New stuff!

Its around 630 on saturday night here in sokode. I just woke up from a little nap that I took due to feeling a little sick today. My stomach/intestinal region decided to not be nice to me or something, I was planning on heading back to village today but I'll have to put that off until tomorrow now. It gives me time to sit here and relax/reflect on this past week though, which I can put into written form for all of you guys to read!

My AIDS ride adventure began last friday with my ride up to sokode. I met two other volunteers who live close to me, Tony and Sam, in Tony's village about 18km from my own. We then had a quick egg sandwich breakfast and a calabash of Tchouk (local millet beer, tastes kind of cidery and is delicious) and hit the road. We get up here and spend the rest of the day just relaxing, its a ~60km bike ride from my house to the transit house in Sokode so its a little workout for me. The ride itself was concentrated in the northern part of the region, so the other volunteers from the southern part of the region started to trickle in on Friday. We spent saturday at the market picking up supplies for the upcoming week, for me that consisted of sachets (little plastic bags) of peanut butter and peanuts for snacking on. I kind of live on those two things here for protein, the peanut butter is delicious. Anyway, we spend quality volunteer bonding time here in town, and then Sunday morning take off for Kaboli, a town close to the border of Benin and in the very north of the Centrale region here in Togo. We stopped to pick up volunteers who live on the way there, bringing our little band of bikers up to 11 volunteers and 2 Togolese counterparts, one of which was from my village and another from Kaboli. We get up to town in the mid afternoon and get everything unloaded from our bush taxi that we rented out to follow us biking for the week, as well as carry all our random stuff from big bags full of sachets of water to the straw mats we used to sleep on. One of the volunteers, Angela, lives in Kaboli so we stayed at her house for the first night before we got started. I got to sleep outside under a paillote in a hammock while a thunderstorm went on around me, definitely an amazing experience.

The first night also began my decision to hang out with the Togolese people with us as much as possible during the week just to get a different insight and perspective on the stuff we were doing. As one of the volunteers here, Chris, said to me, “I didn't come to Africa to hang out with Americans.” So I went out to find dinner food with the driver and his apprentice, as well as with Bello and Fredos, the two counterparts with us on the ride. Togolese food is not very nutritious, but definitely filling. The sauces that they make are beyond outstanding though. I have actually drank remaining sauce like soup when all done with my pate or fufu just because it tasted that good. Anyway, I hung out and talked to Bello a lot about the upcoming elections as well as life and the like here in country. He has a satellite dish at his place and gets english MSNBC so he's had some pretty regular updates for any sort of outside news and actually lets me know whats going on in town when I see him. Hes a really knowledgeable guy too, had some good insights and ideas about the American political process.

Monday morning came pretty quickly. We got all prepped and split up into our two groups, Orange and Blue, of which I was of the former. My group stayed in Kaboli for our first formation of the day, while the Blue team went off to another town. We presented to a crowd of about 40 information on HIV/AIDS and how it was transmitted and what it was. Our presentations consisted of a short True/False question session where we posed questions to the crowd, then a game to show what the virus did to the immune system, then how the virus was and is not spread (believe it or not, over half of the villages we talked to believed mosquitos could transmit the HIV virus), the ABCD's of prevention, and then a demonstration on how to properly use a condom. I had the last two parts of the presentation. The condom demonstrations were a crowd favorite, let me tell you that. The first time doing it it was hard keeping a straight face, but I got pretty good at not laughing along with the rest of the people. Plus I can do a flight-attendant style presentation of how to check the condom for expiration date and imperfections, as well as then apply it to a wooden penis. Random sidenote: The condoms that PSI (Population Services International, they fund this tour for us) gives out are Banana Scented. Not flavored, just scented. My hands smelled like bananas all week, the scent that they put in the lubricant was like impervious to soap and scrubbing. I'm still just a little baffled at why they would make a condom just scented. Another African mystery.

After the first presentation finished, which went really well, we hopped on our bikes and took off to meet up with the second team in their village about 18km away. We rode in as they were still working and hung out in the crowd watching. I noticed a building down the street that had white people on the roof, so naturally I headed over to figure out what other yovo's were doing here. Turns out it was a group of German engineers here on a grant to install solar panels on the roof of a brand new library going in and also to wire the building. They let me go up on the roof and see the work they were doing and explained about what was going on. They spoke decent english too. After hanging out on the roof for a little while watching the end of the second groups presentation, I took off back down and met up with the other volunteers and we headed off to the village chief's house for lunch. At lunch, I had the best goat meat that I've had in country. It was so tender it was like falling off the bones. Plus they had actually taken the time to burn the hairs off the skin so it wasnt like eating a furry steak! We got fed until we couldnt eat anymore, and then sat around outside waiting for the heat to die down a little bit so we could bike the ~38km to Tchamba, our village we were staying the night in that next evening. I spent my time hanging out with Bello and explaining to him where oil comes from, and then we discussed how we thought Togo would be different if they found oil here. I explained the concept of non-renewable resources and why that would be bad in the long run for Togo, which mind you I somehow pulled out in French. After that fun little discussion, we hopped on our bikes and took off.

Riding through the African countryside on a mountain bike is something that I don't think I could ever get tired of. Its just so amazingly beautiful. I plan on sending pictures home on a thumb drive to my parents, I'll try and upload some when I'm down in Lome in December too. Tuesday came on, bringing two more sensibilizations to do. The first went without a hitch, and we had an amazing lunch with the chief afterwards also. Beans and rice with fried soy. Thats pretty much my definition of gourmet meal here. We then biked off to our second town of the day. Turns out, we had to ride through the second town to get to the first earlier on in the day, the chief thought that we were going to be coming in the morning so he got the town gathered up, and when we didnt show up they left. We get there in the afternoon when we were supposed to be and the whole town is at another meeting a few kilometers away. So we do a quick presentation to the people available, and take off to interrupt the other meeting to talk to the people there. So we got to do an extra bonus presentation! That turned out to be really good though, one of the village elders told us a story about a group of young girls from that village that was really touching and we retold to every other village we went to afterwards.

There isn't much here in Togo for work, you either have a family who has something going or you spend time in the fields cultivating. There isnt any sort of class distinction, theres poor and then government employees. This leads to a lot of people leaving the country going to find work elsewhere. In this case, the country is Nigeria. A group of 6 girls from this village, Yeliwa, left for Nigeria to try and find work. What they found was forced prostitution. After a year there, two returned back to village. They wanted to get tested for HIV when they got back, but their parents forbid it. So they didnt. They found men there and were married. Each married a man who had two other wives. Life went on, until one of the other wives was around for a free testing session. Her results came back positive. As did all the others involved in that marriage(s), as well as the other set. Due to the stigma of shame that comes with the virus here, the families are unwilling to allow their daughters to know if they were infected. Now 6 more people are living with the death sentence that is AIDS infection. There are amazing anti-retroviral, ARV's, drugs available that make life with HIV manageable, and can even prevent the virus from leading to full blown AIDS. But they're expensive, and not easy to find here in Africa. The continent suffering the most. Really kind of a sobering moment. It only got more so as the time passed.

The next day in the afternoon we got to our village a few hours early, so we grabbed some drinks and hung out under a big tree in the middle of town. Now when white people show up, everyone comes out because they think we have gifts. “Cadeau”, the french word for gift, is shouted by tens of children, arms outstretched, staring wantingly. That gets old to me, I don't like giving out material stuff. I'm here for the gift of knowledge. But anyways, we had over a hundred kids forming a sort of semi-circle around us sitting around. Tony started chasing one of them around, and they all loved it. That turned into us getting a huge circle formed and teaching them the hokey pokey. I then attempted to teach them how to play freeze tag and red light/green light. They didnt understand the concept of not moving. It was still a lot of fun though. Even more kids showed up as I went along, I tried to make the largest conga line then. The older kids were helping me line up the little ones and we had a fun little snake going on, they all wanted to be in the front with me though so it broke down after a little bit. Then I realized that they would copy any motion I made, so I started doing random clapping patterns. That led to a lightbulb going off in my head. I quickly taught them the beat to “We Will Rock You” and started singing the words to it. Well, they started singing the same too. Theres a ~20 second video clip of this that I'll try to get up, its awesome. I love the kids here. Which is another hard part. Standing there feeling like the director of the African production of Stomp and staring out at the hundreds of smiling, laughing little faces and knowing the statistics of how many of them will contract either HIV or be afflicted by Malaria or Tuberculosis just due to the way of life here is heartbreaking. So many little things that could be prevented by government-sponsored vaccination or subsidization of prophylaxis. But no, the government here is too concerned with maintaining a hierarchical society of elderly men who are uninterested in anything but keeping the power they have. Sometimes I lay awake thinking “what can I do for a country that doesn't seem to want to help itself.” Not sure, but I can try.

The ride from our second sensibilization to meet up with the other group involved a game of wooden penis relay handoff. Doing this while riding down a large paved road with people on the sides and the occasional motorcycle driving by was awesome, and one of my personal highlights of the trip. We passed the night in the village of Wassarabo, where another volunteer lives. After we arrived, we were mulling around waiting to take showers and I grabbed a notebook and went outside of the compound across to by the chase car next to a Dispensaire to write underneath a tree there. After a few minutes of writing, I look up and see that I have a line of kids staring at me. I laugh, put down the notebook, and ask them if they want to play a game. Of course they do, so I get them into a circle with the intention of teaching duck duck goose, but there were too many, so I decided to bust out some clapping rhythm stuff. I taught them a few different patterns and how to go from quiet to loud or vice versa. Then I made each kid make up his own pattern and we went around the circle changing from kid to kid with the whole group following one. They loved that. Then, to make things more fun, I told them that as the whole circle was making up a beat, one person had to go in the middle and dance. I went first to break the ice for them. There is something here about a white person dancing that is intrinsically the funniest thing absolutely possible to a Togolese person. Although, as some of you may know, I'm a pretty amazing dancer, unfortunately white boy moves dont translate to tribal african. After flailing around for a little bit, I sat down and hesitantly one of the little boys hopped in the middle and started going. Then everyone wanted to go. It turned in to Togolese “You Got Served” with some kids breaking out moves that I didn't think would be possible for their size. Yet another wonderful memorable moment of the week.

There was no power in that village, so over a lantern-lit dinner that evening we talked about random goings on. Then there was a huge shooting star overhead. Absolutely spectacular orange and white, I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in the sky. Then a couple Togolese people by me, I tended to go away from the volunteers while eating just to talk to people around, asked me what a shooting star was. I explained what meteors were and also about the trash up in orbit around the earth and what happens when stuff falls into the atmosphere. Then another volunteer who was talking to a Togolese guy asked me to explain why fireflies lit up. Explaining enzymatic reactions in French turned out to be pretty easy even though I knew maybe half of the necessary vocabulary, I felt really awesome after that. I crashed out soon after, staring up at the stars and talking to Bello about what people in Africa thought about the night sky. Every time a star falls, someone dies according to local legend.

The next day we mounted up and headed off to our second to last village. We arrive and are greeted by the headmaster of the school we are presenting at. He takes us over and sits us down and then brings food ladies over and feeds us as a gift from the village. Pretty awesome, I love food so it was a winning situation for me! That presentation was pretty crazy though, we had over 600 people there. Mostly students. The maturity level was not very high, as evidenced by the headmaster starting our introduction with the announcement that whomever was pooping in the classroom everyday should stop because its not funny anymore. The condom demonstration was pretty funny, as soon as you bust out a wooden penis the crowd goes wild. This crowd more wild than most. But it all went pretty well. We then took off, after lunch there, to our final town of Agoulou. We hung out there Thursday night and slept at the Dispensaire, then prepped for our last presentation in the morning. The Country Director for Peace Corps here decided that she would come by and see our final presentation, so that made me a little more nervous than usual. I mean I'm nervous about my French in front of groups but when my like boss boss is there, I was a little shakey. I did fine though, didn't really have too much to say thanks to the fact that we combined both groups for the last presentation, so we had 12 people working. We did our presentation under two large shade trees, which were full of bats. So the kids climbed up with sticks and knocked them around to make them fly away, or knock them to the ground. I saw bats turned into piñatas by crowds of children. The word for bat in French translates literally into “flying mouse”. Random fact for the day. After our final sensibilization, we all piled into the car and headed back into Sokode.

In all, an awesome week. As I look at how much I've managed to write here, I guess you can probably tell that I found what we accomplished was something worthwhile. I head back to village tomorrow, excited to get back to doing something in my community. I find myself missing walking around talking to the people I know there and seeing what they are up to. I'll be spending most of my time there now I think, I've seen parts of the country and the like but I want to do what I came here to do now. I do plan on coming up here to Sokode for election day coverage though, the director of one of the schools here said we could watch it on the TV at the school, so a few of us volunteers are going to. Thats pretty much my life at this point. I'm still working on coping with the loss of a few close volunteers from my stage who left for home already, thats been kinda tough. Plus the loss of a close family friend this past week has been kind of a downer. But fortunately I've got great friends, both in country and back in the states, giving me comfort and words of wisdom. So life goes on, one day at a time.

Until I decide to write another mini-novel, hope that life is going great for all of you guys!

Love,
Marcus