Saturday, October 31, 2009

Du Courage

Friends, I am sorry to say that I have failed to bring the right key to the internet today, so my blog posts remain in Namon. I promise to post real updates next week.

For today, I will just send my warmest wishes (and they are very warm--it is near 100 degrees today) to my dear friend Gail. I know she will remember that with her pearls and winning smile, she cannot fail. There is nothing the Ladies' Auxiliary can't pull off when we, as our charter prescribes, "get some girls on this."

Friday, October 16, 2009

Notes of Importance

A belated happy birthday to Marie H. whose age I will not disclose. I’m sure the party was smaller this year but just as much fun and hopefully didn’t involve anyone’s car breaking down on Lakeshore Drive.

My friend Margaret turned nine a couple of weeks ago. A blossoming artist, author, and storyteller, I think she will begin her memoirs soon. Happy birthday, M.

My cousins Kate and Will both had birthdays. I hope you celebrated by sneaking Will into the Backer for a Dobs.

My baby brother Mark turned 20. Every birthday I think about how I cried the night he was born (I was really hoping for a sister), but since then, I’ve mostly gotten used to him. Hope it was great, bro.

My sister Jenny turned THIRTY just a couple of days ago, and I hear it was a wild time. Festivities lasted until nearly 9pm.

Finally, my dad will be 53 next week. Remember, Padre, all you ever need for a great party is a Growler and the Hat Game.

Several people have asked about my new address, so I’ll share that with you here. Anything sent to the address in Lome will still arrive, but we opened a PO Box a little closer to my post, which is supposed to be more reliable. Letters in regular envelopes don’t seem to have a fantastic success rate, but if you spring for a padded envelope, it gets her just about every time. Theft can be a problem, so whatever you do, write something terribly boring on the customs form.

PCV Emily Pike
BP 12
Guerin-Kouka
Togo, West Africa

I have been hoping for awhile to be able to post some pictures on this blog, but so far, the internet hasn’t really been fast enough. If I had been able to, you would see that my house is shaping up quite nicely but is sadly lacking in decoration. Consider this my official plea for artwork to all my youngest friends in South Bend, Mishawaka, New Castle, Bardstown, Bloomington, London, Amsterdam, and yes, even the one left in Mitchell. Special thanks go out to TC and Flounder whose works already grace my walls.

I Am Very Impressive

There is a little something that’s been bothering me for awhile now. It’s one of those things that started out as not a big deal but the more I think about it, the more it gets to me. I’d like to take this moment to get if off my chest.

It all started a few weeks ago when I was at our clinic’s weekly foyer for malnourished children. We were particularly swamped, so I found myself doing some tasks on my own which I hadn’t really done before. It was nothing too terrible, things like mixing the flour, sugar, and oil in the correct proportions and making sure that each person (we give the flour to the elderly as well, but the mix is different) got the appropriate nutritional boost. Most of the mother’s get two kilos of a corn/soy blend flour mixed with sugar and oil. Because of language difficulties, most of my communication with the women at these sessions is conducted through pointing at their babies and smiling. Anyway, there was one woman who, after having received her two kilos, remained standing in front of me with her sack out. It’s not entirely uncommon for a woman to try and sneak extra flour, but we pretty well have to stick to the rules to make sure everyone gets some, so I gestured her away and gently pushed her bag aside. She began speaking to me quickly and insistently in Konkomba. I tried to make it clear that I didn’t understand as she was becoming more and more wrapped up in whatever she was trying to tell me. Finally, someone explained to me that the woman had twins and was therefore entitled to four kilos of flour. Happy to have the miscommunication cleared up and eager to make friends with the woman, I quickly picked up her sack and pointing to it, repeated loudly some of the words I realized she had been saying. “Uba, bilee,” I began, indicating the sack, and adding two more kilos, I continued, “bitaa, binaa!” Everyone in the area stopped what they were doing and broke into loud applause. My homologue, the birth attendant, rushed over and actually held my arms in the air as if I had kicked the winning goal in the World Cup. “My girl is magnificent!” she shouted in French, “Again, again!” With more confidence this time, I shouted, “Uba, bilee, bitaa, binaa!” The crowd went wild. I had, of course, counted to four, and this was very impressive.

The second event occurred just a couple of days later. The wife of the chief had asked me to help her sell tchouk (a sort of local beer made from millet) at the market. This was a big event for the people in Namon, and many stopped by to buy her goods from the new white woman in town. (I tend to be something of a side show.) Before we started, there was a brief tutorial on the pricing and etiquette. You server tchouk in a calabash from a plastic trash can with a small plastic bowl. There are two sizes of plastic bowls, the smaller of which costs 25 CFA and the larger 50. It was simple enough. All you have to do is ask the person how much they want and serve it to them. You also need to add a little at the end as a cadeau. This is expected with most things you buy. After a practice run with the matron, I was let to serve folks all on my own. The first guy was simple. He wanted 50 CFA worth of tchouk, and he paid with exact change. Nevertheless, this earned a murmur of approval from the audience. The next guy also wanted 50 CFA, but he paid with a 100 CFA coin. My fans held their breath. I successfully handed him the 50 CFA coin I had received from the previous customer. Again, there was approval, but my audience now wanted to test my abilities a bit. There came cries of, “Can you make change for this 2,000 CFA bill?” I did. Someone ordered 100 CFA of tchouk to try my skills with the small plastic bowls. Someone wanted 75 CFA of boisson and then paid with 150 CFA just to throw me off. With every challenge, I rose to the occasion. That’s right, my friends, I can perform simple arithmetic in another currency. I had taken the market by storm, and the applause was immense.

Those are just two examples, but I could go on and on. People are pleased and impressed when I successfully greet them in the morning. They’re even pleased when I just try hard. They’re pleased when I tell them I can make my own tea and peel an orange and differentiate between corn and soy beans.

All this brings me to my real point which is that I am, in fact, very impressive, and I’m not sure that those of you back in the States realize this. I can’t remember the last time one of you applauded when I counted to four, and I’m sure none of you has ever praised my orange peeling ability. I want you all to know that I forgive you for these oversights, but in the future, I would appreciate it if I could get a little recognition when I make change for a dollar, that’s all.

I Would Not, Could Not Eat a Cat...

I would not, could not eat a bat
I will not have it on my plate
No, please don't tell me what I ate.

That’s right friends, we have another tale of culinary cultural crossover! Some of you will recall hearing about the sad fate of my friend B during training. For the rest, I will summarize. One afternoon, as we were all heading off to a training session in the neighboring city, B’s host mother approached him and told him that she was going to prepare something special for dinner. His host father handed him a plastic bag and instructed him to open it. Inside was, of course, a dead cat. Nothing says “dinner party” like fried yams and cat brains. B was a really good sport about the whole thing and managed to eat two different feline themed meals before throwing in the towel, and the rest of us were treated to regular text message updates.

Now, I must confess here that I mocked B quite a lot about the incident, in part because such a happening was one of my biggest fears for life with my host family. Most of you know that I am a not-so-strict vegetarian, and I explained this to my host family upon arrival. It took a lot of explaining (and a compromise on chicken bouillon cubes, which were a deal breaker for my host mom), but in the end, no meat of any kind ever found its way onto my plate. Refusing food here can be even more insulting than declining my grandmother’s ham and cheese ball at Christmas, and the last thing anyone wants on their hands is a host mother with injured pride. I considered myself very fortunate to have such an understanding one, and counted myself lucky to be mostly out of the woods once I made it through stage to my own house here at post, where I could cook and eat as I pleased.

Of course, that’s about when karma kicked in to chastise me for my erstwhile schadenfreude. Though I am mostly free to cook and eat what I like (within the limited options available at my local market), I have made a few friends here who occasionally invite me to dinner at their homes. On these visits, I have explained my preference not to eat meat but have nonetheless, for the sake of politeness, consumed in one form or another chicken, beef, guinea fowl, and on one occasion, goat. This doesn’t particularly thrill me, but I am making slow progress at explaining my dietary preferences, and I have been known to make these kinds of exceptions in the States as well, hence my not-so-strict vegetarian status. When I was living at Dismas House, I partook of more than one donated turkey noodle casserole and a certain world famous peanut butter chicken gumbo.

None of that had adequately prepared me for what happened about a week ago. The chief had invited me to dine at his house with the promise of beans and rice with a tomato sauce, one of my favorites, but on this auspicious occasion, he stopped me in the market around lunchtime and told me that he’d found something extra special for dinner that evening, something which he thought I had never tasted before. He was right because when I got to his house, he showed me a pot full of roasting bats. The bats were whole and had been roasted over a fire on a spit before stewing in a pot of spicy sauce. We were to eat them with fufu. Now, I am trying very hard here to be open to new cultural experiences, but I could feel every reflex in my body recoil at the site of a large bat with teeth grimacing up at me from my plate. On the other hand, he is the chief, and I didn’t really have a choice. Thankfully, I was not expected to eat the entire thing myself. As it turns out, bat is something of a delicacy, so, like a nice merlot or a large slice of chocolate cake, we would share one for the table. My host graciously offered me the head, but I was able to get by with tasting just a bite of rib meat. To answer the most obvious question, it wasn’t all that bad. It did, in fact, taste a lot like chicken. I console myself now with the thought that at least I can be sure the bat was free range and organic.

Beware the Biking Rat

So this story is a little dated, but I’ve been meaning to share it for some time now. As I’ve said, a lot of my time thus far has been devoted to getting to know the people in my village. Anywhere you work, it’s good to know the people around you, but especially in Togolaise society it is important to develop relationships if you want to get anything done. People here are incredibly welcoming of foreigners, and there always seems to be a family willing to extend hospitality, but becoming a credible source of information in the community requires a lot of effort to integrate oneself into the customs and culture of my new home. This means I spend a lot of time sitting around talking to people about nothing at all. Because of the language barrier, it also means I spend some time just sitting while other people are talking and I work on my comprehension skills.

So anyway, one evening shortly after arriving in Namon, I was sitting and having a drink with some colleagues and friends in the local buvette, and the conversation turned to agricultural work. I had mostly been listening, but I am really interested in how people’s farms impact their schedules, so I asked some questions to better understand what an average day was like. They told me it varied a lot depending on the day, so I asked them, for example, to tell me what they did in the fields the day before. One man offered that he hadn’t gone to the fields the day before, and another seconded him. Going around the room, it became clear that virtually no one had gone to the fields that day. I asked if there was something important going on in the village that they didn’t want to miss or if it had been a holiday. They sort of talked among themselves and collectively agreed that the majority of them hadn’t gone because of the Rat. When I asked what precisely the rat problem was, they told me a most amazing story.

It seems that two days before, a rat had been seen riding into town on a red bicycle. At this point, I had to stop the conversation to work out some vocabulary, but the word “rat” in French really does mean rat. (“Like a mouse but bigger?” I clarified. “Yes, yes, it eats the corn if you don’t protect it. It has a long tail,” they affirmed.) Okay, so it was a rat but I wondered how it was riding the bicycle. The told me that obviously a normal rat couldn’t ride a bicycle, but this one was much larger than usual, the size of a short man. (At this point, I have a sort of Ralph S. Mouse picture in my head.) Okay, anthropomorphic mouse on a bicycle. I was up to speed. They told me that the rat had delivered a message that people should not go to work in the fields the following day. Those who did go would have very bad luck. It had, they told me, been an omen (which I was fortunately able to have someone translate). A survey of the room revealed that no one present had personally seen the rat, but that was because as soon as he delivered his message, he disappeared. The disappearing, incidentally, is how you can tell something is really a messenger from the spirits. If it hadn’t been a real messenger, it wouldn’t have been able to do that, a proof whose logic is hard to deny.

I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks talking all this over with my fellow volunteers to see whether they had any insight into the cycling rodent phenomenon, but we didn’t come up with anything specific. They reminded me that Togo has a rich tradition of storytelling, and often stories have other meanings, cues that are familiar to local listeners. We talked about the presence of animism and how it can be a part of people’s lives even if they don’t really practice it. We talked about the lengths people in any culture will go to in order to get a vacation day. In the end, I can really only say that I have no clue what this meant, but it made me laugh a lot. It also gave me some good ideas, and I think in my next job, I’m going to try something like, “Yes, I know I’m out of personal days, but I ran into a cockroach driving a Mini Cooper, and he had something to say about working on Friday afternoons…”