a different world than where you come from (23 Apr 2003)
i can officially get my passport stamped, my visa signed, because i have crossed some sort of imaginary frontier into a whole new world, a whole other dimension of togo in these past few days - a dimension of daily interaction and fun with americans, eating at restaurants and, recently and most incredibly, A/C and even HOT RUNNING WATER!
lomé, it seems, is an enigma and a contradiction unto itself, and being here the third time around (the other two being my arrival in september when none of us really left the hostel for fear of our lives; and then my swear-in week in december when we ventured out a bit but mostly rested comfortably in each others' presence, ready to become "official") is oh-so different.
whereas before this capital city seemed like one endless ramshackle slum, it now appears as a clean, exciting, beachside attraction (what does this tell us about my four months at post, i wonder?).
i arrived good friday with 5 PCV friends (fresh from an entire week of in-service training on project design and management in village) having decided not to spend easter at post. though i'm sure it was fascinating and wonderful, this holiday, like christmas, has too much family bound up in it to celebrate alone.
meghan, a good friend and hardcore irish catholic (even went to notre-dame!) and i pledged to celebrate together. we had a lovely sunday which started around 5 am with people running, drumming, shouting down the streets in the darkness after finishing easter vigil. it was an amazing way to wake up, and things just kept getting better from then on. we went to a 3 hour long mass in ewé, ate lunch at the nicest hotel in lomé (the expatriates there even had an easter egg hunt for their fashionably international kids), frolicked on the beach and ultimately met up with some others for dinner and live music.
at the hotel beach, as we splashed around collecting seashells with our dresses gathered up around our hips, trying in vain to maintain some semblance of decency since we had to walk back though the lobby, meghan turned to me and cried, "this is my first easter ever on the beach!" i grinned and flung my arms open to embrace the ocean and all of togo, shouting, "joyeause paques! jouyease vie!" (happy easter! happy life!), which, while admittedly romantic, attracted a crazy guy who wound up collecting shells with us while falling in the water, laughing hysterically and intermittantly shouting "AMERIKA! it's very okay! yes! my sista! very okay!" with a three-toothed smile.
we now remember him affectionately as crazy shell guy...
this excursion into our dear capital had revealed several very different worlds existing here in lomé. worlds that rotate separately and rarely if ever intersect, and we PCVs are bouncing from one to the other, with all that social and cultural jet lag taking its toll.
in any given day, i'll go from the poor neighborhood we're staying in, to a restaurant that only ex-pats and lebanese car dealers can afford to dine in, to a beach i must pay to use because it's the only strip that's been cleared of human feces, to the PCV lounge (a world unto itself), to the great sprawling, squawking grand marché, where people take one look at me and give exorbitantly yovo prices, but they don't know that i'm a part of their world, too....
it's a strange and often unsettling gift to be able to wander between worlds. amazing, yet sad, to realize how little these people on each side of the divide know of each other - how their lives are parallel yet never intersecting, how they try so hard to pretend the other doesn’t exist.
imperialism reigns 50 years later...
