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…”