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.”