brand new life

After the previous post telling that I had got malaria I have received so many phone calls and messages from Japan asking how I was doing I almost regretted having written that and having made people worried so much. Thank you very much for caring, people! But as I wrote I have completely recovered and am now having a really great time.

Malaria may sound really horrible and scary when you are in Japan but here it’s everywhere and almost everybody gets it once in a while and because of that they know what to do with it when you get it so it’s not really as terrible as it may sound. But of course it is so only if you are not too young or too old to fight the disease and if you have enough money to pay for the medicines. The problem here doesn’t seem to be malaria itself but the poverty that disables the proper treatments. No wonder it’s called the “disease of poverty.”

And that’s not the only reason that I wrote “really great time.” That is to say, I finally, finally got to switch organizations I work for. I cancelled the contract with JADI and started to work for another NGO called CILSIDA (Club Initié pour la Lutte contre le SIDA) from October 15th. There are many stories about how I came to think I had to end my internship at JADI, most of which are so complicated that it would be pages if I started to try to explain. So for now, let me say simply that it was because of tons of miscommunication. I had been working for this cancellation of the contract for more than a month but everything goes incredibly slow with them here and you have to be happy if the person replies to your messages after telling them the same thing for 4 times and before you are finally fed up with it and forced to pretend to be very, very angry with them. So it was a little frustrating moment there but now it’s all over and like I said in the beginning I am so happy being here. My life changed completely. For the first time in my stay in Togo I felt that I actually am enjoying my life here and that I am starting to like Togo. But of course that doesn’t mean that I wasted the first half of my internship. You always learn a lot from difficulties and hardships and it certainly was a good learning experience for me. What I think was really good above all is that I’ve come to get a notion of structural obstacles for development in Togo.

Now let me write a little about my life here.

Where I live and also where my new organization CILSIDA is located is called Adamavo. It’s about 15-20 minutes by car (I don’t know for sure but I think it’s about the same distance as Shibuya – Yoyogi) to the east of Lomé (just in case you don’t know Lomé is the capital of Togo) and just about 5-10 minutes walk to the beach. The sunset here is amazing.

I live with the family of a member of CILSIDA, Nadia. They are as amazing as the sunset of Adamavo. They are cheerful, warm and welcoming and it’s so comfortable and a lot of fun living with them. I am so happy to have finally got someone that I can actually call family here. There are Papa, Maman and Nadia in the family and also other 2 girls from outside the family live in the house and help the housework. 4-year-old Gloria, the daughter of the older brother of Nadia, comes visit pretty often, too. She’s such an adorable little girl.

On weekdays I usually wake up around 6:30, take a shower (but there is no “shower,” of course, it’s just the cool fresh water from the well in a bucket so it feels more right to say “me laver” in the French expression) and have breakfast. As Nadia goes to university, another member Ornella comes at around 7:45 and we walk to the office together. We open the office at 8, clean the floor, turn on the computer and TV and start working. The director Antoine lives beside the office but he usually teaches in “collège” (middle school) in the morning so it’s not all the time that he’s around. He and other members come in and out throughout the day to work, chat or sometimes just to sit and watch TV. When there is no special activity out Ornella and I stay in the office all day. We close the office around 6 or 7 pm depending on the progress of our work and then together walk back home. At home Maman usually is waiting for me and they serve me a good amount of very good food. She’s such a good cook and I’m sure I’ve gained weight since I came to this family. The problem is that almost all food here has so much sugar and/or so much oil in it, and what’s worse, I love the food here. An intern from the Netherlands said people use lots of sugar and oil because they are easy sources of energy here where food is not abundant, and it may be true, but I’ve also seen so many people overweight and that means having way more than enough calories. So after this a little scary (imagine I continue eating like this until the end of my stay here… ahhh) but really delicious dinner, I go to bed around 10 or 11 pm.

Weekend activities are more random. I sometimes wash my clothes, sometimes go to Lomé to buy something or send mail, sometimes go see a friend and other times just sleep in and rest at home. Last 2 Sundays we went swimming in the swimming pool nearby and I loved it – except that a “yovo” (it means “white” in the local language, Ewe) guy talked to me and kept annoying me the whole time. Most of the time being a yovo woman here brings me lots of privileges (often more than wanted or needed) but sometimes it’s also tiring and a little troublesome like this. It’s again the story inevitable for an outsider, someone different who is from outside not only the physical borders, but also the ones that are invisible and often unconscious.

CILSIDA is an organization that was created in 2003 by 10 founding members and that has now 30 members in total, around 10 of which are active. The name of the organization means “club initiated for the fight against AIDS”, but the areas they work in are more than just HIV/AIDS and what they do is rather like improvement of the living environment and situation of people in the community.
Right now we are doing a very interesting project with the financial aid from “Frondation de France”. In the week that I arrived here they had 5 days of training to the group of young women on communication techniques and health issues mainly that of HIV/AIDS. The training itself was pretty interesting also, but what I was really excited to do was what followed in the next week. We took off with these women to visit from home to home to do the “sondage” (poll, in English, according to my little dictionary) on young marriage. We visited every single house in the area and asked if there was any young girl under the age of 19 who was married, pregnant and/or with children, and if there was any, we continued to ask about their lives and needs. We did it in total of 4 days. It was extremely tiring and not easy at all walking hours and hours in the very hot African sun, and I have found some things that could be improved to have better results, but having all that it was still exceptionally interesting and lot of fun visiting people in the community and seeing their houses and their ways of living. And it was such a pity that I didn’t understand Ewe (the local language in the southern Togo), because the interviews were done in Ewe and also I have found plenty of people who don’t understand French at all (which means they don’t or didn’t go to school). If you just stay in the office and work with the members of the organization French is enough to do, but if you want to reach out to the population outside the office you need to understand their own language. And CILSIDA has strong connections with the community and that’s what I really like about this organization, so it’s all the more regrettable that I don’t understand Ewe. Of course I’ve been trying to learn it and now I can say greetings and some simple things, but to actually have a conversation my Ewe is nothing at all. I think there exists a special difficulty in learning their local language. In general if you want to learn a language you need to know the system (c’est à dire the grammar, more or less) of the language, and if it was French or Arabic or any other language it would be so easy to get this information. You can just go to a bookstore to buy some textbooks or go to Nova or something. But in the case of Ewe (and I think also for almost all other indigenous languages) it’s very difficult, if not possible, to find someone or something that would explain you systematically about the language. On the other hand it’s also interesting to find it out on your own because it’s a little like a puzzle, but it takes so much more time than the normal process of language learning because I think it’s similar to how infants learn their native tongue.
Ok, back to the sondage. I think this kind of activity is of a great significance, because it collects facts, and especially because I’ve found that thinking and talking of people here are rarely based on the facts. Now we’ve finished counting the numbers of young girls according to their status. In total we’ve found 320 girls who are either married, pregnant or with children. What we’re going do next is to come up with another project to help some of those girls who are really in need (that is to say, not all of them are in need and there are also young girls who are married, pregnant or with children and are well taken care of by their parents or husband), and also find the financial means for the project. We had a meeting on that on Sunday evening and being there watching the way things went I almost cried because again I could feel for sure that I finally found an organization where dictatorship and politics don’t exist and where the members share the information, exchange their opinions, have their own roles and responsibilities and work together to help people (and not to make money for themselves by pretending that they are serving the population).

There are also other things going on. For example for the World Day Prevention Child Abuse (Jounée Mondiale prévention des abus envers les enfants) on November 19th we are making short plays with young girls (probably at the ages of around 12-13) with the massage that children also have their rights. When we first started it it was unbelievably chaotic and I was kind of shocked at their understanding and learning capacities but after a few practices it’s getting better little by little and I think it’ll be all right by the 19th.

Even when there are no specific activities or meetings, Antoine leaves some tasks to Ornella and me. So the good thing is that I keep myself busy all the time. This is the biggest change from when I was at JADI and the organizations that I was sent to by the director of JADI, and it’s really great. But the other side of this is that I haven’t really had time yet to come up with something on my own. That might not be of great necessity or expectation, but what I’m doing now is to do what I was told to do and although there are lots of things I learn from it (for example doing paper works has helped me a lot to know what was and is going on here and how things work in this domain, and my skills of using Excel definitely improved) and things that I contribute to the organization (for example I taught techniques of Microsoft Office to Ornella that can make her work faster), I also have a feeling that I could do more than that and that’s probably what I’m here for. But I already have talked about it with the members so we’ll see how it goes.

Whew, I don’t know how many of you read this to the end, but to those who did, thanks for spending your time for that! A bientôt