We have World Cup fever here in
Incidentally, for those of you who follow these things,
maybe you can fill me in on the history of
I haven't written in 3 months.
It wasn't intentional, I was just waiting for more uplifting
or fun things to write about and voilà, suddenly 3 months have gone by (a month
of it spent without leaving village, so there's one excuse).
Meanwhile,
I've gotten some great letters and packages and Strangers, and emails to keep
me going, so a million times Thank You! Deb, I got your letter and
then the package of books (I'm on the second one) & chocolates that
didn't last long at all & pen refills and sudoku (thanks for the new
addiction)! Jessica, I got your bday package and the chocolates I have
been savouring. Oh, and I just got your e-greeting but couldn't hear it,
so have to try again when I'm in the Capital next. Briana, I got your
letter and the sundried tomatoes& nectarines & apples and it was
heaven! Jenn, I got your epic letter and the pictures, yayy! I
wanna hear how the Rebar show with Nick and the Sissyfists went! And,
yes, before I forget, send me some of Mark's new music & whatever else -- I
can get access to a cd player easily enough and may buy a cheapo one here cuz
David, yes I got the cd you sent, and Megan I got the cd you sent in that
massive Trader Joe's package -- so I am now inspired to supplement my MP3
player with some older technology. Grandma Viv and Grandpa, as you know,
I got your 2 lovely packages and sister's and the mystery package that said it
was from sister but wasn't in her writing and contained some great reading
material...and I am happy to report to everyone that it doesn't look like
anything went astray. However, if you sent something and I didn't mention
it here, let me know!
Brian, my dear cousin, as you all know has updated the blog
site (complete with a picture and a cheesy caption as I just noticed!), and I
cannot take any credit for it at all (especially for the cheesy caption), as
Mark tried to give me. No, Mark, I don't have it in me, you should know
better! But; luckily, my cousin does...
Also, in the past few months, I had an I Saw You in the
Stranger in February that put a big grin on my face (along with the Valentine
but y'all already knew about that), that is now posted on my kitchen wall along
with photos of many of you; went to a project design & mgt. training and an
all-volunteer conference & fundraiser/auction in March, won the
Poker Tournament (I am my mother's daughter!) at the fundraiser and
donated all my winnings to a Peace Corps Scholarship fund for Togolese girls;
discovered officially that I am in the most remote post in Togo (I had my
suspicions...) & thus will be getting moto taxi rights, along with a
handful of other posts; saw the total eclipse of the sun in March,
which was amazing of course; and have had some crazy brightly colored dreams,
most involving food or at some point veering off to focus on food, as in a
plethora of choices, like in a store or in a market or even at a buffet
(gourmet of course). I always knew how much I valued diversity in my life
(friends, interests, travels and adventures), but had no idea that it also
applied to food! Never in my life has my subconscious been so blatantly
obsessed with a lack of choices. I was in
Moving on: I was just at another training, our last
one, and was also nominated to a committee to help re-vamp our CHAP program's
3-month stage training (problems with the training seem to be an
on-going issue, but maybe you can verify that Jen Samnick?) Oh, and I
turned 37 (thanks for all the birthday messages on the blog site and via email
and letters!). Oooh, I also bought a plane ticket to
So, like I said, it wasn't intentional that I haven't
written, it's just the most pressing things that have been going on in my life
and in my mind have not been the stuff of fun travel memoirs. And, though
I know you all probably want to hear about everything that goes on, and my
processing of it, and how I am coping or not coping with it, for some
reason I am not inspired to write about those things, and worry too
that it will all come across as a complete downer. Deb and Jenn and
Jessica, I've wanted many times to write back but the same applies for letters
as for emails -- It's impossible for me to write just a nice breezy, 'hey
things are fine, wish you were here', and yet I don't want my letters and
emails to degrade into mad ventings that would be best written down in a
journal if I'd only keep one. I do keep a work journal, where I jot
down details of daily meetings and project ideas and activities and
all that, and sometimes I go off on a tangent because I just can't help it, but
in general it exhausts me to write about the emotional upheavals and about my
ongoing contemplations regarding development work.
Basically, in a nutshell, I've been dealing with a lot of death in village. Death death and more death. And all of it avoidable if we didn't live in the African bush. It all started in March. Actually it started in February when I came into contact with a severely malnourished woman and her equally malnourished baby.
I'd noticed her at a funeral ceremony. In general, people here get enough to eat, and have access to a balanced diet; the problem tends to be that people prefer to eat only yams, rice, corn-based food, with a sauce that may or may not contain a protein source. there are plenty of pigs and goats and chickens running around, so they could add a lot more meat to their diets.
The biggest problem I see in terms of avoiding illness and recovering from these same illnesses is that they ignore many of the dark leafy greens and don't tend to go for many of the fruit sources either, except for mangos when in season (small very stringy fibrous things) and bananas at times. They go for the "energy" foods that make you feel full, but ignore the benefits of foods that provide protein, vitamins & minerals that offer growth and protection. My village doesn't grow green veggies nor tomatoes nor pineapple; for some reason, they consider veggies like carrots and lettuce and cucumbers as "city people's food" or for fonctionnaires (govt employees). If it doesn't fill you up, then what good is it? This is part of why we're here, for nutrition education.
So, anyway, I see this woman at the funeral and I ask my
landlord about her. He tells me her name and where she lives and that the
father of the baby teaches at one of the primary schools. With a trusted
village translator/collaborator, I go to visit her and find out she's been
sick since the birth of the baby about 9 months ago. She doesn't live
with the father and she has no income. It is clear she and the baby have
parasites that have led to this state of health, coupled by not enough
nourishment. Not only is she a single mother, but she is far too sick to
go work in the fields for subsistence purposes. I go talk to the father
alone (since he speaks French) who tells me they've been to the dispensaire
(our village clinic) twice and that she is currently taking iron and other
fortifying supplements, along with other meds (he shows them to me &
assures me several times that yes, she is taking them every day as prescribed,
even though he keeps them at his house), but that they continue to get worse
and didn't have the money to go out of the bush to the hospital for further
analysis and treatment. He says he is waiting til he gets paid next and
then they can go. I go to see our nurse, and he tells me they hadn't been
in since November (when he had again referred them to go be seen at a hospital)
and showed me what he had prescribed -- the guy had flat out lied to me.
The meds (the fortifiants plus de-worming antibiotics) he showed me had barely
been touched, and they should have long been finished. Over the next few
days, she leaves to go stay with her father in another village much farther
away, and to get help from him. Okay, fine, done.
In mid-March I
see her in the village walking around but am in discussion with someone else so
don't talk to her and take it as a good sign that she's back and out &
about. I plan to go see her later, but hadn't gotten around to it.
A week later, the guy comes up to me in the market to tell me the baby has
died. I ask him if he ever got treatment for him and he says that yes
both mom and baby had been to dispensaire the previous Friday and had started
treatment but that it was too late for the baby. I left to go be by
myself -- pissed that I hadn't gone to go check on her, sad, and wondering how
on earth he could let that happen? I go see the nurse and he said that
the woman had indeed come in on Friday but waited several hours for the guy to
show up with the money & finally left. They never bought the meds; he
had lied to me once again.
The nurse suspects he had tried to get a
traditional healer to treat them. I learn a little later that same day
that this is the 2nd baby she's had with him and the first one had died as
well. In the days and weeks that follow I learn more the depth of his
negligence, and I want to, literally, castrate him. It seems to me that
he WANTED this to happen, so he could wash his hands of her -- which he
has completely (and she of him now, after all this). I explain to my
cohorts that what he has done is a crime; he has a job, which yes pays very
little, but he has NO expenses; he even lives in his father's house. In
the meantime, I take her to the dispensaire and pay for her antibiotics and
supplements and all that -- I figure this is her chance now to survive, and I
cannot once again stand by and wait to see what happens. For a lousy 1200
francs (less than 3 dollars).
Why hadn't I just done that before?
Because that is not sustainable development; that is giving the fish & not
the fishing skills. Plus, people ask me constantly for money and/or meds,
and I definitely do not want to start a precedent. With my
translator, I explain several times that no one is to know about this.
Since then, I pass by regularly to check on her and bring things like bananas,
avocadoes, beans, enriched soy porridge (you roast 2 parts corn + 1 part soy
beans, add one part rice and take the whole shebang to the miller, and voilà, a
really tasty 'flour' to cook with water to make something akin to cream of
wheat but better). She passes by to thank me, but she still looks
wretched.
She still can't sow her fields and lives in a compound with her
aging aunt and an even older woman. No men, which is like a death
knell. I mention this problem to another wonderful cohort in village,
asking Don't these women have a field somewhere, and can't someone help
them plant this year to get them on their feet? It's planting season, and
it would be a tragedy if nothing was planted just for the fact that they
themselves are not capable. He went to them, talked it over and is going
to find a few men in village to help them prepare the land and sow it.
He
was even going to donate a small part of his own field if necessary. He
is one of the very few inspirations that keeps me going. In general, the
'leaders' of the village lack the will and the long-term vision to do what it
takes to improve the quality of life in village -- and there have been days
when this one inspirational person is the only thing keeping me from feeling
like it's all utterly useless, my time here. Luckily, he is president of
one of the village committees, and smart, and tireless.
So then, in April, my friend's husband died.
She's the woman who had been my Akebou tutor, but has become one of
my only female friends (because I can't communicate well with most women,
due to the language barrier), and her house had become a semi-regular
hangout to just gab or learn a togolese meal. Their house tends to be
frequented by a lot of folk, especially from that church I've told you all
about, and she feeds anyone who happens to be there around mealtime.
Her husband was the area's metalworker/solderer as well, and very mellow
and highly respected for his work and his general character. Young and
normally health, he had been sick for about a week with what we all assumed was
malaria, and which often gets better with a little chloroquine treatment.
I'd seen him, nauseated and no appetite, but otherwise all thought he was doing
better.
I left for my birthday weekend, to celebrate in Badou with other
birthday girls, and came back to discover he'd been evacuated to Atakpame, the
regional capital. Initial diagnosis there was evidently diabetes but I
don't know what their analyses were. He went into a coma. Next diagnosis
I heard was meningitis (he'd progressed to the stiff neck and some tremors and
other weird brain stuff), but then I heard tests were negative. Anyway,
it still seems to be a mystery, perhaps because he died too quickly to do
proper tests. I personally think if it wasn't meningitis, then perhaps it
was cerebral malaria, since symptoms are similar. We will never
know.
But when I found out, it hit me strangely hard. My reaction
was visceral, as if I was mourning my own loss, and it took me by surprise.
But it was for her, and her 3 kids + baby on the way. I instinctively
knew she wouldn't take this like people tend to take death here (as a matter of
course), that her whole life had just turned upside down and not in a
million years could she have thought this could happen to her. Tons of
people were gathered around her house; she was inside sitting on the floor with
a bunch of other women and her husband's body on the bed. I was crying
and she was in utter despair yelling, Laura my husband left me. There is
no more hope, there is no more hope. I got taken out of there into the
sunlight and the courtyard where everyone in the whole village seemed to be
there, and was being led away when I heard my name.
It was my landlord's 2nd
wife, who I adore but cannot communicate with. We just have an inherent
affection for each other, and I fell into her arms. I was a mess, I don't
know why, and she just kept saying, 'my child', in local language. I was
taken home a few minutes later and when I asked why I couldn't stay, I was told,
rather dismissively, "you can't be there crying like
that". I was angry and sad and frustrated, and of course sure I'd
made an utter fool of myself -- how am I supposed to know how to
"act", no one ever told me. The whole village, as well as some
surrounding villages, was in turmoil over this, but they said it was because
the widow was being "weak" and too upset, and it wasn't allowing
others to move on.
She felt the need to grieve, fully and loudly, and it
is evidently not accepted. Over the weeks, she suffered from insomnia and
the nurse gave her valium, and she said once that now she sees life and
considers death to be better; even the words in her bible were blurry and she
couldn't read it she said. I told her it will get better, but it will take
time. She is now thankfully doing much better, and has ventured out
of the house; her church has been supportive of course, and all of his
brothers.
Then, last month, the young wife of a friend's little
brother died, due to hemorrhaging from a botched home abortion. No one
but the husband even knew she was 3 or 4 months' pregnant, and he had told her
not to do it. But they had another baby less than a year old, and she was
ashamed so they say. I had been at the dispensaire earlier that day and
was told there was a woman there recovering fine from an abortion
attempt. Apparently, she had been sent home and started bleeding heavily
that evening. But, while they were trying to find a car willing to
evacuate her to the nearest hospital 3 hours away, it started raining, hard --
which turns those dirt roads into mud pits --, and no one would accept to do
it.
Then, last night, I finally got to witness my first birth in
The baby was deemed stillborn. His feet and hands were
blue, she took him to another room (where the nurse was in the middle
of a consultation!) and left him on the counter, telling the mom we were
giving him "care". I made her come back, because there was a
heartbeat, but she said it was too late, because he couldn't breathe. I
thought about giving rescue breaths, but I don't know enough about deliveries
to know what would have worked and they seemed to think it wasn't worth a damn
anyway. I went to see the woman who thanked me, asking if the baby was
dead. They weren't telling the family yet, for some reason, but they had
to have known -- the sister had seen the color of the skin, and plus, for that
15 minutes while the woman's family scrubbed down the delivery room with bleach
and detergent (they also take the placenta with them and do a ceremonial burial
whether the baby is living or dead), there was the very conspicuous lack of a
baby's crying.
The sister said -- when we finally did
tell her--, that the baby hadn't wanted to live and evidently just wanted
the mother to suffer all that time. The mom seemed fine; it was god's
will. The matrone was in a hurry to leave (the nurse had already left),
and started locking up the offices, forgetting the dead baby on the counter,
while the family was standing patiently by, waiting to take it home. She
laughed out loud at her forgetfulness, saying 2 or 3 times (in front of the
family), as she went thru the process of unlocking the doors, "Oh, I
forgot the baby" ...
So, I'm glad I got that all out, so I can get back to
writing to you all. I will write more about what's been going on with
work and, like I said, my continually evolving thoughts on the subject.
For now, suffice to know, that I had 2 really positive experiences -- one with
a retraining of sorts of traditional midwives, and the other with
the creation of a girls' health club, where you will not be surprised to
learn that my focus will start with reproductive health and family
planning. More on that later; I have to go catch a taxi back to
village. Should be able to check before the very end of the month, so
please write!
Love you all, and thanks for your patience in not having
heard from me in months...
Laura
Peace Corps
B.P. 3194
cell: from