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.