It's the Little Things

So after posting about attending a birth, it’s hard to think anything else will be very interesting, but several people have asked me about my house and things like that, so I’ll try to give you an idea of my living situation. I have a house with two rooms, each about ten by twelve feet. Right now, there is nothing in it except my bike, but I ordered some furniture during my visit, so I’m hoping it will be ready by the time I get back. One room will be for sitting and cooking, and the other will be my bedroom. A fun fact about the place is that the doorways are about five feet tall, so I have a lovely bruise on my face from running into them. Several times. When I worked at Just Goods, we had these really cute West African dresses, and it seemed like every woman who came in tried them on, but no one ever bought them. My boss and I thought this was really weird, so one slow Tuesday, I tried one on, and we realized that they were made for someone who was four and a half feet tall. I’m slowly realizing that they were made for the women of Togo. Every time I walk into my house, I feel like Snow White.

Another fun fact is that my latrine is not yet finished. Now, I hate to be picky about things, but this did present a bit of a problem. I am not above peeing in the shower (a concrete slab and a bucket outside), but eventually I knew I was going to have to find a place to poo. Fortunately for me, on my second day in village, two nearby volunteers came to welcome me, and the first thing they said was, “Your latrine isn’t finished. Where are you pooping?!” I told you, talking about poop is something volunteers seem to love. I told them I hadn’t yet, and they said they would come up with a solution for me. This was welcome news, and I figured they would find a neighbor whose latrine I could share for the week, so when they walked around my house once and came back, I was surprised that the solution had come so quickly. Of course, the solution was not quite what I had expected. They said, “Wait until night and use your head torch dig a hole behind your house. Then, turn off the light and poop in the hole, and use your light again to fill in the hole.” I said, “I am SO in the Peace Corps right now.”

Also fun is the lack of cell phone reception. If I walk about fifteen minutes out of town to the middle school, I can kind of find it sometimes, but it’s sketchy. My nearest internet is in Kara, which is one of the biggest cities in Togo and is about 70k from me. Now, I know that sounds like a forty-five minute car ride, but trust me, it isn’t. You have to find a car leaving my village (which is possible two days a week) going to a nearby village, where you have to get out and find another car going to Kara. Once you find the car, you have to find a way to sit down inside it. This is harder than it sounds because a van made to hold eight people usually has something closer to twelve adults, ten children, a few fifty pound bags of charcoal and several goats and chickens. This is not an exaggeration. One woman had a puppy in a plastic bag, and another woman vomited into her hand and wiped it on my friend’s shirt. It’s also something close to six thousand degrees inside the car, and the roads are worse than on The Island Which Must Not Be Named (Sicily, for anyone who is not Ian). All told, it’s a lot what I imagine the womb must be like. With a Siamese twin. I sent a request to the med unit for more nausea medication. And some Valium.