Alisha Williams

I have won the battle against the cockroaches; against the spiders and the ants. I have learned to live with the choking dust and the bats and mice that keep me awake at night. Benadryl and chemical warfare are newfound friends. I have turned another year older and at least this one will be different, no way to complain of being stuck in a rut. I will spend all of my twenty fifth year here in Togo, and I am beginning to see it as a life, a home. I miss the mountains but Togo is far from bereft of beauty- the hills, the distant brush fires that light up the night sky, the extraordinary sunrises and sunsets, beer that costs a dollar and counts as two… I can get used to this.

Dog drama

I finally got myself a pooch. Something I can smother when lonely and force to love me no matter what, a friend to follow me around and talk to with an understanding that sometimes feels more authentic than all the conversations of the day. His name is Jack, like Kerouac, which apparently is no good because here you don’t give a dog a man’s name. I tell them, oh well I guess he is just bizarre comme moi… I caught him eating a guinea fowl outside the compound on the way to the garden the other morning. Very bad, dogs get eaten for less ‘grave’ behaviour here. Mia, the dog in my compound that I tried to adopt initially is the source, ‘elle vole!!’ says everyone, she steals, meaning she kills chickens and guinea fowls -people’s dinner. This is the reason why it didn’t work out between us. I wanted to save her from her fate but she wouldn’t take to me (until after I got Jack and then she became insufferably jealous and territorial) and I got tired of everyone telling me what a bad dog she was; that I needed to get a puppy, a male, because after they give pups the females are ‘dirty’ and no good. So now she is really in for it, seeing as how Jack is too small to kill a full grown fowl, she is the immediate suspect and the next day she was chained to the orange tree being prepared to be ‘taken out to a farm in the country’ which I think is a euphemism maman told me to make me feel better after I kept asking if they were going to kill and eat her. Bye bye Mia, I will miss your mischievous little mug.

Brief side note: On New Years I had a very interesting conversation with a local crippled man who came by to drink, chat, and pick up his 25f cadeau. The subject was about eating dogs, a very common practice here but apparently there are a few loose guidelines. You don’t eat your own dogs, you eat the ‘bad dogs’ like Mia that come from ‘the city’ or somewhere else. And according to this man, and confirmed by similar conversations other volunteers have had, it is unacceptable for women to eat dog, it is only for men. I attempted to probe him for an explanation but to no avail. He just said that women can eat chicken, guinea fowl, goat and sheep, and beef if afforded and available. Interesting.

So as I told everyone in village I wanted to start ramping up for ‘work’ projects, (meaning other than integration work), in January after the New Years celebrations. I had my reasons, other than that I needed more time to integrate and understand the village dynamic (and still do), everyone was preoccupied by harvest and parties. True to my word I held my first community meeting last week and tried my best to feel that it was not a complete disaster. I am tired of people asking me for money, exhausted to be exact. I felt that while they have had a volunteer here for the past two years there was much misunderstanding as to what the Peace Corps is and what my role is in the community. I wanted to clear a few things up, starting with the money, and let people know that I am here to work for them but patience and good organization is paramount to utilize our time and resources best. I spent the entire day before at the marché going around and verbally promoting the meeting for the next afternoon. I employed the town crier, Victor and I went over the outline of my agenda… nobody showed up. After about twenty minutes of V. going around and shouting at everyone around town to gather up we got about twenty or so people to congregate under the baobab and listen to what I had to say. The meeting itself went well; V. did an excellent job translating into Lamba, I cracked a few jokes, we had good response and questions asked. I should have felt better about it but couldn’t help but feel a bit slighted, considering not even one person from my compound showed (after multiple promises of attendance) and the following hour was filled by people asking me to buy them drinks and one further request for a personal loan. I have decided to resolve to cold refusal; it seems to be the only way.

One of my other January goals was to start my garden, being a natural resource management volunteer and all. The day after the meeting, V. had asked the guys from the gardening groupement to show up and help me clear my plot and dig my beds. I bought 2000f of tchouck beer and asked Madeline (V’s wife and my closest friend) to make up some lunch – both expected for working for someone here and one of my favorite perks to helping out with harvest – Togolese picnic style. While the men burned off the dead sorghum and elephant grass stocks and used pick axes to break up the impenetrable land, and while still others set up and searched for fence posts for me, I busied myself (unable to do much else and feeling like I was in the way) with starting my compost pile under a nearby tree right next to the lake, a perfect location. I was hoping for it to be intriguing or bizarre enough to the gardeners for it to function as a sort of technical demonstration, to an extent it worked out but follow up is needed.

The reason why Ataloté is able to have such impressive gardens/gardeners is because as V. puts it ‘during the time of my parents’ someone had helped create a man made lake at the base of the hill behind village where the water from rainy season has created a small lake that recedes during dry season but does not dry up. The gardeners, all farmers as well who have nothing to do during the dry season until prepping their fields just before the rains, use the land where the lake recedes to garden and the groupement, aside from organizational issues, is impressive. They definitely know how to grow but I hope to implement some easy techniques for them to spend less money and increase yield. The people here are very motivated and I think if I approach things right they will be very receptive. One example of this is when I showed V. how to double-dig his beds, a labor intensive technique that is especially helpful for gardening here in poor soil because the aerating effects is one less struggle for the plants. He absolutely got it and couldn’t be more excited about it. It felt great working with him in his garden and since then he has used the technique in all of his empty beds and the cabbage and lettuce we planted in them have been growing fast! Yeah direct results!

Now I have been double-digging two to three beds a day in my plot, it is back breaking work but I love spending the early mornings at the garden, it is so quiet and more than a bit therapeutic. Jack comes and we kick it. I have transplanted some lettuce and hopefully will start soon with tomatoes, onions, pumpkins and squash!

I decided to stay in village to celebrate both Christmas/Solstice and New Years despite many invitations to volunteer parties throughout the country to see how Togolese party during the holiday season. This also coincides with the end of the harvest season and so they have good reason to celebrate, and celebrate they do. Daniel decided to come and stay for the week during Christmas and we had a good time enjoying all Ataloté has to offer, not to mention Kanté. D. arrived on Thursday and that night I drug him along to go check out a compound that had puppies for sale and he helped me pick out my beloved Jack, a good call and the only option out of the litter but the second opinion definitely helped. I am not much of a dog person really but here it is quite another issue and very comforting not to mention a security measure. We noted that the puppy had a case of round worm after he took a deuce on my porch and after inspection it was easy to confirm my suspicions as the worms made their escape to our mutual horror. We were planning on going in to Kanté to get supplies at the marché and decided to pay a visit to the vet.

Christmas Eve was far from uneventful. After taking a zed into town, Yanga (my moto chauffeur) helped us find the veterinarians office. The vet was very helpful and after a somewhat muddled and humorous conversation about discerning the size and weight of the puppy with many hand gestures and my questioning about the poisonous nature of the mysterious and unknown drug we decided to trust him and went on our way, highly relieved that the worms wouldn’t be around by Christmas morning. We met up with Mary, my closest PCV neighbor to drop off our helmets and pick up mail and packages (!) we headed out for the marché. As entered there was a guy trying to get our attention and we wrote him off as the usual heckler but he was persistent. As we made our way into a clearing in the stalls he made a run at me and tried to grab my bag, I held tight as Daniel pushed him into the next stall and as he made a run for it a group of three Togolese guys attempted a swing or two at him. Damn “Voleur”, thief. I had thought that he ripped the bag because my billfold had fallen on the ground and there was a big hole in it. After a circumspect and hurried pass through the market to get veggies etc. watching over our shoulders we went back to Mary’s, a bit shaken. Upon further inspection of the bag D. let me know that he definitely had used a razor blade because the tear was too clean, the bag unable to be ripped and my billfold slashed as well. According to the safety and security officers the holiday season and just before close of service are the times with the highest crime incident rates. I guess we will chalk it up to that and I have tried to since feel comfortable at the once welcoming market that is a necessity to stalk my kitchen. I am just glad that nobody got hurt and that the man didn’t make off with a cent. Thanks Daniel, crisis averted.

That night presented another interesting occurrence. Long after we went to bed we were awoken by the sound of approaching drums and a troupe making its way through the village- the standard cowbells and chant like singing. It was nearly a full moon so I could make out the group passing by the dispensary across the street. I knew it couldn’t be a funeral procession and it certainly wasn’t a marriage assembly so I deduced it must be a cause of the celebration. They went off, becoming distant and muffled, only to circle back and stand directly outside the compound and my bedroom window. It had to have been near midnight or early morning and I thought it was a bit odd to be making rounds at that time. We realized that they were the Togolese version of carolers and I surmised that they wanted bonbons or a bit of money for their troubles and if it hadn’t been so late I would have certainly obliged. It is nice to know that some Christmas tradition is not lost across oceans and deserts.

Christmas was essentially what I had expected. Tchouck, fufu, tchouck, fufu with an occasional salutation or shot of liquor sandwiched in between. I had decided not to cook anything that day because I knew the nurse’s wife and maman would be sending over bowls of food. After spending most of the day hanging out on the porch and enjoying the time reading and watching my host family, occasionally chatting across the compound, we decided it was time to go and greet Victor and his family. I had given out pocket calendars of Colorado to maman and the nurse’s wife accompanied by some yams. I fished out some random toys, cologne, some empty notebooks (from things that Betsy had left behind) and added another calendar and an really nice pair of earrings that I had a nearly duplicate pair to give to Madeline, V. and the kids. Madeline is an awesome cook; she served us rice with peanut sauce and tofu for dinner and we hung about the compound drinking some more and enjoying the company of his family and friends.

Carlos, my Lamba tutor and M.’s little bro came over with a TIME mag I had given him for a present to ask some pressing questions regarding the content. He had come to my compound a few weeks earlier relating to me that one of his parents had died or something or other and he needed assistance to continue finishing school and take the BAC exam that is necessary, and very difficult, to filter students out before university. I told him that I couldn’t give him anything but asked about possible Lamba tutoring. He has impeccable French, quite a bit of English, and is very bright. We set up tutoring schedule and while now I know that he is M.’s little brother and not so sure he really is an orphan (here an orphan is someone missing one parent not both). Regardless, it seems to be working out alright and I am able to capitalize the sessions by picking his brain and asking him all the pressing questions I have about Togo, the government, the school system and cultural practices that I feel unable to ask those I am living and working with.

Daniel left on the 29th because we both wanted to experience New Years fêtes in our respective villages. New Years- ‘Bon Année!!!’- is a big holiday here and the celebrations go on for three or four days. I awoke New Years day to a group of local guys singing and making a racket outside in the compound at five o’clock in the morning. After realizing they were not going to give it up, and a couple of shouts ‘Akua’ ‘Akua’ (Ah- qwaa – my local name which supposedly mean we will work together as one, or at least that is what V. told me but I have been unable to since confirm it), I went out to see what they were up to. These are the guys that I see consistently downtown under the baobab drinking and never doing much of anything else. As I emerge freezing, wiping sleep from my eyes and wrapping my pagne tightly around my shoulders I see the motley crew and their makeshift instruments. A small metal bowl one is beating against like a cowbell, an empty bucket for a drum and I can’t make out what one of them is blowing through that sounds vaguely like a recorder. I can tell they have been up all night drinking but their exuberance is contagious and I am glad I didn’t roll over, cover my head with a sheet and ignore them. I tell them to come back at a more decent hour and that I have prepared tchouck to share.

Well not quite. I didn’t prepare the beer, Nadeje, Maman and Richard’s daughter who lives behind the baobab with her three mangy kids and her friendly and smiling husband Luc, the mason who is supposed to fix up my walls at some point, prepared it for me. I bought the sorghum. This was a source of slight contention for me. Maman had gone down to celebrate in Kara for a few days before Christmas and to bring up a couple of her other kids (they had ten over the years) for the holidays. While she was gone, the compound was hurting and I realized how much she keeps it together and how senile Richard is becoming. He came to me the day of the marché before the holidays asking what they were going to eat for the celebration. In other words he was asking me for a present, for money. I had already been planning to buy them a couple of chickens or something to eat for a Christmas present and to demonstrate my gratitude at their hospitality so this was irksome. I asked him what would be appropriate for a Christmas dinner and he said two guinea fowls and a cock would suffice; I glowered at him and offered to buy the two fowl. 4,000f plus 1,200f for the sorghum for New Years. I told him that I trusted him and knew he would get the things at the normal price and I would get gauged if I tried to buy it all myself. He spent all day at the market and came back that night completely drunk and incomprehensible. I walked over to the nurse’s wife and asked her if he’d come back with the birds earlier that day, she looked shifty and assured me he did. Maman returned, I watched them kill their own chickens for Christmas.

New Years was fun. After I got over that nearly nobody came to visit and celebrate with me chez moi, I decided to go and visit with the women around Victor’s compound downtown. It was a good call because it ended up being one of the best times I’ve had yet here in Togo. Awa, Clementine, Madeline and their kids were all going around from compound to compound singing and dancing. Awa is a beautiful women and has a rockin body for how many kids she has put out (Madeline is too but she is much more modest), she was singing and had a sort of cowbell castanets. Pelagie’s daughter and Victor’s daughter Flora were hilarious and amazing dancers. Awa was definitely the driving force and made everyone continue dancing, even me. It was not the typical ‘chicken dance’ that all of us got used to down south which is slow and fluid, this dance was athletic and rhythmic. The women and girls would circle up and the two dancers would get in the middle and have a sort of dance off, partner shuffling. After I let go and realized there was no reason to feel self conscious it was extremely fun and I felt like I was among girlfriends again, laughing and letting loose. After two nights of such exhibition I am now told everywhere I go in town how well I dance and that somehow everybody saw how good I am. ‘Tu danse bein!!’ they assure me and go into some kind of re-enactment. I smile. I don’t regret making a fool out of myself because I know that I have real friends now in this strange new place, women and girls I can feel at home with and be myself. Many things are different, some never change.

It goes slow here but there is never enough of it. Days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months and I feel like I have lived in West Africa for years. It is not the truth but the time is deceitful. At five in the morning you have the perception that you have all the time in the world to write letters, to finish the household chores, to socialize with your new friends and neighbors and in one gulp of nescafé the sun is setting and you have fifteen minutes to do anything else that requires light. Harmattan is also the season of the recolte, the harvest. I have calluses forming over my newly healed blisters and the villagers are telling me of another champ that is scheduled to be harvested the next day. “Will you assist?” Yes. I will. It is all I have to feel that I am being productive and useful here as of yet. My first harvesting experience was far different from the others that followed and is indicative of the nuances of social standing in village.

The first sorghum harvest I helped out with was for the nurse’s wife (I do not know her name and everyone refers to her as le matron d’infirmiere). I overslept and as I was devouring raw tofu, too sleepy from battling the noises of bats and mice in my ceilings and drowsy from taking benadryl to get any rest to motivate myself to cook breakfast, I heard Victor’s voice outside. The day before at the petite marché one of the village men said something to me about helping with harvest near my house. It was my second week here at post and I didn’t fully understand him, he was slurring a bit and my French is far from perfect, I nodded and affirmed something I was not too sure of – a daily occurrence. It was eight o’clock and I had been awake maybe fifteen minutes when V. told me to get ready for harvest. A buzz of people filtered in and out of the compound and after grabbing a kitchen knife, which has now accompanied me to the fields many times, and deciding to change into pants instead of the pagne I had initially wrapped around myself thinking I might be in for a bit more work than I anticipated.

Indeed. We swept through the fields in lines of three to four cutting the tops of the sorghum stocks, swiftly taking time only to deposit handfuls of them into basins the apprentices followed us around with, pointing out when we had missed a stalk or two. Sweat, I have come to embrace it seeing as how there is no escape; after a bit I fell into rhythm with the others and realized I was the only woman helping. We took a couple breaks to drink tchouck (local fermented millet beer) and sit in the shade. The air was jovial, festive, and one of the farmers taught me a neat trick of how to weave a stock into a little triangular box. It felt as though a harvest was a harvest no matter where it happened. The harmattan winds made the work bearable and I concentrated on the manual labor that let my mind rest, listening to the white noise of the local language chatter amongst everyone surrounding me. By the time we all congregated around the mango tree in my compound to drink more tchouck and the men taking shots of sodabe (distilled grain alcohol from ?- essentially moonshine) it was nearly two o’clock. As I sat on my porch and chatted with new friends about various subjects with a calabash of tchouck in one hand and a bowl of fufu in the other I felt warm, and it was not a result of the alcohol or sun. I felt as though this whole two years thing might work out, that my life here in Ataloté could be real and fulfilling beyond work. I realized where the women had been… preparing food and drink for the men.

Then there was my harvest with Pelagie, the widow of Betsy, my predecessor’s, homologue (Togolese counterpart). I had helped her harvest with V. and a few others a few days before but I saw her after church and asked her how it was going. It was far from finished and I told her I would be at her house the next day to help out. I got there early and hung around the compound awkwardly while she made sure her kids were set. Pelagie and Betsy were very close for obvious reasons, she is distant and skeptical of me and this makes all of our interactions tense. I feel nervous and don’t know what to do with myself, not really sure what she is doing or if I am early and imposing on her morning I ask, “Are the others at the field already?” “Should I go on ahead?”

She looks up from the basin she is packing with her knife and a large container filled with tchouck, a standard to any trip to the fields, she lets out a sort of suppressed laugh “Who? Who else is there?” she looks down again and lifts the basin up onto her head, “It is just you and me.” I realize the importance of this moment in our relationship. I feel a bit hollowed. It felt like everyone had showed up to help the nurse’s wife, all the gardeners/farmers from the groupement, all the familiar faces I know around town. The day before at Pelagie’s champ there had been far less, but there had still been help. I realized that for the past few days she had been harvesting by herself. The nurse’s wife is a functionaire, her husband has left to a big city further south to continue his studies but he will send for her and her three children soon. They have money. Her temporary dwellings in our compound will not last for long and soon she will move back into the life she is accustomed to. Pelagie has been abruptly widowed with three children to raise, a field to maintain, and a garden to scrap together enough to get by. Her husband was the president of the gardening groupement and well respected in the community. She is strong, perhaps one of the strongest women I have ever met. I would have thought that the community would pitch in more than they did, but what would they benefit? With the nurse’s wife there was a gain to be had, with Pelagie there was duty but it only reached so far. That morning when I woke up I thought about not going, showing up later and excusing it as being sick or something. It was one of those moments that I knew I had made the choice that would go great lengths to helping me integrate, to help me belong.

The harvest went about the same. By that time I had gotten my technique down. I could keep up; it was nice to work in silence side by side. Here I have found there is no micro-managing, people just know how to work together, it happens seamlessly, or at least that is my understanding. A gesture here, a nod, there are not slackers here. You work, or you don’t. We worked like that all morning and it was beautiful, a silent bond between us was bridging. As I sat for a moment in the shade watching Pelagie prepare the stalks by tramping them down to the ground, I could see her as a small girl. She couldn’t be too much older than me. Her face is round and her hair is shorn. She has large eyes that droop slightly, you can see what the sadness has done, you can feel it when you look at her and it makes one slightly uncomfortable for being more content. But in the field I could see her as her daughter, her deft movements of work she had done for longer than she could remember. Life had worn her down but she was quiet about it, always speaking in a soft mumble.

There were moments, if you could spend enough time with her,that you could peek behind the veil of grief and see what she might have been like before. Funny, witty, strong. At one point during the day, when we were nearing a tree that stood in the middle of the field, she stopped short. We both looked under the tree and heard a faint rustling, she took a quick step back and quickly searched for and found a large rock nearby and threw it under the tree, “Il y a un serpent!” and again I could see the girl. We laughed at our femininity, shaking off our shared moment of weakness and got on with the work.