7/12/07 through 7/20/07

7-12-07 to 7-15-07

Hmm, let’s see, overall reflections on our field-trip: we covered a lot of ground (geographically) – going from Kpalimé to Atakpame to Sokode to Bassar to Kara and back Kpalimé – but I don’t feel as though we learned all that much. It was nice to see a lot of the country; I was amazed by how green the whole country is – I was expecting the north to be a lot dryer, but the main difference was that the vegetation is low grasses and bushes, spotted with trees, rather than dense forest like it is in Kpalimé. It is the end of the rainy season, however, so that may have a lot to do with how green it is right now.

In the middle of the Plateau Region, it gets flat and then it gets hilly again. I think my post is in the flat part of the region, but Atakpame, my regional capital, is nestled in the hills and very beautiful. I am excited to get a chance to explore it as I will probably be going there at least once a month. We didn’t get a chance to see the “maison de passage” – the Peace Corps house – there is one in every regional capital (except Lome), but I will probably get to see it towards the end of my post visit (in a week). The volunteers in the region pay monthly dues for the upkeep of the house and then they can stay there for free whenever they go to the regional capital. Volunteers can also stay in the “maison de passage” in regional capitals other than their own, but they ought to pay a small fee (1,000 cFA = $2.00). We saw the maison de passage in Sokode and also in Kara and they both seemed quite nice – like a good place to take a break – a mini vacation from life here whenever necessary (sort of in the same way I use the tech house here at our training site).

Other impressions:

None of the mountains were as high as I expected based on my memories of being scared as a child as we drove through Togo and seeing clouds beneath me as we drove over the mountains. (Thinking back, though, it could have just been fog =0) At the same time, I have to admit that I am skeptical that Mount Agou is really the highest mountain in Togo. What I mean is that I am sure that it is the highest point above sea level in Togo, but there are mountains that look much bigger when you are at the base of them because the change in altitude is more dramatic and severe.

The roads are much better than I expected – the main highway that goes from Lome to Burkina Faso – is really very good and even many of the secondary roads are quite good.

We drove through this famous point in the road near Bafilo where they have blown through a boulder to make a road and so there is a huge standing rock in the middle of the highway – I think I vaguely remember having driven through there as a child and think that it was probably around there that I was scared of the hairpin curves in the road and the altitude, but I could be completely fabricating that “memory.”

What we did:

We spent a lot of time in the car, which was really ok with me because I like road trips and I loved having the opportunity to see the countryside.

We visited a Togolese Red Cross unit in Atakpame. They train volunteer emergency health responders for emergencies such as floods, forest fires, land slides and intercommunity conflict. We can contact them for help in training community health agents and in doing mass HIV/AIDS sensibilizations.

In Sokode we visited a Family Planning Organization. I think the most common form of family planning here in Togo is condoms, but they seem to have ever-increasing numbers of women (particularly young women) accepting birth control pills. Contact with organizations like these can help us learn how to appropriately speak about family planning here in Togo so as not to alienate certain sectors of the population. We can also help someone in our village start selling condoms for a profit – they can buy them in bulk from Family Planning organizations like the one we visited and sell them in village (there would have to be an understanding of the importance of condoms first and a desire to buy them on the part of the target population). This particular center also helps women who have had abortions that go wrong, but they do not do abortions themselves (from what I understand, abortions are sometimes legal in Togo – I am not completely sure yet under what circumstances, but it seems that even though abortions are legal, woman are not always getting the proper care).

In Bassar we visited an Association for People Living with HIV/AIDS. They form a support network for people who have HIV/AIDS, counsel them after they have been diagnosed, help them gain access to ARVs, help keep their children in school, help them learn how to take care of themselves, how to eat well, how to avoid opportunistic infections etc. They do a lot of activities with the orphans and vulnerable children (the children of people living with HIV/AIDS. Some of the children were there and sang several songs for us and some of the same children came to play soccer with us in the afternoon. We also heard several testimonies from people who have HIV/AIDS which was interesting, but felt a little intrusive to listen to – I know they have probably shared their “story” many times, but it doesn’t make it any less difficult to listen to.

In Kara we visited another Association for People Living with HIV/AIDS that was started by a Peace Corps volunteer. It was an impromptu visit and we just walked around the facility for about twenty minutes. We were supposed to meet with a traditional healer in Kara, but he got into some sort of accident and we ended up only meeting with him briefly in Atakpame on our way back to Kpalime. It was interesting, but not as interesting as it could have been I think because the man sounded (perhaps understandably if he had recently been in an accident) a bit bored or unenthusiastic himself. I am very excited to find the traditional healers in my area and see how I might be able to learn from them and work with them. I think it would be great if I could go spend the day once a week with a traditional healer and work with them on certain health issues.

On the food front:

My first meal at a restaurant here in Togo was very disappointing – spaghetti covered with palm oil with fatty chunks of beef. It was quite expensive as well (much more expensive than had been indicated to us – around $3 – and everyone knows how cheap I am and how much I hate to overspend, so . . .). Our lunches and dinners in Bassar were prepared for us by a Togolese friend of the PCVs there and they were pretty good, but none as good as my host mom’s cooking, so I return to my site with an even greater appreciation for her cooking skills. Also in Bassar, the PCVs there made us an American breakfast with hash-browns, crepes (with nutella!!), fruit (mangos, pineapples and star fruit), sausage and juice (juice here means cool-aid or tang). In Kara we went to a restaurant that caters to the expat crowd and we had pizza which was much better than I was expecting after having seen what came of ordering pizza at the other training site a few weeks ago. So, all in all, food was so-so and I was forced to spend more money than I would have liked, but we were given extra money for that purpose, so . . .

Other comments:

The trip was a bit unorganized in part because our coordinators hadn’t considered the fact that the “coming of age” wrestling ceremony was taking place in Kara and therefore there were no hotels with enough rooms to accommodate our needs. They discovered this only a week or two in advance and so we could not spend the night in Kara and instead we spent two nights in Bassar. I did not sleep very well as we were sharing beds with another girl and I got “stuck” with the PCV who accompanied us. I say “stuck” because normally she would have had her own room, but one of the trainees was sick and requested having a room to herself, so I “volunteered” to be the one to stay with the PCV who wasn’t at all thrilled to have to share a room and much less a bed. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very freely as I was sort of afraid to move out of my edge of the bed.

This same PCV was getting on our nerves a bit during the trip because it seemed as though she didn’t want to be there with us and when she translated from French to English for our group she would often roll her eyes, speak in a bored tone and lose half the information in translation. We felt as though she was representing us and we didn’t appreciate her attitude which we interpreted as bordering on rude towards the people we were interacting with.

We got back to our training site at 8 Satruday evening. Our host families had expected us at 5 and had dinner waiting for me when I arrived. I felt badly, but I wasn’t hungry and just wanted to go to bed. My host mother tried to get me to eat, but for some reason I really didn’t want to and so I refused, but I refused in Ewe which made my host mom laugh even though I think she was a little upset that I didn’t eat. This morning she told my host father that I didn’t eat (he lives in a different house, but comes over almost every day at different times throughout the day – I think I forgot to mention that the other day he told me he spent some time in Ghana and in Ivory Coast, I don’t know why he left Togo, but I think that perhaps he made money while in Ghana and Ivory Coast and then came back to settle down and have a family.) Anyway, he said that I got home too late to eat dinner and thereby sort of diffused my host mom’s chastising.

I also lost my mangos last night – I had bought five mangoes for 200 cFA (five mangoes for 40 cents!! Can you believe it?!?!?! I am in heaven!!). I meant to put them in my backpack or something and hide them in my room to take to class as a snack in the morning or afternoon, but the van dropped me off right outside my house and Felicite and my host mom helped me carry my stuff inside, so I felt badly hoarding my mangoes in my room (I don’t like my host mom to see me eating aside from what she makes for me because I don’t want her to think that she isn’t feeding me enough or that I don’t like her food – neither of which is the case – I just get hungry often in the morning because I eat breakfast around 6:30 and it is a long time until lunch around 12:30). Anyway, so I told Felicite that the mangos were for everyone and so she put them in her mom’s room and I can’t access them (although I did have mango in my fruit salad tonight, but I think my sorrow at losing my mangos made me eat way too many peanuts (they were available) this afternoon). There are no mangoes for sale in my training village itself which makes me think that not much at all will be available in at my post.

I also brought my host family some honey from Kara. I asked my trainers if they thought my family would like some honey and they said that they don’t use honey like we do, but more as a medicine (in combination with lemon when someone has a cold or a cough), but that they would appreciate the gesture, so I brought them a jar. I think my host mom liked the gift.

Today, Sunday, I got up a little later than usual, lazily showered, ate breakfast and then, because my host mom wasn’t around I washed my own dishes for the first time. Usually as soon as I lift my dishes off the table they get taken out of my hands and whisked away, but I was able to wash and rinse my dishes before my host mom got back (Felicite and Fidele were still sleeping) and when I told her that I had washed my dishes she laughed good naturedly. Then I scrubbed out my filter (it is kind of gross to see the dirt residue on the candles, but nice to know that that dirt is no longer in my water). I don’t understand why PCVs get lazy about filtering their water, it isn’t that hard – you just have to be a little organized. Many PCVs we talk to say they have amoebas and treat it as if it were inevitable, but when you ask if they filter their water, they say no. Maybe I have yet to discover some of the difficulties of filtering water, because for now it seems pretty easy.

This morning I watched my host mom prepare the meat for the week. I am pretty sure she buys the meat for the whole week on Sunday (last week it was pork or beef – I’m not really sure) and this week it is chicken. She cleans it and then she prepares it with spices – prepared mustard, crushed garlic, onion, anise, ginger, black pepper and red pepper. Then she steams it with a little water (for a long time) until it is mostly cooked and then she fries it in oil. I think this is how she keeps meat for the week without a refrigerator and I have yet to get sick from it. I am not sure, however, if she reheats it every day or just what I am eating.

I also watched her light one of the clay one-pot stoves – she places small pieces of charcoal in the stove and then lights pieces of a dried patty made from palm tree scraps (perhaps the husks) and puts it in the hole in the bottom of the stove to light the charcoal from beneath. Apparently the palm tree patties should have enough palm oil in them to serve as a lighter fluid and no petrol is needed.

Finally, I watched her make peanut sauce – she cooked a peanut paste and tomato paste and then cooked the vegetables separately (each vegetable was cooked separately – I think because of different lengths needed to properly cook, but not overcook, the green beans, carrots, cabbage onions and green peppers). After having already cooked those vegetables, she sautéed them in oil left over from frying the chicken, then she added some left over chicken broth to the sautéed veggies and threw them in the peanut and tomato paste mixture. She added left over crushed spices from the chicken (onion, black pepper, anise, ginger), some chicken stock, some salt and some already cooked pieces of chicken. She let it simmer a short while and then removed it from the flames (I write in detail for my own benefit so that when I am at post and I have forgotten how to make yummy peanut sauce I can look it up =0).

I also learned that they take the corn from their farm, take all the kernals off and take it up to the mill and from that they make a sort of porridge which Fidele and Felicite had for breakfast.

I decided not to do laundry today and instead studied a bit of Ewe while Felicite and Fidele did their laundry. Then I ate lunch and played UNO for two hours. It was nice to spend the whole morning with my family (especially after having been gone for a couple of days), but by 2:30 I was needing a break, so I went down to the tech house and studied Ewe for a bit while waiting for the power to come back on to charge my laptop. When the power did finally come back on I tried to catch up on writing email while I watched one of the trainees teach a couple of other trainees jujitsu (a combination of wrestling, martial arts and self-defense).

The evening was non-eventful – I ate a wonderful fruit salad and then played cards until the light in the hallway failed (even when the power itself is not cut, the light-bulb in the hallway often goes out).

7/16/07

This morning I had Ewe class, which was good. We learned how to form the present, past and future. It is very fun and rewarding to learn Ewe because it is a language very different from any I have learned before, but also because I am surrounded by Ewe and I love understanding words and phrases here and there from what my host family is saying and finally because ever time I try to say something in Ewe I get a very positive response from my host family. People here really REALLY appreciate it when you try to learn their language.

After Ewe, we had time for private studies. Private study usually translates into anything but studying so a group of us went over to the soccer field by primary school and had a jujitsu class. I actually didn’t participate because one, I am scared (I am partially kidding) and two, I don’t have any clothes that I can afford to roll around in the dirt in. It was fun to watch the other girls do it, but luckily we didn’t have too many spectators because the locals would have found it really strange to see one white girl on top of another in a simulated rape position. We did have a few kids who got a little excited and worked up wanting to wrestle with each other.

After I ate lunch, I watched Felicite cook little smoked fish in an okra sauce (what a combination!!!) – I can’t express how glad I am that I said that I don’t like fish right from the start because I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with whole little fish on my plate. They eat the whole thing and just spit the bones out on the ground.

In the afternoon we had our mid-training language exam, an oral exam to gage our progress thus far and to give us an idea of how hard we have to work to reach the necessary intermediate-mid level required for CHAP (Health) volunteers. We each had time slots and so those of us who weren’t first went to Afrikiko to wait for our turn. On the way there I bought a huge (like six feet long) stick of sugar cane. It isn’t sugar cane season, I am told, but I saw it in the little market place and it was only 50cFA (10 cents!!!!) and I could not possibly resist. I got laughed at as I carried the stick down the road and into the bar – I think that everyone who saw me was wondering if the yovo (white person) knew what to do with the sugar cane. I was as happy as a little girl with a treasure in her hands as I sat down in Afrikiko and proceeded to cut the “bark” off the sugar cane. My friends laughed at how happy I looked with my sugar cane and, as most of them had never eaten sugar cane, so I got to introduce them to the sugary goodness. It really made me extremely happy (similar to the way Fanmilk does, I think because my subconscious associates it with good memories). I chopped up the whole stick with Jorge’s swiss army knife and put it in a ziplock to continue offering to my friends. I made a mess in the bar, but of course, when I tried to clean it up myself I was immediately shooed aside and the bar-owner’s young daughter cleaned up after me. I thanked her with several pieces of sugar cane.

My language exam went well, not flawlessly, but well enough, I think. I am not really worried about it, but it will be interesting to see what level I am at according to the Peace Corps rating system. (It will also be interesting to see what my French level is at the end of my Peace Corps service when they test us again so that they can provide our future employers with our French level. Many people here seem to think that their French has worsened over their two years here. I don’t think that will be my case, but I have noticed that the volunteers here speak with a funny lilt that I am not sure I really want to pick up).

After the language exams it was pouring rain (POURING, just like it is right now) and the electricity was out (just like it is right now) and so we just hung around the tech house having a good time. When the rain let up a bit we went to Afrikiko and Felicite soon found me there with instructions from her mother to bring me an umbrella (they are so sweet and thoughtful). She stayed with me for a little while and then we walked home together.

This evening I ate dinner and we played cards for a little while. I am happy because one of my language professors told me today that my host mom was really happy that I had brought them a little gift (the jar of honey) from our fieldtrip and that, of course, made me feel great.

7/17/07

Yesterday (I am writing this the morning of the 18th) I had a difficult morning because I overheard a conversation between two of my fellow trainees that made me wonder if I had not upset someone the day before with something I had said. I don’t like to upset people and I think I ought to be particularly careful with my words here because all of us are a little more sensitive here. Anyway, I agonized the whole morning until I had an opportunity to apologize to the person. I actually don’t think that I had upset her because she reacted as though she hardly remembered the comment, but I was already exhausted with having worried all morning over it. In the morning we had a tech session during which I cut up flashcards for Ewe and then we had a bicycle session in which we learned how to grease our brake cables, how to replace our brake cables and how to replace and align our brake pads correctly. I am not sure how much of this I will remember when I need it, but luckily I am relatively close to both of the girls who are great bikers and know all about bike repair, so if I am in a bind I am sure they can help me out.

I felt all drained of energy after the morning yesterday and so I wasn’t up for UNO after lunch and I made Ewe flashcards instead. In the afternoon I was able to improve my mood a bit – we had a health session and the group from the other training site came over. During the session one of the girls (one of the CHAPers - Health) “boob-tagged” me – they started this “boob-tag” game the other day and I made the mistake of saying leave me out of it, I don’t play games like that, they are beneath me (only half jokingly =0) and so I of course got myself declared the next target. The funny thing was that the girl who did it seemed awfully paranoid afterwards, as if I were going to try to get even (which I might, but definitely not through a boob-tag – water on the head at an unexpected moment sounds like and appealing revenge to me . . . =0)

So anyway, my mood was a bit changed in the afternoon, which was good because I needed a bit of a “pick me up” and it got me through the drama of the evening. It was a drama because we were trying to organize a movie night for our families but there was no electricity in the school, but it all turned out fine because the electricity came back on before my computer battery ran out and so we were able to watch the whole film.

All in all, not a very exciting day . . . the rest of this week will be pretty busy though – I have to do laundry and pack for post visit (I want to take as much of my STUFF as possible and leave it at my post so that when I acquire more STUFF I can manage carrying it all to post the second time around). This time I am not buying much except a pot and a cup and perhaps another bucket for bathing and food supplies to get me through the week because I have no idea what the girl I am replacing left at my post for me to use/have/buy off her, so next week I will make an inventory and then decide what I need to buy to complete my house “set-up” (in terms of cooking supplies, cleaning supplies, furniture, etc.). Tomorrow my host mom is going to teach me how to make jam, so I am very excited about that and on Friday we are meeting our counterparts (mine is a woman, a midwife) and participating in a workshop with them, so that is also exciting.

I just got my “evaluation” back from my language exam and they rated me “intermediate-high” so I fulfill the requirement to be a CHAP volunteer, but of course it is always good to keep improving so that I leave the Peace Corps with the highest language level that I can. I hope to read a lot in French, but the book I am reading right now isn’t too exciting and I don’t have a lot of time to read. Once at post, though, I think I will try to read more and particularly in French because otherwise I am not too sure that my French will improve very much – the vocabulary I use here is rather limited.

7/18/07

About my day . . . it wasn’t exciting. The most exciting part was that I bought TWO huge sticks of sugar cane and had lots of fun chopping them all up and sharing them with everyone. Other than that, it was actually quite unremarkable. In the morning we had a health session – a boring health session, then we had a boring safety and security session and then I went home for lunch and then in the afternoon we had a boring session on our post visit. So – it was a boring (but not necessarily bad) day. I did get a little revenge on the girl who “boob-tagged” me yesterday by pouring some water down the back of her dress, but I wasn’t too mean and I only poured a very little bit.

Other than that, I came home, ate dinner and started packing up my stuff and organizing all my papers.

On Saturday morning we leave at 6:00 for our posts with our homologues (we will meet our homologues on Friday). I will be at my post for Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then on Thursday morning I will go to Notse where I will meet up with three other people from my staging group and we will travel up to Atakpame, our regional capital, together because on Friday the current PCVs are holding a welcome party for all the new PCVs in the Plateaux Region (and in each of the other regions as well, but I am in the Plateaux Region, so that is the only one that really concerns me). It will be interesting I am sure, but I am happy because there are a lot of people in my region that I like and even some that aren’t in my region geographically but will claim my region for logistical reasons and they are girls that I like a lot as well, so that is all good.

The only other thing I have to share is that all the trainees are very fed-up with training right now. I am not as frustrated as most of them, but for some reason everyone seems ready to tear their hair out. I think it is good that we are going to get a taste of post soon because maybe that will help everyone appreciate and take advantage of the last three weeks of training.

7/19/07 and 7/20/07

Yesterday I didn’t write to you because we celebrated one of the other CHAP trainee’s birthday – her birthday is on Saturday, but we decided to celebrate two days early. Anyway, I was at the tech house eating cake until nine o’clock or so and then I was too tired and I left my computer at the tech house to charge.

About my day yesterday, it wasn’t very exciting. This week, all in all, has not been the most interesting week, but luckily I am going to my post tomorrow and so I am sure I will have lots of new and interesting things to tell you!

Yesterday we woke up early and went to the garden for a technique session on bed preparation, planting and transplanting. There is a gardener here who takes care of the garden for us, so pretty much the beds were already made, but we turned them over with the short-handled hoes they have here and then we mixed in some chicken poop fertilizer (I stayed far away from that part of the process what with the smell and the rumors of bird flue . . . just kidding, about the bird flue, not the smell – it did smell really badly and as far as bird flue is concerned, we DID get a memo about it, but I don’t think it has been found in Togo). Then we transplanted some little cabbage plants using a triangulation method of placement or spacing (sounds really technical doesn’t it? well, it isn’t. you just cut a stick and make little triangles putting a plant at each of the three points of the triangle). Then we planted some lettuce seeds. Our moringa seedlings are already over a foot high, so hopefully we will be able to take some plants to post with us and plant them.

Afterwards we wrote evaluations of our trainers – both technical and language. I am afraid I was a bit harsh, but I think they caught us all at a bad (meaning frustrated in general with everything) moment.

Afterwards we got only more frustrated as we proceeded to go to the other village, wait half an hour for bank representatives to arrive (so that we could open bank accounts) only to be told that we needed our Peace Corps IDs. Those who didn’t have them had to go and get them only to be later told that actually we also needed our passports. By the end of this exercise we were all pretty fed-up with the lack of organization and communication. I am less fed up than the rest of the trainees, but I think some of them have real issues with the way things are done here. I have my moments, I guess we all do, but I would have to say that my overall impression of the Peace Corps is that it is actually more organized and well-run than I expected and for the most part our trainers and the administrative personnel are very competent.

We were supposed to have time for cooking with our families to prepare us for our post visit (can one cooking lesson prepare you for a week of cooking for yourself?), but with the banking fiasco we got home an hour late and my lunch was already on the table. Luckily, I have already spent some time watching my host mom cook and I know how to cook some things myself.

We had the afternoon off for packing, but I had already packed some because my host mom and I had jam plans. We made mango jam first (equal parts sugar and fruit, measured by weight – I wonder if I could cut out some of that sugar . . . ) and later in the afternoon we made pineapple jam. The process is pretty simple – you cut up the fruit, at it’s weight in sugar and let it sit for about an hour once mixed with the sugar. Then you smush it around a lot to break up the pieces of fruit a little and you bring it to a boil and let it boil for fifteen minutes. Then you put it directly into little glass jars that have been boiled (and are still steaming) and you put the lids on tightly and turn the jars upside down – I guess to force any air out. And that’s it. With the pineapple jam, my host mom threw half a lime in while boiling and then took it out before putting the jam in the jar. She gave me a jar of each to take with me to post. I am not sure whether to eat a whole jar in a week or save it for when I get back to post permanently . . .

In between the two jam making sessions I (or rather Felicite) washed my laundry. I wanted to do it, I actually like doing it – anything that deals with water when it is hot out can be fun . . . but Felicite insisted that I let her do it and since her mom called me to watch the jam making process I wasn’t right there to insist that she not do my laundry for me. Then I showered and I washed the mud off my sandals and I met with some friends and did a bit of shopping for post – I bought another bath bucket and gobelet (plastic cup for dumping water over your head).

I was supposed to go help make decorations for the birthday party, but the second jam session interfered. Once the jam was finished, I ate dinner and then went to the party – we were all pretty pooped, so it wasn’t much of a party, but the cake was really good (one of the other trainee’s host mom bakes bread and cookies and little cakes and brownies and she made the cake which was sort of like a lemony pound cake which we topped off with some sweetened cream).

Around nine I came home and went to bed. This morning I tried to get up early so that I could go to the tech house (where I had left my computer) to write a quick email and burn a CD with all the emails and the blog posts of the week, but I got a bit behind schedule and only got to the tech house twenty minutes before our scheduled departure for Kpalime (and the workshop with our homologues). I turned on my computer and it seemed to be booting up correctly, until it suddenly turned blue and said that I should uninstall any recently installed hardware (there is none) and then that I should disable BIOS memory options if the problem continued of restart the computer in safe mode. I tried to restart the computer and it didn’t boot up at all, but went to another (blue or black?) page that said that a media test failure had occurred and that the operating system was not found. Then it said that it was initiating a dump of physical memory . . . so I am sure you can understand why I almost burst into tears – a dump of physical memory cannot be a good thing. Luckily I have all of the things on the computer backed up on DVDs, I did that before I left, but I really like having a computer here to write emails on and even though I won’t have electricity, having access to a computer on the weekends (I think I will leave it at my friends house to minimize moving it around too much) will be important. Anyway, the problem with my computer put me in a fowl mood, but I decided to bring it with me to Kpalime because some of the people in the other training group (the Small Enterprise Development group) are IT (information technology – computer) people and I thought maybe they could help me.

When we got to Kpalime, I enlisted the help of half the married couple, but the computer booted up fine – just as it normally would. I tried to burn a CD (but found out later, when I was already at the internet café without my computer that it didn’t burn well) and then ran a virus check which came up clean. I cannot tell you how relieved I was to have my computer again, but I can’t help but feel as though it is a sign that the end is near . . . a friend of mine (a fellow trainee) said that her computer started to do that a little while before the hard-drive crashed, so I don’t think it is a good sign, but the IT person I talked too didn’t seem to think it was too too serious . . .

The workshop with the homologues went ok – it was a bit long and tiring, but I was excited to meet my homologue. At first impressions, she is a nice, very pretty young woman (late twenties, early thirties?) who seems well educated (her French is good and she writes easily in French and very intelligent) and who’s mother tongue is Ewe. Her name is Lily and she is one of only two women homologues (all the rest are men!). I have to say that I am very happy that my homologue is a woman because I feel as though we will be able to have a closer working and personal relationship than if my homologue were a man. She is married, but her husband works in Lome. She is not from Avassikpe (my post), but has been working there since 2004. She was trained as a mid-wife in Lome and then assigned to Avassikpe. Originally, she is from Agou, the same prefecture that we have our training site is located in and that I am in at this very moment =0). Anyway, all and all I am very pleased with my homologue. She seems interested, motivated, open, friendly, flexible, intelligent . . . great really. I wonder if I will witness my first live birth this week . . . I hope, I hope . . . =0). It was interesting that she wore western (jeans and a blouse) clothing rather than Togolese – just a comment. I don’t know if she has any children yet, perhaps tomorrow I will find out.

After the workshop – which was just a lot on the roles and responsibilities of the volunteers and the homologues, we got dropped off in the center of Kpalime. Two girls and I went to internet first (while others went to search out food). The internet itself was working alright, but I was disappointed when I realized that my CD hadn’t burned properly and I wouldn’t be able to send my emails and blog posts. However, it made me really, REALLY happy to receive emails and Jorge, thank you so, SO, SO, SO much for compiling all my emails into one email. I would never have been able to read them all if it hadn’t been for that – I wasn’t even able to sign into my Middlebury account, so thank you so very much – it was so thoughtful! Anyway, it just makes my day to receive emails because I feel very far away and disconnected and I love know what is going on in the lives of people important to me.

I am so excited for my mother and the possibility of her getting a new job – one where she will be able to reach her full potential and where she will be happy and appreciated. I am also very excited that my Dad might be coming to Ghana (AND TOGO! =0) in October – that would make me unbelievably happy.

I put all your emails in a word document, condensed them down to three pages (really small font size) and was just about to print them when the electricity cut. Luckily we had already saved the document to the server and so I was able to come back later in the day and print them (I would have been so very sad had I not been able to print your emails, but I was!).

After the electricity cut we went shopping – I bought a big woven plastic bag (I think I was a little too extreme – it is HUGE and I stupidly didn’t check the zipper, which isn’t great, but I did bargain it down 500cFA (about a dollar)), some green beans, onions, carrots, garlic, cabbage, pineapples, oranges, mangoes, Milo (Nestle chocolate vitamin energy drink that I drink every morning), laundry soap, a shower pagne (since I made my shower pagne into a skirt) and I can’t remember what else. Eventually we got picked up by the Peace Corps vehicle and driven back to our village. Then I went on another shopping expedition with Felicite to buy dish detergent and kerosene (for my lantern). I wanted to buy an extra wick as well, but they didn’t have the right size.

Once home again I ate dinner and finished packing. My host mom is so sweet. Not only did she give me two jars of jam, but she wants to give me a little table (to put my stove on) and she gave me two plates because she said it wasn’t good enough for me to eat out of my Tupperware containers (which was my plan). I am not sure, though, if I am supposed to bring the wooden table back or not. The plates I can bring back easily, because they are small, but I am really not too keen on bringing a table back with me. Maybe tomorrow morning I will ask her . . . we leave bright and early, at 6:00.

Then I took a shower in the dark so I won’t have to do it tomorrow morning.