My dad recently got himself a new toy, a digital camera. With the camera he has begun taking photos around my house and town in the mountains of North Carolina. He recently put some of these photos up on Facebook (my dad is much more tech-savvy than I thought) and asked me if I would show the photos to the Togolese. I agreed and, as a special activity for the last English Club meeting of the year at the lycee (high-school), I brought my laptop and showed the photos to a group of Togolese students. I went through and explained each photo, and the discussion that followed gave some perspective on the cultures of our very different countries. Here are some of the photos, with notes on how they compare to Togo and the reactions of the students.

The view from the back porch of my parent’s house

While there are mountains in Togo, many of the students have never left the Maritime region so have never seen them. I explained that the mountains where I live are covered in forest and that, in the fall, the leaves all change colors and the mountainside transforms into a beautiful collage. The idea of having spring, summer, fall, and winter was pretty foreign to kids used to dry and wet seasons. They asked me what kind of animals live in the forest, and I tried to explain what a deer is: ‘Like a mouton (sheep), but more energetic and with horns.’ They were pretty lost on the idea.

A heron chilling out by the Tucaseegee River

I explained that the heron is a kind of bird. Saying the word in French for bird in Togo, oiseau, implies that the animal can be eaten, so I explained that it is not allowed to kill this bird. I pointed out the neck and explained how herons wait for fish to pass by then propel their heads forward like javelins to eat the fish. When I told them that herons live by the river, I had to go into a long explanation about the mountains and how rivers and streams are located at the base of and in between the mountains.

My mom sewing a quilt

In Togo, students often break off their studies in middle school to become apprentices. This means that they work for a patron and learn a trade during 3 years time. They then become certified to practice that trade. Normal apprenticeships for girls include couturier (making clothes) and coiffuse (hair-dressing, often involves making elaborate styles using braids and added fake strands of fabric). Apprenticeships for boys are carpenter, mason, coiffure (cutting guys hair, and since they all wear it short this basically means shaving all the hair off), and tailor. In this picture they were surprised that my mom was using a sewing machine, and I explained that while all the machines the couturiers and tailors use in Anfoin are foot-powered the one in the picture is electric. Apart from this, I also pointed out the stuff in the picture common to most American houses. Almost no villagers own a refrigerator, and I only see them in the buvettes (bars), nice boutiques, and the houses of rich people in my village. As a result, all the food that an average Togolese family eats does not have to be kept cold in the fridge, while much of the food I eat at home does. The picture also has a great view of our coffee maker. I explained to the students that many Americans can not wake up in the morning without coffee, and that the coffee we drink is made from real ground up coffee beans. Most of the coffee consumed in Togo at the moment comes in the form of instant coffee, which definitely ain’t the same.

The trailer park we pass by on the way into town

In Togo, the common view is that all Americans, Europeans, and white people live in big houses and are very wealthy. I explained to the students that this is not always the case, showing them this photo of what is thought of as a poorer community in the United States: a trailer park. The trailers in the photo are the same size as the crates carried through Anfoin on the backs of semis coming from the Lome port. However, it was hard to get past the fact that, even in the poorest parts of the U.S., there is still electricity and running water. While electricity is becoming more common in Anfoin, the vast majority is left in the dark. In the photo the students also observed that the people own cars. In the smallest villages in Togo, it is unlikely that even one person owns a car. On the other hand, most Togolese families own at least one moto (motorcycle, can also be a scooter) in varying conditions, which makes sense because paved roads are so rare and motos can easily go on the dirt paths and en brousse (in the brush).

Goats grazing in a field near my parent’s house

Having a lot of animals means that a Togolese family is wealthy, so when the students saw this picture they said that whoever owns all these goats must be very rich.

Ladybugs on a flower in the garden

Some of the insects that are very common in Togo are also found in the United States. For example, Togo is covered with flies that try to land on food and poop and get people sick. We also have flies in the U.S., but they are a less common nuisance. Also there are mosquitos. When I was doing fieldwork in Montana and Washington, there were always mosquitos beside the rivers and streams. They were an annoyance in the States, but in Togo they can carry the malaria parasite. Togo also has a wide variety of spiders, many of which are big and hairy and scary but are not found in the U.S. There is usually at least one giant spider hanging out on my wall, but I usually leave it because spiders eat other insects. Ladybugs are not found at all in Togo, and the students said that there should be a type of pagne (colorful African fabric) made in the same pattern as the ladybug’s back.

My mom beside her garden

My mom is wearing overalls in the picture, a type of clothing never seen in Togo. I explained to the students that Americans often wear overalls for working outside or doing manual labor. Also, they were surprised and happy that someone in the U.S. digs in the dirt and grows food. While in the U.S. less than 2 % of the population is involved in agriculture and we use tractors, fertilizers, and giant silos to grow corn, in Togo something like 70 % of the Togolese have a champ, or field, where they usually grow corn, cassava, or yams using hoes and their own hands. Since the remaining 30% mostly live in Lome, that means basically every villager farms. I pointed out that my mom grows lots of tomatoes. I also explained that she grows basil which she uses to make pesto that she sells at the farmer’s market. The student were thrilled that my mom sells stuff at the market, just like a marché momma (volunteer slang for the sometimes very large women who sit at the village market selling peppers, onions, etc. from thatch mats). Unfortunately, they also noted our two family Subarus in the background. I think my family has a pretty small house compared to the national average, but we still have two cars. Our road, as the students noted, is still pretty marked with potholes.

I have this joke I make to bush taxi drivers. At the point during every ride when passengers crowded into the front seat are complaining about the dire state of the road, I say ‘au Togo, les rues en bitumee sont en train de deviner des rues en terres,’ (in Togo, the paved roads are gradually becoming dirt roads) and everyone laughs. Most of the minor roads in this country are made of dirt, and the major roads that are paved are marked by potholes of various sizes and shapes. On top of this, 5 passenger cars are often loaded with 8 people (think creatively to figure out how) and 12 passenger vans are packed with more than 20 (again, think more creatively), forcing many travelers to adjust their comfort zone to fit the transport options. And this doesn’t even account for the baskets and sacks, the goats and chickens that are piled on top. Bad roads combine with overcrowded transport to define travel in this country.

In addition to numerous vehicles in a later state of decay on the road, motorcycles, which the Togolese call ‘motos,’ are much more common in Togo than in the United States. This makes sense because of the paths ‘en brousse’ (in the brush) and that motos tend to use less gas per person. Motos vary in size from go-go scooters (I’ve seen a few nice Italian vespas here) to giant motorcycles with enormous shocks that cause the handlebars to sit high above the front wheel. They are, for the most part, in a rather poor state of repair and often need to get looked at by the road side mechanics in roadside shacks with their hodge podge of tools. Driving in the capital Lomé, every time cars stop at the occasional red light the motos fill the sweaty air with a high pitched drone as they swerve around and in between the semis and vans to get closer to the front of the line. And when, for the most part, there is no stop light and the word ‘intersection’ takes on a very literal meaning, the motos and cars gradually inch out into the oncoming traffic until they are a hairsbreadth away from having their front ends ripped off before the other people let them cross.

All of the directors of NGOs near my village, the big wigs in the development business, drive the hugest, shiniest motos in town. This sends the message to poor people like the groupement I work with: development projects can make you rich. International aid organizations mean money if you can play the application game. On the flip side, whenever I see a woman on a big moto go through the road in my town I get all the women around me to look. Yep, that’s right, women can be rich and awesome too, so send your daughters to school.

The other day I decided to bike to Agbodrafo on the coast along what I think of as the ‘old beach road.’ Along the coast of Togo runs the paved artery that connects all the countries in West Africa from Ivory Coast to Nigeria. Much of this beach road that lies in Togo has recently been reworked by the Chinese, making it so that after almost a year of astounding deviations along sand-laden roads into quartiers of Lome I never knew existed, drivers can now set up at a comfortable, break-neck passing speed of 90 km / hr on the nice new pavement. This new road sometimes runs close to the beach and sometimes is quite far inland. However, the road I biked on was right on the shoreline, and much of it no longer existed. In addition to strong currents preventing vacationers from swimming for fear of being swept out to sea by rip tides, there is also heavy erosion that is inch by inch making the land slip into the ocean. The beach road I biked along was not the first. Or the second. As I found out talking to a guy in a rare motel along the beach (much of that expanse was deserted: who wants to build anything nice when it will get swept out to sea?) when I stopped to drink water, there were at least another 3 beach roads sitting off the shoreline covered by the water. The Togolese just kept building more. When one got eaten by time, they built another one parallel to it but further inland. The guy said that within his lifetime he had seen 2 beach roads go this way. He was around 40, so I’m guessing it happens about every 20 years. The road I was biking on had been riden into the ground. Biking on the parts that still resembled a road were like riding on a wave. Up down up down over the bumps. And there were still tire tracks on it, like the mark of forgotten memories or unlearned lessons. It was one giant pothole.

Voila a truck with too much stuff on it

One fragment of an old beach road has been used by a resort near Lome, called Coco Beach, as a wave break so that patrons can swim safely in the ocean while the ocean wastes its energy on the piece of pavement that sticks up further out. I went to this beach earlier this year and was surprised to find that while vacationers enjoy the relaxed atmosphere and chilling in the sun they can also gaze upon the gray, smoggy, dirty port of Lome stretching across the far end of the horizon. Vacationers playing in the water watch the occasional black plastic bag or other piece of trash float by. One major reason that all the paved roads in this country get torn up so quick are the semis that truckers overload and then try to drive along already ripped-up roads. All day and night these huge 10 and 12 wheel trucks in incredibly bad condition bounce along the road near my family compound, many laden down with ciment from the factory in Tabligbo and bound for the port in Lome. The speed with which they go down the hill to the intersection with the Aneho-Vogan road makes me wonder when one of them is going to have its breaks fail and will take out my favorite egg sandwhich place on the other side. The other day I was on my way toward Tabligbo when it began to rain. When its dry, there is dust flying in the face of the moto driver or coating the windshield of the bush taxi. When its wet or raining, the water makes the clay earth soft and causes all kinds of unforeseen problems. On this particular day, two semis had gotten stuck in the mud trying to go by each other and traffic was beginning to back up. How to get them unstuck? Lots of people pushing. I decided to skip the party: I walked around and took a moto the rest of the way.

As in the U.S., cars and motos here run on gas. There are occasionally gas stations along the major paved roads and in larger towns, but for the most part vendors buy an entire 40 gallon drum at a reduced price, set up next to the road with a bunch of bottles and some big glass jugs that look like they came out of Alice in Wonderland, and sell the gas. They cover a funnel with a rag and pour the gas through the rag on into the tank. Not too much concern for safety, just an understandable concern for making more CFA. Other people, sometimes children, make money by filling up the potholes in the paved road with dirt to make the ride smoother. They then string a rope with colored bits of plastic tied to it across the road and wave it up and down when cars approach to beg for money. I am friends with a guy in my town that does this every day for a living. Sometimes I feel like we are on the same page, fighting dirt with dirt.



I am getting geared up to be a trainer for a new set of agriculture volunteers. I am going to do my best to impart my knowledge about life and work in this country to these fresh new faces. While I am looking forward to the opportunity to take part in building a new Peace Corps generation, seeing new arrivals makes me feel old. It makes me think about where I was and what I was doing about a year ago: taking trains through rustic countryside, eating salami sandwiches with pesto and grape tomatoes, staring up at the frescoes in cathedrals. In Italy. When I think of Italy, my mind still wanders immediately to food. I remember making pizza, pasta sauce, and gnocchi in my house while eating dishes in restaurants that were delicious beyond words with names to match. Here in Togo, my favorite dish to cook is called ‘fettuchini alfredo en brousse.’ As terrifying as it sounds, I have been able to use local products to make a pretty decent pasta sauce that, like fettuchini alfredo, is white. First, as with all dishes, I sauté onions, garlic, and piment peppers (from my village marche, nothing has taste for me anymore unless it has hot pepper in it) in olive oil (expensive but a vital ingredient to my life, could not live without it, found only in Lome). I also put macaroni on to cook with just enough salt water to cover it. After the garlic/onion stuff looks decent, I pour it in with the macaroni and add powdered milk and margarine (available in village) with spices (oregano, pepper) and sometimes fresh basil from my garden. When I can I also throw in carrots or green peas. I stir for about 5 minutes till the sauce isn’t runny, add a few cooked eggs, and BAM, I have made food to keep me sane. I try to imagine that the sounds of babies crying outside or my host mother humming an African folk hymn are drifting up to my balcony from the courtyard of my apartment on via Vizzani. The river that runs through my village reminds me of another part of Italy: Venice. My friend who owns a hotel on the marshy river and a buvette closer to town near the bridge is thinking about joining the two with a canal. I thought he was joking until I saw a bunch of brawny Togolese guys in the river the other day hauling up big globs of mud. Maybe in the future I will have a tailor make me a Gondalier outfit and I will take upper class Togolese on rides through the marshland as a fundraiser. Le Venice du Togo, ca va arriver. I have a new neighboring volunteer who lives on Lake Togo, and soon we will be riding a boat across to visit the town Togoville. Maybe we will even see a mermaid (which I’ve been told exist but will only come if I throw whole eggs in the water, which seems a waste of eggs). Last Friday I went to visit another neighbor in Vogan and together we made lasagna using a dutch oven. It was sooo delicious. She made ricotta cheese by boiling powdered milk and curdling it with lime bought at the marche. I spearheaded the tomato sauce, and we also had salad and garlic bread. The most essential element that was missing was the wine. Oh, there was wine, it just came out of a box. The reputation of Italian boxed wine is improving. Here we are lucky to have wine at all. I wanted to get a nice bottle at one of the stores, but when we live on 8 dollars a day there was an unspoken agreement that the box would win over the bottle. It did the trick. Occasionally I go off on nostaligic speeches about the beauty of Italy, talking at length like a guidebook and staring into the distance. On my birthday after getting decently soused I sprawled across two friends and went on a long monologue about frescoes, piazzas, and porticoes. I do miss Italy, but there are great things about Togo too. This past week work has really begun picking up for me. I’m beginning to talk to a lot more people about the benefits of eating Moringa tree leaves, and I might do just that until I finish my service. If I did nothing with my two years here but tell the entire village of Anfoin that eating Moringa can improve health, I would feel accomplished. This last week I did a Moringa training kids infected or affected by HIV in Aneho, and today I did a training at the lycee and we planted 5 trees. I’m also hoping to do a Moringa mural in local language at the dispensary so that when mothers come on Fridays to get their babies weighed and vaccinated I will be able to tell them in Ewe about the benefits of the tree, how to grow it, and how to make Moringa leaf powder. Doing work and being busy makes me happy. I feel fulfilled, in heart if not in stomach.

Lately in village I have been going to lots of improtu RAVEs (Random Activities in the Village Environment) in Anfoin. Just yesterday I was walking home and got caught up in a RAVE…. carrying a bucket of piment sauce along the road home for a nearby marche momma. A couple weeks ago after soccer at the lycee, I was running home and ran into a RAVE… ended up stacking load after load of corn into a giant pile. And, most insane, the other day I had nothing to do and walked out of my house to find a RAVE happening in the field next to my house: I bobbed my head repetitively in a trance for over 3 hours… using a hoe to whack at weeds in the field. I’m telling you, village life is mad crazy.

Tuesday late morning I went and checked out this RAVE I’d been awaiting for a long time. One of the families who I helped teach about Moringa invited me to their house to eat pate and Moringa leaf sauce for lunch. I headed over around noon and learned how to do a lot of culinary tasks I should have known long before: how to grind up hot peppers on a grinding block to put in the sauce, how to make and stir pate (corn paste) till it’s ready to eat, and how to say ‘I make fire’ in local language: Ma do zo. It was fun helping the mom get the table ready to eat and epically failing at most things I tried (except pulling water up the well, pretty good at that now). The sauce was delicious, and I joked with her husband, a mechanic, about cars and tried to encourage him to stop making comments about ‘les blancs’ (the term for all white people). Afterwards I got a long lesson in Mina while we hung out under a mango tree and the sun topped its arch in the sky. Hanging out with neighbors and walking home with the marche momma have taught me more local language than I’ve learned since arriving in Anfoin, and hopefully if I keep studying I’ll be able to have a real conversation.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking home from a physiotherapy training given by a nearby Spanish volunteer when, suddenly there in front of me, a Voodoo RAVE popped up. A lot of my village friends from my quarter were participating, and all these Togolese were gathered in a big circle under a giant tree. Dancing around the tree in the middle of the circle were separate groups of old and middle aged women, the fettisheuses, in front of adolescent and younger girls, the apprentice fettishers. They all were painted red and had big necklaces made of cowry shells draped across their bodies. A group of men was heartily pounding on tam tam drums and shaking baskets of palm nuts, and whenever the women came around to face them they broke it down with some mad chicken-dancing and then continued in a groovy dance back around the circle. At one point they made hats out of live chickens and made a tour of the village humming a Mina tribal hymn.

I found a few of my friends in a dark, shady hut next to the circle and we had a lunch of bean paste with coconut oil, my first time I’d ever tasted that. I agreed to come back the next day and help keep the RAVE going by bringing along a bottle of sodabi (African gin). I spent the following morning greeting people (traditionally done with the right hand, but at the ceremony was done with the left), dancing, and sleeping on a mat in the kitchen while women cooked food, flies floated lazily through the sunlight, and drums drifted in through the broken shuttered window. It was a good day.

To celebrate my birthday on 4 October, I went to the field with a man who speaks no French or English. We worked for a few hours in the early morning and then went back to his hut to eat pate and wait for it to get less hot hanging out under some coconut trees. We went back to the field, worked for a couple more hours, then sat down and tried to joke about gambling with the local Lotosport while another neighbor interpreted for me. I was pretty happy with the way it went.

As crazy as these times sound, sometimes life in village slows way down. I’ve been spending most of my free time lately talking about Moringa trees to anyone who will listen and studying local language. I’m hoping to start a project to promote Moringa in various parts of the community (churches, schools, rural huts, etc) that I would like to do as much as possible in local language. Been planting quite a few of these trees, and hopefully they won’t all get eaten by animals or get sick and die. I’m gearing up to be a trainer for the new Peace Corps agriculture volunteers that have just arrived, which makes me feel old. I’ve been planning out how I can help them discover what qualities help an agricultural project in a developing country to be sustainable and effective. And help the poorest farmers who need help the most. Trying to integrate those qualities as much as possible into my Moringa project; we’ll see how that goes.

I celebrated my birthday drinking Corona with other volunteers while hanging out under the new river payote at my friend’s buvette. I got the Corona when I was in Accra doing a demi-marathon at the end of September, and it was delicious. All in all, the experience was not quite RAVE material, but it made me happy.

Dust illuminated rays of tired sunlight cutting through the savannah trees. We were approaching the end of a long, bumpy road into the wilderness, and the train of thoughts that went through my head with all those hours to stare out the window was disappearing into the distance as our destination drew nearer. Crawling along the banks of streams in North Carolina, plunging into a freezing lake in Montana, smiling in a coffee shop in Seattle, staring up at a frescoed ceiling in Bologna, the wind passing through my hair on the back of a bike in Amsterdam, images began to disappear as the future rushed up to greet me in the calm of the African evening.

Sun going down over the African Savannah

I have just finished an exhausting trip of Northern Ghana. Starting from Lome, I took a bus with two friends up to the Kara city of Togo. We then went west to Tamale in Ghana and further west to spend three days at Mole National Park. Afterwards we headed to the western border with Burkina to check out the Wechiau hippo sanctuary, making a needed pit stop in Wa along the way. We finished up with two days full of travelling to get back to Daopang and land on solid ground. It was truly worth it, worth all the cramped bush taxis and endless roads and long waits to take off. What made all that worth it?

My homies, bandannad to keep dust off our faces... and rock

We took off together from Lome as the sun was coming up on the Poste bus. Taking the Route Nationale all the way to Kara looked daunting but doable, and I downed some rice and beans from the earliest vendor of the day before the bus took off. I had wanted to read during the ride, but the swerving to avoid potholes made that impossible. Whenever we stopped to pick up passengers, women with food and drinks balanced on their heads swarmed around the bus and we got to reach way down out the window to grab water sachets and beignets. The trip was relatively uneventful until we had to make an ascent through a gap in the mountains going up to the Kara region. At this point the Route takes on a slightly terrifying quality. Semi trucks that seem inches from breaking down or having all of their parts suddenly explode to look like an assembly diagram crawl up a steep, winding hill while motos swerve around them and more semis come downhill the other direction seeing how much pressure their brakes can stand. We passed the other daily Poste bus travelling south on the way up. A very exciting time was had by all when we reached the top and celebrated our survival by taking pictures of the scenery.

Crazy hill on the route

We spent the night in Kara before getting a car west at dawn to head towards Tamale. The driver opened the door and we tumbled out to change cars in a town before the border. My friends joked with some Belgians while I wandered around and tried to figure out what in the culture and architecture was changing. Not much: they still sold the same imported Chinese soap, women sat all around selling the same onions, tomatoes, and peppers I find everywhere, and the countryside was scattered with concrete block shells that would surround family compounds if the families had decided not to go elsewhere. On the other hand, the dramatic shift from my Catholic dominated community in Anfoin to a mostly Muslim population in Kara had some stunning effects. Ramadan was in full force, with loud music and chanting issuing day and night from speakers mounted on the top of village mosque minarets. This also meant that street food was difficult to find during daylight hours throughout our trip because of fasting. After crossing the border with Ghana and being assaulted by money changers (instead of zimmy john moto men like in Togo) as we stepped out of the car, we caught a bus one the way to a village… on the way to Tamale. I was angry because I had to scarf down all my late lunch as the bus began bouncing down the road, but I understood when we halted to let the drivers and passengers pray at the next stop.

Muslim community coming from afternoon prayers on the road to TamaleThroughout the trip I was constantly confused about Ghanaian currency and how to change African Francs (CFA) to cedis, the Ghanaian dollar. The currency was changed very recently and the old money is still used when discussing prices in the north of the country. When I bought my first bus ticket I paid 45,000, which translates into 450 peswas (like cents), or 4.5 cedis, or 1,500 CFA, or $3. Since I think totally in terms of CFA, this was pretty exhausting. Another habit that was difficult for me to get used to was set prices. Throughout Togo, bargaining is the norm. I haggle for everything when I go to the market or travel, but when I tried this in Ghana I failed. Paying a set price for products seems so strange…

After spending a night in Tamale we set off for the hotel at Mole National Park and paradise. Along the way we chatted with a group of European tourists from all the different countries of the EU. They were planning on getting up at 6:30 AM the next day to go on a safari. While we were very eager to see the animals, my friends and I decided to use a different strategy: let the safari come to us. When we saw our air conditioned, refrigerator equipped, shower and bed present hotel room we knew getting up at an early hour was not going to be an option. Fortunately, when we awoke the next morning and stepped outside the door there was an elephant standing there to greet us.

Aaaaaand... Elephant! Off our hotel room porch

Brandon surprised at stepping outside after a morning showerand seeing a giagantic elephant tromping through the bushes.

Other people taking pictures of the elephant, nicknamed 'people lover'

Unfortunately it did not trumpet to express its joy for us, but since trumpeting tends to indicate rage I was grateful for that. Elephants are the largest land animals weighing in at 5000 – 6000 kg. They have two tusks: one for eating and grazing, the other for engaging in combat with other elephants. Despite occasionally violent clashes between males, elephants are very social creatures and could easily be seen happily playing and galumphing (the very technical word I created for describing the elephant walk) from the viewing platform of the park hotel.

Elephants at the watering hole as seen from the park hotel viewing platformThe entire day we saw an incredible amount of wildlife while barely leaving the hotel. Monkeys, antelope, and warthogs seemed oblivious to humans as they grazed beside the porch railings, and when I rode a moto into town to stock up on provisions and explore cheaper lodging options baboons were lining the road.

Warthog eating some grass

Monkey scrambling across the entrance to the park

Me with elephant



Me with elephant skull (different elephant from previous photo)Baboon sniffing out some snackies from a trash can

This hotel was the ideal spot for my first vacation. While it was quite difficult to get to and quite expensive for someone as poor as this guy, there was a pool with a nice bar/restaurant overlooking an enormous watering hole where all kinds of animals flock to drink and hang out. We had thought at the beginning that we would need to go deep into the leafy wilderness to see even a hint of animals, but after the first day we settled on a walking safari and spent most of our time at the hotel pool. The safari was spent walking mostly around the aforementioned watering hole with close up views of elephants awkwardly plunging into the water. We also saw several different species of antelope, a crocodiles, lots of monkey, and birds like the Northern Red Bishop. During the evenings we took advantage of the hotel bar (they have a beer called Castle in Ghana that is lightyears better than anything I’ve tasted in Togo) and I attempted to communicate with the other foreigners in their various languages. We spent the last night of our at a cheap hostel in the nearby town of Larabanga where I slept on the roof, listening to evening prayers and pondering the stars.

Sign at the visitor's center

Our next stop on the trip was the Wechiau hippo, but to get there we had to go through the city of Wa, whose local dialect is called Wa-Wa. While there we stayed with several Peace Corps Ghana volunteers who gave us much useful advice on travelling through their country. I thought at first that it would be much easier travelling around an English speaking country and not having to speak another language, but I had a lot of trouble understanding locals while we were travelling. Just as the French spoken in Togo is much different than the French spoken in France, Ghanaian English is very different from that of U.S. citizens such as myself. Volunteers living in Northern Ghana have adapted their manner of speaking to better communicate, a skill which I sorely lacked. Thus, I left ordering food and asking for directions to those better suited to the task.

The Wechiau hippo sanctuary, our next stop on le voyage, is an AWESOME community-based ecotourism site. This means that community members do all the managing of the park, such as trail and building maintenance, budget organization, and tours. Ninety percent of the money that is made giving tours of the hippo sanctuary, lodging people, and other services is used to benefit the villages within the sanctuary. For example, every village now has a water pump and many have received funds to build schools. The chiefs of three of the villages and other elected community members sit on the board for the sanctuary. Basically, this place is an example of tourism positively impacting an impoverished region.

The Wechiau sanctuary is located on the western border of Ghana with Burkina Faso, which are separated at this point by the Black Volta River. We stayed at the lodge in the sanctuary, which unlike the hotel had no electricity or running water but is super cheap as was everything else. Our guide was amazing: he gave us a canoe safari identifying birds and trees along the way, gave us a lot of information about the park, and cooked us a dinner of spaghetti with sauce. During the safari he had told us there are electric fish in the river that shock people like eels do, so on the way back we bought one that had been smoked and put it in the sauce. It was delicious.

My friends in the back of the canoe

Smoked electric fish

Unfortunately we did not get to see any hippos, the second largest land animal after the elephant. We went during the height of the rainy season when the river is at almost its peak level. This means there was no dust clogging our nostrils during taxi rides, but also there are much more places on the river where the hippos can hang out. Thus, we saw no hippos, and I had to be content with reading the extensive info on them in the guide book. What I did see were lots of birds: Northern Red Bishop, Laughing Dove, Bruce’s Green-Pigeon, and best of all the Hornbill (which swooped over my head as I was diving into the forest for an evening walk). Also we got to see a family of vervet monkeys swooping through the trees on the riverbank.

Following our day at Wechiau, we spent two long days just travelling to get back to Togo. From Wechiau we went back to Wa and then spent a night in Temu before passing through Bolgatanga and finally making it to Daopang in Togo. Although the northernmost region of Togo, Savanes, is renowned for its dry climate, we arrived at the peak of the short wet season. Grasses were popping up everywhere, and some land was covered with great plains obstructed occasionally by the rare Baobab. Others were a kaleidoscope of rice paddies, corn and bean fields, and circular huts arranged in circular family compounds.

While in Daopang I borrowed a bike and visited a friend in a nearby village. He helped me to explore the local brew called Tchakpa, which tastes like a light delicious millet beer. We biked to different stands and sampled the taste. After finishing our tour in a tiny nearby marche, I downed some bean beignets and biked happily back to Daopang.

Drinking Tchakpa with the locals and John, my tchakpa hopping companionThe next day I went to visit the caves close to Nano in Savanes where slaves used to hide from traders back in the 16 and 1700’s. The landscape was amazing: hills topped by giant cliffs spilling onto a vast open plain. I could see for miles.

View from atop the cliffs near the caves

Some of the caves under the cliffs

Soaking under a tropical waterfall

Today I am tired and happy to be heading back to post, to my village and the people I work with. Time to go home.

After a couple weeks of struggling to teach english at the lycee, I decided that working with children during my service was not for me. That was until last week, when I went to Camp ESPOIR and had one of the best times of my life singing, dancing, and playing with a bunch of kiddos. Espoir in French means 'hope', and the goal of the camp was to give kids living with or affected by AIDS an awesome week to jump, run around, and basically have a really good time. And maybe learn something...

The kids from my building, Les Montagnes!!!

Camp ESPOIR is a collaboration between Peace Corps Volunteers and Togolese NGOs. The week's activities include a bonfire (strange when people here cook with fires, but hey its fun), carnival (simple low tech games with prizes), info sessions (sex ed, self confidence, activity generating activities, stuff like that), and more. It takes place at our training center where kids are grouped by age and put into different buildings themed with different environments (Arctic, Caves, Praries). I went with the younger boys, ages 12-13, and we were the mountains. In French 'LES MONTAGNES'. The entire week wherever we paraded to on the grounds I would constantly cry 'les montagnes!' and all the kiddos would yell 'OHHHHHH.'

Firing up some popcorn.

Eating said popcorn.

We also made some caramel popcorn after talking about feasibility studies and Income Generating Activities, accompanied by a camp 'marche' market where the kids packaged and sold what they had made, in our case popcorn. The 2 hour marche was full of kids screaming and chanting their product and creatively parading it around on their heads to sell to others. Many sellers in West Africa carry their product, whether it be soja or soap or shoes, around on their heads while screaming the name, so this was pretty typical.

I presented a session on children's rights (droits de l'enfant). Some of the sessions were dull and I could see the kids looking around, so I tried to make mine as exciting as possible by having sketches where every camper was involved, using very few words and posters, and putting each right (education, vie, alimentation) into song form so the kids would remember them. I discovered that I am very good at being enthusiastic but very bad at generating discussion, so hopefully that will improve next year.

My kiddos trying to lift me to the sky!

The entire week was a truly amazing experience. I got to know the 8 boys in my dorm so well. We would walk to dinner or to the different activities all holding hands and singing, and they always sat around me at all the meetings. I didn't know the exact story of the lives of each kiddo outside of camp, but I knew that this might be the best week of their lives, so I did my best to make that happen.

Some campers on the ride back to Aneho.

The ride back was sad and fun at the same time. Kids are such great teachers, and heading back from Lome to Aneho I was in a taxi with a group of girls and a Togolese staff. The girls laughed and taught be songs in Ewe and I taught them Italian. I found out that they had learned Italian at camp the year before. It was so awesome seeing these kids smiling and having a good time! It's experiences like this that just make me love my service and make me feel like I'm doing something useful to help the world. It reminds me of that age old saying, 'People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.'

Time moves differently in my village. There are still seconds, minutes, and hours, but along with the expected changes in climate, culture, and living conditions I have noticed that the days have begun to disappear. I’ll wake up to my homologue’s wife singing while she prepares fried bon bons over the wood fire in the early morning, and when I’ve turned around night has fallen and my eyes are already closing in front of a book in the flickering fluorescent light. What happened in between opening and shutting my eyes seems to swirl up and disappear like dust on a dry dirt road.

We, the volunteers of Peace Corps Togo, are getting ready to welcome some bright new faces to our midst. While I was initially isolated in my village tucked into the southeast corner of the country, I will be getting two new neighbors, one within biking distance in a nearby village and another right on the coast in a beach town, strategically positioned so that I can easily stop by and grab a beer beside the lapping waves on future trips to Lome. Three weeks ago the other Maritime volunteers and I welcomed the newbies into our midst in proper form: by killing and roasting 3 chickens, teaching them to use a coupe coupe, and introducing them to the fabulous local beverage sodabi at the end of their post visit week. Today these current trainees will become true volunteers, a process I went through 8 months ago.

The bright shining faces of my new neighboring volunteers having lunch chez moi

My new neighbors are going to be working with community health and small enterprise development. I’m hoping that our respective talent sets can merge in order to teach the importance of Moringa to the whole of our villages. A couple days ago I did a training in the market so the women who sell me tomatoes, onions, and fish could learn the health benefits of this tree for them and their children, and I was happy to have a woman who owns a store in town partner up with me to teach them in local language. She had been at the training I did at the Catholic Church, and I let her take the pedestal and do all the talking while I just waved moringa branches around. Watching her give the down low instead of me made me feel like I was doing something right going about teaching this. If I can teach about Moringa its no big deal, but if I can teach others to teach others and keep that process going I just might change the minds of everyone in my village. We shall see. I feel at the same time that I have been doing this moringa project for forever, but at the same time progress is made with every passing day.

Several companies have been moving into my village to encourage stores to sell their products and post their names all over the place. The best example is MOOV, a west African cell phone company. They have hired a guy dressed all in MOOV brand gear who drives around on a very nice MOOV branded moto to get people to sell credit and sell phones for the company. Seems like his whole being, existence, and identity at the moment lies with their products. When I arrived, there were hardly any posters outside stores advertising MOOV credit or special offers or credit. But now they are everywhere, and people seem to go about with this attitude of this is how it has always been. The same thing is happening with cigarettes: the FINE cigarette brand has begun an extensive promotion campaign, with several employees driving around in a shiny brand new ford pickup with the FINE logo on the side getting everyone from up scale boutique owners to marche mammas to sell death sticks. To go along with this, I have noticed more of my neighbors beginning to light up recently. I’m not so shocked about the health (there seems to be plenty of bugs and diseases in this country more harmful to health than cigarettes), but I am amazed that some Africans would pay out of their poor pockets to buy these things. Every time I go into Lome I pass by an enormous new bank built by the giant EcoBank company, and this along with the appearance of new products gives me strange vibes about development in sub-Saharan Africa. Some people further up the socio economic ladder will be able to buy these products and sport them around village, others at the bottom will only be able to watch on as they walk to and from their fields, witnessing development passing them by.

Chillaxin with nearby French and Togolese volunteers

Along with the arrival of new Peace Corps volunteers, I have friends from both Peace Corps and other European organizations who will be leaving soon. Today I am getting lunch with a German volunteer who arrived the same month I did and is going back to his home country next week. Several French volunteers in a village near Anfoin are getting ready to finish up their work on a community library and head back north (not to Savanes, but to France). Seems like the majority of volunteers are here for shorter term projects while few are willing to spend a ‘long’ two years of their lives working on development on this continent. I’ve noticed that volunteers who are here for shorter spans of time tend to be more positive, more outgoing and spontaneous when hanging out with other Africans, where as I tend to be more patient and more withdrawn as I have the same conversation I’ve had a million times before. Also, other volunteers are not ‘alone’ in their villages: they have other volunteers beside them to share the experience with. But Peace Corps volunteers are often the only foreigners in their communities and it can be difficult to relate.

Speaking of the passage of time, I shaved for the first time in 2 months last night and was amazed at how much my hair had grown without me even registering. At post I have a small mirror that I rarely look into, but even with this small reflection I could tell that my face was starting to get kind of raggedy. The hair on top of my head continues to grow and resembles more and more an out of control brush fire. At the start of my service I decided to shave my head and let my hair grow the whole two years as a symbol of my service, but in the Bogardus family our hair tends to not cooperate and attempts all means possible to take off in random directions, so that may be getting cut soon too. It is long, loooong, longer than I remember it ever being.

I’m looking forward to this month. My schedule is packed with stuff: a camp called ESPOIR for children with aids, a vacation tour to northern Ghana, a Take our Daughters to Work training in Tsevie. Things are picking up and moving along, hopefully for the better. A rolling stone gathers no moss, but my hair is growing all the time.

I have two main projects going on in village. The first, creating a training center for raising agoutis, will hopefully be funded in the next few months by a program at the US Embassy and is causing me lots of head ache and frustration. The second project is composed of small trainings on cultivating and using the tree moringa oleifera, whose leaves are packed with vitamins and are in my opinion the cheapest, simplest, easiest solution to problems with malnutrition racking sub-Saharan Africa.

This second project seems to be going much better than the first. To start off with, the only two inputs that are needed are a moringa seeds. I have been doing small trainings in the groups of clay houses between my house and a community partner who already has moringa growing. Whereas with my garden training I asked people to come all the way to my house and failed, I am now going myself into groups of houses and getting a much larger turnout. Going to meetings that have already been set up, whether with groupements or at schools and churches, or stepping outside the door is much easier for villagers than taking their time, leaving their children, and coming all the way across Anfoin to my door.

Each small training has been very successful and rewarding for me. To start them off, I meet with the ‘togbui,’ or leader/head of the group of houses. We decide on a time that would be good for the women and men to talk about moringa, and here I really stress that it is the women who need to participate because it is the women who do the cooking and will be putting the moringa leaves in the sauce. I give him moringa seeds, ten for each woman coming to the training, so he can soak them overnight before the meeting. Also I leave it to the group of houses to find sachets for making a tree nursery.

People happily holding future moringa trees

When the day of the training arrives, I show up on time even though the meeting usually doesn’t start for another half hour. This time is not wasted though because I have time to greet the men and say ‘Okay, I said there needed to be women at this training, so where are they? Go get them.’ Each training is part lecture, talking about the benefits of moringa specifically for children and pregnant women, and part hands-on filling up sachets with dirt and making a small nursery of 10 seedlings to give to each woman present. If possible I ask a woman who has previously attended a training and seems motivated to come and assist me, and I leave it as much up to her as possible to teach the other villagers what moringa can do for their health and then how to plant it.

Who knew the leaves of this one plant were sooo awesome?

The benefits of moringa are endless. Different parts of the tree, from the flowers to the roots, help cure a myriad of diseases. The leaves are full of Vitamin A, B, C, and on down the alphabet, as well as calcium, potassium, iron, and even protein like one finds in meat and fish (super expensive for villagers). They can be either put in the sauce fresh or can be dried in the shade and ground into a powder for later use (say towards the end of the dry season when there aren’t many veggies available). People have found that the tree improves vision like carrots, builds strong bones, and leads to the growth of healthy, alert children.

Essentially, a natural resource management volunteer like myself could go on for hours about how awesome this plant is. But all this information does not help villagers and often serves only as a barrier to getting people to use it. Ever go to sleep during a long lecture where the same things seem to get repeated over and over? Happens a lot easier for Africans tired after working in the field or watching kids all day. So, it is better to have a simple phrase, like ‘Put moringa leaves in sauce for good health,’ and leave it at that. Or better yet, look the women in the eyes and tell them about how often women who eat moringa throughout their pregnancy had the baby with hardly any problems, recovered faster, and had healthier babies because there was moringa in the breast milk. Their eyes light up and they get interested, especially if it is another woman from the group of huts next to them saying this. I also talk directly to the women and look them in the eyes as much as possible. Gender equity doesn’t mean anything if all you do is say ‘les femmes d’abord’ (the women first) and then give all your attention to the men the whole time.

Filling sachets with dirt

So, lecture part finished. Next we move on to filling sachets with dirt, poking holes in the bottom so they don’t flood with water, and putting the seeds in at the depth to the second knuckle of a finger. I do this second because if you try doing this beforehand, everyone just stares at whoever is doing work and no one listens to the person talking about moringa. After each woman has been given 10 sachets with seedlings to take back to her hut, I ask them questions to make them plan for the future. So, what are you going to do to take care of these trees? Where are you going to plant them? How are you going to protect them from the goats? Hopefully they put the trees right next to the kitchen to make it easier to use leaves in the sauce. In asking these questions, the women make their own plan for their tree nurseries, which they are much more likely to carry out than if I told them how to do it.

Each nursery of 10 trees is a small responsibility, but it is still a responsibility. There are only a few trees for every household, and their realizing the benefits of the tree is entirely up to that household. It also helps that her next door neighbors are doing the same thing, and they talk about it. I have given information and helped them start, and continuing is entirely up to them.

Women celebrating their moringa tree seedlings

I have used several guiding principles in promoting moringa in my community. First of all, I have started slow and small. When I first came to Anfoin, there was a surge of interest where everyone wanted to learn everything I had to teach (mostly to make me happy in the hopes that I would bring in money in the future), and then it subsided. If I start slow and small a project is much more likely to last. Another principle I have is to involve community members as much as possible as teachers. When a woman from a nearby house can teach everything about moringa that I can, I leave her the word and let her do it. Lastly, I address a felt need. I ask the villagers how often their kids got sick since the last rainy season, and they say a lot. I say well, if want them to be healthier, do this simple, easy, cheap thing that will help take care of this problem.

The agouti project has gotten me frustrated. We are going to be building more enclosures, buying agoutis, starting to train people how to raise them, etc. But I feel like the vision I have of the project in my mind is very different from the groupement’s. In the application we talked a lot about an agouti bank and helping participants start raising agoutis, but in reality the groupement members seem to think that all the agoutis will belong to them. (sidenote: the project was just too cool to pass up, I would love to go home and say I did nothing for two years except help people raise bush rats, would be awesome)With moringa, I let the community make its own plan, its own vision, and that is why it is working. Funded projects create a lot of headache, and while I love the US Embassy’s project application because it forces applicants to plan their project very well and actually significantly help the community before it will get accepted, the moringa seems like it will have the greatest total impact in the future. I’m hoping I can teach it to enough people and get them started planting it next to their kitchens that it will become the norm, villagers will start telling other villagers about it, and I will leave my quartier in Anfoin a little greener than when I found it.

Improving agriculture in developing countries is the dream of many college environmental majors. In films and newspapers we get glimpses of villagers struggling to pull a living out of the impoverished land while supporting an ever-growing family. We want very badly to help get the poor out of their situation and see that basic human rights are provided to the point where kids can get a reasonable amount of schooling, gender equity begins to take hold, and people aren’t hungry.

But it’s tough, at least in my village. Many years of well-meaning aid in the past have given peasants an idea that there is no way to improve their lives without money and resources coming in from foreign donors. Hands shoot out when handouts come in that might feed people today but leave them tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday. The same might happen when information is given in a technical training: people are well cared for and well fed during the classes, but after the training they continue supporting the status-quo.

Right now I am reading the book Two Ears of Corn by Robert Bunch, the president of World Neighbors. In this compendium of decades worth of learning experiences in the field of agricultural development, he gives guiding principles for determining what technology should be proposed for a given area, how to go about teaching it, and eventually how to remove the assisting organization from the picture entirely so that the project is carried on my villagers. This book should be essential reading for the aforementioned environmental majors. Paternalism, or providing services or money to people who have the potential to provide it for themselves, is one of the first subjects discussed. When aid organizations do this it gives people the mindset that nothing will improve if money doesn’t majestically fall out of the sky into their hands. The next time they want to push a project forward they will first look for that aid and, if the organization has moved on, simply abandon that course of action.

Africa is scattered with rusting tractors, empty warehouses, and experimental fields overgrown with weeds. These are the physical manifestations of a flawed approach to teaching new agriculture techniques. They are symbols of this giving mentality, this idea that I know what these people need so I will give it to them and then leave with that warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach and not look back while the equipment breaks down and the farmers I spent time teaching go back to planting only corn and manioc, their soil dying under their feet.

In the States I rarely got asked for money. Here it happens every day, with kids and adults, who tell me that I have to give them 200 francs to buy beans while the bean lady who I thought was my good friend listens passively to see if I really will give that money out. When it comes to doing financed projects in village, people have the idea that I will do all the application and planning, oversee the project, and then the benefits will come back to them.

I want to give the money. I don’t want people to be hungry like this when I am fed, when I am not doing back breaking work every day. But this is not the way to go. This is not going to help vastly improve the lives of lots of people in the long term. So what will? Agriculture is the central activity of the majority of people in Togo, and real improvements in agriculture take place when farmers teach them to other farmers. And how does one get this process started?

Clearly defining the problem is the first step. The agricultural improvement needs to directly confront felt needs: people need to know that there is a problem and want to carry out a solution aiming to fix it. Also, it is impossible for an organization to come in already knowing what a village needs, do an activity like teach condom use and how to prevent HIV/AIDS, and then expect the people to use that knowledge after the aid moves on. Simply telling villagers to change their habits, like was tried with hand washing in the recent polio vaccination campaign I helped out with, will change nothing. If the problem is poor soil quality and a volunteer charges into a mass of huts telling people that agroforestry is definitely the solution and then leaves before the first growing season is even over, the project will bottom out. Similar attempts by aid organizations often involve a lot of work and actually harm development in a small village: the next time a volunteer attempts to introduce a new agriculture technique the people will have less faith because it didn’t work the first time.

So know the problem, and know the people, before even starting. That takes months. MONTHS. When Roland Bunch talks about agricultural improvement, the programs are on the span of 5-10 years, difficult for me to fathom when I will be a Peace Corps volunteer for 2 years which sometimes feels like a very long time.

The next step is to introduce the correct agricultural technology. This needs to:

• Fit in to what the villagers are doing already: The new technology needs to fit into the agricultural calendar. If it requires that people work a lot when they are already super busy busting their butts in the field, it won’t fly.

• Be simple: if a technology is too complex, it will be impossible for villagers to teach it to other villagers. If it takes too long to teach villagers will lose interest, and if it involves complex materials not already in the community then the project will not be sustainable.

• Farmers must be able to experiment with the technology on a small scale before applying it to their whole field. The farm is their livelihood, and villagers are not able to take chances with a work that their lives and bellies depend on.

• Have early, significant benefits. If there are not results that show up within one season then villagers will lose faith and enthusiasm. They will go back to what they were doing before.

The list goes on. With my recent garden training, I tried to organize for villagers to come and learn many new techniques for planting crops that don’t exist chez moi. I wanted to get people to stop their daily activities, sacrifice their time so I could bombard them with technical information, then leave them to put it into practice. The training took me several months to organize and in hindsight seems like a massive failure. But I learned some of the most important lessons that I wish someone had told me before I started.

First of all, don’t try to introduce a lot of new crops at one time to a community. Work with crops that already exist. Gardens require constant maintenance and do really well in the wet season when local grasses and herbs are already plentiful. Having vegetables right next to the house to put in the sauce and help kids get the vitamins they need makes a lot of sense, but when a woman has to pull water up a long well in the morning and evening to water her garden on top of carrying her kids, making corn paste for dinner, washing clothes… just no. My community didn’t need to be taught how to garden, and I wasted many months figuring that out.

Also, it is much better for volunteers to go to meetings that are already set up than to try and create their own. For my past trainings I have tried to get many people to converge on one place of my deciding when what I really need to do is go towards the people. Talking to people at a groupement meeting, a class at school, or speaking at mass at the church are much more effective and involve much less time than trying to organize a training. Recently I did a training on how to do a feasibility study and make liquid soap with a groupement near the college in Anfoin, and it was more effective than the garden training I spent months prepping for. Also with training, people often have to be fed and lodged, but when one person goes toward a group instead of asking the group to come to the person’s doorstep a training is much more effective.

One central idea of Bunch’s book is that it is much better to teach one thing to many people than a lot of things to one group. When I first got to Anfoin, my groupement wanted me to go through and put all of the techniques I learned during training on the table. So I taught them how to do improved cook stoves, double dig garden beds, and the benefits of agroforestry. At the moment not one of them has put any of this into practice, and if they have it is to keep me happy and not to actually improve their own lives. What I would really like to do with my service is find one technology that my community could really use, teach it to a lot of people, and have it become the HABIT of people to use it. There must be a critical mass where over a certain threshold everyone will begin to put a technology into practice and those who don’t will be considered strange.

The best thing I have found thus far to improve agriculture is a plant called Mucuna. It is a green fertilizer, kind of like a creeping vine, that fixes nitrogen in the soil and crowds out some of the especially annoying weeds. Farmers can plant it towards the end of the wet season when corn is already high enough that the mucuna won’t crawl up it. During the dry season it continues growing for a while and then dies, making weeding the field a lot easier and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. Farmers can see whether it has had an effect or not when they go to plant at the beginning of the next wet season, it is easily planted between growing corn in the middle of a pause in the agricultural cycle, farmers can experiment with it on a small scale, and it is simple and easy to teach to others. This is the best solution I have seen so far to begin addressing the dying soil in my region.

Several other organizations in my village have taught villagers how to correctly use chemical fertilizers. You make a small hole in the ground next to the corn plant, put a small amount of fertilizer in, and cover it up (NOTHING like I envisioned chemical fertilizers being when I first got here). This sounds like a great start to help villagers have faith in a program. I’m hoping I can jump on board and help them with this next step, mucuna, giving a few seeds to a lot of people to put on one portion of their land to see if it continues this process.

I’ve also been investing a lot of time recently helping my homologue get together a project dealing with agoutis (bush rats). Our goal is to create a center to train college students to raise agoutis as an AGR. We will be: (1) Building a lot of new enclosures for the animals, (2) giving trainings on how to raise the animals, (3) creating an animal bank (along with a project for the groupement) to help students begin to raise the animals, and (4) helping them to find a market to sell them when they are ready. At first I was incredibly adverse to financed projects, but this was just too cool to pass up. We are writing the application to send to the American embassy and I have found that, unlike labor in the field, I am actually very good when it comes to writing applications and planning projects. More about this to come.

Before coming to Togo, I thought learning experiences were a one-time deal: something bad happens, I get hurt and learn from it. Now they are drawn out over months and that can be hard to take. But my approach to my service is changing, for the better. Instead of running around on a hamster wheel for this period of my life, I feel like if I put some of these new ideas into practice I just might get somewhere.

(written 4 May 2011)

Since several people have been asking lately, I’m going to start off this blog post with a list of things I would like to get in care packages. Many of these things, which make me ecstatically happy and give a pleasurable reason for my existence, are not available in Togo (except, of course, in the care packages of other volunteers heh heh). Here we go:

-Oreos –Of all sizes and flavors. At the marche in Anfoin I can easily find these Parle-G biscuit cracker cookies that come from China, margarine from Thailand and sugar which when mixed with vanilla make fantastic icing, and make what I like to call ‘en brousse’ oreos. The real thing is better…

- M + Ms – Not to be found even in Lome. Once again all shapes and flavors would be awesome. Recently received some mint m+ms that were exquisite.

- Granola Bars – The kind that aren’t good for you, with chocolate chips and gooey goodness, etc.

- Crystal Light – Those little packets of mix that can make lemonade, orangeade, etc.

- Army rations – These are so delicious! How did I ever think they weren’t that great! I just tear open the packages of food and cute little packets and mix them all together and peacefully consume the goodness.

- Love – Not sure how you can get this into a packet and preserve it very well to ship over cuz it would probably melt, but I’ll ask for some anyway ;)

My life has picked up a little bit since my last blog post. I went to another training in Pagala up in the Centrale region near Atakpame. We talked about how to plan projects and how to make them succeed. I figured out why my garden training didn’t work: in order for a project to fly, the group or community has to do two things:

1) Realize and acknowledge that there is a problem.

2) Have the desire (motivation, enthusiasm, whatever) to solve the problem.

The project is the course of action meant to address that specific problem: malnutrition, soil depletion, bad sanitation practices, lack of income generating activities, no water, etc. I came to Anfoin super gung hoe to do gardens because we spent so much time growing green stuff during training. But I didn’t take the time to realize what the real problems were in my community or help the people spell out the problems and decide on a solution. Heck my arms hurt after hauling one bucket up my looong well, how could I expect people to want to start a garden at their house when they would have to do that time after time to water it?

Needless to say, my garden is beginning to look less pathetic since the rainy season began. I’ve got more cucumber than any person could want for, but there is a tomoto thief who has been stealing my baby grape tomatoes. I don’t really understand because usually when people ask to try a vegetable from my garden I give them some. My friend Ezekiel (my garden is in his compound because in mine there are bush rats running around that would replace the tomoto thief) seems more angry about it than I am. Crop theft is pretty common here: some people will spend the whole rainy season raising a field of yams and then arrive at the end to harvest them and find that someone has come in the night to gank them all.

While the garden training bore resemblance to a broken airplane’s downward spiral, I have a few other projects that are beginning to take flight on wings full of air. The nitrogen-fixing-tree nursery I began back in February is full of young trees that are ready to plant now that the rains have returned. These past couple days I’ve helped my groupement in our communal field planting corn, and when it begins to sprout we are going to plant lots of trees in between the rows of crops. Also, each groupement member is planning on taking trees from the nursery and planting them in their personal fields. Guess I must have done an alright job convincing them that soil degradation is a big problem and agroforestry is the best solution for us.

Another budding project is a training for my community (the Koutigbe quarter of Anfoin) on Moringa. Moringa is a tree whose leaves have vitamins A (good vision), B, and C (dodge sicknesses), calcium (those bones), iron (good for blood), and even protein which people normally get very little of since eggs and meat and fish are so expensive. This is the simplest, easiest, and least expensive way I’ve heard of to help an agricultural community confront problems with malnutrition. I’m working with a really great guy Louis who raises chickens and who already has the tree growing at his place. He’s also already made powder with the leaves and puts it every night in the sauce, so he has experience with the tree which is much more important than anything I could every teach about the tree.

As opposed to the garden training where I did all the planning and preparation alone, now I have a nice and motivated community member working with me on this moringa training. I was planning on scheduling it on a Saturday (like my garden training) but Louis reminded me that Saturday is market day in Anfoin. So we rescheduled to Sunday from 10-12 (after mass at the church) and planned to do the formation in a peyote next to Louis’ house. The way I’m finding participants is also different. There are these clusters of clay huts between where I live and Louis’ house. I’m going to each of these clusters in the evening, trying to arrange to meet with and talk to everyone who lives in the huts, and have them choose one woman (cuz they do the cooking and would be the ones to use the trees) to come to the meeting, learn about Moringa, and take some seeds home to plant them. That way everyone is interested but I’m not just arriving to a group of people I don’t know, talking, and giving them something before disappearing.

(That DOESN’T work by the way. I recently helped with a polio vaccination campaign and walked all over Koutigbe giving the liquid-drop vaccination to kiddos and at the same time tried to help the Community Health worker explain to people that they need to start washing their hands correctly before meals and after they go to the bathroom. Think they’re going to do that after we just talk at them? They need to be guided to realize that diseases are a problem and often come from bad sanitation, they need to want to change their habits so that their children will get sick less and be able to go to school, and then after being demonstrated how to wash their hands, washing their own hands, and then having them get their children in a line and having the parent teach their kiddos to wash their hands and doing it day after day after day… whew, I’ll stop there.)

So one person will represent each group. I couldn’t handle everyone in the community coming, and this way the community is responsible for reminding the participants about the training and then asking them what they learned when they return. At the training I will teach about Moringa, Louis will translate for me into Ewe and also talk about his experience with Moringa, and then we will go to his neighbor’s house and help him to start the tree nursery. While I spent 3 months planning the garden training, I’m only throwing in 2 weeks on this one. And it looks like it might do a lot more because these people are really the poorest of the poor. Each family has basically an army of kids who flock to me like flies when I walk into the middle of their cluster, and lots of them look like they could use moringa powder.

Lastly, I’m gearing to go back to Pagala to help out with a camp this month. It is to teach Togolese students about life skills like AIDS, family planning, much of which I know very little about but will be learning a lot. Pagala is awesome because there is Wagash, or goat cheese, and tons of great big trees that I rarely see in this country.

I’m still here, now poking holes to plant corn instead of digging uselessly in the dirt, which is nice. Finally the rainy season started and has made my job a lot easier. Guess I’ll go plant some trees now.

5 April 2011

I geared up for about 2 months for the garden training I hosted in Anfoin last weekend. In preparation, I created a program with exact times when activities were supposed to start and end, invited community members, groupements, and students to participate, and made arrangements to lodge other Peace Corps volunteers in my family compound.

My program was very nicely laid out and detailed on paper: the training would take place over a weekend while students were on break so they would have time to come. On Friday other volunteers would arrive, we would organize lodging arrangements, and I would cook dinner. Saturday early morning groupement/community members would arrive to practice sustainable agriculture techniques in our model garden and when it got hot the volunteers gave presentations about gardening under our frantically constructed apatam (made from wood beams and palm branches, to create a shady place). In the afternoon, the students would arrive and we would do the same deal.

Apatam built for the training

When I invited people to come, I wrote down information about who they were, what they did, where they lived. Most came from my quarter of Anfoin, which was great because if they wanted help after starting the garden I could go and assist them. I stopped by to talk to them the week before to remind them about the training.

As for lodging arrangements, I thought that my homologue would be cleaning out several rooms in the compound to put volunteers in, find mats/mosquito nets, and clean the rooms very well.

As can be expected, nothing went according to plan, but it was great fun. I had a good time cooking for the 5 volunteers who I hosted in my two tiny concrete rooms and sleeping on mats on my concrete terrace (very glad it didn’t rain). We didn’t really organize presentations, which didn’t really matter since the next day the first participants arrived about two and a half hours after the training ‘began’. Not that I was on time with breakfast either: I began to make honey/brown sugar/cinnamon buttered toast around start time for the training. By this time my house looked like a danger zone: I had filled up water jugs for my guests to sit on since I haven’t yet gotten furniture, we put a lot of random stuff on the floor after finding no space on the countertop, and we spent lots of time huddled in a semi circle around my fan as it slowly rotated and a slight breeze (strength varying with the electrical current) flowed from it.

Volunteers HAPPILY cooking breakfast

I had been planning to work in the garden during the early morning when it was cool and then hang out under the apatam when it got hot. However, we began in the garden around 9:30 when the sun was beginning to really bare down. My friend Ezekiel and one of my neighbors sweated profusely while doing most of the work digging two beds. I did my best to look useful waving a shovel around; the others observed from the shade. After double digging in the hard soil (I thought it would have rained by this time making this part easier, but ironically it rained the day AFTER the training), another volunteer did an excellent job explaining companion planting and bed mapping, and we planted green bean and pepper seeds together. I had asked one of our groupement members to bring baby tomato, gumbo, and pepper plants from his plant nursery beside the river (talked to him 3 times in the month preceding the training) but he alas did not show.

Afterwards we moved to benches under the apatam, but at that point I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be around other people, couldn’t try and stand up and give a presentation, couldn’t keep trying to act like I had a positive attitude about the training when inside I wasn’t feelin it. So I slowly went to my room, slowly pulled some water up the well, filled up a bucket and took a long luxurious bucket shower. I’ve come to realize that when I need time for myself, I just need to go ahead and take it. As a volunteer, if I need to reset or get away from whatever is happening these days I just do it and don’t worry. So I left my homologue to talk about agoutis while I took a half hour to shower off and get my mind back on track. Don’t get me wrong, I can get real enthusiastic about gardening and talk for hours about building a live fence or companion planting, but when I need space, when I feel myself slipping, I’ve learned to just get away and take a break instead of fighting it. So that’s what I did, and when I came back to the training, walked slowly across the mud floored compound strewn with broken concrete blocks, palm fronds, chicken poop, rotting mangos, and water basins, I felt much much better.

The rest of the training went. For lunch I walked the volunteers down to my bean lady; she was thrilled to see so many foreigners coming to lunch. We got some drinks under the mango trees at the Auberge Californie and then walked back in the heat of the day to meet up with another volunteer and take a long repos under the apatam. In the afternoon, the first and only student that came to the training showed up about an hour late, so we all decided to skip the training and go to see our groupement member by the river who has a lot of fish ponds. The one student that did come is an incredibly motivated person in his last year at the lycee, and as I walked with him and the other volunteers into town we talked about plans for starting gardens and building improved cook stoves in the longer ‘summer’ break.

The volunteers were pretty impressed with the fish ponds, and afterwards we walked to the opposite bank of the river where my friend has an auberge and mini-zoo with crocodiles. The place is pretty schwanky, and we took pictures and tried to get the crocodiles to make some motion before motoing back to my place. The night was spent merry making on the terrace accompanied by a dinner of pancakes and carrots with local peanut butter.

Looking back on it, I can’t really say how I thought the garden training would go. I’m just glad it went. This was the first big thing that I have tried to do with my service, and it was a great learning experience. I feel like if I had a budget for the next one, if I was able to rent fancy plastic chairs, make nice invitations and photocopy garden materials, create a nicely laid out notebook to mark down participants in, buy each person a pen and notebook for notes, install a big water tank and pump to easily water the garden, more people would come. But with this training I found out that the most motivated people came, and I made it obvious that if they want to work with me in the future I will be available for them.

In other news, the tree nursery in our groupement garden is growing, and since it rained like crazy the night before last (making a deafening sound, the huge droplets falling on my tiled roof) I believe we will be planting the trees soon in one of our groupement member’s fields. I also have some mahogany plants I’ve been raising and am hoping to have kids at the college plant them in conjunction with a lesson on the importance of trees for the soil.

I’ve begun teaching English at the lycee, and I led my first class yesterday. Only about 50 students showed up because of the rain, but normally I’ll be teaching closer to 70 or 80. For the first lesson I wanted to help the students figure out why they wanted to learn English and how they could better learn the language. For me, when I was studying Italian, it was real important for me to keep in mind that eventually I would be able to read Dante’s Commedia in his own language. Responses from the students were pretty predictable: they wanted to learn English to make more money in the future, to travel to an English-speaking country and find a good job there, to communicate with an international language, etc. But with the activity I tried to help them realize why I would like to teach them English: using their ability to speak and write this language they will be better enabled to help their communities in the future. They will be able to bring resources and work with people in the future that before would not have been possible. I felt like I made a good fight against the dominant escapist mentality, and the class seemed helpful for all involved. I encouraged them for the next time to think of more specific tasks they wanted to use English for in the future like reading a certain book, writing a scientific paper on a certain subject, or talking with a famous person.

Talking in front of so many kids at first was difficult. It was hard for me to get out of bed, my feet felt like lead walking over to the lycee, and I felt real edgy waiting for the class to begin. But next time it will be better. I have to speak very loud to maintain attention and reach all the students, and an hour of that made my voice hoarse. After I teach I feel useful, and when it seems like these days there is no set schedule for anything I do teaching gives me a more solid base to be here. Maybe it will help me to connect more with the lycee students and start more environmental projects there in the future.

Next month I’m going to be helping with a national WHO vaccination campaign against polio for kiddos. Here in village there are many disabled people who get around on hand-powered tricycles. One English professor at the lycee can not get around without crutches. Despite this, I feel like a lot of Togolese seem incredibly fit and healthy. They seem to have either gotten really good at tolerating injuries or have learned to avoid dangerous situations. When I walk through a crowded market place or see my friends doing back breaking work in the field, I am always surprised at their ability to make it through seemingly unscathed.

Just recently got an amazing package full of specialty Italian food from a good friend in the States along with lots of other letters. I read the letters and the food descriptions and looked up the places the pasta, sauces, and biscotti came from on the map. Thank you all for all that. I’ll put up another blog post when another big thing comes along.

Check out pictures at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2586782&id=2737002&l=0d9a632b48

My baby sister is beginning to learn how to do chores around the house. Taking example from her mother and older sisters, she absentmindedly moves the dust around the courtyard with a straw broom, swishes water around with clothes in a basin without cleaning them, and puts a big pot on the stove with dirt and rocks in it to see if it will transform itself into pate. In doing all this, she is incredibly cute and runs off giggling whenever she sees me looking.

When I got here four months ago, she wasn’t doing any of this. She was hardly able to speak a few words in the local language. Now she can hold a basic conversation and is beginning to take a role in the household. She still has a far way to go and some growing up to do, but don’t we all?

This is the way I feel about my service thus far. At first, I couldn’t do anything. Now I can sort of communicate and move things, mainly myself, around. Other things include dirt and people. A lot of this movement though seems misdirected, like I’m pointing the dirt or the people in the wrong direction. Other times it seems like I’m throwing in the wrong combination of ingredients and expecting something entirely different to come out. For example, this afternoon we had a groupement meeting and I decided with the president of the groupement and another member to put on an improved cook stove demonstration. Some of the women got into it right away when I stepped to the side and told them to mix some mud and straw together, put these rocks there, pile the clay up like this. Some just lounged on the grass, wondering what their crazy new volunteer was doing when just before we had been talking about buying another collective field, much more important.

I am also inspired by the fact that there is actually something green in my garden now. Before it was just brown, a very homogenous and not inspiring color. When people come to look at it and see brown they are like ‘you fail’ and walk away. Now though I have some pretty sweet tomato plants to show them and I can point at the basil and tell them how if it grows with the tomatos they both taste better. Oh, Italy, a little piece of you sticks with me though I move closer to the equator. Not only did the tomato seeds I bought here sprout well, but the ping pong ball tomatos that I brought from my mom’s garden in the US are coming up pretty strong. Hopefully when they start producing veggies I can give seeds to the groupement members to plant in their gardens. That and eat copious quantities of them like popcorn.

I feel like these little tomatoes might also do good in the marche here. When I walk over to step into that throng on Saturday mornings, I am always surprised… to see that everyone sells basically the same stuff. There is always a long line of ladies selling just tomatoes that are all the same, another long line of ladies selling just peppers, a long line of vendors with hand me down clothes that I can’t tell apart. Seems like there is just about as much variety in vendors as there is international diversity in my village… The other day I went to the market with a friend in Tabligbo looking for ingredients to make smoothies (yes, you heard me right, smoothies, he found strawberries in Lome and we chopped in a pineapple and four bananas and two things of sugery fan milk glace, then we blended it in his blender, whaaaa) and there was a lady in the market selling home made ice cream! Only one! And it seemed to me like she was making a killing, selling each cone for about 100 francs (20 cents).

When I go to my market I look for original people to tell the volunteers with Small Enterprise Development about, but they are really hard to find. Luckily, when I least expect it I also just happen upon cool stuff. The other day I went to saluer the owner of an auberge (motel-like lodging) who lives in his establishment next to the river that flows through Anfoin. After talking to him for more than two hours, I was astounded how many projects he had going and how cool they were! For starters, he has three fish ponds where he practices pisciculture. He uses the fish to feed to his crocodiles, which have big teeth and are way awesome to see after looking at goats and chickens for months. He also raises ducks and is planning to add agoutis and rabbits to the list. There is a great view of the river from the patio of his auberge, he has all kinds of cool nitrogen fixing trees growing, and he has begun a huge garden where he is growing watermelons (which I have yet to see elsewhere in Togo) and eggplants. We had a fantastic conversation over a beer, and I explained companion planting to him and all my ideas for setting up our model garden and model field. If I was coming to Togo, this is exactly where I would want to stay and what I would want to see.

He also offered to let me stay for free whenever I like, so if I ever need a break from my screaming sisters for the evening (all as cute as they are painstakingly annoying), I can jet down there and we can hang out. He has this cool idea to grow veggies in the river on a floating platform made of bamboo. He can wedge baskets full of sand and soil into the float with the bottom part in the water, and the soil will suck water up into the basket so that he never has to water the plants. Awesome!!! Wish he already had this thing so I could take a picture.

Watering a garden (I do it every morning and evening) is definitely the most difficult part of keeping one up. It’s great to say I want to do raised beds, garden planting, all that jazz. But when I have to pull the water up a well, put it in buckets, and walk it to my garden, it is nothing like having a hose. In fact, my pectoral muscles have been sore for like the last month trying to get those bad-a tomatoes going. Hopefully when the rainy season starts my garden will take off some more, and it will feel less like I am just moving soil around.

Thanks to all the people who wrote to me, acknowledging my existence even though it seems so faible at the moment. I haven’t been out of village in a while, so tomorrow I’m heading a little north to help a friend start his garden. Maybe I’ll have some knowledge to impart. Maybe not. But good times will be had by all.

I’ve added more pictures to my last album, check them out at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2577099&id=2737002&l=8b65af2465

I’ve just passed the 3 month mark of my Peace Corps service in luxury and style. By luxury I mean I slept on a mattress (not my hard lit picot) for the first time in a month, and by style I mean that I have clothes to wear (fortunately you can still tell that the shirt I’m wearing is supposed to be white, kind of have to squint though). I miss you all and I have been responding nostalgically to your letters, but in reality I feel good.

Up till now life in village has been going pretty ‘doucement.’ I’ve been playing around with the groupement garden and my garden, taking different routes to get to the market so I can meet people, and casually gazing into the distance, uncomprehendingly, while the locals talk the local language, usually 2 or 3 hours a day. The last week however I left Anfoin to go to a village in the Centrale region. This was the first time I have left maritime in my 5 months in Africa, and it was a bit of a shock to see mountains rising in the distance. When I got to Pagala our training center, pretty much like a summer camp, was in the middle of an awesome forest and bordered on two sides by a stream and a river. Forests don’t really exist chez moi in Anfoin, unless you consider a grid of eucalyptus trees a forest.

I spent a week in this forest with the other volunteers of Natural Resource Management. We learned how to build salt licks, make container gardens, easily kill bugs with locally available materials, build basket fences to protect trees, and a million other things. We were also fed very well and, after a couple months eating pate or fufu and cooking for myself all the time, I ate each meal like I would never get an opportunity to eat again. For some reason I had lost a bit of weight: I came in weighing 175 pounds but in Pagala I found that I weighted 160. No idea why I lost the weight because I feel like I eat food like a black hole consumes matter. By the end of this training I was back up to 165, and I’m hoping to continue that trend by getting some ingredients here in Lome to ‘spice’ up my kitchen.

I feel very inspired now to go back to village and get a lot of the cool stuff I learned during training started. For example, I am going to be making container gardens to hang on my terrace when I get back home. To make a container garden, you need a sac, some rocks, a tube thing, and good soil. You scrunch up the sack and put the tube in straight up, then fill the tube with rocks. Pack soil around the sides of the tube and then slide the tube up and repeat the process. By the end you have a sack full of soil with a tunnel of rocks going through the middle. Then you plant plants on the top, poke holes in the side and put plants in the holes, and then hang it up. When you water the sac, the water seeps very easily to all parts of the sac through the rocks and it produces like crazy. I can get all this stuff in village, and it gets rid of the hardest part of gardening here: watering. Soon my terrace will be overflowing with passion fruit, grape tomatoes, and tiny peppers… if all goes well.

There are a million techniques like this that I want to teach to the people in my village. However, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months wondering how to do this, and I feel like I found out from the other volunteers and from the trainers the best way: do strange stuff outside and get people who look on in fascination to talk and ask questions. For example, I want to start a tree nursery when I get back to grow Mahogany, some nitrogen fixing plants, and Moringa (a tree that could potentially solve malnutrition due to the vitamins in its leaves). To do this, I need to take a sac and walk around the community picking up these empty water sachets that are everywhere here. People will stare at me, and when they do that I can go up to them and explain what I’m doing and why. Most people here think that trees provide wood, fruit, and shade. The benefits for them stop there. They haven’t been told the importance of trees in the environment: preventing erosion, encouraging water to soak into the ground, bringing nutrients from deep in the earth to the surface where plants can ‘enjoy’ them, and making people happier.

If I can get myself up to do stuff like this I will have a successful service. If I can get people talking, then get them acting, I will have done my job here.

I also had a lot of fun at training in Pagala, swapping stories with other volunteers, throwing Frisbee, playing basketball and pingpong, and participating in other recreational activities I hadn’t experienced in forever. I met a new species of red ants which thought of my legs as a giant meaty chicken wing, danced in the first rains sweeping the dry season away, and had a long argument with a friend about whether unicorns (my school mascot, superior) or griffons (animals confused about what they should be) are better after some (cold!) beers and sodabi at the local ‘buvette.’ I felt at ease for the first time in a while, not pressed in by the stresses of changing cultures or being stared at all the time.

But tomorrow I’m headed back to village, excited and motivated. I’m going to be starting an environmental and English club at the high school, organizing an event for the beginning of April to teach people in my community about gardening, and planning a trip north in March to see how the different projects change as the environment changes and write an article about it in our newspaper. And I have to keep telling myself this WILL HAPPEN!

I just have to believe in the experience. Then the experience will happen.

Check out pics from my first months at post at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2577099&id=2737002&l=8b65af2465

Gardens are a central part of the Peace Corps experience. When I think of a volunteer in the depths of a foreign country working hard in the process of development, I imagine them with a straw hat on bending down and working in the field, demonstrating sustainable agriculture techniques to the population.

Well, I do have a hat. It isn’t made of straw and it has ‘Friday Harbor’ written on it. The hat is pretty dirty now from getting dropped on the ground or concrete floor too many times, but it does the job. As for the garden, well, let’s just say it’s coming along. After almost three months at post I don’t even have a solid fence yet. I tried starting a nursery for tomatoes, peppers, and basil (oh man I would totally make pesto), but the chickens tended to devastate it every day because there was no fence. I’ve refused to plant anything until the fence for the garden is finished.

Thing is, I could easily go into town and find the materials and finish the fence myself. I could get branches chop them up with a machete, dig post holes, and have it all done in one day. But the garden is not going to be my garden: it is my groupement’s garden. It will be a model garden to demonstrate biointensive sustainable agriculture techniques to the community, and it is a good idea and has been approved by the groupement members (or those that come to the meetings at least). Problem is, if I did everything myself it would not be the groupement’s garden. It would be my garden. Our ultimate goal is for the members of the groupement to have small family gardens at their houses (or huts) in order to improve nutrition and health and save money for the families, which they can use to send their kids to school.

I like to think about what I can do. Here in the dry season, and generally in Africa, people like to think about what they can’t do. The general opinion with my prescence here is: we don’t have the money to do this project, so give us money and we will do it. And I say, no, I’m not giving you money, I already am giving two years of my life, left my home in the United States, and spent a lot of time learning French before coming here to help you.

So what can I do?

I can begin to get seeds. When I eat oranges or peppers these days, I save the seeds and dry them out so I can use them in a nursery in the future. The other day I visited a Catholic infirmary in the nearby town of Afiata. Other than speaking Italian with the nuns there (oh the language of Dante, their words flowed over me like a waterfall, so beautiful) I told them about our garden. Then I helped them in their garden and they gave me a ton of seeds my groupement can use and told me I could have a sac of dirt with ‘enzymes’ which will help naturally fertilize the garden the next time I came to visit.

I can talk to people. The hometown of one of my friends in agriculture is close to Anfoin, so I invited him to come meet with my groupement and give us some advice. Apart from considering that he arrived 3 hours late that Sunday (his family sent his sick sister to a voodoo doctor instead of a real doctor in Aneho, so he had to clear that up), he gave some valuable advice about getting the fence done and preparing the garden for planting. After talking with my friend Ezekiel, I’ve decided to start a garden that will be my own personal garden in his family compound (where all the chickens have been turned into sauce) so that I can test out some of these gardening techniques before trying to teach them to people in our model garden.

Every time a person sees my garden or sees me trying to water the pitiful live fencing that will become a strong fence… in 5 years… they talk to me. We talk about the compost (or rather, the 3 current piles, each an improvement on the last but still lacking in compostable vigor), we talk about the nursery or lack there-of, we curse the chickens and their small but hungry chicks. And we talk about the dry season, the harmattan, how it is especially strong this year, and what the garden might look like a month from now (still the same? More weeds?). These conversations are the real reason I have the garden, not to actually grow anything or make a compost myself, but to have people think or reconsider the way agriculture is done in this region, to consider the importance of having a garden close to the house, for the family.

Several groupement members have already begun gardens at their houses (or huts). Not all of them have a well or steady supply of water, but the ones who do are trying. I feel like as an American, I’m pretty used to getting things done and being proactive. With applications and assignments in college, I never waited till the last minute to get started and couldn’t stop thinking about them till they were done. Learning patience for me is hard, not just with projects but with people and with the new life I lead.

I think about the garden because it is strategically located right outside my family compound, so I see it every time I step outside our sandy courtyard. But there are a ton of other good things that have gone on in the past few months apart from the miniscule progress made with this plot o’ land. For starters, I’ve built a lot of relationships and gotten to know a lot of people. From the Catholique nuns in Afiata to my next door neighbors, from random people in bush taxis to teachers at the local elementary school, I’ve talked with a lot of people. And while I still constantly stick out as a foreigner and white person, I’ve realized I can use that to my advantage to tell people why I’m here and explain what my groupement is doing. Being called names and taunted every time I go the marche still hurts, but I’ve gotten good at ignoring the people I don’t care about, responding in a loud obnoxious voice when people saluer me in loud obnoxious voices, and recognizing who are my friends and being nice to them.

I’ve made a general rule for myself that whenever I take off my moto helmet, whenever I start a new conversation, whenever I meet someone for the first time, I smile. Sometimes it is real hard, and most times the smile is fake, but it makes the situations so much better. If I get angry and show I’m angry, I’ve lost, but if I can be composed instead and smile nicely and nod when people try to ruffle my feathers, life is a lot better.

Every day here I am going to see my garden (now in my mind what my dad would call a ‘learning experience’). Every day I will get called ‘Yovo’ and be taunted for being here and trying to help. But I will also see the smiling, patient faces of my groupement members who try to talk with me in Ewe. I will see my homologue who has made it his goal to make sure I am happy and who wakes up every morning to work as a volunteer teacher in the school he started. I will look at the pictures of my friends and family on my wall and be inspired to keep on keepin’ on.

With the dry seasonal winds of harmattan beginning to flow south over Togo from the Sahara desert, the pictures that I taped to a board above my desk are beginning to dry out and curl back. There are photos of my trip to the island of Stromboli where I saw a volcano shoot fire into the night air, of my kitchen table loaded with empty plates and wine bottles after an epic dinner on my fourth floor apartment in Bologna, of my arms outstretched gliding on a boat under a bridge in Seattle. If I had less time to think, I might not see any meaning in the glimpses into my past losing their grip and floating down to the floor, but as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the first stages of service I have more than enough time to think, and what I think is this: one chapter in my life’s book is folding shut like the photos while another is beginning.

Togo is beginning to feel more like home. I’ve made it halfway through my first 3 months now and things are starting to feel pretty good. I still miss my family and friends (that means you!) back home, but I am beginning to find some new family and friends here. For example, my friend Ezekiel is 24 and in the ‘premier’ grade at the local lycee, or high school. Last month I went to visit his village and got fed fufu (severely beaten manioc, pretty mushy stuff), visited his chef, and met his family (which is basically the entire village). Before eating the fufu I saw them pick up a chicken from the hard dirt floor of their courtyard and carry it behind the house. Later, I was informed that the chicken we were eating in the sauce was the chicken I had seen previously turned ex-chicken. The Ben that I was at the beginning of my stay here would have been a tad uneasy, but now I have become comfortable with the way animals are raised and consumed as well as other facts of life in this country.

I am still very excited about the work I will be doing over the next two years. I have been assigned to work with a groupement, or group of community members with a common interest, called ‘Union Fait la Force’. The name comes from the fact that apart it is more difficult for people to solve their problems, but together with their forces combined they can do things that were not possible before. When I see the women and men at our meetings on Wednesdays, I look at their determined faces and am inspired by their motivation and determination to work on our projects.

Last month I did an activity with the groupement to find out what our projects are and which are most important. I used the results of the activity to create a website (which is all in French but there are pictures, you can find it at sites.google.com/site/gapu2f) and to figure out how to present our groupement and explain it in the future. The goal of the groupement is to improve the lives of its members, which more concretely means 5 things: we want the women (several of whom go to Lome now to look for work and money) to be able to stay at the house with their kids, we want the members and their families to be able to eat well 3 meals a day with fruits and veggies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we want the members to be able to pay for sicknesses, send their children to school until they graduate high school, and build houses out of concrete rather than clay. The common work of the women in the groupement is the transformation of manioc, or cassava, into manioc flour, called ‘gari’. The most important project of the groupement which will help us achieve the goals mentioned above involves taking out a microfinance loan to get a collective moulin (grinds manioc into powder) for the groupement. Much of my service will devoted to creating a center for the production of gari where we will house the moulin and other related tools. Other projects that I am starting with my groupement include a model farm and a model garden, which I am working to plan during the dry season and start when the rains bless us again.

That’s work. Outside of work, I am improving my skills at drinking the local strong drink offered to me every time I visit someone, called ‘sodabi.’ I am gradually turning my two concrete rooms into a home by adding things like spices to cook food, posters on the wall (much harder to mount with the crappy paint they use here) and more rows of books. While I am still at a loss when anyone tries to speak the local language, I am studying it every night and taking lessons twice a week so that maybe in the future I won’t imagine a lot of question marks coming out of someone’s mouth whenever they speak it. And this Saturday, if all goes well, I will even have electricity so I can do stuff on my computer for our groupement and play the loads of music I brought on my external hard drive!

Its getting better all the time. When I first got to Togo I freaked out about transportation, and the first time I took a bush taxi from Anfoin back to training in Gbatope I thought all my money was going to get stolen and I was going to end up a burning wreck on the side of the road. But now it is normal for me to shove into a five-seater car (if you can call it a car, more like a scarred chunk of metal that was left over after they got done filming combat scenes in the first Terminator) with six other people. I even have nice conversations if they speak French, all while the rusted car with a cracked windshield bangs it’s way over the potholes. As for food, I am gradually adding stuff to my kitchen, and tonight I am planning to cook humus with home made tortilla chips. Ambitious, right? We’ll see how it turns out… So far I’ve been able to make pancakes on my tiny gas stove and even pasta with sauce (I have olive oil now, don’t you know it, and olives, oh my goodness they are soo good) that resembles what I ate in Italy. I still eat a lot of pate and fufu, or corn and manioc paste respectively, but even those are beginning to taste delicious if not nutritious.

Last weekend I went to visit another volunteer in a village near Tabligbo as part of our Natural Resources Management ‘shadowing’ (ohhhh scary) to see what she has started in the year since she arrived. She took me to a sodabi party WAAAAY out in the brush, like many many miles from a paved road, and under a straw thatched roof I drank honey and ginger sodabi while talking with the guy who makes it and his several apprentices. Afterwards we took a walk through this diverse forest full of huge trees, very hard to find one of those in Togo, and the sodabi manufacturer explained that the forest is under 10 feet of water during the rainy season. It was crazy to walk through a place with so much organic material and diversity when all I see most of the time are corn and manioc in straight lines. Being slightly tipsy, we decided it would be a good idea to start climbing trees. I stopped after getting about 15 meters in the air, wanting to not get fatally wounded and end up ending my service that way and all, but one of the apprentices climbed to the top of the tree, walked along a branch like it was nothing, jumped to another tree and clambered down! I keep on trying to get a grip on people’s value of life here, but I don’t seem to be getting any closer.

Harmattan also means lots of dust, dust which tried to clog my nose as I biked to Aneho today. My knee seems to be doing better; perhaps the absence of cold all the time is good for it. In Aneho I spoke with some workers for a government agency that deals in agriculture called ICAT and found out that there are some other groupements who have already got collective moulins. Then I went to the bank and managed to take out money in small bills that I can actually use in village rather than large bills that people just kind of look at me funny when I show and wonder why I ever came to market. I checked out the main strip in Aneho, looked inside a hotel on the beach called L’Oasis, and then biked back with the Harmattan winds howling in my ear. I had beans and sauce with gari on the side of the road when I got back to Anfoin, bought some bananas a woman was carrying on her head, and headed home. The Corps gave me this sweet bike, but it is getting pretty choked with dust and I need to clean it soon. While I was in Aneho I found out where villagers can get tested for AIDS for free, and tomorrow I am helping a woman whose husband helped the president of my groupement start a school go to Aneho to get tested. Her husband died last year, she doesn’t know why, and she has 6 kids.

One conversation I have continuously here goes like this: Are you married? No? Do you want to get married? No?!? Why? You have to! How many kids will you have? No kids?!? But you have to have kids, at least four of them! What if something happens to them? After the Togolese and I go through this, I usually ask people how many brothers and sisters they have and how many died. Many of them say 7 or 8 brothers and sisters (per wife, polygamy is a reality here) and that none of them died. Children are like insurance for the parents and help in the house and fields, but you can’t feed and clothe 6 kids well when you barely have the means to do it for 2! I feel like having lots of kids made sense back in the days when infant mortality was high, and that family is a very very important part of African culture, but it seems like kids could go a lot further along the path if they didn’t have so many siblings. Then again, I have only been here 5 months while Africans were born and raised here, so my opinion and experience are both incredibly limited.

There seem to be a lot of questions that I get all the time: Do you like Obama? Are you French? You eat pate?!? I also still get yelled at, jeered at, whenever I go into town. Yesterday I went to a neighboring village to help build a house. As I was sticking my hands in the pile of clay to plop another glob to build up the wall of the house along with the rest of the community, an adult in nice looking pagne, his hands clean and sunglasses shiny, stood taking a picture of me with his cell phone without asking, without anything, like I was just here to amuse him. Stuff like this happens continually. Some people here just give me no respect no matter what I do. But the good stuff makes up for the bad, and life continues.

Hope all is well in the States. I don’t understand the French accent on the BBC, which comes in staticky anyway, and my most recent magazine is Newsweek from before my plane landed in Lome. Needless to say, I’m a tad out of touch with what’s happening in my home country, but I hope you all are doing well. You are missed across the ocean. Happy New Year, Bonne Annee!

Hey all, so I’m back in Lome on a quest to create a website for my groupement and get my laptop fixed. Thus far, I have in a way failed to do both those things but hey, that is Togo. The website (google the words ‘GAP Union Fait la Force’ if you want to check it out) has been difficult to organize even with the ‘faster’ connection at the Peace Corps office. My laptop, which managed to break the first week I got here after I bought a new external hard drive and new battery, has now been cleaned up and scoured by the owner of a sketchy looking photocopy booth on the side of a dirt road here in the Kodjavakope quarter of the city. He basically took it all apart, removed all the dirt and hairs (remember when I had long hair?), and called his friend to find out that we wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the random part needed to fix the computer. Sigh… Now the thing works, thanks to his cleaning and tightening of bolts, but I have to be very, very gentle with it. That should get interesting when I climb in the back of a bush taxi to head back to Anfoin this afternoon.

Life is beginning to take on a little more normalcy for me in my village. I’m getting used to not having some of the pleasures of life in the states. No electricity means no lighting and no fridge, which means I either need to get creative at preserving food or lower my quality standards and risk contracting one of the many diseases mentioned in our Safety and Health In Togo book (can you see the acronym…). Friday night getting into the hotel in Lome, which costs only 5000 CFA or $10, I imagined when I stepped under the rusted showerhead to wash all the dirt and grime off that it was a tropical waterfall, kind of like when I try to imagine that I am being buffeted by waves off the shore of the Outer Banks when in reality I am getting bounced around by a bush taxi. However, doing without makes things better when I actually get ahold of them.

I’ve developed a routine for the mornings now. I get up at 5:30AM with the sunrise and take my daily constitutional in the latrine. I bought a toilet seat to set up on the concrete blocks to make the experience less painful, and I have a bag of wood ash from our fire to pour down the hole and cut down on the smell. Afterwards I make my way in my flipflops (we call them tapettes because of the tchwack noise they make when they hit your foot) back to my room while my homologue’s children sweep our dirt courtyard and stare at me like I’m from another planet. I then grab my pagne (the name of cloth here) and my bucket. From our deep well I pull up water filling the bucket and head for the shower. When I first got here I bleached the shower to try and kill the bacteria that grow on the floor, but there is still an interesting looking green algae that manages to survive my continuous antiseptic attacks. The first ladle of cold water wakes me up pretty well, and if the first one doesn’t do the job the second follows close on its heels like an electric shock. I scrub myself with a rough sponge to wipe off the grime from the day before and then hang the pagne on the line to dry. I found that I attract more bugs if I take a shower in the late evening.

I take off to go running after my shower because I’ve found that if I can heat up my body and sweat immediately after cleaning myself my dry skin problems go away! In fact, I haven’t had any problems with my dry skin since I’ve arrived in Togo because the heat kind of assures that I sweat continuously.

During my runs, which at the moment are enormously entertaining for all the people in my village because exercise by a white person is just hilarious, I try to run by the houses of members of our groupement and by the local lycee so I can say hello to the students. When I begin working in the schools, hopefully at the beginning of next semester, I’m going to start at the lycee because the students there have already mastered French. In the elementary schools the local language is a lot more effective. There is a dirt track next to the lycee and I do a few laps before turning around. Some days on my runs I’ll take off on random unexplored dirt roads and surprise people in small villages who have not yet found out that a Yovo (local name for a foreigner) has moved in nearby. I found this great hat to wear at the marche that somehow made it’s way there from the Hard Rock Café in Dubai. On the back it says ‘Love all, Serve all’ which I think is a pretty peaceful slogan.

I’m finally beginning to run again after recovering from my knee injury. The flat dirt paths that wind through the manioc and corn fields and mud hut villages in Maritime are great for this. I’m beginning to consider going to Ghana for the marathon next year if this keeps up. It’s fun to run when everyone say hello to you and there are chickens and goats always scurrying across the paths.

When I get home I usually wipe all the sweat off, hang more clothes on the line to dry (the heat of the sun really helps to get the odor out), and go on my bike into town to buy food for the day. I get bread from a lady behind the thatched wooden shelter where guys with motos hang out waiting to ride people to nearby villages. The word for bread in Mina is ‘kpono’ and I eat it pretty much every morning for breakfast along with citronella tea and hot chocolate. I also eat tons of fruit: papaya, oranges, pineapples, bananas, and the list goes on. However, the other day I bought a couple of apples and they were real expensive because no apples are grown locally. A lot of my fruit is going to eventually come from the trees near our house and from my garden, but that’s a while in coming. I also buy hot peppers, tomatoes, spices, and other things from the ‘marche mommas’ sitting under umbrellas with the vegetables in piles in front of them on little round wooden tables.

After I get done with that I bike back to the house for breakfast and I have time to work in the garden or do something else productive. My homologue, who is my connection to the community and who I live right next to, goes on weekdays to the mud walled school he helped to create over the course of the last 10 years in a nearby village. They are now in the process of finding funding to construct a real building for the school. I’ve been welcomed by the directors at every school I’ve gone to so far except his, where the director insists that I need official papers even to introduce myself to the students or sit in on classes. This is pretty frustrating because I’ve been there twice now and want to get to better understand how teachers teach in this country, but I will get these papers and everything will smooth over.

During the middle of the day, from about 11AM till 3PM, everyone lies on straw mats in the shade and tries not to move in order to escape the heat. Right now we are just beginning the dry season (la saison seche) which people also refer to as the dead season (la saison morte) because it is hard to do anything. Without rain and water cultivating crops is very difficult. For the garden we are going to do only 2 sunken beds for the dry season because to water them I will have to pull water up the same long well I get my shower water from. I’m beginning to get more used to the heat, but I still sometimes have trouble sleeping at night and am always, always drinking water.

We also have started a compost beside the garden, and whenever anyone will listen I explain the structure of compost and its benefits to soil and crops. People in my town spend a large portion of their income buying chemical fertilizer for their fields, and if I could help them find a way to not buy so much they would have more money to spend on things like sending their kids to school. When we finish the fence for the garden, I am planning to start growing basil and tomatoes in one bed (oh Italy) and peppers and onions in the second one. We’ll see how it goes since I have never had my own garden and have thus far little experience with agriculture in general (except for the end part, eating).

Other than that, I study the local language by candle light at night, sleep at night under my mosquito net on a hard cot called a ‘lit picot,’ and am trying to cook more things other than just spaghetti or rice and red sauce for every meal. I have been talking with one of our trainers from my formation in Gbatope about a big reforestation project for the region, and I am pretty excited about starting on that. Every day the women from the groupement pass by on their way to or from town, take whatever they are carrying down from their heads, and say ‘woezoo’ to me, which means welcome. Their smiling faces give me hope for my service and for the future.

So I made two presentations this week, one teaching people Italian and another detailing a huge reforestation project that one of our trainers wants to start in my region. I also took a French test and wrote a short speech in Mina that I will be giving at our swearing in ceremony in less than a week when I become a volunteer! My host parents have bought me a sweet outfit made from African cloth called pagne and I plan to sport it at the ceremony and during the dancing that will follow.

Things are awesome in Togo. I play all kinds of made up games with my awesome 2 year old host brother Godwin who takes a shower in a bucket. There isnt a lot of rain these days so I have been taking showers with about half the water I was at the beginning. It is super hot at night and I cant get to sleep cause I sweat so much under my mosquito net but I think I will begin sleeping on the floor with the spiders and cockroaches to at least cool off. We have no electricity in gbatope, so we are going to light some candles or lanterns tonight and sing songs or play musical chairs or something.

PLEASE send me mail! My address is on my blog. Even if it is just a postcard with 'Ben, I know you exist' I will super appreciate it and respond to you immediately. Please! Miss you all, hope all is well overseas.

Ciao a tutti! Sto per devenire volontario fra meno d'una settimana! Fa troppo caldo qui e é difficile per me a dormire la notte. Questa settimana ho fatto una presentazione sulla lingua italiana per i miei amici e insegnanti! Loro sono molto interessato ma io sto dimenticando la lingua. Per favore, mi scrivete qualche lettera. Il mio indirizzo é sul mio blog. Ciao!

Bonjour tout le monde! I am entering the 8th week of training here in Togo and I'm beginning to feel a little more prepared for the next two years. Yesterday we learned how to make improved cook stoves out of clay, sand, and dried grass followed by a session on the ethnodiversity of Togo. There are over 50 main ethnic groups in this tiny country and hundreds of subethnicities. The main ethnic group at my post in Anfoin is Mina, and the language is very close to Ewe but just different enough to make things frustrating. Since I am leaving soon, I treated my host family in Gbatope to breakfast yesterday: french toast, which was still incredibly easy even though I cooked it over a wood fire in a mud hut. My little 2 year old host brother Godwin ate it up real fast and gave some to his friend, but when I tried to give some to his friend he got scared of me and ran away. Its so easy to scare kids here not trying because many of them have never seen a white person before.

I am looking forward to our swearing in ceremony and to becoming a real volunteer. I have so many plans for projects to help with or start at my post: permagarden and composting, a tree nursery to begin a regional reforestation project, doing agroforestry in the field that my groupment has recently acquired, helping to install a well in a nearby town where the water is 54 meters underground, and souping up my two small rooms with a lippico and a gas stove. Let's hope this all happens! I'm really looking forward to cooking for myself with vegetables I grow, but it's hard to do as one person with a wood stove. Tonight I am going to be spending some quality time with the other volunteers before preparing for a presentation on compost next week. Pretty much everything is in French now, and I feel like I've made some progress in these weeks on talking faster. My grammar could still use some polishing and my American/African accent is not too romantic, but I'm working on it. Write me! I miss you all a lot!

Amici, adesso ho passato otto settimane in Togo! Sto per finire la formazione fra 2 settimane e apre saro' volentario davvero! Maintenant mi sto divertendo molto con gli altri volentieri, e questa sera guarderemo un video insieme a Tsevie dove c'è l'electricità. Africa è tres differente, ma mi sto abituando un po. Tutte le macchine sono in mal condizione, e come in Italia la gente va spesso in moto (ma le moto sono anche in mal condizione). In Italia abbiamo l'olio d'olivo, ma ici usiamo piu spesso l'olio di palma e l'olio d'olivo è troppo costoso a comprare. Non ho ancora cucinato per se stesso ma quando comincio il mio servizio à Anfoin, la mia posta futura, spero di cucinare molto e di avere un giardino con le tomate e il basilico! Oh pesto, oh pizza, oh lasagna! Ricodatevi i giorni quando ho cucinato gli gnocchi per tutti voi! Non piu :( Ma ici il cibo è anche buono ma solo differente. Mon indirizzo è scritto sul mio blog: per favore mi scrivete delle lettere e io faro una risposta perchè vorrei continuare di praticare l'italiano. Mi manca la lingua di Dante! Alla prossima!

I just spent a week visiting my future post in Anfoin and it is way awesome! I'm the only white person in a town of 10000 and that means a lot of attention. I visited a lot of schools and introduced myself to a lot of students, and I think I will be doing a lot in the two years to come. I live in a compound with my homologue, the guy who is helping me integrate into the community, and I will be working with a groupment of women and men most of whom don't speak French. This means I get to learn another language... YAY!!! There is already a really cool project there doing animal husbandry with agoutis, which are crazy looking bush rat things, and there are manioc and corn fields everywhere and coconut trees swaying overhead. Coconuts are awesome! I get up each morning to take a bucket shower with the rising sun, then I go run along a dirt path to run around a dirt track at the lycee. I get lots of looks and there are lots of bugs like BIG spiders and tons of flies but there is also papaya and I eat with my hand and ride around on the back of my homologue's moto out in the bush with the huge helmet the Peace Corps gave me strapped to my head. Three more weeks of training in Gbatope and then I start my service in Anfoin! Miss everybody in the states! Please send candy or pictures or cool articles from the Independant or the Smoky Mountain Times!

Hey everyone, I am in Togo and the internet is not soo great but the country is awesome! I am completing training for natural resource management in Gbatopé north of Lomé with 14 other amazing volunteers. I take a shower with a bucket under a banana tree, live with a Togolese family who feed me pate and fou fou and papayas, and take language lessons in French and the local language Ewe. I miss my family and friends and the 4th grade class I will write letters to while I'm here, but I write you all by candlelight each night while the goats bleet and the roosters crow. Cheers from Togo!

Ciao a tutti! Sono arrivato in Togo e ho cominciato la formazione per il mio programma con il Corpo del Pace: Gestione delle Risorse Naturali. Faccio una doccia ogni mattina sotto un albero con le banane, mangio tantissimi cibi differenti come papaya pate e fou fou, e sto imparando la lingua locale Ewe al nord di Lome a Gbatope! Mi mancate tutti voi: coinquillini, studenti, americani; tutti! Spero che tutto va bene in bella Italia!

There are some things that you never can fully appreciate until they are gone.

Camping with my best friend in Great Smoky Mountain National Park last weekend, I began to realize what some of those things are. As we hiked through the woods at Deep Creek and took a long walk along Sukota ridge, I began to really see the flowers and trees that make up the beautiful forest in the Appalachian Mountains of our state. How beautiful the flowers are, how the light that filters through the forest trees makes a kaleidoscope of the ground so that strolling along the trail feels like I’m turning that kaleidoscope and its crystals are changing shape and size. During our time in the woods I began to really want to know the names of trees and flowers and learn more about them, something which I have never felt previously in all my time living in those mountains and hiking along those trails.

For the second time in my life, just like last year when I was in Italy, I won’t have the opportunity to see the leaves change color over the ridges and down in the valleys this fall. I won’t get to hike and see the reds and yellows and oranges float down in the air around me. I won’t feel the first cool drafts of fall after the hot summer, and I won’t get to go to the music festival near Asheville that I miss so much.

My best friend Alex next to our campfire.

Some things seem to last forever until they are over, but when they are over it seems like they flew past.

Things like my college career, the last week with my parents in our small but cozy house, my year in Italy, the hikes my friend and I took in the woods last weekend, my final travels through Europe to Paris and Amsterdam, a few glorious days on the Outer Banks soaking in the sunshine, a train ride along a river flanked by red tile roofed houses and dolomite cliff faces. I really felt like I had all the time in the world to do everything in college and put it off, I felt like I could travel everywhere I wanted to with a year in Italy no problem and put off going to Assisi, Sicily and Sardinia. I felt like I would have plenty of time in the last month and a half in NC to hang out with my parents and friends. But no, time slips away from me, and I feel now like I do after a long train ride: astonished to have arrived in this spot at this time.

The departure date on which I will take off for Togo from my home in the U.S. draws closer with the passing minutes, and while I know that I will be leaving many things behind over here I try to think of what I will gain when I get across the Atlantic. Instead of thinking of getting on the plane as a stopping point like I did when I left for Italy, I’m trying to think of it as a starting point, a beginning instead of an end.

I will miss people: I will miss my mom and dad so, so much. I will miss my best friends and all the friends who have moved on to careers or jobs or across the country or across the world. I will miss food: oreos, kung pow tofu my dad makes, tomatoes from my mom’s garden, pizza at IP3’s, peanut butter, bagels, granola, pancakes, apple cobbler, BLUEBERRIESSSS, pesto, and the list goes on. Perhaps a lot of this will be in Togo, but it will all be more difficult to make or take longer to find the ingredients and it won’t be the same as eating it with the people I love. I will miss air conditioning and electricity and the green futon that I bury myself in every night at my parent’s house.

But maybe I will find more people to share time with, laugh with, eat and drink with when I get over there, people from a different place who speak yet another language. Maybe I will find food that tastes awful at first but will learn to love by the end. Maybe I will learn to not only cope with the loss of immediate access to the internet or a light switch but learn to enjoy getting up with the sun and going to sleep when it sets. Maybe after a few months of sweating all over myself every night I’ll get used to sleeping with the heat.

Thing is, I don’t know, and I’m not gonna know till I get there.

I’ve got a great job description that goes along with my assignment as a Natural Resource Management volunteer, but apparently all that’s expected of me could change while I’m overseas. I feel like I’m passable at French, but there is no telling until I sit down to dinner with a Togolese family. I feel like I’ve learned a lot in an out of the classroom over my college career, but this is a bit further out of the classroom than I’ve been before.

The fact of the matter is, I’m going. I’ve made up my mind, and yes I can turn back but by jove I’m not going to. I’ve got this vision of my mind of doing research on water purification methods in the developing world in the future, and going to work in one seems like the best next step to take. Most of my friends have graduated now and are beginning to teach children or start jobs or other great things. This is where I’m going, and as far as I can tell it’s the right path for me.

Un po’ in italiano:

Ciao a tutti! Sto per partire per Africa: vado in Togo il 17 settembre. Sono un po’ triste xhe’ mi mancheranno molto i miei genitori e i miei amici negli Stati Uniti, ma vorrei fare bene per il mondo e questa opportunita’ in Africa e’ la prossima cosa da fare.

Sono appena tornado da casa mia nelle montagne di North Carolina e adesso sto festeggiando molto con i miei amici alla mia universita’! La mia vita e’ piu’ facile in questi giorni xche’ posso capire quando altre persone parlano e loro possono capire me, ma mi manca molto la lingua italiana. In Togo dovro imparare parlare francese con i togolesi e un altra lingua locale che non ho mai studiato. Francese, la lingua d’amore, e un po’ differente in Africa, ma dai provero di parlare in modo amoroso dopo il mio soggiorno in Africa.

Ho passato due settimane con i miei genitori nelle montagne di North Carolina, e mentre ho mangiato bene in Italia mangio meglio a casa mia che ho mai mangiato in Europa. Mia madre ha un bellissimo giardino con pomodori magnifici e dei pepi deliziosi (non ho mai imparato pronunciare delizioso). Ho fatto trekking molte volte con mio padre. A lui piace molto guardare gli uccelli e io sto imparando, ma bisogna molto pazienza per farlo.

Il weekend scorso ho fatto campeggio con il mio amico caro a questo posto nel ‘Great Smoky Mountains National Park’ (Il Parco Grande delle Montagne di Fumo???). Abbiamo provato di pescare ma abbiamo fallito! A un certo punto abbiamo visto i pesci nel stagno sotto un ponte. I pesci hanno nuotato vicino la verme alla fine della fila, hanno guardato la verme, e poi hanno girato in modo arrogante e non hanno mangiato la verme! Merda!!! Gli altri pescatori hanno preso moltissimi pesci, ma noi no. Dai, ogni notte abbiamo bevuto moltissima birra e abbiamo cantato alcune canzone americani.

Mi sono laureato adesso dalla Universita’ di North Carolina nel campo delle scienze ambientali. Oggi ho fatto un discorso con molti student del primo anno per dare consiglio di andarci a Bologna, e parto fra quasi una settimana. Ho molto paura e sono triste, ma sono felice di cominciare finalmente il mio soggiorno in Italia.

Per favore, leggete il mio blog! Mi mancate tutti voi, e spero che tutto va bene in Italia!

So I have finally returned to my home state of North Carolina, and my experience of reverse culture shock has been just AWESOME! When I first landed at the airport and was riding in Martin's car back to Chapel Hill, I was absolutely astounded at the size of the vehicles. On the highway I would consistently spot giant Suburbans and even Hummers with the only occupant sitting in the driver's seat. The first time I stepped back into the grocery store I wondered where the pasta aisle had gone and why there were not enormous salamis and hams hanging everywhere in the butcher's corner. Finally, when I went to Elmo's diner last week my friends were wondering when we left the restaurant why I hadn't tipped (tipping is very uncommon in Italy except among tourists)! Where is my mind?

As far as my knee goes, I feel like I am well on the road to recovery. After getting back to Chapel Hill and meeting with my study abroad advisor, I went to my parents house in the mountains of Western Carolina for an appointment with the orthopedic, a meeting with a physical therapist, and a week in which I devoted myself to nothing but getting this knee better. Basically what I have is a bruise and some scar tissue right under my patella, and the therapist gave me some great exercises and advise. I went all the way trying to get it better and bought orthotics, started taking anti-inflamattories and fish oil (like my dad, so I guess I am getting old like him :) ), and began writing romantic sonnets and whispering secrets to my knee in this hope that this influx of positive energy will heal it completely.

The knee was a great excuse to rest and kick back to enjoy some of the amazing fruit and vegetables that are in season right now in Cullowhee, where my mom teaches nutrition at Western. There were homegrown tomatoes, homemade pesto, beets, and blueberries gathered from a farm right near our house where there is a bumper crop and plenty left over even for the bears! When I get settled in Togo I am going to start a garden to grow some fresh fruit so I don't have to bike a long ways to the market as often, but I doubt it will ever get near the beautiful garden my mom has going or the organic garden that our friend has by the stream down the road. Honestly, despite all of the dishes I tried travelling through Italy, Spain, Germany, and the rest of Europe, the food I eat at my house is still the best. Period.

Right now I have come back to Chapel Hill and am trying to get graduation worked out. Transferring courses from Bologna to UNC has become (of course) more difficult than I thought, but at least I have orthopedics to go on as I skip merrily from office to office to meet with advisers and professors. I really enjoyed meeting with my Italian adviser the other day because we had our whole meeting in Italian! Abbiamo fatto tutto il nostro incontro in italiano! Most nights I have been hanging out with friends that I haven't seen for a long time past and will not see for a long time hence. I am trying to connect with them but some have moved on to other states or countries and others are constantly 'impegnato.'

As far as preparing for the Corps (that's right, I'm usin' the slang word like a cool cat), I am planning on making several big purchases (an external hard drive, hiking back pack, new perscription glasses and perscription sunglasses) that are promising to further put to the test the decrepit state of my already withering bank accounts and a million smaller purchases, like massive amounts of ziplock bags or duct tape or spices, dishtowels, seeds. The list is growing, and there are probably more forms to get done for the Corps which I have forgotten in this jumbled mess.

My plan was first, take care of knee, second, get graduated, third, prepare to go to Togo. Plans are made to go astray, but I always feel better when there is a plan. Some of the other volunteers have started finding me on email and facebook, and it is nice to read that they are having many of the same problems I had (when I was in Italy) so that I don't feel like I'm charging into this solo.

Time is flying by, and the day I take off for Togo is getting closer and closer. My mind keeps repeating 'I am going to go to Togo' until I can't say it any longer (it is also a tongue twister). But thinking about it is far different from the real thing. For now, I look at what the next step is to get accomplished and try to head for that.

I have to admit I’m looking forward to the challenge of cultural readjustment. After being in Italy for almost a year, I have found startling differences between this country and the US. It will be strange to come back to a place where there is not a train station right in the center of every town. Everyone talks English! What, you understand me the first time I say something, no way!?! Not having gelato, bread, and groceries less than 2 minutes from my front door will also be hard to adjust to, since my happiness is correlated with the distance between me and food. Harder still will be readjusting to the distances between places and having to take a car or a bus to get just about everywhere. However there are also things that are, at the bottom, the same in the US and Italy. In Italy there are still giant supermarkets where you can buy products from around the world. There are still nice people and mean people, good professors and poor ones, slow food and fast food. Underneath the shiny cover of red tiled houses and narrow streets that has come to be known as Bologna there are a lot of similar economic and personal desires driving what goes on in people’s lives. I have just completed my last trip through Europe with my best friend Martin and am flying home to the States for the first time in a year. I remember the long flight over 12 months ago, the emotional stress and the final decision to jump on the plane, the tired arrival in Bologna and immediate onset of confusion and the struggle to do ten million things at the same time. Now, however, I feel amazingly at peace, like returning to the United States is going to bed after being awake for a long, long time. I know that I will be working a ton when I get back and have a long (very, very long) list of things I need to get done to finally graduate (about that…) and to prepare myself for the Peace Corps. But now I can think. The biggest thing I think about is my knee. Now I have had this knee problem for over 7 months and when I arrive in the US I am going to really have to get it taken care of. It will mean a lot of time, money, and patience, but I am only 22 for crying out loud and I refuse to believe my knee will be like this forever. Problem is, I am supposed to leave for Togo in the middle of September, and if my knee does not get it’s act together by then my departure will be delayed and worst case my service will be cancelled. I informed the Peace Corps about my knee problem a month ago because I would hate to fly to Africa and then find out that I can’t help because this one small part of my body is hurt. My body is a lot like trying to get anything done in Italy: one part breaks down and nothing moves forward. I have an appointment with an orthopedic on Aug. 4 that will decide my fate, and I am feeling pretty scared. Despite the physical pain in my knee and the emotional stress from leaving behind the only country in the world that talks Italian, my last tromp through Europe was amazing. My friend Martin and I spent 5 days in Paris, 1 in Belgium, and 5 in Amsterdam. Paris was full of beautiful views, enormous dinners, and endless hallways packed with art. In Belgium I managed to get my point across in French while tasting some traditional sausage. And in Amsterdam I rode around on the back of a bike while Martin pedaled (with great strength, I might add) and got a moving tour of the buildings lining the canals. All in all, it was fantastic and would take me at least a hundred years to fully describe, so let me just go ahead and give the highlights. Last thing first: Guiness. Last night we were in a hostel in Dublin on a lay over before heading back to the states, and while we were there we went to a 500 year old joint called ‘The Temple Bar’ to have the greatest, best, most astounding, most amazing, proud supporter of the Irish Rugby Team, basically liquid butter beer that I have ever, ever, ever tasted. The swill in the bottle does not even come close to the real Guiness. Martin and I sat down at the bar and the barrista brought over a pint for each of us. After the first sip, which went down like melted sugar mixed with butter and irish whisky and manna that falls from the sky and I don’t know what, I promptly decided to empty my wallet and fill my belly with deliciousness. I then realized that my wallet was already empty and soundly resolved to devote my life to the amassing of great amounts of money with which I will buy great amounts of Guiness. I sipped the beer slowly while me and Martin recounted our trip to each other and listened to the Irish with really red faces talk in an English accent that I did not understand. It thought that only happened with Italian! But oh my goodness that beer was… you really need to find out for yourself. I will have daydreams for the rest of my life about that beer. Other than that Dublin was pretty much a mixing pot for tourists and a wasteland for the locals. Amsterdam, however, was fantastically organized in every way, shape, and form. The apartment where we stayed with one of my Dutch friends was actually an old red shipping container stacked on the bottom of a stack of shipping containers set next to other piles of shipping containers, each outfitted with bathroom and kitchen. While these apartments were a tad small, the advantage was that all the students were set close together. This was nice when, for example, we threw an enormous barbecue party which brought people out of their respective shipping containers and into mad disco craziness.

Friends at the barbecue. Dutch is a pretty crazy language,I would describe it as a scary form of english.

That barbecue was epic in every sense of the world. I danced and drank and talked and cooked and ate until the wee hours of the morning. To ward off the rain we slung enormous tarps over the green area between the shipping container buildings and when the rain poured down it added a nice rhythmic background to the music. One of the guys brought his dj set down from his shipping container and spun mad records with his friend. We all drank good Dutch beer (although not as good as Guiness, oh my goodness) and ate good Dutch sausage while the night wore on and we put up outdoor lights from another shipping container. There is a word in Dutch, ‘hezzeluh’ pronounced his- zeh-luh and untranslatable in english, that describes the cozy, comfortable, happy atmosphere of the party. Unforgettable. Then there was Paris, where I saw the Code of Hammaurabi in the Louvre, Sacre Couer from the Eiffel Tower, and an exhibit at Pompadou, the modern-art museum, on artwork made from the visualization of fantasy worlds. We walked around a lot and drank wine with our French hosts and spent at least half the time on the metro or in a supermarket. The last night we went with this amazing girl Nina and her friends and had a real French dinner over the course of 3 hours and I had: coffee, beer, escargot (snails with some kind of sauce), wine, various cheeses, tartar (raw meat with all kinds of sauces on salad), dessert, more wine and more coffee. Afterward we moved (I don’t know how) to a terrace overlooking the Eiffel tower and at the stroke of midnight all the lights on the tower sparkled like fireflies in the clear night sky. That night we talked until 4 in the morning (a pretty European thing to do) and finally collapsed into bed. It was an amazing trip, but now I feel the need to return to my patria (something Dante was never able to do).I now have an idea of what I should be doing and when after this plane lands in known territory:July 31 - Return to Chapel Hill, NCAug. 3 – Go to Cullowhee, NC for orthopedic appointmentAug. 8 – Return to Chapel HillAug. 11, 12, or 13 – Return to CullowheeAug. 20-24 – Beach with AlexSep. 11 – In Chapel Hill for Carolina Navigators presenter trainingSep. 16 – Leave for pre-service orientation in D.C. (?)Sep. 17 – Take the plane to Togo (?)Send me a message at bybenjam@gmail.com if you would like to meet up when I get back. I will be quite busy getting my courses straightened out to graduate and working to heal my knee but I hope to stay in contact with previous friends and professors. Now I have finished my vacation and I am ready to step out into the daylight.

I'm at a hostel in Dublin right now with my best friend Martin and feeling very nostalgic about my time in Europe. This is my last day on this continent and tomorrow I am flying back across the Atantic to North Carolina. Martin and I have had an amazing trip, but all I can think about is how it feels like forever and no tome at all have passed at the same time. During the plane ride I will try to write and epic story about my last Eurotrip through Paris, Belgium, and Amsterdam, but I just really, really miss Italy right now.

I’m sitting in my Italian apartment two days before beginning my final European jaunt to Paris and Amsterdam with my best friend Martin. Outside the weather is boiling hot, but I know that it will be this hot all the time when I get to Togo. I probably won’t have electricity to run a fan, or a freezer to make ice to chill down the water in my hand. While my departure date is set for the middle of September, Togo still seems a long way off.I’ve gotten a bunch of materials from the Peace Corps explaining the various crises that will befall me right after I start service. I am personally trying to look at them all as cheerful ways to build character J but this is difficult when I am going to have to reroute my entire life again. The manuals I have received clearly delineate many of the problems I am likely to have, such as difficulty to communicate, a high degree of alienation from Togolese society, living out in the bush with no electricity or running water, the weather and food and mosquitos, getting sick, having to bike a long way to get to town, spending long days working in harsh conditions, bearing the failure of many projects I have attempted to start, and the list goes on.However, one thing I didn’t count on was that the problems would begin before I even left Italy. Since last December, I have had a problem with my knee after banging it against the angle of a seat while cooking. Despite many attempts large and small to heal it while I have been in Bologna the problem has not been resolved, and I have decided that it will be much easier to take care of once I am back in the States. I thought it would go away, but it hasn’t and I don’t want to go to Africa if I will simply be useless. I’ve tried resting, a lot, knee braces, seeing an orthopedic, a special laser surgery, stretches, special exercises, the list goes on, but still nothing. Soon after my triumphant return to my patria I will be having a meeting the orthopedic to determine my fate, but until then I can only wait.I feel confident that I can get this knee better by the middle of September and head off for Africa. I am gradually getting used to the fact that unexpected events and problems constantly happen not only in science and in the Peace Corps but life in general. Just yesterday I went to the post office in Bologna’s city center to send a very heavy backpack of books to my home in NC and discovered that they had to be specially wrapped and addressed and weighed with labels in certain places and closed in a certain way so they could be reopened and on and on. Rather than being angry about this, I had been expecting it, and was immediately resolved to the fact that sending these books would be an all-day task. This kind of acceptance would never have happened before Italy! Maybe now I won’t be so surprised when I spend months creating a Natural Resource Management plan for farmers in the semi-arid Northern region of Togo and they simply ignore all my advice.On a more lighter note, I am having a little going-away party tonight with some Italian friends in Piazza Santo Stefano. They will help me finish the beer remaining in my fridge (it usually sits there a long time because my roommates and I always drink only water for meals) and we will talk a little more in the language that I have tried for 11 months to adsorb. I really think that it is too bad Italy did not have more colonies in Africa, South America, or the Orient back in the day so that my language skills would have some benefit outside this country. I heard recently that Eritrea was an Italian colony, but I doubt they speak the language there.Heading off to Paris in a couple days, I will have the opportunity to practice some of my French. Or should I say, j’avrai l’opportunite’ de practicer mon francais! Or is that wrong… ANYWAY, Martin and I will be staying with some French people and hopefully strolling down the Champs Elysees while I say something close to grammatically correct to our hosts. I am excited!There is a lot coming up in my life. Leaving Bologna is the next big event, and while I will be sad to leave the city many of my friends, foreign and Italian, have already taken off for the summer. My plan to take this final trip, graduate in August, and take off in September seemed spectacular, but as I know plans inevitably change or transform or metamophosize into something else completely. All this preparation for the Peace Corps, from big things like taking most of the semester to learn French to small things like setting myself up with a teacher and class to write to while I’m in Africa, seem to mean nothing if this knee does not get better. But I will thwart it out, for mine is a heart made of iron!Can’t wait to return to the U.S. and see what reverse-culture shock is like. Should be interesting…

While here in Italy, I have been accepted to the U.S. Peace Corps and will be leaving a short time after returning from Italy. I will be flying out of Bologna on July 19 to join my best friend Martin in Paris for one last trip around Europe. We will spend five days 'dans les rue de Paris', then head to Amsterdam to bike along canals under trees swaying in the breeze, and finally take a plane back across the Atlantic to the States, which at the moment feels like a foreign country to me. I will arrive on August 1 and be in NC for six weeks. In that time I will graduate from college, fill out all kinds of forms, get equipped in preparation for service, and say goodbye to friends and family before going to serve in Africa for 27 months. This is the biggest and most important decision I have made in my entire life, and while here in Italy I have thought considerably about why I want to go, what I want to accomplish with this experience, and where it might take me in the future.

I am 22 years old. I have up to this point been very, very fortunate in all the opportunities that life has given to me, starting from when I had food to eat as a baby to the chance to spend an amazing year in Italy. I have not gone a day without eating in my life and have always had medical care for me when I was sick or injured. In all this I am very, very lucky. I am going to Togo to help teach farmers and associations implement sustainable agriculture practices and help develop a natural resource management plan for my assigned community. In Togo, the people have been cutting down the forest so that they can cook food so that they can eat it. Here in Italy I easily turn on my stove with a lighter to make my moka in the morning. I want to take part in addressing these problems with deforestation so that the future generation of Togo will be better off. In short, I will be going to a very far away place to help with a cause I believe in, and I am ready to go.

Togo is located on the West coast of Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east, and Burkina Faso to the north. The coastal region on the southern end of the country is quite humid, but the land gets drier as one goes north towards the Sahara Desert. The biggest city is called Lome', and that is where I will fly into in the middle of September for a three month pre-service training. From talking with previous volunteers, I know that Lome' is quite developed and almost cosmopolitan, but farther afield things start to change.

For most of my time in Togo, I will be living in a hut with no running water or electricity. I will have to learn a local language in addition to the French I am studying now in order to successfully communicate with the people in my village. I will have to get myself to the nearest large town to buy supplies, and I will have internet access less than once a week.

Italy is different, Togo is REALLY different. I may be the only white person in my village, and at the start my lack of abilities with the local language will make communication difficult. Things are going to proceed a lot slower than anything has in Italy or North Carolina, and many of the various agroforestry, sustainable agriculture, or environmental education projects I take part in will go at a snail's pace. Many will fail. Here in Italy, I feel like I stand out like a sore thumb when Italians ask me where I am from and why I came to their country. In Togo this gut feeling will be a hundred times worse.

But I know that all of these things take time. It is not possible to run into these country towns with a million suggestions and expect immediate change inside or out. I hope in the Peace Corps I will be able to develop the patience that it takes to work in a developing country so that when I pursue a career in water sanitation and purification in the future I will be able to successfully conduct research in the parts of the world where I feel it can help the most.

Ironically, food tends to occupy my thoughts these days. Nearing the end of my stay here in Italy, I realize how delicious the food has been not only here but also for all of my life growing up in the United States. When I take off for Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer on September 17 there will be a million other things on my mind, but for now, but right now visions of different plates and drinks I have tried in the last year are parading past my eyes.

I came to Italy over ten months ago, and since then I have made a tour not only of the country but of the cuisine. Lasagna, gnocchi, passatelli, pasta, wine, cheese, bread, coffee, it just does not stop. There seems to be such an endless supply of ingredients in the country that at times it can be hard to imagine that there are people that don't have a super market near them, that don't have an enormous supply of vegetables or a panetteria right outside the front door. Over my stove there is an army of spices like curry, oregano, and garlic that I use to make the food taste even more delicious

In Togo, the typical meal is called 'pate.' It is basically a corn paste, and often a hot spicy sauce is poured over it. Another common dish is rice and beans. Vegetables and fruits are seasonal and can be bought at local markets, but are likely more difficult to get than in Bologna. I am truly going to miss the wine and cheese I have had here in Bologna. It is hard to realize how much something means to you until it is gone.

The Peace Corps gives me a monthly stipend that will be enough to live safely and with proper sanitation in the town where I will be sent after the three-month pre-service training. It will give me a mountain bike so that I can get to and from the community where I will be, and there are going to be many other volunteers in the country for support. Peace Corps has been working with the Togolese people since the 1960's, so it really isn't as if I'm headed out into a wilderness with no path or guidance.

I've talked with previous volunteers and now have a wealth of information about what life might be like for me in Togo. Many of the inhabitants are poorer, and I will have to watch my back whenever I am traveling or working to not get my stuff stolen. Transportation across the country is often by bush taxi or bus, and while many of the main roads are navigable the smaller roads are riddled with potholes and insane during the rainy season. In my community I hope to live with a host family to help me learn the language and better adjust to the culture, and I am going to have a garden to begin growing plants and to help me connect with the people around me.

Last week I finished my last exam here in Bologna of my entire college career, (French) and I am hanging out for two weeks and thinking about my future before taking a final jaunt across Europe. While from the writing above it may seem like I have a wealth of knowledge about what I am getting myself into, I have not seen anything yet. It is one thing to write about it and quite another thing to do it. For my whole life I have been writing in application and scholarship essays about how I want to go to help developing countries using my education and experience in environmental science, and I believe going to Togo is the first step towards doing that.