Friday, July 17, 2009

Happy Birthday!

So it has been a busy week for birthdays. I still don't have a phone, so this is the best I can do by way of felicitations.

Cheri: I heard the party was a great time. Sorry I missed it. For a present, I promise to post an update as soon as I get my first Togolaise haircut.

Theresa: I hope it was great and that you are enjoying your last few weeks in Roma. Twenty-six is nowhere near thirty!

Allison: Just be glad Carl lives in another state now, so you don't have to share.

Eric: Your birthday is not quite here, but this is my pre-emptive strike because I am going to post tomorrow, and I don't know when I can update again. All this time in French class here reminds me of you and Mr. Giggy. It was more fun with you.

Carl: Last but not least, my brother is 27 yesterday, and if I'm not mistaken he is on his first tour right now. You can find Carl Pike on myspace. It is nearly all I listen to, and that's only partly because it is the only music on my computer. Congrats, bro, the new HP is the best gift anyone could ask for.

We Didn’t Start the Fire…Or At Least I Didn’t, But It Wasn’t Because I Didn’t Try (July 11)

A warning: the more earth friendly among you may find this entry disturbing. If you find descriptions of your friends performing environmentally unsavory acts unpleasing, you may want to avert your eyes for the following paragraphs.

Okay, that’s only kind of a joke. Many of you know that I was far from the greenest person you know when I was living in the US, but I did my best. I could never quite escape my addiction to giant Diet Cokes and chocolate chip cookies from McDonald’s. (It is, after all, the perfect snack for only $1.49.) I did, however, make and effort to show a little love to our Earth. We do only get one, so as Brian Gurley would say, I appreciate things like NOT plastic bags. Plus, being green is kind of a little cool in the US, and I am nothing if not kind of a little cool. I mean, even my parents recycle these days.

Well, the green wave has not yet hit Togo. Here, everything you’d ever want to buy and a lot of things you don’t come in little black plastic bags. When you are finished with whatever was in the bag (likely more bags), you have two options: you can throw it on the ground where you stand (the more popular choice) or you can take it home to throw it away in your trash can. Of course, if you are me, you are likely to realize that you have been exercising option two for three weeks or so, and the weekly collection doesn’t seem to be happening, so there is a moderately sized mound forming in the corner of your room. What does one do with said mound? Easy. You burn it.

Now, while I didn’t find this practice particularly appealing at first, I figured there are really only so many battles a person can fight at once. If I’m going to fight the family planning and nutrition battles, I might just have to leave the burning plastic and Styrofoam fight for the next guy. And, I cannot lie; part of me expected to feel a certain liberation in watching everything I didn’t want anymore going up in smoke, in being decidedly un-green. SPOILER ALERT. This dream did not come to fruition.

The truth is I have been nervous about burning my trash since I got here. They told us that trash is a very personal thing here, so you should try to burn it in private. I live in a host family with seven other people, so privacy is not really a possibility, but earlier this week, my host parents were away for a couple of hours, so it was just me, three of my sisters and my niece at home. I don’t know how much more private it gets. I asked my 14 year old sister where the family burned their trash, and she immediately became interested. This was unfortunate for my privacy wish but what can you do? Visitor trash is big news in my little village, and it quickly became a family affair. We carefully covered everything with the kerosene I had purchased that morning, and I lit a match. We all watched in anticipation as nothing happened. The match just went out. I lit another match. Nothing. More kerosene and six more matches later, still nothing. At this point, my host sister picked up the bottle of kerosene and smelled it. Then, to my horror, she took a drink and proclaimed it not kerosene at all but “bizarre water.”

My sisters were livid. I told them that I had just purchased the kerosene in town, and they couldn’t believe the vendor would take advantage of a visitor. In a matter of seconds everybody, including the baby, was ready for a showdown downtown. Fortunately, I had a moment of insight. I picked up the kerosene and tasted it to discover that it was, in fact, neither kerosene but Crystal Lite Peach Mango Green Tea, which I had mixed up after lunch to help mask the bleach in my water. Tasty. I meekly called off the confrontation and produced the actual kerosene, which, in my defense, looked exactly the same. (They are both stored in a big used water bottle.) I think my family cannot believe how completely inept I am.

So we took a second stab at burning everything, which proved even more difficult now that I had doused everything in water, but the six year old had fun lighting match after match in the attempt. (It is okay to let Kindergarteners play with matches here because even they can burn their own trash without incident.) The whole affair wasn’t finished for two hours, giving the rest of the family plenty of time to come home and laugh at me. At least they still find me entertaining. At post, I think I’ll just bury my trash. In the meantime, I’m coloring the kerosene bottle red.

To my family:

Have a great vacation. I wish I could be with you, but I am thinking about all of you, and I love you very much!

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Fourth of July

Today, we are having a big party with my whole stage. It’s going to be super awesome, and I get to cook for the first time since I’ve been here, but I will write about it another time. Today, I have only one message, and that is

CONGRATULATIONS RACHEL AND BEN!

My lovely cousin Rachel is getting married today, and I am not there, but I don’t need to be in Grand Rapids to know that she looks absolutely beautiful, and the day is perfect. I wish I could be there, Rach, but know you are in my thoughts. You can expect a lovely gift from Togo in roughly three months. They don’t call it snail mail for nothing.
Namon Sweet Home (July 2)

After weeks of anticipation and days of endlessly discussing the pros and cons of each potential site, we finally received our post assignments this week. I’ll be heading to the northern half of Togo to a village called Namon. The bad news is that there is no real road that leads to the village, the average temperature during the dry season is 35 degrees Celsius, and three months of the year it is plagues by terrible dust storms. The good news is it will be far less humid. I’m really clinging to the humidity thing as my ray of hope.


Seriously, I am very excited. The post will involve a lot of nutrition and family planning work. In the northern part of Togo, in particular, child nutrition is a huge problem, and there is plenty of opportunity to educate families on ways to get better nutrition from the food already available. Family planning is a problem for just about all of Togo. It is estimated that less than 10% of women use birth control on a regular basis, and a lack of spacing between births is the number one indicator of both infant and maternal mortality. Additionally, large family size contributes greatly to malnutrition, but just like in the US, it is a delicate issue for any number of religious and social reasons, so among a myriad of other things, I will be study how to tread lightly but still aim for efficacy.

Other fun facts include that Namon is home to between two and three thousand people, does not, of course, have electricity or running water, but it is only 20k from another volunteer who does have both. I’m not sure where I can get internet access, but the maximum distance is 70k which is completely doable a couple of times a month. Finally, I will definitely have cell phone reception, which is wonderful. (Or will be once I have a phone again. Many of you know that my phone broke a couple of weeks ago, and I am having trouble getting a new one.) If you Google Namon, I don’t think you’ll find anything, but it is 70k from Kara, which is a pretty big city, and if you are interested, it should be fairly easy to find on a map.

So two weeks from Saturday, I get to go for a visit. This should be a lot of fun because the site has had Peace Corps volunteers before, but they weren’t health volunteers, so I have the benefit of their being familiar with volunteers and what we do without the worry of trying to discover what the previous volunteer has already covered. I’m psyched. After the week long visit, I come back to our training site for four more weeks, and then on August 20th, I and my 24 fellow staigieres will be sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers.

Field Trip

Friends, it has been a busy week. After nearly four weeks of clamoring about how bored we are at our training site, Peace Corps let us have two outings in one week. It was amazing. The first was to a little village near the coast to see a latrine project. “Emily, what do you mean, latrine project?” you ask. Well, hygiene and sanitation are both a big part of what my job is here in Togo, and finding good ways to get rid of waste is a big part of hygiene and sanitation. One of the projects we are encouraged to do as Health Agents is to help our communities build latrines. When done correctly, they can prevent disease and provide a useful source of fertilizer for crops that are already scarce. I know it sounds gross to use your own poo to grow the food you’ll eat, but people who know about these things promise me that if you do it right, it’s completely safe and a completely smart use of resources.

Anyway, as with a lot of things in Togo, we got off to a late start because we had to wait for one of the teachers to arrive from Lome. (As Peter said, it is like everyone in Togo is on Emily time.) Once we did get on the road, it was quite an adventure. There has been an enormous amount of rain lately, and the roads showed it. We had to stop and get out of the car no fewer than three times to navigate the huge ruts, and once we all got to help push. It was actually a lot of fun except for the fact that I forgot to take any motion sickness medicine. I did not, however, throw up, and I am very proud of that fact. You have to cling to the small things, you know.

Once we got there, the presentation lasted much longer than we had anticipated, and afterward, in true Togolaise fashion, the women of the village insisted on feeding us. (In that way, Togo is not unlike the Midwest.) Long story short, we got home an hour and a half late, and all of our host families were quite worried. They construed this worry by insisting that we eat the lunch they had prepared in addition to the lunch we had just finished eating in village.

The next day, we got to go on a trip purely for pleasure. It was to beautiful lake Togo, but because of the roads, we were only there for about half an hour. Nonetheless, it was nice to get out of our training site and have an afternoon free from French class, the new bane of my existence. The way home was where the real adventure began. Because the roads on the way to the lake had been so bad, we decided to take another route home, and we were stuck in traffic for no nearly four hours. For both motionsickness and traffic, Togo is worse than "the island which must not be named" (Sicily for everyone who is not Ian). We didn’t get home until nearly ten o’clock (the Togolaise equivalent of four in the morning). Nearly everyone had a great sense of humor about, though it was a little difficult to explain to our host families who have become surprisingly protective. The result of the whole trip was a lot of new road trip games and our new motto, “Well, this is Togo.”