Don't Call Me Yovo

*Hey guys, so internet is hard to get to and slow right now during training. I've writen a few blog posts over the past couple weeks and have just now gotten them up. My togo cell phone on the contacts page so feel free to call me. I'll get back to your emails as soon as i can but realize it may be a while...*

Yovo is the term here in Togo for “light-skinned person”, aka white people. This does, however, include asians, latinos and even African-Americans, so basically anyone not from Africa. It’s not meant to be demeaning, it’s just a matter of fact here. On my 5 minute walk to class I probably hear “Yovo” at least 10 times, and those are just the people who say it loud enough for me to hear it. In general, I think calling out any word to a stranger passing by is inappropriate, so this has been something that I’ve really had to adapt to.

The majority of the time, it’s kids who call out Yovo. (Sometimes, though, adults do it too, which I have been assured by my host mom is not okay for them to do.) The kids get all excited when they see us and start singing a little song that goes like this: “Yovo, yovo, bonsoir. Ça va bien? Merci!” Picture a group of 3 years olds trying to sing this in unison when they don’t even speak French yet, and it can sometimes get pretty entertaining. I’ve found that some days it makes me smile. I try to always be polite to the kids, but there have definitely been days when I just want to yell at them to shut up. Unfortunately, this is something that I’m going to have to get used to.

Volunteers have different methods for trying to combat the yovo callout. Occasionally, a simple bonsoir or bonjour back quiets them, but this generally only works until you turn away from them and then the singing resumes. Another one is to stop and say “Je ne m’appelle pas Yovo. Je m’appelle Katy”, but that only works with the ones who know english and in a town as large as Tsévié there’s no way you can tell every kid your name and have them remember it. I walked the same path as another female volunteer and I’ll sometimes get called her name. Some people have also tried, in the mornings, to tell the kids that the song is incorrect because it says bonsoir (good evening) and the correct way would be to say bonjour (good  morning). We visited one PCV in her village her would do a special handshake with the kids only when they called her by her name and not Yovo. My favorite response, although I have yet to do it, it to say “Ameeba” back to them, which means “black person”. I’ve been told this one really stumps them. We’ll see.

The Yovo calls get worse worse we are in groups. One day, we had a bike lesson where we all road on the Rue Nationale (the main road in Togo, their equivalent to a highway). Not only were there 10 of use riding in a row, but we all have to wear bike helmets that make us stand out even more because the Togolaise never wear them. We started singing the baseball chant that goes “Everywhere we go, people wanna know, who we are, so we tell them, we are the Yovos, the mighty mighty Yovos…” It was a great comic relief for us and now someone will occasionally break out into song and make us all smile.

In other news, I found out where I will be living for the next 2 years. It’s a town called Tanjouaré and it’s in the northernmost region of Togo called Savanes. I’ve been told the town has about 15,000 and it’s right on the Rue Nationale so it should be easy to get to. I’ve heard that there’s a really good group of volunteers up there, which is important because it’s definitely isolated from the rest of the country. I’m going to be working with an NGO that focuses on helping women gain business skills, but this is probably just going to be a small fraction of what I do. More on it later though, as we have a post visit week starting on July 10.

June 17, 2011

Today was a long day, filled with lots of French. I had 2 hours of French class in the morning and then we went to a local NGO to observe their setup and ask some questions. Well, this was all mainly in French as well. Even with my limited French abilities, there are some people here who I can understand very well due to their pronunciation. On the other hand though, there are some people who I cannot understand at all. (Side-note, my host mom is one of these people but I’m getting a little better at understanding her...) One of our trainers was translating the conversation into English, but unfortunately that was really hard to hear due to the rain pounding down on the tin roof of the room we were in. Overall, it was really nice to see how a successful NGO is run here in Togo, but it tired me out.

It was still raining when it came time to walk back home for lunch. I was wearing flip flops, which are very difficult to walk in when it rains because they either get stuck in the muddy, sandy roads or make it really easy to slip on the slick parts. I elected to take off my shoes, which I found earns me even more attention than the color of my skin (any light skinned person here is called Yovo, but more on that in a later post). Two separate concerned groups of women stopped me to ask why I wasn’t wearing my shoes. Personally, I found this a little odd because people walk around barefoot all the time. When I walked into my compound, my whole family made a fuss about my dirty feet and they made sure they were cleaned right away. My sister called me a baby because I had two other people helping me clean off my feet. The whole scene was a little ridiculous but I’ve learned that you can only walk barefoot in Togo when it’s not raining. My sister, concerned that I didn’t know how to walk in the rain, walked me to class this afternoon and pointed out the proper areas of the road to walk on. I still got quite a bit of mud on me, but I didn’t fall so I think I’m allowed to walk in the rain by myself again.

This afternoon was yet another French lesson. Double whammy. I realized today at the NGO how important speaking French well is going to be for the work that I do here in Togo, yet there is only so much information my brain can absorb in one day. On top of that, my teacher assigned a ton of homework due tomorrow. Ugh. So I finished the day’s lesson and headed to the bar with 3 other friends (to do homework, I swear I didn’t have anything to drink). While we were sitting there, a boy about 3-4 years old walks up to us. When they’re that young they haven’t gone to school yet and therefore don’t speak any French. We said the few phrases we know in Ewe and found out his name was Coco. At this point his mom comes to take him away but the kid does not want to leave. The mom says “he’s yours now” and walks away, leaving us all a little dumbfounded but we assume she’s just around the corner. We notice that the kid has a little plastic bag with him with some stuff inside. We try to ask what it is, but the conversation was completely one-sided. One of my friends said it looked like rocks, but I thought it was just bits of old chocolate so it had a whitish coating. The boy was very generous and offered some to my friend. She took a piece and put it in her mouth only to take it out immediately and confirm that he was indeed eating rocks… out of a bag…

When it came time to leave, we didn’t know what to do with the boy. His mom was nowhere in sight and he was too young to know where he lived. We talked to a couple people and eventually found someone who knew him. Coco gave us some good entertainment and there were numerous references made to Big Daddy. We told the boy we renamed him Frankenstein, which we later had to shorten to Frank so that he could pronounce it. All in all, Coco/Frank was exactly what we needed to lighten up our day.

Then tonight, papa and three neighbor kids were all intensely watching an Indian movie dubbed in French. I joined them while I ate dinner and even though I couldn’t understand it all I got hooked to the story. So this guy was riding in a car. Someone else was driving but they hit another car. The guy gets out and finds that the girl he loves was in the car that they hit. I thought she was dead at first, but it turned out that she was in coma. The guy is beside her bed telling her how much he loves her and how she has to wake up when she suddenly moves her hand and then the dvd freezes…

June 16, 2011

I’ve been in Tsévié now for a little over a week and I’m slowly settling into a routine. On most days I get up at 6am, shower and have breakfast. We have French language class almost every morning from 7:30-9:30 and then some type of info session from 10-12 (usually SED training of some sort). Then we all go home for lunch and come back for a 2:30-5:30 class. After that, I usually go home and help mama cook dinner (although I mainly just watch her cook, but recently she’s let me do a few simple things such as grating carrots and adding pre-cut food to a pot). My French cooking vocabulary is improving a lot! After dinner (between 7 and 8), I take another bucket shower and go to my room to read or watch a movie.

This morning, however, I got up a little earlier and met two other stagieres at the tech house for a circuit/pilates workout. One girl used to be a pilates and kickboxing instructor in college so she planned out a nice workout routine. With all the carbs that I’ve been eating it was definitely nice to work out, but it’s still so hot and humid in the morning that I swear I sweat in places where I didn’t even know it was possible to. We plan to try and do this twice a week.

Tonight was a little different than other nights. It was one stagiaire’s birthday today, which of course translates into a celebration for all of us. Instead of having dinner with our families, we all went straight from class to a local bar called Albatros. The first time I went here was on our second night in Tsévié. We went with a PCV who ordered dinner, which was spaghetti avec une omelette. Ever since I have been craving this, and more so than Mexican food or cheese or pizza. Well tonight I finally got to eat it and it was delicious. I’m realizing that it’s the little things in life (like food) that make me really happy.

I’m going to stop here for right now, but I’ve been compiling a list of blog post topics that I want to be sure to cover. This was a more general post, but please, if you have any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them and I’m sure there are other people wondering the same thing as well!

June 7, 2011

Everything changed today. Our stage moved out of Lomé (pronounced Low-mey) and are now living in a city about an hour away by car called Tsévié. Let me recap the day.

I woke up this morning at 6:30. Lunch was at 7 and then we had the next 4 hours to pack and relax and enjoy the remaining time we had as a group. You could tell that the vibe between us stagieres was a mixture of excitement, nervousness and hesitation. I had gotten used to always having people around who spoke English. My French is pretty weak so it was nice to be able to look to others around me and have them translate anything I didn’t understand, but I knew this wasn’t going to last forever and today the reality of the finally set in.

At noon, we drove away from our hotel and ventured outside of the 8 or so blocks we had been confined to for the past 3 days. It was nice to see a little of the rest of Lomé, as the area we had been in was mainly residential. We passed markets and gas stations and, as we began to leave Lomé, greenery. Lots of grass and trees and agriculture (such as corn). We arrived at the Tech house in Lomé and had to say goodbye to the 13 CHAP stagieres who were headed to their town, Gbatopé. And then there were 10.

We gathered in one area as our home stay families gathered in another. Once everyone had arrived, we entered this giant gazebo-like area and sat down. You could tell how excited everyone was. One by one we stood up and said our name and then a member of our new family would come and “claim” us and everyone would cheer. Then came the dancing. It’s kind of hard to describe but essentially everyone walked around in a circle and swayed to the rhythm of the drums. The next song, only a few women danced along and the rest watched. Me, in an attempt to bond with my new family, said “Je besoin aprender danser” or “I would like to learn to dance”, meaning someday in the next 2 months I would like them to teach me, but, of course, that translated into my host mom telling them to play another song and my sister grabbing me and teaching me to dance… just the two of us… in front of everyone (did I mention that there were also 4 village chiefs present who very official looking). It was actually a lot fun and I think everyone enjoyed my impromptu public dance lesson and it even led into another song where everyone got up and joined me.

After the brief meet and greet, we packed up the bus and drove to my new home. I am with a very nice family named Teko-Agbo. There’s the mom (34) and the dad (48), and their daughter, Akouve (26), although she doesn’t live here with us. I got the impression that she’ll be around a lot though, especially since they realized how bad my French actually is and Atouve speaks some English so it’s easiest for me to communicate with her for right now. Mama’s* sister-in-law also lives with us. Her name is Afi (21) and she’s currently very pregnant. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has the baby sometime before I leave. We talked for a little bit about our families and then I went to unpack my things. It’s so nice to know I won’t be having to move again for at least 2 months. I hate the whole living out of 3 different bags. It’s not fun.

After I unpacked, I ventured out of my chambre (yay for having my own room!) and attempted to ask if there was anything I could do to help mama prepare dinner. Of course, what came out of my mouth didn’t make any sense. Atouve wasn’t there so I stood hopeless as mama, papa and Afi jointly tried to comprehend what I was saying. Eventually, Atouve came back and all was good. They all announced together that I could help by watching mama prepare dinner. I grabbed a notebook, pen and French/English dictionary and proceeded to learn a few words. This included louche (spoon), crevette (shrimp), goût (taste), rire (to laugh) and jumeau (twin). The word twin came up because there was a boy and a girl who were hanging out in our compound. They’re 7 and are named Florentine and Florentaine (not sure of the spelling but you get the drift). Florentine would just stare at me and when I would look back she’d smile and look away. She’s very cute.

I need to go to bed so I’m going to end this here, but I would like to add that I have about 8 mosquito bites on my legs and feet and I have only seen one mosquito, which I killed. Mosquitos here have somehow mastered the art of both invisibility and skillful attack strategies. Don’t worry mom and dad, I sleep under a net, wear bug spray and take my malaria pills diligently. I have no desire to catch malaria while I’m here.

Bon nuit!

*From here on out, when I refer to mama and papa, it’s in reference to my host mom and host dad, just so not to confuse them with my American mom and dad.