January 24, 2011   In the local languages here, the names of days depend on what day of the week is market day. There will be market day, day before market day, day after market day, etc. During more recent bike travels to visit other volunteers in villages in this region, I got a better [...]

Here are excerpts from the benefit concert we put on last weekend to try to gather community support for the construction of Cultural Center Espoir.

We are busy preparing the kids for a benefit concert here in Kanté scheduled for next week – percussion, music, dance, and some English speaking, too. On the Peace Corps Partnership website, it says that we have currently raised $1,115 of the $36,614 needed to construct the center. If you have not yet done so, [...]

November 11, 2010 I feel so naïve in my earlier reaction to finding a hen laying eggs near my doorstep – wow, what a miracle, what a good thing for me, I thought, with only a twinge of guilt for the feelings of the hen herself, going to the trouble of laying and incubating only [...]

Navarro’s friend Arenga thinks it is so interesting that in the US we have institutions for crazy people. Here, they just wander the streets, saying and doing what they want, just maybe having to be shooed and shushed out of certain establishments, like Navarro’s bar, every once in a while. There is one fou, as [...]

September 15, 2010 Since my return from the US, the difference between my status and the status of an average Togolese has been all the more apparent: traveling from excess to scarcity makes you even more aware of things that are lacking, plus more appreciative of the ability to travel between the two. The rainy [...]

We need your help to make the Espoir Cultural Center a reality! Please take a moment to read a summary of our project on the Peace Corps Partnership website and consider making a tax-deductible contribution. Also, please support us on our new page on Facebook.

When you want to buy something to eat here on the street, which is a very common thing for Togolese to do, you are asked how much you want to buy. Not how much food, but what price. For instance, rice. You can’t ask for a plate of it, but have to sort of guess [...]

I awoke this morning to sounds of a marching band going up and down the section of the route nationale near my house. A marching band? In Togo? And at just after dawn? Well, it must be a celebration of some sort, I thought. A holiday I wasn’t informed about. Only at school did I [...]

“The Animals Sick from the Plague” by Jean de la Fontaine, a Frenchman writing in the 17th Century, but whose stories relate well to modernity in Africa according to M. Bayamna: A group of animals gets together to discuss their problem: they are sick from the plague. The lion, the king, says, okay, we are [...]

January 3, 2010 Yesterday I was sitting on the stoop talking with my host father and Giselle when a caricature of a person a la Lord of the Rings or some scary animated film came into the yard, a youth, perhaps a teenager, but wrinkled looking, with skinny arms, a dramatically curved spine, yellow eyes, [...]

December 6, 2009 After our swearing-in ceremony and two days of frantic shopping in Lome, we arrived at our sites yesterday. The van that took us here was loaded super high with all of our group’s stuff—mattresses, gas tanks, cots, plastic water buckets, suitcases, bicycles, etc. It is nice to have a chair to sit [...]

November 8, 2009 I returned to my host family in Tsevie today after our weeklong site visit, previously called “de-myst,” as in, demystification. We were introduced to our homologues and dropped off at our new houses in towns and villages all over the country, many of us toting borrowed kerosene lamps and stoves, to survive [...]

October 2, 2009 After our morning classes, I arrive home for lunch and then take off my clothes and lay sprawled out on my bed in my underwear, nearly paralyzed from the heat for over an hour….I can see why productivity levels in equatorial countries are generally much lower than in countries with colder climates. [...]

Women in patterned wrapped fabrics posed perfectly upright and relaxed on the back of whizzing motorcycles, unhelmetted, touching only lightly and unconcernedly the shoulder of their husband or boyfriend in front, sometimes a child strapped into the fabric between. It gets dark at 6:30 about, and people go to bed soon after, especially where there [...]