It’s January already!?

I’m definitely getting back into my groove in N’digbe after an amazing Christmas and New Years. There have been plenty of project opportunities both with partners in village, and with other Peace Corps volunteers.

 

I had the opportunity to attend another volunteer’s “girl camp”–a weekend full of confidence-building activities, health talks and self-empowerment for middle-school girls. I had such a great time—it reminded me of being a Girl Scout counselor at Camp Mountaindale! We sang songs, played ice breakers, painted each other’s nails, and listened to a panel discussion on the life stories of successful Togolese women. I left Sunday afternoon excited and motivated for similar upcoming activities, like the Woman’s Wellness and Empowerment Conference.

Without camps and conferences like these, Togolese women never have the opportunity to share ideas and feelings exclusively with other women. Girls can say whatever they want without having to worry about men interrupting them, correcting them, or sexually harassing them. At the girl’s weekend, they listened to sessions about motivating their community, child trafficking, sexual harassment, HIV/AIDS, abstinence, and confidence.

 

I loved the presentations by Togolese women, such as one by Tanti, an organizer for Peace Corps camps and a past participant herself. There was also a university student named Marie. I am so impressed that she’s made it all the way to university—quite a challenge in Togo! And she’s a great speaker, full of ambition to become an English teacher, and to help younger girls accomplish similarly awesome things.

 

Now I am helping a woman from my village with her application for the Woman’s Wellness and Empowerment Conference—the CVD President. As CVD president she has successfully raised money in the village for electricity lines, started a new annual festival « La Fete de Retrouvailles ,» created a woman’s agriculture group, and sustained the energy of the CARE group « Femmes Lumieres. » In addition to these activities, she constantly pursues opportunities to improve her family’s economic situation through AGR’s such as peanut brittle, raising guinea pigs, and cooking bean beignets.

 

She is an amazing lady and I am so glad she’s interested in attending. I think she will be a great participant, because she is full of ideas, not afraid to share her mind. She has told me that ending underage pregnancies is one her top priorities, but she is not sure what else she can do other than share methods of family planning. Hopefully both of us can go in March, her as a participant, and me, to help with health presentations.

 

Otherwise, there have lots of smaller activities going on in N’digbe. It is a great balance between short-term small projects like health talks and baby weighing and home visits, and planning for long-term projects like the Woman’s Conference. We had 70 women come to baby weighing this month. I talked about enriched bouille (porridge) for underweight babies, and a Red Cross volunteer (a Togolese woman from my village) gave a more in-depth talk about malaria prevention.

 

Now it’s time for a reunion/meeting in Pagala, where we’ll be learning about health topics along with our Togolese homologues. I’m bringing Ernest. Of course he’s really excited, and I’m equally excited for him to meet lots of my volunteer friends!

 

P.S. Thanks to cousin Michelle for her package! It was full of thoughtful goodies like stationary, recipes, a new journal, a scarf, and other cool stuff. For anyone thinking about sending a package, just want to let you know that I have everything I could possibly need. But if you still would like to help out, please consider making a donation to the Woman’s Conference so the project can take place as planned!  https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=693-389

Christmas abroad, New Years in Togo

It’s the beginning of a new year, and my eighth month in Togo. I’ve been up to a lot these past months—graduating college, moving to Togo, two-month training, and five months at post as a health volunteer. I really appreciated the chance to see my friends and family over the holidays. I saw my parents for Christmas, and we spent a week enjoying each others company, eating yummy food, and playing lots of Settlers of Catan (and other games). There was so much to talk about, like all the things about Togo that I don’t have time or space to write about on my blog!

When I left Togo, I half expected to feel culture shock upon entering the developed world. The airport alone is full of modern, “fancy” stuff like flushing toilets, real drip coffee, ice cream, unlimited food, escalators, and other modern conveniences. Since I had three hours before my parents arrived, I had some Ha-gen-Daaz ice cream right off the plane!

I didn’t feel culture shock, as in oh now how do I use a flushing toilet again!?, but it is hard to believe that two places like Spain and Togo can exist on the same planet. The whole time I was in Spain, I felt that I had somehow imagined or dreamt the past few months in Togo. And when I returned to Togo, it seemed like I had dreamt my vacation with my parents.

It was very nice to eat nice food, go shopping, stroll down the pretty streets of southern Spain, and stay in a real hotel room. After being in Togo, I feel like I appreciate all of these things that I might have otherwise taken for granted. Nothing in Spain seemed overly inefficient since I had already tested the limits of my patience in a Togolese bush taxi. My parents’ suitcases didn’t make their flight, but I was surprised the baggage eventually turned up unopened and damage-free.

My mom drove a rental car for our day trips along the Mediterranean coast, which felt like heaven after being squeezed in a nearly broken down 11-seat van. We visited caves, attempted to go geo-cacheing, and visited tiny, picture-perfect Andalucian “villages” (more like luxurious towns now that I think about it!). I was the navigator, for the most part successfully, so I go to sit shotgun.

Spending Christmas with my parents was fun, but leaving them was not so fun. We flew to CDG in Paris together, then I tried to go with them to the gate but I had a boarding pass for a different area. We said goodbye very hurriedly, and for the first time I didn’t want to go back to Togo.

I have always understood the hardships of living in Togo, but I never explicitly wanted to leave. Life here is an adventure, and I’m having fun the whole way. But leaving beautiful, “civilized” Spain for 20 months in Togo was not as easy as I initially assumed it would be. I got on my plane for Lome (after eating some macaroons and coffee in the Paris airport), waited at the gate with groups of excited “voluntourists” and Togolese returning home, and flew back to Togo. When I got off the plane, there was so much humidity that it fogged up my glasses.

By the next morning, I had already started readjusting to life in Togo: the weather, the crowded streets of Lome, the annoying kids (and adults) shouting yovo, yovo, and the lack of variety in food. But I was also with friends—Peace Corps friends, my host family in Gbatope—and I had a great New Years with both groups of people. (Side note: finally saw the new and last Harry Potter movie, yay!) I shared some chocolate with my host family, which they loved:

My work partners are anxious and ready to start working on new projects—working in the schools, with the women’s groups, baby weighing in other villages, and a regional women’s conference to empower and build confidence for Togolese women. Going back to my village will also require readjusting, but I think I am more than up for the challenge!

This year, I will try to write more about what day to day life is like in Togo, since many people tell me they still can’t imagine living in Africa I’ll also take more pictures of things I’ve grown to take for granted, like water in plastic bags, yummy street food, and the ubiquitous tiny stores called boutiques.

I am so thankful for everyone’s support—letters, phone calls, and packages—you have no idea how much they mean to me! I keep an envelope with all of the letters, notes, and postcards that I have received. If you want a letter from me (trust me, I have lots of time for lengthy letter writing), then just send me your address!

World AIDS Day Celebration

December 1st, the Journee Nationale de Lutte Contre SIDA, is an important opportunity to highlight the HIV/AIDS crisis in Togo. According to UNICEF, the HIV prevalence rate in Togo is 3.2%–and more than a hundred of these people live in my prefecture in Plateaux Region. Brandon Avery (GEE) and I organized a parade in his village of Apeyeme, the prefectorial capital, to make Danyi’s residents aware that they have the power to help stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. The parade was also a great community tie-in after our two-day MAP formation for community leaders of Apeyeme’s quartiers.

The World AIDS Day parade included members of many different at-risk populations, including gendarmes, moto drivers, apprentices, and high school students. We marched together from the hospital to the community center to the music of a fanfare group. At the end of the parade, representatives of the DPS, prefet, and local radio station were waiting. During the parade, we pinned red ribbons to people’s shirts and handed out about 400 Protector condoms, which were provided by PSI.
Brandon and I presented more information about HIV/AIDS as well as ISTS during the two-day MAP formation. In addition to holding information sessions about the ABCD methods of prevention (abstinence, bon fidelite, condoms, and depistage), we held a condom demonstration and dispelled funny myths about condoms.

Afterwards, the 12 MAP participants had to show off what they learned with a fun condom relay race. Each participant had to correctly and quickly place a condom on a wooden penis. Everyone had fun, laughing at first, but ultimately intent on trying for victory. I was very happy with the participants also had serious questions about female condoms, which can be found free in Danyi’s hospital.
The most important lesson we took away from the three-day HIV/AIDS and gender equality bonanza was how great Togolese counterparts can make a project run that much more smoothly. Brandon works very closely with an NGO in Apeyeme, and the NGO’s staff was instrumental in organizing the event. Additionally, the assistant d’hygiene at the hospital helped throughout the process with planning and execution, and personally gave presentations on ISTs and HIV. He originally came to Brandon and I with the idea for a World AIDS Day event. I think that together we pulled off a powerful reminder of the fight against HIG/AIDS, which will benefit many different portions of Apeyeme’s population.

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New Photos!

Check out photos from the World AIDS Day event, Thanksgiving, paragliding, etc.

Vaccinating kids for the WHO’s polio campaign.

November: Dry Season Begins

After in-service training, I’ve been excited to start working on projects in village. Life seem surprisingly busy now, compared to my first few months spent getting to know N’digbe. There was also Thanksgiving, which I spent with volunteers at a hotel.

Each week, I’ve held English Club at the middle school. I wasn’t planning on doing anything fancy with the students since they are still learning the basics. I taught them songs like “Row Row Row Your Boat,” “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” and games like “Duck Duck Goose.” I’m glad they can learn English in a fun way in my English club, because their typical school day is not very fun at all. Teachers scream at students rather than encouraging them. All of the assignments are based on pure memorization and the middle schoolers chant back facts and figures. They don’t have any chances for creativity. So I hoped that English Club would be a chance for something new and exciting. But attendance has been dwindling each week—from 25 the first class, to just three girls. I knew that most students are too busy with work in the fields, homework, and chores to do extra-curriculars, so I tried not get discouraged. Instead, I taught my games and songs to just those three girls. They were shy at first, but by the end they were laughing and playing along too. More and more kids showed up, as they saw how much fun we were having. Soon enough, the whole English Club was assembled on the lawn in front of the schoolroom.

I also participated in the World Health Organization’s polio vaccination campaign. All Peace Corps health volunteers were invited to help supervise the campaign. Since we are volunteers, not trained medical staff, we normally can’t vaccinate or provide any medical treatment. During this campaign, we could help supervise the Togolese campaign members hired by WHO for the weekend.

I first helped my health clinic staff while they vaccinated the children in our own village. They divided into teams and knocked on every door in N’digbe to find all of the children under five years old. Everyone in the village knew ahead of time that the polio vaccines were coming; someone’s job is to walk around the village ringing a gong and make announcements. So the moms were standing ready outside their houses, expecting our visit. A community health volunteer (ASC) filled out a survey—asking questions about ages, medical history, etc.–while the nurse dropped the oral polio drops into the children’s mouths. I helped round up the children, make sure the ASC did his job, and that we didn’t miss any houses. In the past, campaigns failures have included misreporting data, skipped households, and improper distribution of vaccines. As Peace Corps volunteers, we added an extra pair of eyes and ears to keep the campaign on track.

The rest of the week, I worked with some temporary WHO campaign volunteers from Lome—university students and government workers. They receive a stipend for helping monitor the polio vaccination campaign. Each morning, they picked me up in N’digbe and we drove throughout Danyi in a rented bush taxi. We visited as many of the villages in the region as we could, surveying 10 households per village. They carried polio drops in case we found any children not vaccinated. It’s easy to tell—children who are vaccinated have a mark on their left hand with indelible marker from the volunteers.

I really enjoyed working on the campaign because I got to see so much of Danyi. We traveled out to the middle of nowhere, and not in an uncomfortably full bush taxi! I also enjoyed working with the two Togolese volunteer supervisors. It was interesting to see affluent Togolese people, as my village friends live with much less than Americans are used to. But these students had blackberries, Facebook accounts, and aspirations to travel outside the country. Therese especially impressed me. She told me how she’s waiting to find a husband until after she’s farther along in her career. She said that she knows she’s past the age that most Togolese women get married, but she has no intention of depending on a man for money or a home.

This month I had the amazing opportunity to go paragliding! There is a French couple who spends part of the year in N’digbe and they take tourists paragliding. To be a friendly neighbor, I stopped by their house and said hi. And they offered me the chance to go paragliding! It was awesome! The wind carried us through the air for just under an hour. It felt like a combination between riding a boat on rough seas and airplane turbulence—but I didn’t feel queasy at all. The houses, fields, and people looked tiny below me—600 to a thousand meters below. We floated by the mountains, admired the clouds, and eventually landed in the American Baptist Hospital’s airport landing strip (no longer in use). The doctor at my health clinic has also been paragliding with the French couple—they often take Togolese people from the village for free—and he said it best: wouldn’t it perfect to just be hung up in the sky like that?

Thanksgiving was the perfect end to the month. A ton of volunteers met up at a hotel in central Togo. The hotel provided the turkey, and we brought side dishes. I brought some gravy. More ambitious volunteers brought pumpkin pie (there was one whole pie for every two volunteers), stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberries, and apple pie! Yumm, I ate a ton and even enjoyed a cup of coffee at the end of the meal, just like home. Of course I missed my family lots; it was strange not to be with my parents since I’ve spent every other Thanksgiving with them.

Trip to Badou and IST

Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/kl9100a/TripToBadouAndIST

All of the in-country traveling I’ve been doing these past few weeks has inspired me to write about the travel conditions in Togo. I first visited another volunteer in Badou, a larger village in the northern part of Plateau. I shadowed her to learn about what kinds of projects I can work on in my own village. However, I was not looking forward to the trip. I would have to leave my mountain, survive the dangerously bumpy road from Adeta to Atakpame (2 hours) and then another road from Atakpame to Badou (4 hours!). I heard from some people in Ndigbe that there was another option… a “secret” road accessible only to motos that crosses the Danyi Plateau and arrives directly in Badou. I was prepared to make the two hour trip on a moto when I discovered a Peace Corps car that could give me a ride!

Compared to bush taxis or motos, the Peace Corps vehicles are pure amazingness. The drivers are hilarious and extremely nice. And the cars are pure luxury… Land Cruisers with leather seats, seatbelts, air conditioning, radios and, best of all, my own seat! In fact, I had the entire back seat to myself! Since the Peace Corps cars are so well maintained, we took the secret shortcut road to Badou. The trip was as bumpy as the Dinosaur Ride at DisneyWorld, but I hardly even noticed because I was so happy.

From Trip to Badou and IST

I really enjoyed spending time with another Peace Corps volunteer and seeing how she has become well integrated. Plus, Badou is a gorgeous city, with misty mountains on the horizon and cool, rainy evenings. We cooked some delicious food together—homemade pizza, chocolate chip pancakes, and pasta with pesto. One night, her neighbor slaughtered a sheep and gave us a leg to cook for ourselves! I was very impressed with her generosity, but I had no idea how to prepare this huge piece of raw meat. We ended up boiling it for a long time and then simmering it in tomato sauce, yum!

From Trip to Badou and IST

The amazing Peace Corps car was not available for a trip back to village, so I took a motorcycle. It ended up being a three hour trip! I think my back muscles and legs are going to be super strong as a result. Although my shoulders ached by the end, I found riding a moto much more enjoyable than sitting in a cramped, hot bush taxi. I loved looking at the scenery and tiny villages along the tiny, twisty mountain road.

After Badou, it was time for a week of in-service training with the other volunteers from my stage. Once again, I lucked out and got a ride in the Peace Corps car to the training site! It was great being with my friends from stage, some of whom I hadn’t seen since stage three months ago. It felt like being at summer camp, because we stayed in shared rooms in little cabins, ate every meal together in the dining hall, and spent all day, every day together in sessions on technical information like the malaria campaign, how to train health workers, and how to start a latrine project.

From Trip to Badou and IST

We took field trips to see nearby volunteers projects and get ideas for our own villages. Us health volunteers visited a middle school in the village to practice giving health talks to school kids. I led a condom race with the kids in my group! Other volunteers gave talks about good communication skills, HIV/AIDS, and safe sex practices. (To celebrate Halloween, the volunteers from my stage also had a costume contest!)

From Trip to Badou and IST

After sharing our ideas and thoughts with each other, we’re all headed back to our villages. There aren’t any clear rules or strategies for starting working in village. Each volunteer has a unique situation, and it is up to each one of us to find out what our community wants and how we can meet their needs. I’m feeling overwhelmed with information and ideas, but excited to start being productive!

From Trip to Badou and IST

Doing some work in village

From Togo Togo Togo

You may be wondering when am I going to get around to doing some work, instead of looking at waterfalls and eating yummy food with friends. Fair question, but I haven’t started any projects these first three months at post because this time is reserved for site study. I have questions to answer about my community—what are the resources, what is the population, what is the history—and at the end of October we have a conference and share ideas for implementing projects.

I am feeling really good about project ideas for Ndigbe. As I mentioned earlier, my homologue and I want to work with the middle school and talk about family planning to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The doctor at my health clinic was also really enthusiastic about this idea. The women’s group in village is excited about learning income generating activities, and we already had a session on how to make neem lotion, a natural insect repellant. Finally, the director of the middle school is hoping that I can help out with the English club after school, and hopefully I can squeeze some health topics in there too.

From Togo Togo Togo

The neem lotion session was really fun! Another volunteer visited and helped teach the Femmes Lumieres how to make an easy and cheap insect repellant. The women in village are very excited because they want to sell neem lotion at the market to earn more money. Everyone had a great time mixing up neem lotion and smearing it on the other members of the class. At the end, everyone took home some of the lotion as well as some neem leaves. I was super impressed that the women took responsibility for bringing all the materials needed for neem lotion—one woman brought the soap, one woman brought the vegetable oil, etc. Then the Femmes Lumieres told me they wanted to earn money not only for themselves, but to raise money to finance trips to nearby villages and teach them about hygiene, sanitation and malaria prevention. Wow! That’s really cool of them! I think it would be awesome to expand the Femmes Lumieres to nearby villages that aren’t lucky enough to have their own Peace Corps volunteer.

(This week I also took a sightseeing trip to visit the monastery nearby, which is very beautiful! The monks and nuns make their own yummy jams, yogurt, and wheat bread. We had a super delicious lunch of chicken, mashed potatoes, and salad.)