Sunday, December 28, 2008

Ala Fia: Christmas in Northern Togo

I'm having a wonderful time in Arwen's village. Everyone has been exceptionally welcoming to me, they've served special food for the holidays, and I've been able to observe Arwen doing her work and interacting with the people she's been living with for a year. We got in on Christmas eve, and early the next morning we got up, put on our complets, and went to church with her village counterpart. The church is a very basic cement box, with open grillwork for light and air, but inside I experienced one of the best Christmas masses I can think of. There was so much amazing music, from singers and a small group of musicians playing traditional instruments. The sermon was long, but very good, in both French and Kabye (the local language), all about hope, thankfulness and working for peace. Throughout the congregation, the feeling of sincere happiness was palpable. It was such a wonderful sensation, I felt swept up in it. At a certain moment, they had an offering, and invited people up according to the day of the week on which they were born, which apparantly holds great importance in this culture. There was dancing, greeting, and all around good spirits. Everyone was dressed well, and the women especially were striking in their beautiful complets, some with braids or wire head-dressed, most with shaved heads, which I think it a very attractive look.
Later, they served us "fufu", boiled yams pounded into a sticky paste, and served with sauce. The sauces are much spicier here, but bearable, and I like the taste of fufu! "Pate", which is a grainier dish made of ground corn, is not nearly as good. But so far what we've eaten has been pate (which is cheaper to make than fufu) with a sauce on the side. Then we ball up a bit of the starch and dip it into the sauce dish. Since it was a special occasion, we also had spaghetti, and once or twice a dish called "watchi", which is sticky rice and beans with hot tomato sauce. Since I arrived during the grande fete, we've had meat for several dishes, but Arwen says this is not common; she explained that usually they put leaves in the sauce to add nutrients and flavor. The area of the village is gorgeous. At the base of some low mountains, it it covered with trees of many kinds, including palm trees, which are particularly picturesque at the foot of the hills. A truly lovely spot.
I can't forget one thing that has marked my Christmas here: tchouk. "Tchouk" is a home-made alcohol, kind of like beer, but not really. They serve it in little calabash bowls. Arwen and I have been offered a lot of this! It's not bad, but after a couple calabashes I'm pretty done with tchouk. Anyway, Togo is so different from Senegal, and I am having a fantastic experience here.

Monday, December 22, 2008

I go to Togo!

At last, after ridiculous delays that pissed off an entire planeful of people headed to Abdijan or Lome, I got here. To be welcomed by Arwen looked gorgeous in her Togolese complet. It is beyond wonderful to be visiting such a good friend on her home turf! This is a quick blog. My first impressions from one afternoon in Lome: humidity, greenery, palm trees and grass everywhere. No horse or donkey carts, only lots and lots of motos. In the market, almost exclusively women selling their goods. Beautiful women with short-cropped hair, so practical in this hot climate, and really more attracive than mounds of fake-hair braids. And the colors that never get old. Wax-printed fabrics (called pagne here in Togo) in all shades and patterns, piles of jewelry, food, decorations, and lots of Christmas gifts! Yes, Christmas is coming, and people are buying their Santa hats in the Lome marche.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Making soap and seeing friends

Yesterday we finally got to do the soap-making seminar I've been planning for awhile! The girls' group in the village has been buying and selling soap for a couple months now, and I offered to pay for the trainer to come if they wanted to learn to do it all from scratch. They were delighted by the idea, so I found the trainer, set a date...and had to whange the date...had to change it again...saw no materials or preperation....was getting worried. But yesterday morning, they pulled it off. We picked up the trainers in the nearby town in a charette, and set up shop in the courtyard by my hut. The girls were put right to work with dull knives, making soap shavings, while the trainer explained the different kinds of soap they were going to learn. In the end, they did it two ways: making soap from scratch with lye, oil, and water; and also extending commercially-made soaps by melting them down and adding water with only a little lye. The extended soap is cheaper to do, but the lye-and-oil soap is more flexible and can be higher quality, depending on the oil. So, we had a fun day stirring pots of boiling soap foam, or beating the oily mixture into a thick batter, then pouring it into improvised moulds to set. The soap hardened enough by that afternoon to cut into bars. Then, I tried to explain to the girls how they should keep track of how much their ingrediants cost, in order to set a price for their soaps and make a profit. They had a really good time making the soap, and I they have a pretty good grasp of basic economics, so I'm looking forward to continuing this little project when I get back! Our next challenge is to find the perfect soap recipe for maximum profit and saleability.
But in the meantime, I'm going on vacation. This is the only big, out-of-Senegal trip I have planned, and I can't wait! I fly out to Togo on Sunday to meet up with my very good friend, Arwen, who I haven't seen for a year and who'se been serving in Togo since I arrived here in Senegal. Then, together we plan to travel up through Burkina Faso, through Mali, back into Senegal before she flies out again. It's gonna be great, right? And best of all, I'll get to be with a friend for Christmas.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Tabaski take two, weddings, and solar cooking

Last Tuesday was my second village Tabaski experience, and this year it was more fun, since I understood what was actually going on for the most part. The first day, I dressed up, covered my head, and went out with everyone to a shady spot behind an ancient tree. There, for probably an hour everyone prayed, led by three village notables who stood up front, their heads and shoulders covered by a cloth. I sat in theback with the women, as I usually do, and enjoyed the atmosphere of serenity. Once the prayres were over, we greeted each other with a "baalma ac", responded by saying "baalma ala", which means roughly, I think, an apology for anything one might have done wrong the previous year, and acceptance of the apology. Then a round of blessings for health and happiness. I also got plenty of blessings for my work, for going home safely to the USA, for having a husband and male children. Amen! Though I was sure to specify that I would like girl children first, anyway.
After prayers they killed the rams, which I managed to peek at this year. It is not so gruesome as one might think, but the blood does spurt everywhere, and the most disturbing part of it is probably the sheep's death twitches, though his throat is already cut. Anyway, meat is not for the squeamish. To butcher the rams they hang them up by the hind legs from a tree, peel off the skin (which they just discard; I would htink it could be used for something) and remove the entrails (which they do eat, after a thorough cleaning), then chop up the muscle meat. It's really interesting from an anatomical point of view, to see hoe the animal is put together in all it's layers. And of course, once the butchering is done, the cooking begins. This year, once again, I was put in charge of onions. I will probably smell like onions for weeks. But, they're supposed to repel flies, so I don't mind. The menu: day one - sauce with meat, onions, fried potatoes, macaroni, and lots of oil, sopped up with chunks of bread; day two - "cous cous", which is actually tiny vermicelli noodles, topped with meat and onion sauce; day three - mafe farine (a kind of tomato sauce thickened with flour) and meat, over white rice. Pretty tasty stuff.
One might think everyone was tired of meat after three days of eating sheep, but not so! The past several days have been full of celebrations, practically one a day. There was a good harvest this year, which means people have some money, and that has resulted in a lot of "noos" (fun times) in the village because of weddings. I've been to three in as many days! The young brides' husbands sent them beautiful new clothes of crinkly, shiny bazane, heavy with embroidery. They also sent mounds of food: onions, potatos, rice, vermicelli, chickens, and goats. And when there's meat and fancy clothes, there's a party! I've been in charge of the onions, as usual. But the result is that there have been a lot of oily, delicious meals lately in celebration of these weddings. None of the girls have left the village for their husbands' homes yet; this is one of the many steps that comes before that, involving giving of gifts, clothes, food, and other amenities. During these celebrations I have no idea what the men do. I never see them. But the women cook, and laugh, and dance, and talk long into the night.
Another thing I'm experimenting with is solar cooking. I brought a simple solar cooker with me, thanks to a neighbor, and last eyar kept it in my hut, telling people they could borrow it to try whenever they liked. But I noticed that once family asked more than all the rest, so after the rainy season I decided to outright give it to them. Then, because people are leary of risking their expensive food in a solar oven that, in their view, may or may not work, I decided to buy ingrediants every week or two to try cooking Senegalese food in a solar cooker. So far, with this family, we've tried mafe, white rice, and tchou. They were extremely dubious at first, but willing to try (it was my money, after all) and the results have been fairly good. Cooking rice without steaming it first was a big concern, but it turned out well, only we didn't put in enough water so it was a little crunchy. Both sauces, the mafe and the tchou, cooked perfectly in the heat of the sun, but they weren't ready in time for lunch, so only the children got to enjoy them with their late-afternoon half-meal before dinner. Still, everyone's interested in the solar cooker, and hopefully once they've seen it in action, they'll try it for their own cooking as well as mine.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Pictures and stuff from Mom's visit

It's back to the village for me after Mom's wonderful visit. I'm still coming down from the high of great food, relaxing days, and of course having a friend around all the time. But now it's the season for threshing peanuts, and Tabaski is coming up again. Everybody's days are spent in the fields, holding huge bowls of peanuts and chaff high in the air and pouring them out so the grass blows away in the wind. People are shelling their peanuts, selling them to the boutique, and otherwise life is back to the way it was when I got here this time last year.
Tabaski is on Wednesday, and my counterpart just went to buy a sheep in Dinguraye. The moms have their hair braided, and tomorrow we plan to do henna on our hands and feet. Time for noos! Then, the girls' group has invited (well, I invited, on their behalf) a trainer to come teach them how to make soap in the village, so there's that to look forward to. Also, the books are definitely in circulation! I'm arranging to be availible two days a week for return/check-outs and the kids are loving it. Even though they can't read most of the English words, they can still enjoy the pictures and learn from them. So, things are going well here in the village.

And now, some photos from Mom's trip!


The best tea in Senegal on Ile de Goree. He also voted for Obama, as you may be able to see from the sticker.

This Aby makes much better bean sandwiches than I do!

A special treat for me was a two-hour horseback ride in the savannah around Toubab Dialaw. So wonderful! Thanks, Mom!

Mom enjoying a nap in one of our beachside hotels. This is the beautifully decorated Sobo-Bade, which reminds me of Hobbiton.

Our last name on a pirogue.

Walking with a tailor in his fabulous shirt, in Palmerin.

You can barely see her, but here is Mom in our awesome treehouse! The Lodge des Collines de Niassam was perhaps the best hotel I've ever been in.

Me buying vegetables from the same guy every week, at the louma in Nioro.

The family portrait.

Mom and I and all of our stuff in a charette to the village.

Me in a St. Louis cafe. Are we still in Senegal? It's hard to say in this picture!

Letters, visitors, and packages from home keep us Volunteers sane. Thank you, maman!!!!