perspective (09 May 2003)

i am now in kara, that grand metropolis of stevie's money, and was aghast the other day walking down the street to see a new hotel being built. there are no tourists! are they crazy? who builds a new hotel in togo when all the old ones can barely afford to stay in business? stevie does, man, with help from jacques chirac, too!

anyway, i need to stop waxing political in these volatile times...i'm going to get my butt booted out of peace corps or into a togolese prison if i'm not careful. with the presidential elections coming up, though, it's hard not to think about the situation more than ever, and i keep subtly trying to encourage rebellions in village. i do, however, live in RPT (stevie's party and the only one that really exists) land since i'm with the kabyé and stevie himself is of that tribe.

we shall see what goes down!

i started painting a large mural of a world map on the wall of my one school in village and it's been a little crazy since the info i had was incomplete - i'll have students trying to draw a tiny section of alaska in the grid i set up while cursing in the background because i realize that i don't have the model for the rest of north america and fun stuff like that! i'm hoping this can kick off the world awareness club i want to start as well as encouraging the villagers to get some perspective on togo's geographical position vis-a-vis the rest of the world, but for now it seems the people of kaniamboua are once again (understandably) mystified by the strange and inexplicable actions of the resident yovo as i toil under the morning sun, transferring continents onto a wall with a pencil at the beginning of rainy season. super logical.

last night, after the meeting of the gender and development committee i'm on (i'm the new editor of a magazine for togolese girls run by an NGO affiliated with peace corps!!), we went to one of the THREE restaurants here in kara (pretty hardcore, man!!) and discovered a little back room with darts and a pool table!! it was incredible! for a few short hours, i felt like a normal 23 year old woman, hanging in my friend's den. we even found some vodka at the gas station (which features air conditioning!), so i had my first non-tchouk-or-really-bad-boxed-wine drink in months!! it was heavenly, i tell ya! i may never be able to go back!

no, actually, the one thing that being able to come in and eat cheese and experience A/C has shown me is that, as much as i long for and miss those comforts, they're not the things that make me miss home, and they're not the things that make me happy when i do get to have them (although they don't hurt!); no, no, it's the people and the ability to have a real conversation and feel at ease...to feel productive, even.

i was so amazed at the rush i got from having a real, organized meeting with an agenda yesterday. that sense of accomplishment, or even ability to accomplish things, is missing from my life here.

i think i got myself into trouble recently talking a little too much. i just can't put a lid on my political side, man. last week was a big fête in village - the first of may, it seems, is labor day for the rest of the world, so we were all partying in village and i had a few too many calabashes and some wine and then the chef gave me some whisky and before i knew it was having this sort of out of body experience, watching myself stand in front of a group of villagers exhorting them to make a difference - “don’t you see that the future of this country is in your hands, i said, you have to change this government…” and i threw in some stuff about AIDS and family planning but man, i was half expecting the secret police to kill me in my bed that night...scary stuff, i’m even pretty nervous writing this so lets go on shall we…

in other, less scandalous news, i’ve been trying to help this handicapped kid in my village for months now and things might be coming about finally after this week...i got him a consultation with a sort of charity here in sokode but i have yet to hear the results. i met samwake at the beginning of my service here and have been researching and trying to hit up a religious order the next town over to at least get him a tricycle - which many polio victims use here because they can pedal with their hands - to get him to and from school. i kept hitting dead ends until i was put in contact with this painter in adjengre who, it turns out, is a volunteer for a group of nuns here in sokode who fund operations for young handicapees.

SO we tried for months to meet but things never worked out and then the one time we did meet up to talk to the kid someone took us to the wrong person’s house...it was a mess until the other night he just showed up in my compound and said we could go talk to the family toute de suite which we did - for what seemed like hours...it’s so agonizing because this kid is an orphan living with kind of extended family and they dont really want to be bothered with him. when we told them that the nuns could potentially fund a 200,000 plus CFA operation and just needed like 40,000 from the family for transporation and miscellaneous, they scoffed and said they didnt have the money to change this poor kid’s life for the better...

it was revealed, too, that he’s not even a polio victim - he was given too much anti-malarial vaccination stuff at a young age - some injection that the disponsaire screwed up and gave him twice as much as he should have had - and THAT’S why he’s handicapped. and as if that wasn’t terrible enough, his father died shortly after and - get this - his mother was apparently murdered just 3 years ago. i can’t get a straight story from anyone but its common knowledge that this was no natural death...

it’s awful so i truly hope the sisters can find some way to help him given that his family doesn’t seem to care enough to raise some money and the people of the village are too consumed with their own lives and suffering to help him out. i was ready to BURST the other day when i watched the same people who won’t even put down change for pump repairs or a well for the school throw in 3000 CFA to celebrate the first of may in style. it’s infuriating, but hey, we keep on keeping on - that's all there is to do, i suppose.

it’s so strange to be in a place of such extreme need and, 8 months in, still not really know what to do to help. the girls' education and empowerment program is an amazing and important project here in togo, but it's tough to work with such forward-thinking ideals in a country that's 90 percent farmers who can barely feed their kids, a country with almost zero infrastructure and no other NGOs, really.

ahhhh togo, ever the challenge!