there are three types of toilets in Togo: pit latrines, bucket flush toilets and flushing toilets. I had a pit latrine during training and now I’m upgraded to a flushing toilet. Flushing toilets which flush toilet paper are pretty rare). On both sides of the bathroom salon are two bedrooms. My bedroom is on the left side and the other room serves as a guest bedroom and I hope to build a desk and turn it into my study room as well.

As I mentioned before, my house is pretty much fully furnished by my landlord. Joelle made some additions like a few bookshelves and a bed for the guest bedroom and she’s leaving everything for me. I’m pretty lucky too because apart from the furniture, she’s also leaving me with her gas stove and two gas tanks along with whatever non-perishable food she doesn’t finish (such as her spices); this basically means that I have very little shopping to do in Lomé. I don’t think a volunteer could ask for a nicer house (okay so hot water would be nice but that would be kind of pushing it as already the house is bigger and nicer than many places back in the States).

Oh and icing on the cake: I live across the street from a buvette! Nothing too fancy but it’s a close place to grab a beer and people-watch during “repos” (the French/Togolese version of siesta). Apparently the guy who runs the place also works for the Togolese Ministry of Health so he might end up being an invaluable resource when it comes to my health work in the prefecture.

Sotouboua

Sotouboua is a prefectural capital meaning that Sotouboua is the largest city in the prefecture, kinda like a county, and everyone has to come in to bank, to do major grocery shopping and to see the prefet (like the mayor). After seeing Kpalimé and Lomé I figured that a prefectural capital would at least have lots of paved roads and maybe a hotel and some restaurants; or at least some 2-story buildings. Boy was I wrong!

Although Sotouboua is “big” it’s more like one of those one-street-towns where the one street in this case happens to be the Route Nationale. The Route is the one paved road in town and all the auxiliary roads are dirt roads, including the road to my house. There is a gas station, the post office, my UTB bank and several convenience type stores on the main road. There is also a petit marché where I do most of my day to day grocery shopping (vegetables and spices). The grand marché is back towards my house and takes place every Friday. I unfortunately left Sotouboua for Sokodé on Friday so I didn’t get to check out my grand marché but I’ll have plenty of time over the next 2 years. It’s nice to have all my every day needs in one place. Joelle said that unless I need “special” vegetables (green peppers, pineapples, etc.) or “special” yovo type items (like yogurt, milk in a box or hot dogs), I don’t really need to leave Sotouboua. The other great thing about Sotouboua being the prefectural capital is the fact that there are loads of ONGs here to work with along with the prefectural hospital of course (as I mentioned above).

Post Visit Party & Sokodé

To end up my week, Joelle, Korie and I headed up to Sokodé to meet up with the other Centrale volunteers and celebrate the end of post visit week at our regional transit house. Each region (except for Lomé/Maritime) has a transit house in the regional capital for the volunteers to stay at if they need to spend the night in the city for work/banking/shopping purposes. Unfortunately PC Admin feels that the houses are seen more as “party” houses so they are considering closing all the transit houses except for the ones they deem necessary for PC purposes. Since Centrale has only 15ish volunteers who use our maison, I’m pretty sure our house will be one of the houses that are closed which sucks because our house is awesome. We keep it nice and clean and it’s a great place to just “get away” when you want to escape from village life. There are beds, a TV and a full kitchen so many volunteers come by the house to catch up on reading or chill and watch movies. Oh well, might as well enjoy the house while we still have it (for another 6 months that is). So yea, came up to the house on Friday to chill and check out Sokodé and we had our party on Saturday.

Sokodé, unlike Sotouboua, has a real “city” feel. Apparently it’s the 2nd biggest city in Togo and it’s really nice. A little more city-feel than Kpalimé, but more Togolese-feel than Lomé. I won’t go into too much detail about Sokodé, since in terms of amenities it’s not toooo different from Sotouboua, just bigger. The one difference is that although Sokodé has a grand marché day (every Thursday), the marché is still open all week long making it really easy to pick up flour and cucumbers and peanut butter (which unfortunately is not found in Sotouboua for some reason) and a huge selection of pagne.

Okay, so there are 14 volunteers in Centrale (at least the ones who use Sokodé as their regional capital…there are 5 volunteers in the Pagala cluster but they go to Atakpamé for their regional capital as it’s closer and cheaper to go there than to come up to Sokodé). Oh and there’s Amy in Bassar (who Taressa is replacing) who is technically in the Kara region but come to Sokodé too as it’s closer for her than her regional capital. Marcus, Korie, Sam, Tony and I (and Joelle) make up the Sotouboua cluster; Rachel (GEE), Rebecca (ICT) and Jillian (GEE) make up the Sokodé cluster and then Heather (CHAP my stage), Tami (GEE), Chris (NRM), Golda (NRM), Silas (SBD), and Angela (SBD) make up the Tchamba cluster. I really like the vibe of the volunteers in my region. The other regions joke that we are the “retirement home” region which I both agree and disagree. We are all super chill and easy to get along with but way more fun than a retirement home though. Joelle, Tami, Rachel, Chris and Silas are COS-ing (finishing their service and heading back to the US) soon so they are leaving our region but will be replaced with new volunteers from the next stage (Joelle and Silas are being replaced by me and Heather obviously) and I heard we might be getting one “new” post in the next stâge. Hope they are as cool as we are :)

As for the actual post visit party, it was cool and chill like the volunteers. On Saturday the current volunteers cooked us dinner and it was AMAZING! Having pretty much eaten only Togolese food (which although it’s really good, it gets a bit monotonous after a while), it was a nice change of pace to eat chili dogs (we found real hot dogs here in Sokodé and then the volunteers made a Togolese version of chili thanks to spice packets from home). The volunteers also made real French fries, guacamole and beer-battered wagash. Can’t remember if I already mentioned it or not but wagash is the Togolese version of cheese made by members of the Fulani tribe (a nomadic West African tribe). It actually tastes pretty much like Indian paneer and it’s delicious when fried. It’s not found everywhere in Togo so it was a special treat to eat. The beer-battered wagash was AMAZING! And to top it off, we added guacamole onto it with some sriracha (sp?) sauce and it was an explosion of taste in my mouth. SOO GOOD! We devoured the entire meal. Oh yea, forgot to mention that some of the Kara volunteers decided to crash our party so in addition to Amy and Larissa (Kara volunteer), we also had Krissy, Taressa, Will and Mark from my stage join us for our party so that was cool to see them and hear about their post visit weeks.

But all good things must come to an end I guess and after waking up in the morning, my stâge-mates who were posted in the Kara region came down and picked us up and we all travelled back to Agou in a cramped 15-placer bush taxi for a very LONG and very UNCOMFORTABLE ride back south. I wasn’t feeling too hot so I took two Benadryl’s and was pretty much knocked out for the rest of the car ride back which was good, although my butt hurt like no other (*note to self*: must remember to ask mom to send me a butt cushion for travelling in the next care package).

Meeeeeeeeeeeee

As I mentioned earlier, I am about to have a “meeeee” moment as Jess would say. Let me preface this with the fact that I am super excited about my post and even though it’s my fault I am in this situation, I can’t help the way I feel, no matter how illogical or irrational it may be. If you don’t want to hear me whine & complain, I suggest you skip this part.

Expectations suck. You don’t want to have them, but you do anyways. Then sooner or later you realize the inevitable, that what you expected is NOT what you got. I tried to come to Togo with no expectations other than 2 years of service. But with me I also brought an image. The typical Peace Corps experience: mud hut, tin roof, no running water or electricity, and middle of nowhere Africa, cut off from the entire world except the tight-knit community you live in. Yes, it was an image somewhat fueled by romanticism (blame Dr. Farmer or The Poisonwood Bible or even every Peace Corps ad you ever see). An image also somewhat fueled by this desire to prove to myself that I could live less materialistically (blame my Dad). But mainly it was an image fueled by the fact that I would like to think of myself as a badass. I wanted to be a badass. Who spent the last two years in the middle of the hot African jungle where he didn’t have air conditioning, had to do laundry by hand and the nearest post office with his mail was 60km away? Oh that’s right: me, the badass!

But what do I get: running water from a spigot 3 feet outside my front door, a detachable showerhead, reliable electricity, a big town with all the essentials, a gas stove, a site mate to keep me company and of course, the coup de grace – a flushing toilet. Not a stinky pit latrine or even a flush-it-yourself bucket-flush toilet but a full on, push-a-button-and-watch-it-flush American style toilet. Hello Posh Corps! Ready for duty. I can’t believe that I am actually complaining about having all the amenities I mentioned above but part of me didn’t want any of those things, even if I did bring my laptop, digital camera and iPod with me from the US. Like I said, this is how I feel and it’s funny because I don’t think I knew what I wanted in a post assignment until I saw my actual post and realized it’s not what I truly wanted.

So just some advice for all you potential Peace Corps volunteers out there: as much as you think about what you are willing to live without for the next two years, also think about what you are willing to live with…

There isn’t really anything I can do about this situation since our post assignments are final, at least for the first year. I’ve tried talking to other volunteers about my situation and although they do sort of understand where I’m coming from, they keep telling me that all that “peace corps experience” stuff isn’t the hard stuff. Volunteers get used to going to bed when the sun goes down, they get used to spending 2 hours over a charcoal stove just to cook breakfast. The quote-unquote “hard stuff” is the work. The apathy. The language gap. The total lack of punctuality (mind you, I’m not saying that in a negative sense…us Americans might do well to learn that a little tardiness is good for the soul). But even though the “peace corps experience” isn’t the hard stuff, it still goes back to my expectations and the image I had in my head. Not what I expected and not what I wanted. Especially when there were people in my training group who only wanted electricity or really wanted running water. I feel like I jipped them out of something they could have had.

I’ve tried to contemplate why do I feel this way? Who on earth in their right mind would actually WANT to live that way? Not to say the “village” life is undesirable in any way, but why would an American or even a westerner who is so used to “modern” and convenient technology WANT to live like this. And honestly, I don’t really know. I guess I could say it’s because I saw Peace Corps with a certain image and they even “promised” me that image when I signed up. They mentioned it in the interview: what are you willing to live without for the next two years? Health volunteers are mainly placed in small, remote villages. Do you think you can do it? Of course I can. This is the schema I have in my head. It’s what I’m prepared for and in a way, it’s what I secretly want. And then they have to go and break this image by placing me in a “city”. It’s funny because Peace Corps talks about putting the volunteers in the same living conditions of people in the community and here I find myself in not just one of the nicest houses in Sotouboua but probably one of the nicest houses in my region. I’m sure if PC really wanted to find a house with a pit latrine and an outdoor shower in Sotouboua they wouldn’t have a very hard time. It’s also funny because out of the 15 available posts in Togo for health volunteers, only 4 of them could really qualify as being “en brusse” villages. So much for CHAP volunteers being in “small, remote villages”…

So finally my “meeee” moment, my internal monologue, concludes on a certain fact: that my so-called image of the “peace corps experience” isn’t just an image. It’s life. Real life. For billions of people. The so-called “peace corps experience” might be “roughing it” for me but it’s the everyday-to day life for my fellow Togolese. They aren’t in those conditions for an “experience”. They didn’t choose to live that way. The live the only way they know how. The only way their economic status will allow them. And so they live… and I guess I’ll just have to stop pitying myself and appreciate what I have when so many others don’t…

ciao for now,
-Nikhil