11/13/08 through 11/17/08

11/13/08 through 11/17/08; Highlights =0)

The past four days of my life, from Thursday through Sunday, were spent cleaning my house from top to bottom. Sometimes I think small houses are harder to keep clean than big houses because one often has just as much STUFF and so floor space inevitably becomes storage space making it hard to walk much less sweep or mop. And who wants to dust when cleaning one thing means dirtying another? It is just starting to be Harmattan, so I barely hit the end of my cleaning window; for the next couple of months, as clouds of dust roll in and over, cleaning won’t be worth the effort. Even now, dust already coats my shelves.

One of the great things about visitors is how they force you to clean your house. I probably never would have gathered the momentum to engage in battle with the spiders if it hadn’t been for the impending visit of a close college friend. The excitement of the visit dulls the pain of cleaning and provides an objective above and beyond just having a clean house (which sometimes isn’t enough to get one out of the hammock).

Breaking the monotony of my cleaning was a visit from one of my neighbor’s, Tseviato’s older sister. She asked me for some band-aids. When I asked if she was hurt, she pulled her pagne down, revealing her breasts and told me that she wanted to put band-aids over her nipples in an a attempt to trick Parfait (her two year old) into not breast feeding. I guess she wants to wean him and he is fighting it. It was hilarious. She put the band-aids over her nipples then and there and pretended that they hurt, but she wasn’t very convincing because she couldn’t stop laughing. Parfait crossed his little arms over his chest and pouted, not knowing what to make of it all. In the end, it wasn’t very effective because I saw him hanging off her breast later in the day.

The only other thing worth recounting was a conversation that I had with Jerome today during my Ewe lesson (by the way, I forgot to mention that he has started holding Ewe literacy classes for three village women before my Ewe class. We are only in the third week, but it is exciting to watch women who have never been to school begin to read and write). The women were still under my paillote after their literacy class when Jerome and I sat down to eat. After praying, he stood up and said that he forgot to “dire aux femmes qu’on a gagne un peu” (tell the women that we had “won” a bit to eat). He went to the door and called out to them to come and eat and they responded “nezo,” as expected. This exchange initiated a conversation on the very peculiar Togolese habit of always inviting people to share in your meal if you happen to be eating (anything from peanuts to a full meal) in the presence of others. As Jerome explained, it is customary always to invite others to join you (“mangions” – “let’s eat”). For the most part, however, the offer is an empty one. People don’t expect you to accept. This makes it particularly confusing for an outsider to know when an offer to partake in a meal is genuine. I was once criticized, after refusing such a call to eat, for never wanting to eat “their” food, but according to Jerome, I was right to refuse. A good rule of thumb, he says, is that if someone goes out of their way to make you aware of the fact that they are going to be eating and to invite you to join, then you know the invitation is sincere and that you should accept (for example, when Tsevi, Lili, or Effoh came to my house to call me to their homes to eat). If you happen upon people eating, however, it is obvious that your presence was not taken into consideration when the calculations of how much to prepare were made and you should refuse. If you were to happen upon someone eating and accept their invitation, even if you only took a few bites, the symbolic gesture of desiring to share a meal with someone means that you hold that person particularly dear. The logic is that you must really cherish the person to stop whatever you were doing and accompany the person during a meal however meager it may be. Jerome advised me not to accept casual invitations, however, because if I accept from one person and refuse another people will think I am playing favorites (so complicated!). After Jerome explained the custom, I explained my inability to invite people to eat unless the offer is genuine. I know it is the culturally correct thing to do, but I can’t get the words out of my mouth unless I really want the person to share my food. Mostly, if I have only prepared enough for myself, I don’t feel it is right to offer what I don’t have. What if they accept? I know it is unlikely, but when one invites someone to eat, from my point of view, one should have prepared enough so that the guest can eat his or her fill. I would find it terribly embarrassing to invite someone to eat, have them unexpectedly accept, and then not have enough food to share. In my head, I wouldn’t be able to help chastising myself: “why on earth did you offer if you didn’t have enough?” But, for a Togolese person, there is always enough to share – Tsevi once told me that if I shared a meal with him, he could eat more (that goes directly against an American, mathematical sense of logic, but makes total sense if you think about how sharing a meal with someone increases the enjoyment and makes eating more of a social event than just a means of satiating a basic bodily need).

You might commend the Togolese behavior as remarkable hospitality (and I wouldn’t completely throw that thought out the window), but when Jerome elaborated on the “why?” behind the practice of always inviting others to share your food, he likened it to the practice of greeting people you pass on the street. He said, if something happens to you while you are eating and you didn’t offer to share your food with the people around you, would they help you? Or, if you have an accident on the road and you didn’t greet the person you most recently passed, would he help you? And so, the way in which he explained it betrays an essentially selfish motive and harks back to a discussion I was having with another volunteer a couple of weeks ago in which we were debating the question: Are any human actions truly altruistic or does everything ultimately boil down to self interest?