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…