Totally Togo

Maybe I'm just a moron, but it wasn't until I set an actual foot in West Africa that I had any idea that there is a country called Togo. Soccer fans may remember Togo as a 2006 world cup qualifier or know the Togolese soccer star Emmanuel Adebayor, who according to my outdated lonely planet guide plays for the English team Arsenal. Togo is a small strip of land sandwiched between Burkina, Ghana, Benin, and the Atlantic Ocean. Generally better off than Burkina (but not as well off as Ghana), the Togolese per capita annual income is a little less than the value of an 8GB iphone (around 380 USD).

Togo is your basic West African country struggling to grow into democracy in the wake of colonialism. First and most cruelly occupied by Portuguese, Togo earned the nickname "The Slave Coast". She was then briefly a German protectorate before being divided into British and French colonies at the end of WWI. When European imperialism finally went out of vogue in the early 60s, British Togoland was absorbed into the newly independent Ghana and French Togoland became Togo. After independence in 1960, Togo had several military leaders ousted in both bloody and bloodless coups until finally settling into a 38 year dictatorship. While Togo is technically now a democracy, free and fair elections are hard to come by in these parts and Togo is perennially on the UN shitlist for human rights violations (yet continues to enjoy diplomatic support from France!).

Our arrival into Togo was pretty bumpy, literally. We crossed over from Ghana at a minor (and possibly not entirely legitimate) border crossing at Wli, in the eastern Volta region. The border guards were two extremely cranky women who kept one eye on Brazilian soap operas while looking over our passports. In between Ghana and Togo is a half kilometer no man's land that belongs to neither country and no cars pass. We carried our bags over to the Togolese side only to find that no cars run from the border post to the nearest village 15k away on Sundays. The only option was to hitch a ride on zemi-johns, which are guys you can pay to let you sit on the back of their motorcycles while they drive way too fast on steep winding roads and and you precariously balance all your worldly possessions on your back and you watch your life pass before your eyes and hope that your family knows that you love them and realize why helmets were invented. After a long day of transport we finally arrived in Kpalime where we had to stay in a brothel and eat stale cookies.

In my snap judgment, Togo seems to be a pretty nice place. People seem kind and quick to laugh. The literacy rate is 60% (compared to 13% in Burkina), which makes getting around easier since more people have been to school and therefore speak French. So far we have done some hiking through the coffee and cocoa hills in the western part of the country. We are now in the capital (Lome) spending way too much of our precious time eating pizza and surfing the internet. Tomorrow we head to Togoville, the voodoo capital of west Africa. The better known Haitian voodoo was brought to Haiti by slaves taken from this area. If you need to hex anyone, drop me a line between now and tomorrow and I'll see what I can do.

Pictures: Kid with a sugar cane gun in Wli, Ghana; mating millipedes in Kpalime, Togo; and myself with some friends in Loumana, Burkina Faso.

No Direction Home

I'm guessing no one will read this since I did such a lousy job of posting regularly but I'll try again. I finished Peace Corps in July. Two years fly whether you`re having fun or not. Illnesses aside, I would say I had fun. I had fun the way running marathons is fun. I`m better off for having done it but no way in hell will I ever do it again. I learned French, learned to teach, generally learned a lot, and made a lot of new friends. I think I'm a better person. I have no regrets.

Now that it's over, my employment status goes from "volunteer" to "not at all". Odd waitressing and babysitting jobs not withstanding, a review of my job history goes like this: student, grad student, postdoc (technically a fellowship and not a job), peace corps volunteer, and now itinerant bum. I have not, in fact, ever had a real job. Looking on the bright side (a state of mind that gets easier every year), I have a nice chunk of free time and future plans roughly as solid as my e. coli tainted bowel movements. Fluid as they are, I nonetheless have plans. I will spend a few months here in West Africa to finish my tour of the world's poorest countries. Then off to SE Asia. And back on US soil before Christmas. If I can scrape together the resources for a car, I'd like to see America through my newly acquired rose colored glasses. If you have a free couch you could loan me for a night around end of December/early Januaryish, I will schedule my road trip to pass through your living room.

At the moment I'm in Accra (Ghana) trying to take care of plane tickets and visas. Africa is not known for her efficiency, so it's kind of frustrating but the process is ambling on. Ghana is nice. Unlike in Burkina, most households in Ghana have an annual income higher than the value of my ipod. Other bonuses are a good number of English speakers (thanks to British Imperialism), moderate double (as opposed to triple) digit temperatures, and even the occasional fresh vegetable. I spent a sweet week at a beach resort, some kind of eco friendly backpacker type establishment complete with dreadlocked blonds and drunk Australians. Soon we (my friend Brandi, another ex-volunteer, and her friend Peter) will head to the Lake Volta region in the Ghana's eastern region. Lake Volta is famous for giant egg laying turtles as well as the being the largest man made lake in the world. It is also a haven for butterfly enthusiasts. And who isn`t enthusiastic about butterflies? Pictures: Both from Burkina. The first is a fisherman in the village where I lived. The second is a cool cricket that's not nearly as big as it looks in this photo.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

As a Math teacher in Burkina, I get a whopping 5 months of summer vacation. This coincides with the rainy season. Rainy season softens the usually hard soil making this an ideal time for planting crops. Most of the kids at my school come from farming families so their hands are needed in the fields during this time. Left with nothing to do, I took the opportunity to skip town and see a little of West Africa. I started the summer in “Dogon country”. Dogon is most notable for its ruins of eccentric cliff dwelling communities high in the mountains and for it’s proximity to Timbuktu- letting you know that you’re in the middle of nowhere. It was not so unlike Burkina, although we did learn that women in these communities are relegated to “menstrual houses” when it’s that time of the month. These “menstrual houses” are dark, dank, depressing round houses which were empty at the time of our visit but are presumably full during the dark moon.

As a side note, did you know that in the absence of artificial lighting and the birth control pill, women have a natural tendency to menstruate during the dark phase of the moon and ovulate during the full phase of the moon? Hence the 28ish day menstrual cycle (There are about 29.5 days between new moons). I guess people are more amorous on well lit evenings. In a world where people are dependent on natural lighting, the evening of the full moon would make a great “date night”. The idea is that the cycle of the moon and the menstrual cycle line up to favor conception on these nights. It would have sounded like a sketchy theory to me before I got to Africa. Now that I’m here I can really appreciate how dark it is and how different the night feels during varying phases of the moon. Doesn’t surprise me at all that behavior (and biology) could be ruled by such a thing. The science to support this theory is weak, but speaking from my personal experience I’m a believer. If you’re interested, look at the Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle#Menstruation_and_the_moon. But I digress.

After this jaunt through northern Mali, we came back through Burkina, took a break for a conference in the capital city Ouagadougou, and then went on a 2^nd trip passing through the southern part of Mali and on to Guinea. Getting there was about 90% of the battle. Overland transportation in West Africa is a grueling test of patience and endurance. We began with a 14 hour bus ride from hell to get from Bobo-Dioulasso in southern Burkina Faso, to Bamako, the Malian capital. Taking the advice of other volunteers who have traveled in his region, I didn’t get any visas. As promised, in Mali the $20 bribe was cheaper and easier than the $100 and several days it would have taken to get the appropriate stamps in my passport. The Guinean embassy in Mali was my last chance to get a Guinean visa. Here I learned that the visa would cost me about $140 and a day. I chose to pass on this formality since my traveling companions already had visas and it was going to hang our trip up several days. So I went with the bribery method which, in hindsight, was a mistake. Transportation across the Guinean border involved stuffing 10 (yes TEN) people into a station wagon for 7 hours during the hottest part of the day. The border crossing was different from Mali in several ways. Most notably, the immigration officers were neither drunk nor good humored. After considerable intimidation (of me by them), the officers refused to speak to me. The transport driver finally negotiated a bribe of about $60, but the officers didn’t give me an entry stamp on my passport. I was really nervous about traveling in Guinea without this stamp because Guinea has a lot of “barrages”. These are check points on the roads at which transport vehicles are stopped and documentation and identification is checked, usually for everyone in the car. I was worried that I was going to have to pay a lot in bribes since I had no entry stamp in my passport. As luck would have it, during the time of our trip the transport drivers were protesting these check points. The drivers claimed (probably with good reason) that these checkpoints were a ruse for extortion. It seems the drivers would pay bribes when the paper work wasn’t up to par. The few times that we were stopped, our drivers just blew right by the officers presumably “in protest”.

Guinea is a country with a lot of problems. The issues between transport drivers and military are really the tip of the iceberg. When we finally reached the capital in Conakry (after another grueling 24 hours of transportation!), we found the students on strike. This time they were protesting (surprise surprise) government corruption. There is a general feeling of chaos in this country as if all hell could break loose any second. Infrastructure is atrocious. The educational and healthcare systems are a joke. The cities are filthy. I was reminded of that joke: You know you’re from Philly when you go to New York and notice how clean it is. Once back in Burkina, I marveled at the relatively clean streets, organized border control, and reliable transportation. You know you’ve been to Guinea when Burkina seems to run like a well oiled machine. It’s all relative I guess.

Pics: My feet in the forground of a very large rock; waterfalls; foneo fields all in Guinea.