We finally
have a little free time to write a significant blog post. Leah doesn’t like to use the computer from
1998 (really, it doesn’t even have a USB port), but it’s our only way to
connect to the internet, and we are grateful for that. There is so much to tell you all about our
little village and the adventures we’ve been having.
The volunteer house is starting to feel a
little more like home every day. The
four of us cook and clean together and get along well. School hasn’t started yet so Adam, who is here to teach English, comes and helps
with odd jobs around the dispensary. We
work every day excluding Sunday, and Saturday is only a half day of work. The dispensary is right around the corner and
only a 3 minute walk from our house, and it’s very interesting. There is a walk-in clinic, laboratory,
pharmacy, two multi-person hospitalization rooms (mostly used for patients who
require IV treatments), and a surgical suite which only operates (pun intended)
when surgeons come from Italy to give their time. Patients who require follow up and
observation must go home for the night
and come back the following day, since there are no facilities to keep patients
overnight. The dispensary is not a 24
hour hospital. Also, surgeries are only
done twice a year, October and April.
There is a hospital in Lomé called Tokoin but most of the people here
cannot afford it. We occasionally have
to refer patients there if we cannot treat them here.
We live in
an area where all the roads are dirt.
You don’t hit pavement until you get closer to Lomé. Our compound is on the main road so there is
a decent amount of traffic, and with that comes dust. But it’s rained twice since we’ve been here
so that helps keep the dust down. The
local language is called Ewe (pronounced Eh-vay). It’s word for white person is “Yovo”, and we
hear it all the time. Having any skin
color other than black makes you Yovo; even the Filipina sister here is
considered Yovo. The children chant at
us as we walk by, “Yovo, Yovo, Bonjour!”
Some of the children are a little skittish but others run up and hold
your hand and walk with you.
Quite
often, people automatically assume we are wealthy simply because we are
white. Each of the four of us gets a
monthly allowance from the money that you all generously donated before we
left. Our total allowance for the year
comes out to less than $1400 each. It is
still a very strange thought that we can live for an entire year on that small
an amount of money, but we have successfully been doing so thus far. Our housing and utilities are provided by the
sisters, but we pay for all of our other expenses out of that money. We buy what groceries we can in bulk (i.e. 50
kg bag of rice), and everything else, we try to eat and shop like the locals
do. We don’t eat meat very often, and we
eat a lot of fruits, starches, and vegetables.
We include as much food that grows here in the compound as we can. Everything about how we live now is radically
different than at home, and it’s good for us.
You definitely learn to appreciate things more when you have a very
finite amount of resources and you have to work for everything. In spite of all that I just related, we are
actually still better off than many of the people here. A normal monthly salary here is a little bit
less than what we have. It is definitely
a major perspective shift to be here.
There is a
lady on the corner who sells coconuts every day. They pick the coconuts when they are very
green, so they don’t have much meat to them but they are full of milk and SO
GOOD! The sisters have a ton of fruit
trees on the premises: coconut, mango,
papaya, grapefruit, orange, passion fruit, banana, mandarin, avocado, and some
fresh garden veggies in the sisters’ garden.
We eat lunch with the sisters every Sunday and Sr. Agnes, Mother
Superior, eats dinner with us every Wednesday.
There is a farmers market every 5 days so we try to buy our food from
the local people instead of going to the supermarche (supermarket). Some things you just can’t get at the farmers
market. Dairy products are very
rare. Anyone familiar with camping
milk? That’s the closest think to milk
we can find here. But it has been so fun
eating the local food and coming up with new ways to cook it.
We went to
the US Embassy and registered with them this week. That should set some parents at ease J. Oh, and we were invited to a wedding! Weddings in Togo consist of three
ceremonies: engagement ceremony, civil ceremony,
and church ceremony. Last Saturday we
were invited to a traditional engagement ceremony. It is usually a private event for the family
but in attendance at this one were extended family, friends, and coworkers. Everyone at the dispensary was invited, and
since we have never seen the traditional events surrounding a wedding, we were
invited too. Tomorrow is the civil
ceremony, which is like a wedding at the court house. Next Saturday is the church ceremony. We’ve been told that church ceremonies are
very extravagant for those who can afford it.
There is a lot of food and music after every ceremony. We had so much fun at the engagement ceremony
(we were treated like family) that we can’t wait for the other two.
Well it’s
about dinner time and we need to cook something. Hope everyone is well.
Love and
miss you all,
The Yovos