Tuesday, June 30, 2009

All Around

It’s been awhile since the last time I updated this blog, but I promise that this entry will make up for it. Believe it or not, I’ve been remarkably busy these past few months and my free time with a computer and a fast enough internet connection to open my blog have been remarkably scarce.

I spent all of April and most of May in Wassarabo, finally feeling like I was getting the hang of things. The slow, slow pace of rural life is still wearing , but sometime in early April, I stopped fighting it and just let myself roll with the way life works here. I still get annoyed and bored in Wassarabo, but I’m less frustrated and far more patient, which is something to be proud of, I guess. I wouldn’t exactly say that my calendar was booked or anything, but sometime around April, my village life started to feel pleasantly full.

April began with a huge fete in Wassarabo, with people pouring into our tiny village from all corners of West Africa. It was a huge party, with people decked out in their finest clothes, selling food that I had never seen outside of Lome (avocado and bean sandwiches on crusty bread! So delicious), dancing, singing, and straight-up partying (Muslim style, of course) for three full days.

Wassarabo felt like a whole new place. All of the village girls had new complets made with matching fabric, and I, of course, jumped on the bandwagon and got a new fancy outfit made out of the same cloth. It took me a few days to figure out exactly what we were celebrating (straight answers here are frustratingly hard to come by), but I finally determined that this huge party was basically a family reunion. Every member of the Sando clan—the dominant family group in my village—was there to party, celebrate, and check in on each other’s lives.
It took awhile for the village to return to normalcy after the chaos of the party, but once life got back to normal, my own life fell back into a nice routine. My work and life in village revolves mostly around the school, and I spent April and May teaching daily (English and life skills), helping kids prepare for their end of the year exams, and holding meetings for my peer educator group.

My little group of peer educators has been one of my most successful projects in Wassarabo. The group is made of 15 of the smartest and most motivated kids at the school, and while I would love for it to eventually evolve into a community service group, it’s basically more of a club right now. We meet every week to play games, put together sketches, do life skills style activities (anything ranging from good communication skills to nutrition to HIV/AIDS) and talk about being a teenager in Wassarabo.

There are some pretty cool kids in the group, and I hope things will pick up once school restarts in September. Our last meeting for the year was at the end of May, and I haven’t been able to get them all together as a group since then. The official last day of school in Togo is not actually until July 17; In Wassarabo, however, school unofficially ends as soon as the end of the year exams are over in early June. Wassarabo, after all, is an agricultural community; it’s a tiny isolated little village surrounded by miles and miles of corn, wheat, peanut, and yam fields. In late April and early May—when the rains are just starting to fall—a struggle emerges between the school teachers and the community. School is not over and there is still much ground to cover in the curriculum, but the parents need the labor on the farms. By early June, though, the teachers just gave up.

I, however, actually missed the unofficial last day of school. I left Wassarabo at the end of May, having wrapped up as much of my work as possible at the school, for an unprecedented month-long trip away. From the end of May to now, my life has been a whirlwind of travel and movement.

I left Wassarabao and headed south to Lome, stopping along the way to visit a few fellow volunteers and to celebrate all the PCV May birthdays (there were a few of us) at a regional party in Sotouboua, a little city along the Togolese national road. It is so interesting to visit fellow volunteers and see how different our lives are even in this small little country! My life in a small rural Muslim village is so strikingly different from that of a PCV living in a southern Christian city. Tiny Togo is so culturally and ethnically diverse, and traveling really hits home how arbitrary the borders of this country really are.

I finally made it down to Lome, where I embarked on another grand adventure: Leaving Togo. My Dad and stepmom had planned a family trip to Amsterdam for Memorial Day weekend and, believe me, no one in the family was more excited than me about this trip. My first time since I started my service leaving Africa, seeing my family, taking a hot shower, eating good food, and wearing pants and make-up! I was almost in shock boarding the plane in Lome.

The trip was a short and lovely one—only 5 days and packed full of family, friends, food, and sight-seeing. It was so wonderful to see my family, hug my little sister, and catch up on life with everyone. What made the trip complete was seeing three of my best college friends—Emily, Emma, and Maura—who are all living in various corners of Europe and who make the weekend trek to Amsterdam to see me.

Amsterdam itself was a cool little city, and I would love to return to explore it sometime when I’m not incredible over-whelmed and culture-shocked. To be honest, all I really remember about the city itself is that it was very quiet, very clean, and had great food. I spent most of the time staring in awe at the neat little streets and beautiful building, and finding it impossible to believe that this orderly, clean city could exist in the same world as Sokde, my loud, jumbled, dusty regional capital in Togo. I honestly felt like I had entered into some weird time warp.

As interesting as Amsterdam was, the best part of the trip was seeing my friends and family (and, of course, the food and hot showers!). I though that coming back to Togo was going to be impossibly difficult after getting such a tease of what my old life was like. And I’ll be honest—the day before I left I had fantasies that my flight from Amsterdam to Paris would be delayed and that I’d miss my connecting flight to Lome (through no fault of my own!) and be forced to stick around Paris for a full three days on Air France’s dime until the next Paris-Lome flight was scheduled to leave. No such luck, however. My return trip to Lome was a smooth as could be.

Luckily, I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself when I got back to Togo. My huge national summer camp project—Camp UNITE—began a week after I got back from vacation and I spent that time running around Lome in a frenzy, buying supplies, organizing and photocopying documents, finalizing schedules, and negotiating countless other logistical details. Rose—a fellow UNITE organizer—and I put in long, hard days in Lome and were flat-out exhausted by the time we loaded up all the boxes and began the 5 hour journey north to the Peace Corps Training Center in Pagala, where camp was going to be held.

But as exhausting and stressful as Camp UNITE was to plan, it was so worth it! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone of you who helped make camp possible this year! It was far and away the coolest and most rewarding project I’ve worked on in Togo. I could write pages and pages just on what an amazing experience Camp was, but I’m going to save it all up and write a big camp UNITE blog entry at the end of August. Let’s just say that it was everything I could’ve wanted—tons of singing, dancing, playing games, being silly, and just having fun. Of course, this being Togo, things didn’t go entirely according to plan—we had to deal with a pretty disruptive (and scary) political riot in the community during the first week of camp, but that’s a whole other story in and of itself.

Luckily, camp isn’t over for the year quite yet! Because of scheduling at the Peace Corps Center, we were forced to split up camp this year, holding half the camp (for apprentices) in early June) and the student camp in early August. All of us organizers have a nice break for the month of July before the final push in early August. As much as I appreciate this down time, I can’t wait to head back to Pagala and get student camp underway. UNITE is such a wonderful program and I’ve already started thinking about next year, and how to make camp even better.

And that brings me to now, enjoying this month long break in between the 2 UNITE programs. I’ve been back to Wassarabo, where planting season is well underway, and everyone heads out to the fields from dawn to dusk. I’ve caught up with my students, inquired about their exams, and extracted promise from them to help me with projects once school starts, but I’m not planning anything too ambitious here during the summer months. Everyone is too busy planting. The village feels deserted during the day, except for the handful of women who stick around to prepare food and watch after young children. It’s been fascinating to see how the dry and dusty land has been transformed by the summer rains—everything is so green and alive, and it looks nothing like the village that I arrived in last November.

I’ve found a few other projects to keep my busy during the month of July, including helping a fellow PCV with a computer camp for high school students in Sokode. But August will be here before I know it. So, despite the many frustrations of life here, things are going well. I still love hearing from all of you, although I know that many letters have been getting lost in the mail. I’ve been managing to check my email once every 2 weeks or so (which is about the turn around for mail), so emailing may become the way to go. At any rate, please keep me up to do date on life! I miss you all,

Emily