A Post for Betty Jo

So it’s been awhile since my last post. Sorry about that. I could offer excuses of broken computers, lacking electricity, and general busy-ness, but electricity and internet really are in limited supply, so we’ll just assume I’ve done that and move forward. Right now, I’ll just share a story that I think sums up what, another time, will be a considerably lengthier response to your question, “So how’s Togo?” This post is especially for Betty Jo, who has been kind enough to keep sending cards and notes despite my rather impolite disappearance from the blogosphere and who has requested, on numerous occasions, an update.

One of the most difficult aspects of life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo is what I can only describe as the general roughness of people. Life here is hard. It’s hard for me (how, after all, am I supposed to get by without cold Diet Cokes and an iPhone???), but that’s nothing to what it is for the average resident of Namon. Malnutrition affects as many as one third of our children, malaria is rampant, most of the women I know can’t read or write; sometimes there is no rain, and then there is not much food to go around. Other times, when the rain finally comes, it does so with such force and fury that families are left homeless, their mud huts obliterated by the torrential downpours and destructive winds. With all of this hardship comes a harshness on the part of the people. The boon companions of poverty and little education, domestic violence and alcoholism often leave their mark on our community. Men mistreat and fail to appreciate their wives, children are abused and often seem undervalued by their parents, and it sometimes feels as if anyone in a position of authority needlessly asserts it over those they see as less important than themselves. It is particularly difficult to see this behavior and not think to oneself how self-destructive it really is, not to want to tell them how much easier things could be if they would simply try being a little gentler with one another. With so many difficulties just facts of life, it seems silly to add all the strife that comes with this kind of social stratification. I don’t know how much of it can be blamed on colonization and how much is inherent to human nature, but it colors my experiences here.

In Namon, Thursday is market day, the busiest day of the week for just about everyone. Most of the women and girls sell some sort of good in the bustling center of town, and from the early morning, you can see them about their preparations. From fresh vegetables, various cheaply made plastic containers, dried fish, and handmade soap to fried yams, spicy tofu, and local beer, everyone seems to have something on offer. Those who don’t sell don their finest and come into town to peruse the wares of others. It is the social event of the week, with not only local participants but vendors from nearby larger cities, who come in with jewelry, bicycle parts, “dead yovo” clothing (the local term for those Hammer pants, stonewashed jeans, plaid flannel jackets, and other Goodwill rejects you’ve been donating all these years, so named because people assume that the only reason to part with perfectly good clothing is that the owner has died without any family to lay claim to all that loot), and all kinds of merchandise not normally available in a small village. Nobody misses it. During the rainy season, a lot of folks still have to work in their fields in the morning, but by early afternoon, they, too, have made their way over.

Generally speaking, most of the real shopping gets done in the first several hours of the market (which really gets going between ten and eleven in the morning), and by three o’clock, the local sellers are out of their fresh produce, and the first of the big city merchants have begun to pack up shop for the day. The vast majority of market frequenters, however, purchase little or nothing from these vendors, anyway. They don’t have much money, and once they have bought a bowl of spicy peppers for that week’s dinners, they stick around to socialize, which for most people is the real point of the market. They sit under open grass huts and chatter the afternoon away over calabashes of warm millet beer called tchouk. For most people, the market is a rare opportunity to relax a little bit among friends. Children, for the most part, don’t have lessons in the afternoon and are left, more or less, to their own devices, which they seem to like just fine.

Market day can also, however, be pretty stressful, especially if you’re the lone white, American woman in a small village. While I rarely face any kind of harassment from the residents of Namon, market day brings with it visitors from many other villages who consider me something of an entertaining oddity. When faced with a single proposal of marriage, I find I have gotten good at deflecting with humor and what I hope is a little grace (as many of you know, not always my strong point), but as the afternoon rolls on and the tchouk continues to flow, these encounters become both more frequent and more obnoxious. For this reason, I tend to avoid the market once mid-afternoon has passed, knowing that a large number there will have been “over-served,” if you will. Nonetheless, because my house is not far, I can hear the goings on well into the night.

Namon is generally pretty quiet after eight in the evening, but on market day, everything is different. Loud music and louder conversations can be heard from quite a distance. Most of these sounds are genial, but it’s not terribly uncommon to hear, also, the sounds of an angry dispute or even an all out fight erupt from the vat of liquid courage that is the night market. By ten thirty or eleven, even these sounds tend to have died down, and our sleepy village is sleepy again.

It was with some surprise and a little distress, then, that a few Thursdays ago just before midnight, I heard the distinct sound of a child screaming. Shortly thereafter, I heard several people run outside my bedroom window, speaking frantically to one another. By the time I found my shoes and walked to the back of the house, no one was there, but within a few minutes, they seemed to have returned with more screaming and more hushed arguing. On a few occasions in my village life, I have witnessed truly disturbing scenes of violence toward children, once even driven from my bed by the screams of a child being beaten by his older brother. In these instances, I did what I could to intervene but was met mostly with amusement, a response more infuriating to me even than the defensive anger I had anticipated. Though in one or two cases, I succeeded in putting an end to the episode, I do not delude myself that I inspired any lasting behavior change. Recalling, then, these incidents, I was immediately frightened for the child screaming somewhere not far from my window. It was, after all, market day, which meant the odds of an alcohol-induced episode of domestic violence were (at least in my mind) significantly higher.

I went into my back yard and waited, still hearing an occasional scream followed by shouting a little way off. This time, when the voices came close, I could see that it was a group of boys and that they were running away from someone carrying a flashlight. I grabbed one of them and demanded he tell me what they were doing, why the other child was screaming. At first, he looked away from me and told me he really needed to run, but when I refused to let him go, he finally explained to me what was going on. They were, he said, in the middle of an important hunt, in which the children hid themselves in the dark and tried not to be seen by other kids running around with lights. The screams I heard were of children who had been discovered. They were, in short, playing flashlight tag. I laughed out loud at the information and quickly let the kids go to find good hiding places. Then I went inside and back to bed.

As I laid in bed smiling to myself about the children, I realized that life in Namon is not really all that different than life anywhere else in the world. That is to say, difficult things happen and we handle them badly; we take out our anger, fear, and frustration on those we love; and we do what we can to feel a little better about ourselves, even at the expense of those around us. Life here may never be as gentle as I’d like it to be, and there a lot of problems Namon will continue to face, but for the most part, people are doing their best just like people everywhere else. Children here seem almost a dime a dozen sometimes, and they don’t receive the kind of attention here we’re used to giving at home (I have yet to see a single Kindermusik or Tiny Tots’ Tumbling class), but that means, too, that they have a kind of freedom children in the US haven’t known for generations. I’m not saying this is all for the best, and I will continue to object to people’s mistreatment of each other, but there is a level of security and of community here that one rarely finds at home. Either way, it’s my community, and I think I don’t mind being woken to find excited neighborhood kids hiding in my yard.