A Day in the Life

Okay, one of the questions I get the most from all of you at home goes something like this, “Wow, Emily, Togo sounds really interesting and cool. I especially like hearing about all the ways you’ve humiliated yourself, but…what do you…you know, do there?” When I first got to post, this was a somewhat difficult question to answer. Well, if not difficult, it was a sort of embarrassing question to answer. It takes time to get things started in this part of the world, so the truth would have been something like, “I have two or three ‘meetings’ a week, I sit around the clinic, I make French language flashcards, and I do crossword puzzles in astonishing volume.” You can see why I wasn’t eager to broadcast my busy schedule. Now that I’ve finally figured out how to start doing actual work, I thought I would share a little of that with all of you.

In a normal week, I spend three or four mornings a week at the clinic helping with various initiatives. On Mondays, we have a program for malnourished children at which we give out enriched flour and nutrition lessons and track the growth of all the babies to make sure everyone is making progress. On Wednesdays, we do more general growth/health sessions for healthy babies. These times also serve as an opportunity to identify those children who could use extra help on Mondays, and on Thursdays, we do vaccinations. I obviously cannot give the injections, but I help prepare them, and I give the oral Polio vaccination and vitamin A capsules to the babies or nursing mothers. Each of these sessions starts out with a brief health lesson, and preparing and presenting these lessons to the mothers is a big part of my work. Right now, a lot of my time is dedicated to bring a little organization to the way we run these sessions. Those of you who used to appreciate my nanny text messages reading, “I just got peed on,” or “I have poo on my shirt,” or “The clerk at the grocery just pointed out to me that there is vomit in my hair,” will be happy to know that all of those things are still happening. Babies here don’t wear real diapers but usually just a piece of folded cloth with the absorbency of a dinner napkin. In the course of weighing thirty or forty babies, there’s almost always at least one accident. While I can’t afford to send mass overseas text messages, you can just giggle to yourselves virtually any Monday or Wednesday morning a know that I have been dampened by some small person’s urine. The difference is that now I get to do the laundry by hand. Fun.

I have also started teaching classes at my local middle school, and one of the great cross cultural lessons I’m learning is that middle schoolers are a challenge in any culture, but things are going relatively well in this department as well. I teach there Monday and Wednesday afternoons and Tuesday mornings, and I have a lot of freedom about what I teach. When I started, there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm in my community about HIV/AIDS, so I began there, and I feel like we are making some progress on it. The hard part has been trying to remember that there isn’t a lot of knowledge I can take for granted. A couple of weeks ago, I spent several hours getting together a lesson about STIs. It covered all the major infections facing Togo, and I even included a review game at the end, which is always a hit. So I gave the whole lesson, and they seemed as attentive as one can ever expect seventh graders to be, but when the game started, they were supposed to race to match the symptoms with the diseases that cause them. I said go, and everyone just stood there. Then they asked me what a symptom is. We had to start over from the beginning.

Another thing I do is go to meetings with my ASCs (stands for Community Health Agent in French). This is usually pretty fun, as I am lucky to have a lot of dedicated people in my community, but it also requires some adjustments from me. For example, a couple of Fridays ago, we had a meeting at 8am. I had some notes I wanted to go over with the employees at the clinic, so I got there around 7:30 just to iron out exctly what was on the agenda. Of course, I was running a few minutes late, and I was worried there wouldn’t be enough time before the meeting started to get everything done. No such worries.. The first person didn’t show up until about nine, and by ten, we had nearly half of our attendees. Now, most of you know that I am not one to throw stones about punctuality, but this seemed ridiculous even to me. Finally I asked where everyone else was, and it turned out they were all in the market having a morning calabash of tchouk. Excellent. Once everyone was successfully rounded up, the meeting went really well, but I’m definitely going to have to adjust my expectations on this front. Yes, I hear all of you laughing. And you’re right, karma is a drag.