internet access is bad.....

hey friends! so i wrote the following blog posting on my laptop way back at the beginning of november, when i came back from my week long visit to my village. better late than never, i guess.....anyway, next week ill be in lome, officially swearing in as a volunteer, so hopefully ill have better internet access then and will be able to make an updated post and put up some picture! until then, keep letters coming and enjoy this belated post:


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Just got back from visiting the village where I’m going to live for the next two years! It’s a very small, very rural, and very Muslim village right smack in the middle of Togo, about 10 kilometers off the nearest paved road. There’s not much there in terms of, well, anything—there’s not even a weekly market, which is kind of unusual—but there is an elementary school, a middle school (or the Togolese equivalence), and a small, government-run clinic.

I spent the week walking around, meeting various people, visiting the clinic and schools (where I’ll be working when I arrive for good in December), and setting up house. My house is great—the building I live in is a long, cement, motel-like building with four different housing units. My house is on the end, a lovely, three-room unit with a private latrine and outdoor washing area. There’s no electricity or running water or cell phone reception, but it’s in pretty great condition. I got pretty lucky , because the volunteer who was here before me left most of her furniture, saving me the enormous headache of either having furniture made by the local carpenter (who, I learned this week after trying to get him to come fix a broken door latch to my latrine, works on his own, very slow schedule) or transporting it from the nearest big town.

All in all, really liked my village and am looking forward to living and working there for the next two years. I do kind of wished that I had been able to celebrate the Obama win with fellow Americans this week, though—I felt pretty pathetic curling up on the floor of my house by myself on Tuesday night, listening all alone to my staticky short-wave radio. According to all the radio reports that I’ve been listening to on the BBC, Africans all across the continent are obsessed with Obama and have apparently been following the election as closely as Americans. I’m sure that’s true in most places, but in my small village, people could have cared less. Seriously, with the exception of the teachers at the schools (all of whom are really wonderful and I really can’t wait to work with) and a random guy who showed up on my porch this morning saying “Victoire pour Obama! Victoire!”, no one in my village has really heard of Obama.

I know this because I spent most of Wednesday morning sitting on my porch, trying to get every person who walked by to engage in some conversation about Obama. My house is right by the school, so all those lucky children had the privilege of listening to my impassioned Obama speeches on their way to school that day. Alas, most of my conversations went something like this (only in French):

Child innocently passing by my house on the way to school: Good morning white person!
Me, sitting on my porch: Good morning child! It’s a great day! Barack Obama is going to be the president of the United States!
Child (stopping, confused): Ba-rack O-bama?
Me (a little too eagerly): Yes, do you know who Barack Obama is?
Child: Ah, yes.
Me: Really??
Child (pointing to the fields): Yes, he lives over there. He owns the cows.
(pause)
Me: No, I don’t think that’s the same Obama.
(pause)
Child: Oh.
Me: It’s ok. Go to school.
Child: Do you want to go see the cows?
Me: No, it’s ok. Go to school.
Child (shrugging): Ok.

During one exchange with a random teenage boy walking by my house, I pulled out an old Newsweek that I had and showed him a picture of Barack Obama. I was trying to impress the significance of the election, that Obama was an African-American and had his roots in Africa. Instead, the boy carefully examined the Newsweek without looking twice at the picture and exclaimed, “Je l’aime! Donnez a moi.” (Translation: I like this, give it to me.”) So……yeah.


love you all! keep letters coming......