Food, Weddings, Work: Life in Togo So Far

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